Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)

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Title: Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Author: Strong, Augustus Hopkins, 1836-1921
Language: English
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Systematic Theology

A Compendium and Commonplace-Book

Designed For The Use Of Theological Students

Augustus Hopkins Strong, D.D., LL.D.

President and Professor of Biblical Theology in the Rochester Theological
Seminary

Revised and Enlarged

In Three Volumes

Volume 1

The Doctrine of God

The Judson Press

Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Kansas City,
Seattle, Toronto

1907

CONTENTS

Preface
Part I. Prolegomena.
Chapter I. Idea Of Theology.
I. Definition of Theology.
II. Aim of Theology.
III. Possibility of Theology.
1. The existence of a God.
2. Man’s capacity for the knowledge of God
3. God’s revelation of himself to man.
IV. Necessity of Theology.
V. Relation of Theology to Religion.
1. Derivation.
2. False Conceptions.
3. Essential Idea.
4. Inferences.
Chapter II. Material of Theology.
I. Sources of Theology.
1. Scripture and Nature.
2. Scripture and Rationalism.
3. Scripture and Mysticism.
4. Scripture and Romanism.
II. Limitations of Theology.
III. Relations of Material to Progress in Theology.
Chapter III. Method Of Theology.
I. Requisites to the study of Theology.
II. Divisions of Theology.
III. History of Systematic Theology.
IV. Order of Treatment in Systematic Theology.
V. Text-Books in Theology.
Part II. The Existence Of God.
Chapter I. Origin Of Our Idea Of God’s Existence.
I. First Truths in General.
II. The Existence of God a first truth.
1. Its universality.
2. Its necessity.
3. Its logical independence and priority.
III. Other Supposed Sources of our Idea of God’s Existence.
IV. Contents of this Intuition.
Chapter II. Corroborative Evidences Of God’s Existence.
I. The Cosmological Argument, or Argument from Change in Nature.
II. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Order and Useful
Collocation in Nature.
III. The Anthropological Argument, or Argument from Man’s Mental and
Moral Nature.
IV. The Ontological Argument, or Argument from our Abstract and
Necessary Ideas.
Chapter III. Erroneous Explanations, And Conclusion.
I. Materialism.
II. Materialistic Idealism.
III. Idealistic Pantheism.
IV. Ethical Monism.
Part III. The Scriptures A Revelation From God.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.
I. Reasons _a priori_ for expecting a Revelation from God.
II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.
III. Miracles, as attesting a Divine Revelation.
1. Definition of Miracle.
2. Possibility of Miracle.
3. Probability of Miracles.
4. Amount of Testimony necessary to prove a Miracle.
5. Evidential force of Miracles.
6. Counterfeit Miracles.
IV. Prophecy as Attesting a Divine Revelation.
V. Principles of Historical Evidence applicable to the Proof of a
Divine Revelation.
1. As to documentary evidence.
2. As to testimony in general.
Chapter II. Positive Proofs That The Scriptures Are A Divine
Revelation.
I. Genuineness of the Christian Documents.
1. Genuineness of the Books of the New Testament.
1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).
2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).
3d. The Romance-theory of Renan (1823-1892).
4th. The Development-theory of Harnack (born 1851).
2. Genuineness of the Books of the Old Testament.
II. Credibility of the Writers of the Scriptures.
III. The Supernatural Character of the Scripture Teaching.
1. Scripture teaching in general.
2. Moral System of the New Testament.
3. The person and character of Christ.
4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a messenger from
God and as being one with God.
IV. The Historical Results of the Propagation of Scripture Doctrine.
Chapter III. Inspiration Of The Scriptures.
I. Definition of Inspiration.
II. Proof of Inspiration.
III. Theories of Inspiration.
1. The Intuition-theory.
2. The Illumination Theory.
3. The Dictation-theory.
4. The Dynamical Theory.
IV. The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration.
V. Objections to the Doctrine of Inspiration.
1. Errors in matters of Science.
2. Errors in matters of History.
3. Errors in Morality.
4. Errors of Reasoning.
5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.
6. Errors in Prophecy.
7. Certain books unworthy of a place in inspired Scripture.
8. Portions of the Scripture books written by others than the
persons to whom they are ascribed.
9. Sceptical or fictitious Narratives.
10. Acknowledgment of the non-inspiration of Scripture
teachers and their writings.
Part IV. The Nature, Decrees, And Works Of God.
Chapter I. The Attributes Of God.
I. Definition of the term Attributes.
II. Relation of the divine Attributes to the divine Essence.
III. Methods of determining the divine Attributes.
IV. Classification of the Attributes.
V. Absolute or Immanent Attributes.
First division.—Spirituality, and attributes therein involved.
1. Life.
2. Personality.
Second Division.—Infinity, and attributes therein involved.
1. Self-existence.
2. Immutability.
3. Unity.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.
1. Truth.
2. Love.
3. Holiness.
VI. Relative or Transitive Attributes.
First Division.—Attributes having relation to Time and Space.
1. Eternity.
2. Immensity.
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.
1. Omnipresence.
2. Omniscience.
3. Omnipotence.
Third Division.—Attributes having relation to Moral Beings.
1. Veracity and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth.
2. Mercy and Goodness, or Transitive Love.
3. Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness.
VII. Rank and Relations of the several Attributes.
1. Holiness the fundamental attribute in God.
2. The holiness of God the ground of moral obligation.
Chapter II. Doctrine Of The Trinity.
I. In Scriptures there are Three who are recognized as God.
1. Proofs from the New Testament.
A. The Father is recognized as God.
B. Jesus Christ is recognized as God.
C. The Holy Spirit is recognized as God.
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.
A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the
Godhead.
B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.
C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.
D. Descriptions of the Messiah.
II. These Three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled
to conceive of them as distinct Persons.
1. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from each other.
2. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from the Spirit.
3. The Holy Spirit is a person.
III. This Tripersonality of the Divine Nature is not merely economic
and temporal, but is immanent and eternal.
1. Scripture proof that these distinctions of personality are
eternal.
2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages.
A. The Sabellian.
B. The Arian.
IV. This Tripersonality is not Tritheism; for, while there are three
Persons, there is but one Essence.
V. The Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are equal.
1. These titles belong to the Persons.
2. Qualified sense of these titles.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.
VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes
the Key to all other Doctrines.
1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.
2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.
3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other
doctrines.
Chapter III. The Decrees Of God.
I. Definition of Decrees.
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Decrees.
1. From Scripture.
2. From Reason.
A. From the Divine Foreknowledge.
B. From the Divine Wisdom.
C. From the Divine Immutability.
D. From the Divine Benevolence.
III. Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.
1. That they are inconsistent with the free agency of man.
2. That they take away all motive for human exertion.
3. That they make God the author of sin.
IV. Concluding Remarks.
1. Practical uses of the doctrine of decrees.
2. True method of preaching the doctrine.

[Cover Art]

[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]

Christo Deo Salvatori.

“THE EYE SEES ONLY THAT WHICH IT BRINGS WITH IT THE POWER OF
SEEING.”—_Cicero._

“OPEN THOU MINE EYES, THAT I MAY BEHOLD WONDROUS THINGS OUT OF THY
LAW.”—_Psalm 119:18._

“FOR WITH THEE IS THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE: IN THY LIGHT SHALL WE SEE
LIGHT.”—_Psalm 36:9._

“FOR WE KNOW IN PART, AND WE PROPHESY IN PART; BUT WHEN THAT WHICH IS
PERFECT IS COME, THAT WHICH IS IN PART SHALL BE DONE AWAY.”—_1 Cor. 13:9,
10._

PREFACE

The present work is a revision and enlargement of my “Systematic
Theology,” first published in 1886. Of the original work there have been
printed seven editions, each edition embodying successive corrections and
supposed improvements. During the twenty years which have intervened since
its first publication I have accumulated much new material, which I now
offer to the reader. My philosophical and critical point of view meantime
has also somewhat changed. While I still hold to the old doctrines, I
interpret them differently and expound them more clearly, because I seem
to myself to have reached a fundamental truth which throws new light upon
them all. This truth I have tried to set forth in my book entitled “Christ
in Creation,” and to that book I refer the reader for further information.

That Christ is the one and only Revealer of God, in nature, in humanity,
in history, in science, in Scripture, is in my judgment the key to
theology. This view implies a monistic and idealistic conception of the
world, together with an evolutionary idea as to its origin and progress.
But it is the very antidote to pantheism, in that it recognizes evolution
as only the method of the transcendent and personal Christ, who fills all
in all, and who makes the universe teleological and moral from its centre
to its circumference and from its beginning until now.

Neither evolution nor the higher criticism has any terrors to one who
regards them as parts of Christ’s creating and educating process. The
Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge himself
furnishes all the needed safeguards and limitations. It is only because
Christ has been forgotten that nature and law have been personified, that
history has been regarded as unpurposed development, that Judaism has been
referred to a merely human origin, that Paul has been thought to have
switched the church off from its proper track even before it had gotten
fairly started on its course, that superstition and illusion have come to
seem the only foundation for the sacrifices of the martyrs and the
triumphs of modern missions. I believe in no such irrational and atheistic
evolution as this. I believe rather in him in whom all things consist, who
is with his people even to the end of the world, and who has promised to
lead them into all the truth.

Philosophy and science are good servants of Christ, but they are poor
guides when they rule out the Son of God. As I reach my seventieth year
and write these words on my birthday, I am thankful for that personal
experience of union with Christ which has enabled me to see in science and
philosophy the teaching of my Lord. But this same personal experience has
made me even more alive to Christ’s teaching in Scripture, has made me
recognize in Paul and John a truth profounder than that disclosed by any
secular writers, truth with regard to sin and atonement for sin, that
satisfies the deepest wants of my nature and that is self-evidencing and
divine.

I am distressed by some common theological tendencies of our time, because
I believe them to be false to both science and religion. How men who have
ever felt themselves to be lost sinners and who have once received pardon
from their crucified Lord and Savior can thereafter seek to pare down his
attributes, deny his deity and atonement, tear from his brow the crown of
miracle and sovereignty, relegate him to the place of a merely moral
teacher who influences us only as does Socrates by words spoken across a
stretch of ages, passes my comprehension. Here is my test of orthodoxy: Do
we pray to Jesus? Do we call upon the name of Christ, as did Stephen and
all the early church? Is he our living Lord, omnipresent, omniscient,
omnipotent? Is he divine only in the sense in which we are divine, or is
he the only-begotten Son, God manifest in the flesh, in whom is all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily? What think ye of the Christ? is still the
critical question, and none are entitled to the name of Christian who, in
the face of the evidence he has furnished us, cannot answer the question
aright.

Under the influence of Ritschl and his Kantian relativism, many of our
teachers and preachers have swung off into a practical denial of Christ’s
deity and of his atonement. We seem upon the verge of a second Unitarian
defection, that will break up churches and compel secessions, in a worse
manner than did that of Channing and Ware a century ago. American
Christianity recovered from that disaster only by vigorously asserting the
authority of Christ and the inspiration of the Scriptures. We need a new
vision of the Savior like that which Paul saw on the way to Damascus and
John saw on the isle of Patmos, to convince us that Jesus is lifted above
space and time, that his existence antedated creation, that he conducted
the march of Hebrew history, that he was born of a virgin, suffered on the
cross, rose from the dead, and now lives forevermore, the Lord of the
universe, the only God with whom we have to do, our Savior here and our
Judge hereafter. Without a revival of this faith our churches will become
secularized, mission enterprise will die out, and the candlestick will be
removed out of its place as it was with the seven churches of Asia, and as
it has been with the apostate churches of New England.

I print this revised and enlarged edition of my “Systematic Theology,” in
the hope that its publication may do something to stem this fast advancing
tide, and to confirm the faith of God’s elect. I make no doubt that the
vast majority of Christians still hold the faith that was once for all
delivered to the saints, and that they will sooner or later separate
themselves from those who deny the Lord who bought them. When the enemy
comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will raise up a standard
against him. I would do my part in raising up such a standard. I would
lead others to avow anew, as I do now, in spite of the supercilious
assumptions of modern infidelity, my firm belief, only confirmed by the
experience and reflection of a half-century, in the old doctrines of
holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, of an original transgression
and sin of the whole human race, in a divine preparation in Hebrew history
for man’s redemption, in the deity, preëxistence, virgin birth, vicarious
atonement and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord, and in his
future coming to judge the quick and the dead. I believe that these are
truths of science as well as truths of revelation; that the supernatural
will yet be seen to be most truly natural; and that not the open-minded
theologian but the narrow-minded scientist will be obliged to hide his
head at Christ’s coming.

The present volume, in its treatment of Ethical Monism, Inspiration, the
Attributes of God, and the Trinity, contains an antidote to most of the
false doctrine which now threatens the safety of the church. I desire
especially to call attention to the section on Perfection, and the
Attributes therein involved, because I believe that the recent merging of
Holiness in Love, and the practical denial that Righteousness is
fundamental in God’s nature, are responsible for the utilitarian views of
law and the superficial views of sin which now prevail in some systems of
theology. There can be no proper doctrine of the atonement and no proper
doctrine of retribution, so long as Holiness is refused its preëminence.
Love must have a norm or standard, and this norm or standard can be found
only in Holiness. The old conviction of sin and the sense of guilt that
drove the convicted sinner to the cross are inseparable from a firm belief
in the self-affirming attribute of God as logically prior to and as
conditioning the self-communicating attribute. The theology of our day
needs a new view of the Righteous One. Such a view will make it plain that
God must be reconciled before man can be saved, and that the human
conscience can be pacified only upon condition that propitiation is made
to the divine Righteousness. In this volume I propound what I regard as
the true Doctrine of God, because upon it will be based all that follows
in the volumes on the Doctrine of Man, and the Doctrine of Salvation.

The universal presence of Christ, the Light that lighteth every man, in
heathen as well as in Christian lands, to direct or overrule all movements
of the human mind, gives me confidence that the recent attacks upon the
Christian faith will fail of their purpose. It becomes evident at last
that not only the outworks are assaulted, but the very citadel itself. We
are asked to give up all belief in special revelation. Jesus Christ, it is
said, has come in the flesh precisely as each one of us has come, and he
was before Abraham only in the same sense that we were. Christian
experience knows how to characterize such doctrine so soon as it is
clearly stated. And the new theology will be of use in enabling even
ordinary believers to recognize soul-destroying heresy even under the mask
of professed orthodoxy.

I make no apology for the homiletical element in my book. To be either
true or useful, theology must be a passion. _Pectus est quod theologum
facit_, and no disdainful cries of “Pectoral Theology!” shall prevent me
from maintaining that the eyes of the heart must be enlightened in order
to perceive the truth of God, and that to know the truth it is needful to
do the truth. Theology is a science which can be successfully cultivated
only in connection with its practical application. I would therefore, in
every discussion of its principles, point out its relations to Christian
experience, and its power to awaken Christian emotions and lead to
Christian decisions. Abstract theology is not really scientific. Only that
theology is scientific which brings the student to the feet of Christ.

I would hasten the day when in the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. I
believe that, if any man serve Christ, him the Father will honor, and that
to serve Christ means to honor him as I honor the Father. I would not
pride myself that I believe so little, but rather that I believe so much.
Faith is God’s measure of a man. Why should I doubt that God spoke to the
fathers through the prophets? Why should I think it incredible that God
should raise the dead? The things that are impossible with men are
possible with God. When the Son of man comes, shall he find faith on the
earth? Let him at least find faith in us who profess to be his followers.
In the conviction that the present darkness is but temporary and that it
will be banished by a glorious sunrising, I give this new edition of my
“Theology” to the public with the prayer that whatever of good seed is in
it may bring forth fruit, and that whatever plant the heavenly Father has
not planted may be rooted up.

ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
ROCHESTER, N. Y., AUGUST 3, 1906.

PART I. PROLEGOMENA.

Chapter I. Idea Of Theology.

I. Definition of Theology.

Theology is the science of God and of the relations between God and the
universe.

Though the word “theology” is sometimes employed in dogmatic
writings to designate that single department of the science which
treats of the divine nature and attributes, prevailing usage,
since Abelard (A. D. 1079-1142) entitled his general treatise
“Theologia Christiana,” has included under that term the whole
range of Christian doctrine. Theology, therefore, gives account,
not only of God, but of those relations between God and the
universe in view of which we speak of Creation, Providence and
Redemption.

John the Evangelist is called by the Fathers “the theologian,”
because he most fully treats of the internal relations of the
persons of the Trinity. Gregory Nazianzen (328) received this
designation because he defended the deity of Christ against the
Arians. For a modern instance of this use of the term “theology”
in the narrow sense, see the title of Dr. Hodge’s first volume:
“Systematic Theology, Vol. I: _Theology_.” But theology is not
simply “the science of God,” nor even “the science of God and
man.” It also gives account of the relations between God and the
universe.

If the universe were God, theology would be the only science.
Since the universe is but a manifestation of God and is distinct
from God, there are sciences of nature and of mind. Theology is
“the science of the sciences,” not in the sense of including all
these sciences, but in the sense of using their results and of
showing their underlying ground; (see Wardlaw, Theology, 1:1, 2).
Physical science is not a part of theology. As a mere physicist,
Humboldt did not need to mention the name of God in his “Cosmos”
(but see Cosmos, 2:418, where Humboldt says: “Psalm 104 presents
an image of the whole Cosmos”). Bishop of Carlisle: “Science is
atheous, and therefore cannot be atheistic.”

Only when we consider the relations of finite things to God, does
the study of them furnish material for theology. Anthropology is a
part of theology, because man’s nature is the work of God and
because God’s dealings with man throw light upon the character of
God. God is known through his works and his activities. Theology
therefore gives account of these works and activities so far as
they come within our knowledge. All other sciences require
theology for their complete explanation. Proudhon: “If you go very
deeply into politics, you are sure to get into theology.” On the
definition of theology, see Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik,
1:2; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Theology; H. B.
Smith, Introd. to Christ. Theol., 44; cf. Aristotle, Metaph., 10,
7, 4; 11, 6, 4; and Lactantius, De Ira Dei, 11.

II. Aim of Theology.

The aim of theology is the ascertainment of the facts respecting God and
the relations between God and the universe, and the exhibition of these
facts in their rational unity, as connected parts of a formulated and
organic system of truth.

In defining theology as a science, we indicate its aim. Science
does not create; it discovers. Theology answers to this
description of a science. It discovers facts and relations, but it
does not create them. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation,
141—“Schiller, referring to the ardor of Columbus’s faith, says
that if the great discoverer had not found a continent, he would
have created one. But faith is not creative. Had Columbus not
found the land—had there been no real object answering to his
belief—his faith would have been a mere fancy.” Because theology
deals with objective facts, we refuse to define it as “the science
of religion”; _versus_ Am. Theol. Rev., 1850:101-126, and
Thornwell, Theology, 1:139. Both the facts and the relations with
which theology has to deal have an existence independent of the
subjective mental processes of the theologian.

Science is not only the observing, recording, verifying, and
formulating of objective facts; it is also the recognition and
explication of the relations between these facts, and the
synthesis of both the facts and the rational principles which
unite them in a comprehensive, rightly proportioned, and organic
system. Scattered bricks and timbers are not a house; severed
arms, legs, heads and trunks from a dissecting room are not living
men; and facts alone do not constitute science. Science = facts +
relations; Whewell, Hist. Inductive Sciences, I, Introd.,
43—“There may be facts without science, as in the knowledge of the
common quarryman; there may be thought without science, as in the
early Greek philosophy.” A. MacDonald: “The _a priori_ method is
related to the _a posteriori_ as the sails to the ballast of the
boat: the more philosophy the better, provided there are a
sufficient number of facts; otherwise, there is danger of
upsetting the craft.”

President Woodrow Wilson: “ ‘Give us the facts’ is the sharp
injunction of our age to its historians ... But facts of
themselves do not constitute the truth. The truth is abstract, not
concrete. It is the just idea, the right revelation, of what
things mean. It is evoked only by such arrangements and orderings
of facts as suggest meanings.” Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith,
14—“The pursuit of science is the pursuit of relations.” Everett,
Science of Thought, 3—“Logy” (_e. g._, in “theology”), from λόγος,
= word + reason, expression + thought, fact + idea; _cf._ _John
1:1—_“In the beginning was the Word.”

As theology deals with objective facts and their relations, so its
arrangement of these facts is not optional, but is determined by
the nature of the material with which it deals. A true theology
thinks over again God’s thoughts and brings them into God’s order,
as the builders of Solomon’s temple took the stones already hewn,
and put them into the places for which the architect had designed
them; Reginald Heber: “No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung.” Scientific men
have no fear that the data of physics will narrow or cramp their
intellects; no more should they fear the objective facts which are
the data of theology. We cannot make theology, any more than we
can make a law of physical nature. As the natural philosopher is
“Naturæ minister et interpres,” so the theologian is the servant
and interpreter of the objective truth of God. On the Idea of
Theology as a System, see H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy,
126-166.

III. Possibility of Theology.

The possibility of theology has a threefold ground: 1. In the existence of
a God who has relations to the universe; 2. In the capacity of the human
mind for knowing God and certain of these relations; and 3. In the
provision of means by which God is brought into actual contact with the
mind, or in other words, in the provision of a revelation.

Any particular science is possible only when three conditions
combine, namely, the actual existence of the object with which the
science deals, the subjective capacity of the human mind to know
that object, and the provision of definite means by which the
object is brought into contact with the mind. We may illustrate
the conditions of theology from selenology—the science, not of
“lunar politics,” which John Stuart Mill thought so vain a
pursuit, but of lunar physics. Selenology has three conditions: 1.
the objective existence of the moon; 2. the subjective capacity of
the human mind to know the moon; and 3. the provision of some
means (_e. g._, the eye and the telescope) by which the gulf
between man and the moon is bridged over, and by which the mind
can come into actual cognizance of the facts with regard to the
moon.

1. The existence of a God.

_In the existence of a God who has relations to the universe._—It has been
objected, indeed, that since God and these relations are objects
apprehended only by faith, they are not proper objects of knowledge or
subjects for science. We reply:

A. Faith is knowledge, and a higher sort of knowledge.—Physical science
also rests upon faith—faith in our own existence, in the existence of a
world objective and external to us, and in the existence of other persons
than ourselves; faith in our primitive convictions, such as space, time,
cause, substance, design, right; faith in the trustworthiness of our
faculties and in the testimony of our fellow men. But physical science is
not thereby invalidated, because this faith, though unlike
sense-perception or logical demonstration, is yet a cognitive act of the
reason, and may be defined as certitude with respect to matters in which
verification is unattainable.

The objection to theology thus mentioned and answered is expressed
in the words of Sir William Hamilton, Metaphysics, 44,
531—“Faith—belief—is the organ by which we apprehend what is
beyond our knowledge.” But science is knowledge, and what is
beyond our knowledge cannot be matter for science. Pres. E. G.
Robinson says well, that knowledge and faith cannot be severed
from one another, like bulkheads in a ship, the first of which may
be crushed in, while the second still keeps the vessel afloat. The
mind is one,—“it cannot be cut in two with a hatchet.” Faith is
not antithetical to knowledge,—it is rather a larger and more
fundamental sort of knowledge. It is never opposed to reason, but
only to sight. Tennyson was wrong when he wrote: “We have but
faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see” (In
Memoriam, Introduction). This would make sensuous phenomena the
only objects of knowledge. Faith in supersensible realities, on
the contrary, is the highest exercise of reason.

Sir William Hamilton consistently declares that the highest
achievement of science is the erection of an altar “To the Unknown
God.” This, however, is not the representation of Scripture. _Cf._
_John 17:3—_“this is life eternal, that they should know thee, the
only true God”; and _Jer. 9:24—_“let him that glorieth glory in
that he hath understanding and knoweth me.” For criticism of
Hamilton, see H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 297-336. Fichte:
“We are born in faith.” Even Goethe called himself a believer in
the five senses. Balfour, Defence of Philosophic Doubt, 277-295,
shows that intuitive beliefs in space, time, cause, substance,
right, are presupposed in the acquisition of all other knowledge.
Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 14—“If theology is to be
overthrown because it starts from some primary terms and
propositions, then all other sciences are overthrown with it.”
Mozley, Miracles, defines faith as “unverified reason.” See A. H.
Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 19-30.

B. Faith is a knowledge conditioned by holy affection.—The faith which
apprehends God’s being and working is not opinion or imagination. It is
certitude with regard to spiritual realities, upon the testimony of our
rational nature and upon the testimony of God. Its only peculiarity as a
cognitive act of the reason is that it is conditioned by holy affection.
As the science of æsthetics is a product of reason as including a power of
recognizing beauty practically inseparable from a love for beauty, and as
the science of ethics is a product of reason as including a power of
recognizing the morally right practically inseparable from a love for the
morally right, so the science of theology is a product of reason, but of
reason as including a power of recognizing God which is practically
inseparable from a love for God.

We here use the term “reason” to signify the mind’s whole power of
knowing. Reason in this sense includes states of the sensibility,
so far as they are indispensable to knowledge. We cannot know an
orange by the eye alone; to the understanding of it, taste is as
necessary as sight. The mathematics of sound cannot give us an
understanding of music; we need also a musical ear. Logic alone
cannot demonstrate the beauty of a sunset, or of a noble
character; love for the beautiful and the right precedes knowledge
of the beautiful and the right. Ullman draws attention to the
derivation of _sapientia_, wisdom, from _sapĕre_, to taste. So we
cannot know God by intellect alone; the heart must go with the
intellect to make knowledge of divine things possible. “Human
things,” said Pascal, “need only to be known, in order to be
loved; but divine things must first be loved, in order to be
known.” “This [religious] faith of the intellect,” said Kant, “is
founded on the assumption of moral tempers.” If one were utterly
indifferent to moral laws, the philosopher continues, even then
religious truths “would be supported by strong arguments from
analogy, but not by such as an obstinate, sceptical heart might
not overcome.”

Faith, then, is the highest knowledge, because it is the act of
the integral soul, the insight, not of one eye alone, but of the
two eyes of the mind, intellect and love to God. With one eye we
can see an object as flat, but, if we wish to see around it and
get the stereoptic effect, we must use both eyes. It is not the
theologian, but the undevout astronomer, whose science is one-eyed
and therefore incomplete. The errors of the rationalist are errors
of defective vision. Intellect has been divorced from heart, that
is, from a right disposition, right affections, right purpose in
life. Intellect says: “I cannot know God”; and intellect is right.
What intellect says, the Scripture also says: _1 Cor. 2:14—_“the
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for
they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because
they are spiritually judged”_; 1:21—_“in the wisdom of God the
world through its wisdom knew not God.”

The Scripture on the other hand declares that “by faith we know”_
(Heb. 11:3)_. By “heart” the Scripture means simply the governing
disposition, or the sensibility + the will; and it intimates that
the heart is an organ of knowledge: _Ex. 35:25—_“the women that
were wise-hearted”; _Ps. 34:8—_“O taste and see that Jehovah is
good” = a right taste precedes correct sight; _Jer. 24:7—_“I will
give them a heart to know me”; _Mat. 5:8—_“Blessed are the pure in
heart; for they shall see God”; _Luke 24:25—_“slow of heart to
believe”; _John 7:17—_“If any man willeth to do his will, he shall
know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak
from myself”; _Eph. 1:18—_“having the eyes of your heart
enlightened, that ye may know”; _1 John 4:7, 8—_“Every one that
loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not
knoweth not God.” See Frank, Christian Certainty, 303-324; Clarke,
Christ. Theol., 362; Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality,
114-137; R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 6;
Fisher, Nat. and Method of Rev., 6; William James, The Will to
Believe, 1-31; Geo. T. Ladd, on Lotze’s view that love is
essential to the knowledge of God, in New World, Sept.
1895:401-406; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 14, 15.

C. Faith, therefore, can furnish, and only faith can furnish, fit and
sufficient material for a scientific theology.—As an operation of man’s
higher rational nature, though distinct from ocular vision or from
reasoning, faith is not only a kind, but the highest kind, of knowing. It
gives us understanding of realities which to sense alone are inaccessible,
namely, God’s existence, and some at least of the relations between God
and his creation.

Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:50, follows Gerhard in making faith the
joint act of intellect and will. Hopkins, Outline Study of Man,
77, 78, speaks not only of “the æsthetic reason” but of “the moral
reason.” Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 91, 109, 145,
191—“Faith is the certitude concerning matter in which
verification is unattainable.” Emerson, Essays, 2:96—“Belief
consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul—unbelief in
rejecting them.” Morell, Philos. of Religion, 38, 52, 53, quotes
Coleridge: “Faith consists in the synthesis of the reason and of
the individual will, ... and by virtue of the former (that is,
reason), faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding of
truth.” Faith, then, is not to be pictured as a blind girl
clinging to a cross—faith is not blind—“Else the cross may just as
well be a crucifix or an image of Gaudama.” “Blind unbelief,” not
blind faith, “is sure to err, And scan his works in vain.” As in
conscience we recognize an invisible authority, and know the truth
just in proportion to our willingness to “do the truth,” so in
religion only holiness can understand holiness, and only love can
understand love (_cf._ _John 3:21—_“he that doeth the truth cometh
to the light”).

If a right state of heart be indispensable to faith and so to the
knowledge of God, can there be any “theologia irregenitorum,” or
theology of the unregenerate? Yes, we answer; just as the blind
man can have a science of optics. The testimony of others gives it
claims upon him; the dim light penetrating the obscuring membrane
corroborates this testimony. The unregenerate man can know God as
power and justice, and can fear him. But this is not a knowledge
of God’s inmost character; it furnishes some material for a
defective and ill-proportioned theology; but it does not furnish
fit or sufficient material for a correct theology. As, in order to
make his science of optics satisfactory and complete, the blind
man must have the cataract removed from his eyes by some competent
oculist, so, in order to any complete or satisfactory theology,
the veil must be taken away from the heart by God himself (_cf._
_2 Cor. 3:15, 16_—“_a veil lieth upon their heart. But whensoever
it_ [marg. ‘a man’] _shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken
away_”).

Our doctrine that faith is knowledge and the highest knowledge is
to be distinguished from that of Ritschl, whose theology is an
appeal to the heart to the _exclusion_ of the head—to _fiducia_
without _notitia_. But _fiducia_ includes _notitia_, else it is
blind, irrational, and unscientific. Robert Browning, in like
manner, fell into a deep speculative error, when, in order to
substantiate his optimistic faith, he stigmatized human knowledge
as merely apparent. The appeal of both Ritschl and Browning from
the head to the heart should rather be an appeal from the narrower
knowledge of the mere intellect to the larger knowledge
conditioned upon right affection. See A. H. Strong, The Great
Poets and their Theology, 441. On Ritschl’s postulates, see
Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 274-280, and
Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie. On the relation of love
and will to knowledge, see Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology,
1900:717; Hovey, Manual Christ. Theol., 9; Foundations of our
Faith, 12, 13; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:154-164; Presb. Quar., Oct.
1871, Oct. 1872, Oct. 1873; Calderwood, Philos. Infinite, 99, 117;
Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 2-8; New Englander, July, 1873:481;
Princeton Rev., 1864:122; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, 124, 125; Grau,
Glaube als höchste Vernunft, in Beweis des Glaubens, 1865:110;
Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 228; Newman, Univ. Sermons, 206;
Hinton, Art of Thinking, Introd. by Hodgson, 5.

2. Man’s capacity for the knowledge of God

_In the capacity of the human mind for knowing God and certain of these
relations._—But it has urged that such knowledge is impossible for the
following reasons:

A. Because we can know only phenomena. We reply: (_a_) We know mental as
well as physical phenomena. (_b_) In knowing phenomena, whether mental or
physical, we know substance as underlying the phenomena, as manifested
through them, and as constituting their ground of unity. (_c_) Our minds
bring to the observation of phenomena not only this knowledge of
substance, but also knowledge of time, space, cause, and right, realities
which are in no sense phenomenal. Since these objects of knowledge are not
phenomenal, the fact that God is not phenomenal cannot prevent us from
knowing him.

What substance is, we need not here determine. Whether we are
realists or idealists, we are compelled to grant that there cannot
be phenomena without noumena, cannot be appearances without
something that appears, cannot be qualities without something that
is qualified. This something which underlies or stands under
appearance or quality we call substance. We are Lotzeans rather
than Kantians, in our philosophy. To say that we know, not the
self, but only its manifestations in thought, is to confound self
with its thinking and to teach psychology without a soul. To say
that we know no external world, but only its manifestations in
sensations, is to ignore the principle that binds these sensations
together; for without a somewhat in which qualities inhere they
can have no ground of unity. In like manner, to say that we know
nothing of God but his manifestations, is to confound God with the
world and practically to deny that there is a God.

Stählin, in his work on Kant, Lotze and Ritschl, 186-191, 218,
219, says well that “limitation of knowledge to phenomena involves
the elimination from theology of all claim to know the objects of
the Christian faith as they are in themselves.” This criticism
justly classes Ritschl with Kant, rather than with Lotze who
maintains that knowing phenomena we know also the noumena
manifested in them. While Ritschl professes to follow Lotze, the
whole drift of his theology is in the direction of the Kantian
identification of the world with our sensations, mind with our
thoughts, and God with such activities of his as we can perceive.
A divine nature apart from its activities, a preexistent Christ,
an immanent Trinity, are practically denied. Assertions that God
is self-conscious love and fatherhood become judgments of merely
subjective value. On Ritschl, see the works of Orr, of Garvie, and
of Swing; also Minton, in Pres. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1902:162-169,
and C. W. Hodge, _ibid._, Apl. 1902:321-326; Flint, Agnosticism,
590-597; Everett, Essays Theol. and Lit., 92-99.

We grant that we can know God only so far as his activities reveal
him, and so far as our minds and hearts are receptive of his
revelation. The appropriate faculties must be exercised—not the
mathematical, the logical, or the prudential, but the ethical and
the religious. It is the merit of Ritschl that he recognizes the
practical in distinction from the speculative reason; his error is
in not recognizing that, when we do thus use the proper powers of
knowing, we gain not merely subjective but also objective truth,
and come in contact not simply with God’s activities but also with
God himself. Normal religious judgments, though dependent upon
subjective conditions, are not simply “judgments of worth” or
“value-judgments,”—they give us the knowledge of “things in
themselves.” Edward Caird says of his brother John Caird (Fund.
Ideas of Christianity, Introd. cxxi)—“The conviction that God can
be known and is known, and that, in the deepest sense, all our
knowledge is knowledge of him, was the corner-stone of his
theology.”

Ritschl’s phenomenalism is allied to the positivism of Comte, who
regarded all so-called knowledge of other than phenomenal objects
as purely negative. The phrase “Positive Philosophy” implies
indeed that all knowledge of mind is negative; see Comte, Pos.
Philosophy, Martineau’s translation, 26, 28, 33—“In order to
observe, your intellect must pause from activity—yet it is this
very activity you want to observe. If you cannot effect the pause,
you cannot observe; if you do effect it, there is nothing to
observe.” This view is refuted by the two facts; (1)
consciousness, and (2) memory; for consciousness is the knowing of
the self side by side with the knowing of its thoughts, and memory
is the knowing of the self side by side with the knowing of its
past; see Martineau, Essays Philos. and Theol., 1:24-40, 207-212.
By phenomena we mean “facts, in distinction from their ground,
principle, or law”; “neither phenomena nor qualities, as such, are
perceived, but objects, percepts, or beings; and it is by an
after-thought or reflex process that these are connected as
qualities and are referred to as substances”; see Porter, Human
Intellect, 51, 238, 520, 619-637, 640-645.

Phenomena may be internal, _e. g._, thoughts; in this case the
noumenon is the mind, of which these thoughts are the
manifestations. Or, phenomena may be external, _e. g._, color,
hardness, shape, size; in this case the noumenon is matter, of
which these qualities are the manifestations. But qualities,
whether mental or material, imply the existence of a substance to
which they belong: they can no more be conceived of as existing
apart from substance, than the upper side of a plank can be
conceived of as existing without an under side; see Bowne, Review
of Herbert Spencer, 47, 207-217; Martineau, Types of Ethical
Theory, 1; 455, 456—“Comte’s assumption that mind cannot know
itself or its states is exactly balanced by Kant’s assumption that
mind cannot know anything outside of itself.... It is precisely
because all knowledge is of relations that it is not and cannot be
of phenomena alone. The absolute cannot _per se_ be known, because
in being known it would _ipso facto_ enter into relations and be
absolute no more. But neither can the phenomenal _per se_ be
known, _i. e._, be known as phenomenal, without simultaneous
cognition of what is non-phenomenal.” McCosh, Intuitions, 138-154,
states the characteristics of substance as (1) being, (2) power,
(3) permanence. Diman, Theistic Argument, 337, 363—“The theory
that disproves God, disproves an external world and the existence
of the soul.” We know something beyond phenomena, viz.: law,
cause, force,—or we can have no science; see Tulloch, on Comte, in
Modern Theories, 53-73; see also Bib. Sac., 1874:211; Alden,
Philosophy, 44; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 87; Fleming, Vocab.
of Philosophy, art.: Phenomena; New Englander, July, 1875:537-539.

B. Because we can know only that which bears analogy to our own nature or
experience. We reply: (_a_) It is not essential to knowledge that there be
similarity of nature between the knower and the known. We know by
difference as well as by likeness. (_b_) Our past experience, though
greatly facilitating new acquisitions, is not the measure of our possible
knowledge. Else the first act of knowledge would be inexplicable, and all
revelation of higher characters to lower would be precluded, as well as
all progress to knowledge which surpasses our present attainments. (_c_)
Even if knowledge depended upon similarity of nature and experience, we
might still know God, since we are made in God’s image, and there are
important analogies between the divine nature and our own.

(_a_) The dictum of Empedocles, “Similia similibus percipiuntur,”
must be supplemented by a second dictum, “Similia dissimilibus
percipiuntur.” All things are alike, in being objects. But knowing
is distinguishing, and there must be contrast between objects to
awaken our attention. God knows sin, though it is the antithesis
to his holy being. The ego knows the non-ego. We cannot know even
self, without objectifying it, distinguishing it from its
thoughts, and regarding it as another.

(_b_) _Versus_ Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 79-82—“Knowledge
is recognition and classification.” But we reply that a thing must
first be perceived in order to be recognized or compared with
something else; and this is as true of the first sensation as of
the later and more definite forms of knowledge,—indeed there is no
sensation which does not involve, as its complement, an at least
incipient perception; see Sir William Hamilton, Metaphysics, 351,
352; Porter, Human Intellect, 206.

(_c_) Porter, Human Intellect, 486—“Induction is possible only
upon the assumption that the intellect of man is a reflex of the
divine intellect, or that man is made in the image of God.” Note,
however, that man is made in God’s image, not God in man’s. The
painting is the image of the landscape, not, _vice versa_, the
landscape the image of the painting; for there is much in the
landscape that has nothing corresponding to it in the painting.
Idolatry perversely makes God in the image of man, and so deifies
man’s weakness and impurity. Trinity in God may have no exact
counterpart in man’s present constitution, though it may disclose
to us the goal of man’s future development and the meaning of the
increasing differentiation of man’s powers. Gore, Incarnation,
116—“If anthropomorphism as applied to God is false, yet
theomorphism as applied to man is true; man is made in God’s
image, and his qualities are, not the measure of the divine, but
their counterpart and real expression.” See Murphy, Scientific
Bases, 122; McCosh, in Internat. Rev., 1875:105; Bib. Sac.,
1867:624; Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:4-8, and Study of
Religion, 1:94.

C. Because we know only that of which we can conceive, in the sense of
forming an adequate mental image. We reply: (_a_) It is true that we know
only that of which we can conceive, if by the term “conceive” we mean our
distinguishing in thought the object known from all other objects. But,
(_b_) The objection confounds conception with that which is merely its
occasional accompaniment and help, namely, the picturing of the object by
the imagination. In this sense, conceivability is not a final test of
truth. (_c_) That the formation of a mental image is not essential to
conception or knowledge, is plain when we remember that, as a matter of
fact, we both conceive and know many things of which we cannot form a
mental image of any sort that in the least corresponds to the reality; for
example, force, cause, law, space, our own minds. So we may know God,
though we cannot form an adequate mental image of him.

The objection here refuted is expressed most clearly in the words
of Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 25-36, 98—“The reality
underlying appearances is totally and forever inconceivable by
us.” Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, 77, 78 (_cf._ 26) suggests the
source of this error in a wrong view of the nature of the concept:
“The first distinguishing feature of a concept, viz.: that it
cannot in itself be depicted to sense or imagination.” Porter,
Human Intellect, 392 (see also 429, 656)—“The _concept_ is not a
mental image”—only the _percept_ is. Lotze: “Color in general is
not representable by any image; it looks neither green nor red,
but has no look whatever.” The generic horse has no particular
color, though the individual horse may be black, white, or bay. So
Sir William Hamilton speaks of “the unpicturable notions of the
intelligence.”

Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 39, 40—“This doctrine of
Nescience stands in exactly the same relation to causal power,
whether you construe it as Material Force or as Divine Agency.
Neither can be _observed_; one or the other must be _assumed_. If
you admit to the category of knowledge only what we learn from
observation, particular or generalized, then is Force unknown; if
you extend the word to what is imported by the intellect itself
into our cognitive acts, to make them such, then is God known.”
Matter, ether, energy, protoplasm, organism, life,—no one of these
can be portrayed to the imagination; yet Mr. Spencer deals with
them as objects of Science. If these are not inscrutable, why
should he regard the Power that gives unity to all things as
inscrutable?

Herbert Spencer is not in fact consistent with himself, for in
divers parts of his writings he calls the inscrutable Reality back
of phenomena the one, eternal, ubiquitous, infinite, ultimate,
absolute Existence, Power and Cause. “It seems,” says Father
Dalgairns, “that a great deal is known about the Unknowable.”
Chadwick, Unitarianism, 75—“The beggar phrase ‘Unknowable’
becomes, after Spencer’s repeated designations of it, as rich as
Croesus with all saving knowledge.” Matheson: “To know that we
know nothing is already to have reached a fact of knowledge.” If
Mr. Spencer intended to exclude God from the realm of Knowledge,
he should first have excluded him from the realm of Existence; for
to grant that he is, is already to grant that we not only may know
him, but that we actually to some extent do know him; see D. J.
Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 22; McCosh, Intuitions, 186-189 (Eng.
ed., 214); Murphy, Scientific Bases, 133; Bowne, Review of
Spencer, 30-34; New Englander, July, 1875:543, 544; Oscar Craig,
in Presb. Rev., July, 1883:594-602.

D. Because we can know truly only that which we know in whole and not in
part. We reply: (_a_) The objection confounds partial knowledge with the
knowledge of a part. We know the mind in part, but we do not know a part
of the mind. (_b_) If the objection were valid, no real knowledge of
anything would be possible, since we know no single thing in all its
relations. We conclude that, although God is a being not composed of
parts, we may yet have a partial knowledge of him, and this knowledge,
though not exhaustive, may yet be real, and adequate to the purposes of
science.

(_a_) The objection mentioned in the text is urged by Mansel,
Limits of Religious Thought, 97, 98, and is answered by Martineau,
Essays, 1:291. The mind does not exist in space, and it has no
parts: we cannot speak of its south-west corner, nor can we divide
it into halves. Yet we find the material for mental science in
partial knowledge of the mind. So, while we are not “geographers
of the divine nature” (Bowne, Review of Spencer, 72), we may say
with Paul, not “now know we a part of God,” but “now I know [God],
in part”_ (1 Cor. 13:12)_. We may know truly what we do not know
exhaustively; see _Eph. 3:19—_“to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge.” I do not perfectly understand myself, yet I
know myself in part; so I may know God, though I do not perfectly
understand him.

(_b_) The same argument that proves God unknowable proves the
universe unknowable also. Since every particle of matter in the
universe attracts every other, no one particle can be exhaustively
explained without taking account of all the rest. Thomas Carlyle:
“It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my
hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.” Tennyson,
Higher Pantheism: “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of
the crannies; Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little
flower; but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and
all in all, I should know what God and man is.” Schurman,
Agnosticism, 119—“Partial as it is, this vision of the divine
transfigures the life of man on earth.” Pfleiderer, Philos.
Religion, 1:167—“A faint-hearted agnosticism is worse than the
arrogant and titanic gnosticism against which it protests.”

E. Because all predicates of God are negative, and therefore furnish no
real knowledge. We answer: (_a_) Predicates derived from our
consciousness, such as spirit, love, and holiness, are positive. (_b_) The
terms “infinite” and “absolute,” moreover, express not merely a negative
but a positive idea—the idea, in the former case, of the absence of all
limit, the idea that the object thus described goes on and on forever; the
idea, in the latter case, of entire self-sufficiency. Since predicates of
God, therefore, are not merely negative, the argument mentioned above
furnishes no valid reason why we may not know him.

_Versus_ Sir William Hamilton, Metaphysics, 530—“The absolute and
the infinite can each only be conceived as a negation of the
thinkable; in other words, of the absolute and infinite we have no
conception at all.” Hamilton here confounds the infinite, or the
absence of _all_ limits, with the indefinite, or the absence of
all _known_ limits. _Per contra_, see Calderwood, Moral
Philosophy, 248, and Philosophy of the Infinite, 272—“Negation of
one thing is possible only by affirmation of another.” Porter,
Human Intellect, 652—“If the Sandwich Islanders, for lack of name,
had called the ox a _not-hog_, the use of a negative appellation
would not necessarily authorize the inference of a want of
definite conceptions or positive knowledge.” So with the infinite
or not-finite, the unconditioned or not-conditioned, the
independent or not-dependent,—these names do not imply that we
cannot conceive and know it as something positive. Spencer, First
Principles, 92—“Our consciousness of the Absolute, indefinite
though it is, is positive, and not negative.”

Schurman, Agnosticism, 100, speaks of “the farce of nescience
playing at omniscience in setting the bounds of science.” “The
agnostic,” he says, “sets up the invisible picture of a _Grand
Être_, formless and colorless in itself, absolutely separated from
man and from the world—blank within and void without—its very
existence indistinguishable from its non-existence, and, bowing
down before this idolatrous creation, he pours out his soul in
lamentations over the incognizableness of such a mysterious and
awful non-entity.... The truth is that the agnostic’s abstraction
of a Deity is unknown, only because it is unreal.” See McCosh,
Intuitions, 194, note; Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 363. God is
not necessarily infinite in every respect. He is infinite only in
every excellence. A plane which is unlimited in the one respect of
length may be limited in another respect, such as breadth. Our
doctrine here is not therefore inconsistent with what immediately
follows.

F. Because to know is to limit or define. Hence the Absolute as unlimited,
and the Infinite as undefined, cannot be known. We answer: (_a_) God is
absolute, not as existing in _no_ relation, but as existing in no
_necessary_ relation; and (_b_) God is infinite, not as excluding all
coexistence of the finite with himself, but as being the ground of the
finite, and so unfettered by it. (_c_) God is actually limited by the
unchangeableness of his own attributes and personal distinctions, as well
as by his self-chosen relations to the universe he has created and to
humanity in the person of Christ. God is therefore limited and defined in
such a sense as to render knowledge of him possible.

_Versus_ Mansel, Limitations of Religious Thought, 75-84, 93-95;
_cf._ Spinoza: “Omnis determinatio est negatio;” hence to define
God is to deny him. But we reply that perfection is inseparable
from limitation. Man can be other than he is: not so God, at least
internally. But this limitation, inherent in his unchangeable
attributes and personal distinctions, is God’s perfection.
Externally, all limitations upon God are self-limitations, and so
are consistent with his perfection. That God should not be able
thus to limit himself in creation and redemption would render all
self-sacrifice in him impossible, and so would subject him to the
greatest of limitations. We may say therefore that God’s 1.
_Perfection_ involves his limitation to (_a_) personality, (_b_)
trinity, (_c_) righteousness; 2. _Revelation_ involves his
self-limitation in (_a_) decree, (_b_) creation, (_c_)
preservation, (_d_) government, (_e_) education of the world; 3.
_Redemption_ involves his infinite self-limitation in the (_a_)
person and (_b_) work of Jesus Christ; see A. H. Strong, Christ in
Creation, 87-101, and in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1891:521-532.

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 135—“The infinite is not the
quantitative all; the absolute is not the unrelated.... Both
absolute and infinite mean only the independent ground of things.”
Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, Introduc., 10—“Religion has to do, not
with _an_ Object that must let itself be known because its very
existence is contingent upon its being known, but with _the_
Object in relation to whom we are truly subject, dependent upon
him, and waiting until he manifest himself.” James Martineau,
Study of Religion, 1:346—“We must not confound the _infinite_ with
the _total_.... The self-abnegation of infinity is but a form of
self-assertion, and the only form in which it can reveal
itself.... However instantaneous the omniscient thought, however
sure the almighty power, the execution has to be distributed in
time, and must have an order of successive steps; on no other
terms can the eternal become temporal, and the infinite
articulately speak in the finite.”

Perfect personality excludes, not _self_-determination, but
determination _from without_, determination _by another_. God’s
self-limitations are the self-limitations of love, and therefore
the evidences of his perfection. They are signs, not of weakness
but of power. God has limited himself to the method of evolution,
gradually unfolding himself in nature and in history. The
government of sinners by a holy God involves constant
self-repression. The education of the race is a long process of
divine forbearance; Herder: “The limitations of the pupil are
limitations of the teacher also.” In inspiration, God limits
himself by the human element through which he works. Above all, in
the person and work of Christ, we have infinite self-limitation:
Infinity narrows itself down to a point in the incarnation, and
holiness endures the agonies of the Cross. God’s promises are also
self-limitations. Thus both nature and grace are self-imposed
restrictions upon God, and these self-limitations are the means by
which he reveals himself. See Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:189,
195; Porter, Human Intellect, 653; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 130;
Calderwood, Philos. Infinite, 168; McCosh, Intuitions, 186;
Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 85; Martineau, Study of Religion,
2:85, 86, 362; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:189-191.

G. Because all knowledge is relative to the knowing agent; that is, what
we know, we know, not as it is objectively, but only as it is related to
our own senses and faculties. In reply: (_a_) We grant that we can know
only that which has relation to our faculties. But this is simply to say
that we know only that which we come into mental contact with, that is, we
know only what we know. But, (_b_) We deny that what we come into mental
contact with is known by us as other than it is. So far as it is known at
all, it is known as it is. In other words, the laws of our knowing are not
merely arbitrary and regulative, but correspond to the nature of things.
We conclude that, in theology, we are equally warranted in assuming that
the laws of our thought are laws of God’s thought, and that the results of
normally conducted thinking with regard to God correspond to the objective
reality.

_Versus_ Sir Wm. Hamilton, Metaph., 96-116, and Herbert Spencer,
First Principles, 68-97. This doctrine of relativity is derived
from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, who holds that _a priori_
judgments are simply “regulative.” But we reply that when our
primitive beliefs are found to be simply regulative, they will
cease to regulate. The forms of thought are also facts of nature.
The mind does not, like the glass of a kaleidoscope, itself
furnish the forms; it recognizes these as having an existence
external to itself. The mind reads its ideas, not _into_ nature,
but _in_ nature. Our intuitions are not green goggles, which make
all the world _seem_ green: they are the lenses of a microscope,
which enable us to see what is objectively _real_ (Royce, Spirit
of Mod. Philos., 125). Kant called our understanding “the
legislator of nature.” But it is so, only as discoverer of
nature’s laws, not as creator of them. Human reason does impose
its laws and forms upon the universe; but, in doing this, it
interprets the real meaning of the universe.

Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge: “All judgment implies an objective
truth according to which we judge, which constitutes the standard,
and with which we have something in common, _i. e._, our minds are
part of an infinite and eternal Mind.” French aphorism: “When you
are right, you are more right than you think you are.” God will
not put us to permanent intellectual confusion. Kant vainly wrote
“No thoroughfare” over the reason in its highest exercise.
Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:135, 136—“Over against Kant’s
assumption that the mind cannot know anything outside of itself,
we may set Comte’s equally unwarrantable assumption that the mind
cannot know itself or its states. We cannot have philosophy
without assumptions. You dogmatize if you say that the forms
correspond with reality; but you equally dogmatize if you say that
they do not.... 79—That our cognitive faculties correspond to
things _as they are_, is much less surprising than that they
should correspond to things _as they are not_.” W. T. Harris, in
Journ. Spec. Philos., 1:22, exposes Herbert Spencer’s
self-contradiction: “All knowledge is, not absolute, but relative;
our knowledge of this fact however is, not relative, but
absolute.”

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:16-21, sets out with
a correct statement of the nature of knowledge, and gives in his
adhesion to the doctrine of Lotze, as distinguished from that of
Kant. Ritschl’s statement may be summarized as follows: “We deal,
not with the abstract God of metaphysics, but with the God
self-limited, who is revealed in Christ. We do not know either
things or God _apart from_ their phenomena or manifestations, as
Plato imagined; we do not know phenomena or manifestations
_alone_, without knowing either things or God, as Kant supposed;
but we do know both things and God _in_ their phenomena or
manifestations, as Lotze taught. We hold to no mystical union with
God, back of all experience in religion, as Pietism does; soul is
always and only active, and religion is the activity of the human
spirit, in which feeling, knowing and willing combine in an
intelligible order.”

But Dr. C. M. Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of Doctrine,
has well shown that Ritschl has not followed Lotze. His
“value-judgments” are simply an application to theology of the
“regulative” principle of Kant. He holds that we can know things
not as they are in themselves, but only as they are for us. We
reply that what things are worth for us depends on what they are
in themselves. Ritschl regards the doctrines of Christ’s
preexistence, divinity and atonement as intrusions of metaphysics
into theology, matters about which we cannot know, and with which
we have nothing to do. There is no propitiation or mystical union
with Christ; and Christ is our Example, but not our atoning
Savior. Ritschl does well in recognizing that love in us gives
eyes to the mind, and enables us to see the beauty of Christ and
his truth. But our judgment is not, as he holds, a merely
subjective value-judgment,—it is a coming in contact with
objective fact. On the theory of knowledge held by Kant, Hamilton
and Spencer, see Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures for 1884:13; H.
B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 297-336; J. S. Mill, Examination,
1:113-134; Herbert, Modern Realism Examined; M. B. Anderson, art.:
“Hamilton,” in Johnson’s Encyclopædia; McCosh, Intuitions,
139-146, 340, 341, and Christianity and Positivism, 97-123;
Maurice, What is Revelation? Alden, Intellectual Philosophy,
48-79, esp. 71-79; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 523; Murphy, Scientific
Bases, 103; Bib. Sac. April, 1868:341; Princeton Rev., 1864:122;
Bowne, Review of Herbert Spencer, 76; Bowen, in Princeton Rev.,
March, 1878:445-448; Mind, April, 1878:257; Carpenter, Mental
Physiology, 117; Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 109-113;
Iverach, in Present Day Tracts, 5: No. 29; Martineau, Study of
Religion, 1:79, 120, 121, 135, 136.

3. God’s revelation of himself to man.

_In God’s actual revelation of himself and certain of these relations._—As
we do not in this place attempt a positive proof of God’s existence or of
man’s capacity for the knowledge of God, so we do not now attempt to prove
that God has brought himself into contact with man’s mind by revelation.
We shall consider the grounds of this belief hereafter. Our aim at present
is simply to show that, granting the fact of revelation, a scientific
theology is possible. This has been denied upon the following grounds:

A. That revelation, as a making known, is necessarily internal and
subjective—either a mode of intelligence, or a quickening of man’s
cognitive powers—and hence can furnish no objective facts such as
constitute the proper material for science.

Morell, Philos. Religion, 128-131, 143—“The Bible cannot in strict
accuracy of language be called a revelation, since a revelation
always implies an actual process of intelligence in a living
mind.” F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith, 152—“Of our moral and
spiritual God we know nothing without—everything within.” Theodore
Parker: “Verbal revelation can never communicate a simple idea
like that of God, Justice, Love, Religion”; see review of Parker
in Bib. Sac., 18:24-27. James Martineau, Seat of Authority in
Religion: “As many minds as there are that know God at first hand,
so many revealing acts there have been, and as many as know him at
second hand are strangers to revelation”; so, assuming external
revelation to be impossible, Martineau subjects all the proofs of
such revelation to unfair destructive criticism. Pfleiderer,
Philos. Religion, 1:185—“As all revelation is originally an
_inner_ living experience, the springing up of religious truth in
the heart, no external event can belong in itself to revelation,
no matter whether it be naturally or supernaturally brought
about.” Professor George M. Forbes: “Nothing can be revealed to us
which we do not grasp with our reason. It follows that, so far as
reason acts normally, it is a part of revelation.” Ritchie, Darwin
and Hegel, 30—“The revelation of God is the growth of the idea of
God.”

In reply to this objection, urged mainly by idealists in philosophy, (_a_)
We grant that revelation, to be effective, must be the means of inducing a
new mode of intelligence, or in other words, must be understood. We grant
that this understanding of divine things is impossible without a
quickening of man’s cognitive powers. We grant, moreover, that revelation,
when originally imparted, was often internal and subjective.

Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 51-53, on _Gal. 1:16—_“to reveal
his Son in me”: “The revelation on the way to Damascus would not
have enlightened Paul, had it been merely a vision to his eye.
Nothing can be revealed _to_ us which has not been revealed _in_
us. The eye does not see the beauty of the landscape, nor the ear
hear the beauty of music. So flesh and blood do not reveal Christ
to us. Without the teaching of the Spirit, the external facts will
be only like the letters of a book to a child that cannot read.”
We may say with Channing: “I am more sure that my rational nature
is from God, than that any book is the expression of his will.”

(_b_) But we deny that external revelation is therefore useless or
impossible. Even if religious ideas sprang wholly from within, an external
revelation might stir up the dormant powers of the mind. Religious ideas,
however, do not spring wholly from within. External revelation can impart
them. Man can reveal himself to man by external communications, and, if
God has equal power with man, God can reveal himself to man in like
manner.

Rogers, in his Eclipse of Faith, asks pointedly: “If Messrs.
Morell and Newman can teach by a book, cannot God do the same?”
Lotze, Microcosmos, 2:660 (book 9, chap. 4), speaks of revelation
as “either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or
continually repeated in men’s hearts.” But in fact there is no
alternative here; the strength of the Christian creed is that
God’s revelation is both external and internal; see Gore, in Lux
Mundi, 338. Rainy, in Critical Review, 1:1-21, well says that
Martineau unwarrantably _isolates_ the witness of God to the
individual soul. The inward needs to be combined with the outward,
in order to make sure that it is not a vagary of the imagination.
We need to distinguish God’s revelations from our own fancies.
Hence, before giving the internal, God commonly gives us the
external, as a standard by which to try our impressions. We are
finite and sinful, and we need authority. The external revelation
commends itself as authoritative to the heart which recognizes its
own spiritual needs. External authority evokes the inward witness
and gives added clearness to it, but only historical revelation
furnishes indubitable proof that God is love, and gives us
assurance that our longings after God are not in vain.

(_c_) Hence God’s revelation may be, and, as we shall hereafter see, it
is, in great part, an external revelation in works and words. The universe
is a revelation of God; God’s works in nature precede God’s words in
history. We claim, moreover, that, in many cases where truth was
originally communicated internally, the same Spirit who communicated it
has brought about an external record of it, so that the internal
revelation might be handed down to others than those who first received
it.

We must not limit revelation to the Scriptures. The eternal Word
antedated the written word, and through the eternal Word God is
made known in nature and in history. Internal revelation is
preceded by, and conditioned upon, external revelation. In point
of time earth comes before man, and sensation before perception.
Action best expresses character, and historic revelation is more
by deeds than by words. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:231-264—“The
Word is not in the Scriptures alone. The whole creation reveals
the Word. In nature God shows his power; in incarnation his grace
and truth. Scripture testifies of these, but Scripture is not the
essential Word. The Scripture is truly apprehended and
appropriated when in it and through it we see the living and
present Christ. It does not bind men to itself alone, but it
points them to the Christ of whom it testifies. Christ is the
authority. In the Scriptures he points us to himself and demands
our faith in him. This faith, once begotten, leads us to new
appropriation of Scripture, but also to new criticism of
Scripture. We find Christ more and more in Scripture, and yet we
judge Scripture more and more by the standard which we find in
Christ.”

Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 71-82: “There is but one
authority—Christ. His Spirit works in many ways, but chiefly in
two: first, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and, secondly, the
leading of the church into the truth. The latter is not to be
isolated or separated from the former. Scripture is law to the
Christian consciousness, and Christian consciousness in time
becomes law to the Scripture—interpreting, criticizing, verifying
it. The word and the spirit answer to each other. Scripture and
faith are coördinate. Protestantism has exaggerated the first;
Romanism the second. Martineau fails to grasp the coördination of
Scripture and faith.”

(_d_) With this external record we shall also see that there is given
under proper conditions a special influence of God’s Spirit, so to quicken
our cognitive powers that the external record reproduces in our minds the
ideas with which the minds of the writers were at first divinely filled.

We may illustrate the need of internal revelation from Egyptology,
which is impossible so long as the external revelation in the
hieroglyphics is uninterpreted; from the ticking of the clock in a
dark room, where only the lit candle enables us to tell the time;
from the landscape spread out around the Rigi in Switzerland,
invisible until the first rays of the sun touch the snowy mountain
peaks. External revelation (φανέρωσις, _Rom. 1:19, 20_) must be
supplemented by internal revelation (ἀποκάλυψις, _1 Cor. 2:10,
12_). Christ is the organ of external, the Holy Spirit the organ
of internal, revelation. In Christ (_2 Cor. 1:20_) are “the yea”
and “the Amen”—the objective certainty and the subjective
certitude, the reality and the realization.

Objective certainty must become subjective certitude in order to
be a scientific theology. Before conversion we have the first, the
external truth of Christ; only at conversion and after conversion
do we have the second, “Christ formed in us”_ (Gal. 4:19)_. We
have objective revelation at Sinai (_Ex. 20:22_); subjective
revelation in Elisha’s knowledge of Gehazi (_2 K. 5:26_). James
Russell Lowell, Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire: “Therefore with
thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs
Life in the withered words! how swift recede Time’s shadows! and
how glows again Through its dead mass the incandescent verse, As
when upon the anvil of the brain It glittering lay, cyclopically
wrought By the fast throbbing hammers of the poet’s thought!”

(_e_) Internal revelations thus recorded, and external revelations thus
interpreted, both furnish objective facts which may serve as proper
material for science. Although revelation in its widest sense may include,
and as constituting the ground of the possibility of theology does
include, both insight and illumination, it may also be used to denote
simply a provision of the external means of knowledge, and theology has to
do with inward revelations only as they are expressed in, or as they agree
with, this objective standard.

We have here suggested the vast scope and yet the insuperable
limitations of theology. So far as God is revealed, whether in
nature, history, conscience, or Scripture, theology may find
material for its structure. Since Christ is not simply the
incarnate Son of God but also the eternal Word, the only Revealer
of God, there is no theology apart from Christ, and all theology
is Christian theology. Nature and history are but the dimmer and
more general disclosures of the divine Being, of which the Cross
is the culmination and the key. God does not intentionally conceal
himself. He wishes to be known. He reveals himself at all times
just as fully as the capacity of his creatures will permit. The
infantile intellect cannot understand God’s boundlessness, nor can
the perverse disposition understand God’s disinterested affection.
Yet all truth is in Christ and is open to discovery by the
prepared mind and heart.

The Infinite One, so far as he is unrevealed, is certainly
unknowable to the finite. But the Infinite One, so far as he
manifests himself, is knowable. This suggests the meaning of the
declarations: _John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God at any time; the
only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him”; _14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”;
_1 Tim. 6:16—_“whom no man hath seen, nor can see.” We therefore
approve of the definition of Kaftan, Dogmatik, 1—“Dogmatics is the
science of the Christian truth which is believed and acknowledged
in the church upon the ground of the divine revelation”—in so far
as it limits the scope of theology to truth revealed by God and
apprehended by faith. But theology presupposes both God’s external
and God’s internal revelations, and these, as we shall see,
include nature, history, conscience and Scripture. On the whole
subject, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:37-43; Nitzsch, System Christ.
Doct., 72; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 193; Auberlen, Div. Rev.,
Introd., 29; Martineau, Essays, 1:171, 280; Bib. Sac., 1867:593,
and 1872:428; Porter, Human Intellect, 373-375; C. M. Mead, in
Boston Lectures, 1871:58.

B. That many of the truths thus revealed are too indefinite to constitute
the material for science, because they belong to the region of the
feelings, because they are beyond our full understanding, or because they
are destitute of orderly arrangement.

We reply:

(_a_) Theology has to do with subjective feelings only as they can be
defined, and shown to be effects of objective truth upon the mind. They
are not more obscure than are the facts of morals or of psychology, and
the same objection which would exclude such feelings from theology would
make these latter sciences impossible.

See Jacobi and Schleiermacher, who regard theology as a mere
account of devout Christian feelings, the grounding of which in
objective historical facts is a matter of comparative indifference
(Hagenbach, Hist. Doctrine, 2:401-403). Schleiermacher therefore
called his system of theology “Der Christliche Glaube,” and many
since his time have called their systems by the name of
“Glaubenslehre.” Ritschl’s “value-judgments,” in like manner,
render theology a merely subjective science, if any subjective
science is possible. Kaftan improves upon Ritschl, by granting
that we know, not only Christian feelings, but also Christian
facts. Theology is the science of God, and not simply the science
of faith. Allied to the view already mentioned is that of
Feuerbach, to whom religion is a matter of subjective fancy; and
that of Tyndall, who would remit theology to the region of vague
feeling and aspiration, but would exclude it from the realm of
science; see Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, translated by
Marian Evans (George Eliot); also Tyndall, Belfast Address.

(_b_) Those facts of revelation which are beyond our full understanding
may, like the nebular hypothesis in astronomy, the atomic theory in
chemistry, or the doctrine of evolution in biology, furnish a principle of
union between great classes of other facts otherwise irreconcilable. We
may define our concepts of God, and even of the Trinity, at least
sufficiently to distinguish them from all other concepts; and whatever
difficulty may encumber the putting of them into language only shows the
importance of attempting it and the value of even an approximate success.

Horace Bushnell: “Theology can never be a science, on account of
the infirmities of language.” But this principle would render void
both ethical and political science. Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of
Revelation, 145—“Hume and Gibbon refer to faith as something too
sacred to rest on proof. Thus religious beliefs are made to hang
in mid-air, without any support. But the foundation of these
beliefs is no less solid for the reason that empirical tests are
not applicable to them. The data on which they rest are real, and
the inferences from the data are fairly drawn.” Hodgson indeed
pours contempt on the whole intuitional method by saying:
“Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the
explanation of everything else!” Yet he would probably grant that
he begins his investigations by assuming his own existence. The
doctrine of the Trinity is not wholly comprehensible by us, and we
accept it at the first upon the testimony of Scripture; the full
proof of it is found in the fact that each successive doctrine of
theology is bound up with it, and with it stands or falls. The
Trinity is rational because it explains Christian experience as
well as Christian doctrine.

(_c_) Even though there were no orderly arrangement of these facts, either
in nature or in Scripture, an accurate systematizing of them by the human
mind would not therefore be proved impossible, unless a principle were
assumed which would show all physical science to be equally impossible.
Astronomy and geology are constructed by putting together multitudinous
facts which at first sight seem to have no order. So with theology. And
yet, although revelation does not present to us a dogmatic system
ready-made, a dogmatic system is not only implicitly contained therein,
but parts of the system are wrought out in the epistles of the New
Testament, as for example in Rom. 5:12-19; 1 Cor. 15:3, 4; 8:6; 1 Tim.
3:16; Heb. 6:1, 2.

We may illustrate the construction of theology from the dissected
map, two pieces of which a father puts together, leaving his child
to put together the rest. Or we may illustrate from the physical
universe, which to the unthinking reveals little of its order.
“Nature makes no fences.” One thing seems to glide into another.
It is man’s business to distinguish and classify and combine.
Origen: “God gives us truth in single threads, which we must weave
into a finished texture.” Andrew Fuller said of the doctrines of
theology that “they are united together like chain-shot, so that,
whichever one enters the heart, the others must certainly follow.”
George Herbert: “Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, And
the configuration of their glory; Seeing not only how each verse
doth shine, But all the constellations of the story!”

Scripture hints at the possibilities of combination, in _Rom.
5:12-19_, with its grouping of the facts of sin and salvation
about the two persons, Adam and Christ; in _Rom. 4:24, 25_, with
its linking of the resurrection of Christ and our justification;
in _1 Cor. 3:6_, with its indication of the relations between the
Father and Christ; in _1 Tim. 3:16_, with its poetical summary of
the facts of redemption (see Commentaries of DeWette, Meyer,
Fairbairn); in _Heb. 6:1, 2_, with its statement of the first
principles of the Christian faith. God’s furnishing of concrete
facts in theology, which we ourselves are left to systematize, is
in complete accordance with his method of procedure with regard to
the development of other sciences. See Martineau, Essays, 1:29,
40; Am. Theol. Rev., 1859:101-126—art. on the Idea, Sources and
Uses of Christian Theology.

IV. Necessity of Theology.

The necessity of theology has its grounds:

(_a_) _In the organizing instinct of the human mind._ This organizing
principle is a part of our constitution. The mind cannot endure confusion
or apparent contradiction in known facts. The tendency to harmonize and
unify its knowledge appears as soon as the mind becomes reflective; just
in proportion to its endowments and culture does the impulse to
systematize and formulate increase. This is true of all departments of
human inquiry, but it is peculiarly true of our knowledge of God. Since
the truth with regard to God is the most important of all, theology meets
the deepest want of man’s rational nature. Theology is a rational
necessity. If all existing theological systems were destroyed to-day, new
systems would rise to-morrow. So inevitable is the operation of this law,
that those who most decry theology show nevertheless that they have made a
theology for themselves, and often one sufficiently meagre and blundering.
Hostility to theology, where it does not originate in mistaken fears for
the corruption of God’s truth or in a naturally illogical structure of
mind, often proceeds from a license of speculation which cannot brook the
restraints of a complete Scriptural system.

President E. G. Robinson: “Every man has as much theology as he
can hold.” Consciously or unconsciously, we philosophize, as
naturally as we speak prose. “Se moquer de la philosophie c’est
vraiment philosopher.” Gore, Incarnation, 21—“Christianity became
metaphysical, only because man is rational. This rationality means
that he must attempt ‘to give account of things,’ as Plato said,
‘because he was a man, not merely because he was a Greek.’ ” Men
often denounce systematic theology, while they extol the sciences
of matter. Has God then left only the facts with regard to himself
in so unrelated a state that man cannot put them together? All
other sciences are valuable only as they contain or promote the
knowledge of God. If it is praiseworthy to classify beetles, one
science may be allowed to reason concerning God and the soul. In
speaking of Schelling, Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 173,
satirically exhorts us: “Trust your genius; follow your noble
heart; change your doctrine whenever your heart changes, and
change your heart often,—such is the practical creed of the
romanticists.” Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 3—“Just those persons
who disclaim metaphysics are sometimes most apt to be infected
with the disease they profess to abhor—and not to know when they
have it.” See Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 27-52; Murphy,
Scientific Bases of Faith, 195-199.

(_b_) _In the relation of systematic truth to the development of
character._ Truth thoroughly digested is essential to the growth of
Christian character in the individual and in the church. All knowledge of
God has its influence upon character, but most of all the knowledge of
spiritual facts in their relations. Theology cannot, as has sometimes been
objected, deaden the religious affections, since it only draws out from
their sources and puts into rational connection with each other the truths
which are best adapted to nourish the religions affections. On the other
hand, the strongest Christians are those who have the firmest grasp upon
the great doctrines of Christianity; the heroic ages of the church are
those which have witnessed most consistently to them; the piety that can
be injured by the systematic exhibition of them must be weak, or mystical,
or mistaken.

Some knowledge is necessary to conversion—at least, knowledge of
sin and knowledge of a Savior; and the putting together of these
two great truths is a beginning of theology. All subsequent growth
of character is conditioned upon the increase of this knowledge.
_Col. 1:10—αὐξανόμενοι τῇ ἐπιγνώσει τοῦ Θεοῦ [omit ἐν] =
_“increasing by the knowledge of God”—the instrumental dative
represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures
the growth of the plant; _cf._ _3 Pet. 3:18—_“grow in the grace
and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” For texts
which represent truth as nourishment, see _Jer. 3:15—_“feed you
with knowledge and understanding”; _Mat. 4:4—_“Man shall not live
by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God”; _1 Cor. 3:1, 2—_“babes in Christ ... I fed you with milk,
not with meat”; _Heb. 5:14—_“but solid food is for full-grown
men.” Christian character rests upon Christian truth as its
foundation; see _1 Cor. 3:10-15—_“I laid a foundation, and another
buildeth thereon.” See Dorus Clarke, Saying the Catechism; Simon,
on Christ Doct. and Life, in Bib. Sac., July, 1884:433-439.

Ignorance is the mother of superstition, not of devotion. Talbot
W. Chambers:—“Doctrine without duty is a tree without fruits; duty
without doctrine is a tree without roots.” Christian morality is a
fruit which grows only from the tree of Christian doctrine. We
cannot long keep the fruits of faith after we have cut down the
tree upon which they have grown. Balfour, Foundations of Belief,
82—“Naturalistic virtue is parasitic, and when the host perishes,
the parasite perishes also. Virtue without religion will die.”
Kidd, Social Evolution, 214—“Because the fruit survives for a time
when removed from the tree, and even mellows and ripens, shall we
say that it is independent of the tree?” The twelve manner of
fruits on the Christmas-tree are only tacked on,—they never grew
there, and they can never reproduce their kind. The withered apple
swells out under the exhausted receiver, but it will go back again
to its former shrunken form; so the self-righteousness of those
who get out of the atmosphere of Christ and have no divine ideal
with which to compare themselves. W. M. Lisle: “It is the mistake
and disaster of the Christian world that effects are sought
instead of causes.” George A. Gordon, Christ of To-day,
28—“Without the historical Christ and personal love for that
Christ, the broad theology of our day will reduce itself to a
dream, powerless to rouse a sleeping church.”

(_c_) _In the importance to the preacher of definite and just views of
Christian doctrine._ His chief intellectual qualification must be the
power clearly and comprehensively to conceive, and accurately and
powerfully to express, the truth. He can be the agent of the Holy Spirit
in converting and sanctifying men, only as he can wield “the sword of the
Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17), or, in other language, only
as he can impress truth upon the minds and consciences of his hearers.
Nothing more certainly nullifies his efforts than confusion and
inconsistency in his statements of doctrine. His object is to replace
obscure and erroneous conceptions among his hearers by those which are
correct and vivid. He cannot do this without knowing the facts with regard
to God in their relations—knowing them, in short, as parts of a system.
With this truth he is put in trust. To mutilate it or misrepresent it, is
not only sin against the Revealer of it,—it may prove the ruin of men’s
souls. The best safeguard against such mutilation or misrepresentation, is
the diligent study of the several doctrines of the faith in their
relations to one another, and especially to the central theme of theology,
the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The more refined and reflective the age, the more it requires
reasons for feeling. Imagination, as exercised in poetry and
eloquence and as exhibited in politics or war, is not less strong
than of old,—it is only more rational. Notice the progress from
“Buncombe”, in legislative and forensic oratory, to sensible and
logical address. Bassanio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,
1:1:113—“Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing.... His
reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff.”
So in pulpit oratory, mere Scripture quotation and fervid appeal
are no longer sufficient. As well be a howling dervish, as to
indulge in windy declamation. Thought is the staple of preaching.
Feeling must be roused, but only by bringing men to “the knowledge
of the truth”_ (2 Tim. 2:25)_. The preacher must furnish the basis
for feeling by producing intelligent conviction. He must instruct
before he can move. If the object of the preacher is first to know
God, and secondly to make God known, then the study of theology is
absolutely necessary to his success.

Shall the physician practice medicine without study of physiology,
or the lawyer practice law without study of jurisprudence?
Professor Blackie: “One may as well expect to make a great patriot
out of a fencing-master, as to make a great orator out of a mere
rhetorician.” The preacher needs doctrine, to prevent his being a
mere barrel-organ, playing over and over the same tunes. John
Henry Newman: “The false preacher is one who has to say something;
the true preacher is one who has something to say.” Spurgeon,
Autobiography, 1:167—“Constant change of creed is sure loss. If a
tree has to be taken up two or three times a year, you will not
need to build a very large loft in which to store the apples. When
people are shifting their doctrinal principles, they do not bring
forth much fruit.... We shall never have great preachers till we
have great divines. You cannot build a man of war out of a
currant-bush, nor can great soul-moving preachers be formed out of
superficial students.” Illustrate the harmfulness of ignorant and
erroneous preaching, by the mistake in a physician’s prescription;
by the wrong trail at Lake Placid which led astray those ascending
Whiteface; by the sowing of acorns whose crop was gathered only
after a hundred years. Slight divergences from correct doctrine on
our part may be ruinously exaggerated in those who come after us.
Though the moth-miller has no teeth, its offspring has. _2 Tim.
2:2—_“And the things which thou hast heard from me among many
witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able
to teach others also.”

(_d_) _In the intimate connection between correct doctrine and the safety
and aggressive power of the church._ The safety and progress of the church
is dependent upon her “holding the pattern of sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13),
and serving as “pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). Defective
understanding of the truth results sooner or later in defects of
organization, of operation, and of life. Thorough comprehension of
Christian truth as an organized system furnishes, on the other hand, not
only an invaluable defense against heresy and immorality, but also an
indispensable stimulus and instrument in aggressive labor for the world’s
conversion.

The creeds of Christendom have not originated in mere speculative
curiosity and logical hair-splitting. They are statements of
doctrine in which the attacked and imperiled church has sought to
express the truth which constitutes her very life. Those who
deride the early creeds have small conception of the intellectual
acumen and the moral earnestness which went to the making of them.
The creeds of the third and fourth centuries embody the results of
controversies which exhausted the possibilities of heresy with
regard to the Trinity and the person of Christ, and which set up
bars against false doctrine to the end of time. Mahaffy: “What
converted the world was not the example of Christ’s life,—it was
the dogma of his death.” Coleridge: “He who does not withstand,
has no standing ground of his own.” Mrs. Browning: “Entire
intellectual toleration is the mark of those who believe nothing.”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 360-362—“A doctrine is but a
precept in the style of a proposition; and a precept is but a
doctrine in the form of a command.... Theology is God’s garden;
its trees are trees of his planting; and ‘all the trees of the
Lord are full of sap’_ (Ps. 104:16)._”

Bose, Ecumenical Councils: “A creed is not catholic because a
council of many or of few bishops decreed it, but because it
expresses the common conviction of entire generations of men and
women who turned their understanding of the New Testament into
those forms of words.” Dorner: “The creeds are the precipitate of
the religious consciousness of mighty men and times.” Foster,
Christ. Life and Theol., 162—“It ordinarily requires the shock of
some great event to startle men into clear apprehension and
crystallization of their substantial belief. Such a shock was
given by the rough and coarse doctrine of Arius, upon which the
conclusion arrived at in the Council of Nice followed as rapidly
as in chilled water the crystals of ice will sometimes form when
the containing vessel receives a blow.” Balfour, Foundations of
Belief, 287—“The creeds were not explanations, but rather denials
that the Arian and Gnostic explanations were sufficient, and
declarations that they irremediably impoverished the idea of the
Godhead. They insisted on preserving that idea in all its
inexplicable fulness.” Denny, Studies in Theology, 192—“Pagan
philosophies tried to capture the church for their own ends, and
to turn it into a school. In self-defense the church was compelled
to become somewhat of a school on its own account. It had to
assert its facts; it had to define its ideas; it had to interpret
in its own way those facts which men were misinterpreting.”

Professor Howard Osgood: “A creed is like a backbone. A man does
not need to wear his backbone in front of him; but he must have a
backbone, and a straight one, or he will be a flexible if not a
humpbacked Christian.” Yet we must remember that creeds are
_credita_, and not _credenda_; historical statements of what the
church _has_ believed, not infallible prescriptions of what the
church _must_ believe. George Dana Boardman, The Church,
98—“Creeds are apt to become cages.” Schurman, Agnosticism,
151—“The creeds were meant to be defensive fortifications of
religion; alas, that they should have sometimes turned their
artillery against the citadel itself.” T. H. Green: “We are told
that we must be loyal to the beliefs of the Fathers. Yes, but who
knows what the Fathers believe now?” George A. Gordon, Christ of
To-day, 60—“The assumption that the Holy Spirit is not concerned
in the development of theological thought, nor manifest in the
intellectual evolution of mankind, is the superlative heresy of
our generation.... The metaphysics of Jesus are absolutely
essential to his ethics.... If his thought is a dream, his
endeavor for man is a delusion.” See Schaff, Creeds of
Christendom, 1:8, 15, 16; Storrs, Div. Origin of Christianity,
121; Ian Maclaren (John Watson), Cure of Souls, 152; Frederick
Harrison, in Fortnightly Rev., Jan. 1889.

(_e_) _In the direct and indirect injunctions of Scripture._ The Scripture
urges upon us the thorough and comprehensive study of the truth (John
5:39, marg.,—“Search the Scriptures”), the comparing and harmonizing of
its different parts (1 Cor. 2:13—“comparing spiritual things with
spiritual”), the gathering of all about the great central fact of
revelation (Col. 1:27—“which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”), the
preaching of it in its wholeness as well as in its due proportions (2 Tim.
4:2—“Preach the word”). The minister of the Gospel is called “a scribe who
hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 13:52); the
“pastors” of the churches are at the same time to be “teachers” (Eph.
4:11); the bishop must be “apt to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2), “handling aright
the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15), “holding to the faithful word which is
according to the teaching, that he may be able both to exhort in the sound
doctrine and to convict the gainsayers” (Tit. 1:9).

As a means of instructing the church and of securing progress in
his own understanding of Christian truth, it is well for the
pastor to preach regularly each month a doctrinal sermon, and to
expound in course the principal articles of the faith. The
treatment of doctrine in these sermons should be simple enough to
be comprehensible by intelligent youth; it should be made vivid
and interesting by the help of brief illustrations; and at least
one-third of each sermon should be devoted to the practical
applications of the doctrine propounded. See Jonathan Edwards’s
sermon on the Importance of the Knowledge of Divine Truth, in
Works, 4:1-15. The actual sermons of Edwards, however, are not
models of doctrinal preaching for our generation. They are too
scholastic in form, too metaphysical for substance; there is too
little of Scripture and too little of illustration. The doctrinal
preaching of the English Puritans in a similar manner addressed
itself almost wholly to adults. The preaching of our Lord on the
other hand was adapted also to children. No pastor should count
himself faithful, who permits his young people to grow up without
regular instruction from the pulpit in the whole circle of
Christian doctrine. Shakespeare, K. Henry VI, 2nd part,
4:7—“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge the wing wherewith
we fly to heaven.”

V. Relation of Theology to Religion.

Theology and religion are related to each other as effects, in different
spheres, of the same cause. As theology is an effect produced in the
sphere of systematic thought by the facts respecting God and the universe,
so religion is an effect which these same facts produce in the sphere of
individual and collective life. With regard to the term “religion”,
notice:

1. Derivation.

(_a_) The derivation from _religāre_, “to bind back” (man to God), is
negatived by the authority of Cicero and of the best modern etymologists;
by the difficulty, on this hypothesis, of explaining such forms as
_religio_, _religens_; and by the necessity, in that case, of presupposing
a fuller knowledge of sin and redemption than was common to the ancient
world.

(_b_) The more correct derivation is from _relegĕre_, “to go over again,”
“carefully to ponder.” Its original meaning is therefore “reverent
observance” (of duties due to the gods).

For advocacy of the derivation of _religio_, as meaning “binding
duty,” from _religāre_, see Lange, Dogmatik, 1:185-196. This
derivation was first proposed by Lactantius, Inst. Div., 4:28, a
Christian writer. To meet the objection that the form _religio_
seems derived from a verb of the third conjugation, Lange cites
_rebellio_, from _rebellāre_, and _optio_, from _optāre_. But we
reply that these verbs of the first conjugation, like many others,
are probably derived from obsolete verbs of the third conjugation.
For the derivation favored in the text, see Curtius, Griechische
Etymologie, 5te Aufl., 364; Fick, Vergl. Wörterb. der indoger.
Spr., 2:227; Vanicek, Gr.-Lat. Etym. Wörterb., 2:829; Andrews,
Latin Lexicon, _in voce_; Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doctrine, 7;
Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 75-77; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:6;
Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:18; Menzies, History of Religion, 11; Max
Müller, Natural Religion, lect. 2.

2. False Conceptions.

(_a_) Religion is not, as Hegel declared, a kind of knowing; for it would
then be only an incomplete form of philosophy, and the measure of
knowledge in each case would be the measure of piety.

In a system of idealistic pantheism, like that of Hegel, God is
the subject of religion as well as its object. Religion is God’s
knowing of himself through the human consciousness. Hegel did not
utterly ignore other elements in religion. “Feeling, intuition,
and faith belong to it,” he said, “and mere cognition is
one-sided.” Yet he was always looking for the movement of
_thought_ in all forms of life; God and the universe were but
developments of the primordial _idea_. “What knowledge is worth
knowing,” he asked, “if God is unknowable? To know God is eternal
life, and thinking is also true worship.” Hegel’s error was in
regarding life as a process of thought, rather than in regarding
thought as a process of life. Here was the reason for the
bitterness between Hegel and Schleiermacher. Hegel rightly
considered that feeling must become intelligent before it is truly
religious, but he did not recognize the supreme importance of love
in a theological system. He gave even less place to the will than
he gave to the emotions, and he failed to see that the knowledge
of God of which Scripture speaks is a knowing, not of the
intellect alone, but of the whole man, including the affectional
and voluntary nature.

Goethe: “How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking,
but by doing. Try to do your duty, and you will know at once what
you are worth. You cannot play the flute by blowing alone,—you
must use your fingers.” So we can never come to know God by
thinking alone. _John 7:17—_“If any man willeth to do his will, he
will know of the teaching, whether it is of God.” The Gnostics,
Stapfer, Henry VIII, all show that there may be much theological
knowledge without true religion. Chillingworth’s maxim, “The Bible
only, the religion of Protestants,” is inadequate and inaccurate;
for the Bible, without faith, love, and obedience, may become a
fetich and a snare: _John 5:39,40—_“Ye search the Scriptures, ...
and ye will not come to me, that ye may have life.” See Sterrett,
Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion; Porter, Human
Intellect, 59, 60, 412, 525-536, 589, 650; Morell, Hist. Philos.,
476, 477; Hamerton, Intel. Life, 214; Bib. Sac., 9:374.

(_b_) Religion is not, as Schleiermacher held, the mere feeling of
dependence; for such feeling of dependence is not religious, unless
exercised toward God and accompanied by moral effort.

In German theology, Schleiermacher constitutes the transition from
the old rationalism to the evangelical faith. “Like Lazarus, with
the grave clothes of a pantheistic philosophy entangling his
steps,” yet with a Moravian experience of the life of God in the
soul, he based religion upon the inner certainties of Christian
feeling. But, as Principal Fairbairn remarks, “Emotion is impotent
unless it speaks out of conviction; and where conviction is, there
will be emotion which is potent to persuade.” If Christianity is
religious feeling alone, then there is no essential difference
between it and other religions, for all alike are products of the
religious sentiment. But Christianity is distinguished from other
religions by its peculiar religious conceptions. Doctrine precedes
life, and Christian doctrine, not mere religious feeling, is the
cause of Christianity as a distinctive religion. Though faith
begins in feeling, moreover, it does not end there. We see the
worthlessness of mere feeling in the transient emotions of
theatre-goers, and in the occasional phenomena of revivals.

Sabatier, Philos. Relig., 27, adds to Schleiermacher’s passive
element of _dependence_, the active element of _prayer_. Kaftan,
Dogmatik, 10—“Schleiermacher regards God as the _Source_ of our
being, but forgets that he is also our _End_.” Fellowship and
progress are as important elements in religion as is dependence;
and fellowship must come before progress—such fellowship as
presupposes pardon and life. Schleiermacher apparently believed in
neither a personal God nor his own personal immortality; see his
Life and Letters, 2:77-90; Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:357.
Charles Hodge compares him to a ladder in a pit—a good thing for
those who wish to get out, but not for those who wish to get in.
Dorner: “The Moravian brotherhood was his mother; Greece was his
nurse.” On Schleiermacher, see Herzog, Realencyclopädie, _in
voce_; Bib. Sac., 1852:375; 1883:534; Liddon, Elements of
Religion, lect. I; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:14; Julius Müller, Doctrine
of Sin, 1:175; Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 563-570;
Caird, Philos. Religion, 160-186.

(_c_) Religion is not, as Kant maintained, morality or moral action; for
morality is conformity to an abstract law of right, while religion is
essentially a relation to a person, from whom the soul receives blessing
and to whom it surrenders itself in love and obedience.

Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Beschluss: “I know of but
two beautiful things, the starry heavens above my head, and the
sense of duty within my heart.” But the mere sense of duty often
distresses. We object to the word “obey” as the imperative of
religion, because (1) it makes religion a matter of the will only;
(2) will presupposes affection; (3) love is not subject to will;
(4) it makes God all law, and no grace; (5) it makes the Christian
a servant only, not a friend; _cf._ _John 15:15—_“No longer do I
call you servants ... but I have called you friends”—a relation
not of service but of love (Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_). The
voice that speaks is the voice of love, rather than the voice of
law. We object also to Matthew Arnold’s definition: “Religion is
ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; morality touched
with emotion.” This leaves out of view the receptive element in
religion, as well as its relation to a personal God. A truer
statement would be that religion is morality toward God, as
morality is religion toward man. Bowne, Philos. of Theism,
251—“Morality that goes beyond mere conscientiousness must have
recourse to religion”; see Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 128-142.
Goethe: “Unqualified activity, of whatever kind, leads at last to
bankruptcy”; see also Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:65-69;
Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, 244-246; Liddon, Elements of
Religion, 19.

3. Essential Idea.

Religion in its essential idea is a life in God, a life lived in
recognition of God, in communion with God, and under control of the
indwelling Spirit of God. Since it is a life, it cannot be described as
consisting solely in the exercise of any one of the powers of intellect,
affection, or will. As physical life involves the unity and coöperation of
all the organs of the body, so religion, or spiritual life, involves the
united working of all the powers of the soul. To feeling, however, we must
assign the logical priority, since holy affection toward God, imparted in
regeneration, is the condition of truly knowing God and of truly serving
him.

See Godet, on the Ultimate Design of Man—“God in man, and man in
God”—in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 5-79,
and Religionsphilosophie, 255—Religion is “Sache des ganzen
Geisteslebens”: Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 4—“Religion is the
personal influence of the immanent God”; Sterrett, Reason and
Authority in Religion, 31, 32—“Religion is the reciprocal relation
or communion of God and man, involving (1) revelation, (2) faith”;
Dr. J. W. A. Stewart: “Religion is fellowship with God”; Pascal:
“Piety is God sensible to the heart”; Ritschl, Justif. and
Reconcil., 13—“Christianity is an ellipse with two foci—Christ as
Redeemer and Christ as King, Christ for us and Christ in us,
redemption and morality, religion and ethics”; Kaftan, Dogmatik,
8—“The Christian religion is (1) the _kingdom of God_ as a goal
above the world, to be attained by moral development here, and (2)
_reconciliation with God_ permitting attainment of this goal in
spite of our sins. Christian theology once grounded itself in
man’s natural knowledge of God; we now start with religion, _i.
e._, that Christian knowledge of God which we call faith.”

Herbert Spencer: “Religion is an _a priori_ theory of the
universe”; Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 43, adds: “which assumes
intelligent personality as the originating cause of the universe,
science dealing with the _How_, the phenomenal process, religion
dealing with the _Who_, the intelligent Personality who works
through the process.” Holland, in Lux Mundi, 27—“Natural life is
the life in God which has not yet arrived at this recognition”—the
recognition of the fact that God is in all things—“it is not yet,
as such, religious; ... Religion is the discovery, by the son, of
a Father who is in all his works, yet is distinct from them all.”
Dewey, Psychology, 283—“Feeling finds its absolutely universal
expression in religious emotion, which is the finding or
realization of self in a completely realized personality which
unites in itself truth, or the complete unity of the relations of
all objects, beauty or the complete unity of all ideal values, and
rightness or the complete unity of all persons. The emotion which
accompanies the religious life is that which accompanies the
complete activity of ourselves; the self is realized and finds its
true life in God.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 262—“Ethics is simply
the growing insight into, and the effort to actualize in society,
the sense of fundamental kinship and identity of substance in all
men; while religion is the emotion and the devotion which attend
the realization in our self-consciousness of an inmost spiritual
relationship arising out of that unity of substance which
constitutes man the true son of the eternal Father.” See Van
Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 81-85; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:227;
Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 10-28; Luthardt, Fund. Truths,
147; Twesten, Dogmatik, 1:12.

4. Inferences.

From this definition of religion it follows:

(_a_) That in strictness there is but one religion. Man is a religious
being, indeed, as having the capacity for this divine life. He is actually
religious, however, only when he enters into this living relation to God.
False religions are the caricatures which men given to sin, or the
imaginations which men groping after light, form of this life of the soul
in God.

Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 18—“If Christianity
be true, it is not _a_ religion, but _the_ religion. If Judaism be
also true, it is so not as distinct from but as coincident with
Christianity, the one religion to which it can bear only the
relation of a part to the whole. If there be portions of truth in
other religious systems, they are not portions of other religions,
but portions of the one religion which somehow or other became
incorporated with fables and falsities.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas
of Christianity, 1:25—“You can never get at the true idea or
essence of religion merely by trying to find out something that is
common to all religions; and it is not the lower religions that
explain the higher, but conversely the higher religion explains
all the lower religions.” George P. Fisher: “The recognition of
certain elements of truth in the ethnic religions does not mean
that Christianity has defects which are to be repaired by
borrowing from them; it only means that the ethnic faiths have in
fragments what Christianity has as a whole. Comparative religion
does not bring to Christianity new truth; it provides
illustrations of how Christian truth meets human needs and
aspirations, and gives a full vision of that which the most
spiritual and gifted among the heathen only dimly discerned.”

Dr. C. H. Parkhurst, sermon on _Proverbs 20:27—_“The spirit of man
is the lamp of Jehovah”—“a lamp, but not necessarily lighted; a
lamp that can be lit only by the touch of a divine flame”—man has
naturally and universally a capacity for religion, but is by no
means naturally and universally religious. All false religions
have some element of truth; otherwise they could never have gained
or kept their hold upon mankind. We need to recognize these
elements of truth in dealing with them. There is some silver in a
counterfeit dollar, else it would deceive no one; but the thin
washing of silver over the lead does not prevent it from being bad
money. Clarke, Christian Theology, 8—“See Paul’s methods of
dealing with heathen religion, in Acts 14 with gross paganism and
in Acts 17 with its cultured form. He treats it with sympathy and
justice. Christian theology has the advantage of walking in the
light of God’s self-manifestation in Christ, while heathen
religions grope after God and worship him in ignorance”; _cf._
_Acts 14:16—_“We ... bring you good tidings, that ye should turn
from these vain things unto a living God”_;_ _17:22—_“I perceive
that ye are more than usually reverent toward the divinities....
What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto
you.”

Matthew Arnold: “Children of men! the unseen Power whose eye
Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath looked on no religion
scornfully That man did ever find. Which has not taught weak wills
how much they can? Which has not fallen on the dry heart like
rain? Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man, Thou must be
born again?” Christianity is absolutely exclusive, because it is
absolutely inclusive. It is not an amalgamation of other
religions, but it has in it all that is best and truest in other
religions. It is the white light that contains all the colored
rays. God may have made disclosures of truth outside of Judaism,
and did so in Balaam and Melchisedek, in Confucius and Socrates.
But while other religions have a relative excellence, Christianity
is the absolute religion that contains all excellencies. Matheson,
Messages of the Old Religions, 328-342—“Christianity is
reconciliation. Christianity includes the aspiration of Egypt; it
sees, in this aspiration, God in the soul (Brahmanism); recognizes
the evil power of sin with Parseeism; goes back to a pure
beginning like China; surrenders itself to human brotherhood like
Buddha; gets all things from within like Judaism; makes the
present life beautiful like Greece; seeks a universal kingdom like
Rome; shows a growth of divine life, like the Teuton. Christianity
is the manifold wisdom of God.” See also Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics,
88-93. Shakespeare: “There is some soul of goodness in things
evil, Would men observingly distill it out”

(_b_) That the content of religion is greater than that of theology. The
facts of religion come within the range of theology only so far as they
can be definitely conceived, accurately expressed in language, and brought
into rational relation to each other.

This principle enables us to define the proper limits of religious
fellowship. It should be as wide as is religion itself. But it is
important to remember what religion is. Religion is not to be
identified with the capacity for religion. Nor can we regard the
perversions and caricatures of religion as meriting our
fellowship. Otherwise we might be required to have fellowship with
devil-worship, polygamy, thuggery, and the inquisition; for all
these have been dignified with the name of religion. True religion
involves some knowledge, however rudimentary, of the true God, the
God of righteousness; some sense of sin as the contrast between
human character and the divine standard; some casting of the soul
upon divine mercy and a divine way of salvation, in place of
self-righteous earning of merit and reliance upon one’s works and
one’s record; some practical effort to realize ethical principle
in a pure life and in influence over others. Wherever these marks
of true religion appear, even in Unitarians, Romanists, Jews or
Buddhists, there we recognize the demand for fellowship. But we
also attribute these germs of true religion to the inworking of
the omnipresent Christ, “the light which lighteth every man”_
(John 1:9),_ and we see in them incipient repentance and faith,
even though the Christ who is their object is yet unknown by name.
_Christian_ fellowship must have a larger basis in accepted
Christian truth, and _Church_ fellowship a still larger basis in
common acknowledgment of N. T. teaching as to the church.
_Religious_ fellowship, in the widest sense, rests upon the fact
that “God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that
feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him”_ (Acts
10:34, 35)_.

(_c_) That religion is to be distinguished from formal worship, which is
simply the outward expression of religion. As such expression, worship is
“formal communion between God and his people.” In it God speaks to man,
and man to God. It therefore properly includes the reading of Scripture
and preaching on the side of God, and prayer and song on the side of the
people.

Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 166—“Christian worship
is the utterance (outerance) of the spirit.” But there is more in
true love than can be put into a love-letter, and there is more in
true religion than can be expressed either in theology or in
worship. Christian worship is communion between God and man. But
communion cannot be one-sided. Madame de Staël, whom Heine called
“a whirlwind in petticoats,” ended one of her brilliant
soliloquies by saying: “What a delightful conversation we have
had!” We may find a better illustration of the nature of worship
in Thomas à Kempis’s dialogues between the saint and his Savior,
in the Imitation of Christ. Goethe: “Against the great superiority
of another there is no remedy but love.... To praise a man is to
put one’s self on his level.” If this be the effect of loving and
praising man, what must be the effect of loving and praising God!
Inscription in Grasmere Church: “Whoever thou art that enterest
this church, leave it not without one prayer to God for thyself,
for those who minister, and for those who worship here.” In _James
1:27—_“Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is
this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and
to keep oneself unspotted from the world”—“_religion_,” θρησκεία,
is _cultus exterior_; and the meaning is that “the external
service, the outward garb, the very ritual of Christianity, is a
life of purity, love and self-devotion. What its true essence, its
inmost spirit may be, the writer does not say, but leaves this to
be inferred.” On the relation between religion and worship, see
Prof. Day, in New Englander, Jan. 1882; Prof. T. Harwood Pattison,
Public Prayer; Trench, Syn. N. T., 1; sec. 48; Coleridge, Aids to
Reflection, Introd., Aphorism 23; Lightfoot, Gal., 351, note 2.

Chapter II. Material of Theology.

I. Sources of Theology.

God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge
with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a
summary and explanation of the content of God’s self-revelations. These
are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the
revelation of God in the Scriptures.

Ambrose: “To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than
to God himself?” Von Baader: “To know God without God is
impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime
source of knowledge.” C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth
in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of
mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but
above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.” F. H. Johnson,
What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed.
Revelation _helps_ reason and conscience, but is not a
_substitute_ for them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution
for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like
nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing
ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.” A. J. F. Behrends: “The
Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars
which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine
to see the stars with our own eyes.” Schurman, Agnosticism,
178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But
it is useless when you put your eyes out.”

We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The
immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any
more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from
us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word ‘authority’ is
derived from _auctor_, _augeo_, ‘to add.’ Authority adds something
to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element
of _witness_. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which
cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which
results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own
knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church,
Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only
original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is
only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.” Gore,
Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason
of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to
it.... Man is made in God’s image: he is, in his fundamental
capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully,
through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as
Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better
reason,—to use Plato’s beautiful expression, he can salute it by
force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give
intellectual account of it.”

Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332-337, holds that there is no
such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were,
natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution
of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason.
“Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy,
repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in
beauty and truth, are all derived from God.” Kaftan, in Am. Jour.
Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other
principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that
knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The
order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture,
faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is
the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to
the _will_ of the man, and it claims _obedience_ from him. Since
all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on
obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is
self-manifestation on the part of God. Kaftan should have
recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable
truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is “the light
which lighteth every man”_ (John 1:9)_. Revelation is an organic
whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the
historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C.
Minton’s review of Martineau’s Seat of Authority, in Presb. and
Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203 _sq._

1. Scripture and Nature.

By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to
the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but
also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral
constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and
history.

We here use the word “nature” in the ordinary sense, as including
man. There is another and more proper use of the word “nature,”
which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law
of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as
respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a
supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and
mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said: “Nature and the
supernatural together constitute the one system of God.” Drummond,
Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or
supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to
the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.” We shall in
subsequent chapters use the term “nature” in the narrow sense. The
universal use of the phrase “Natural Theology,” however, compels
us in this chapter to employ the word “nature” in its broader
sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and
with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See
Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183 _sq._

E. G. Robinson: “Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural.
Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it,
except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural,
because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating
an independent train of causes.” If this were the proper
conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with
P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation
in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We
cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is
harmony, not reconciliation.... For the conscience, stricken or
strong, she has no word.... Nature does not contain her own
teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed,
Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”
But this is virtually to confine Christ’s revelation to Scripture
or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the
telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George
Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and
revelation. As soon as the question _How_ is answered, the
questions _Whence_ and _Why_ arise. Nature is to God what speech
is to thought.” The title of Henry Drummond’s book should have
been: “Spiritual Law in the Natural World,” for nature is but the
free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural
is simply his extraordinary working.

(_a_) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The
Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not
only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution
and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an
inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man
(Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these
facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes
natural theology.

Outward witness: _Ps.19:1-6—_“The heavens declare the glory of
God”; _Acts 14:17—_“he left not himself without witness, in that
he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”;
_Rom. 1:20—_“for the invisible things of him since the creation of
the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things
that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.” Inward
witness: _Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ = _“that which is known of
God is manifest in them.” Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel
in verse 17, with the ἀποκαλύπτεται of wrath in verse 18—two
revelations, one of ὀργή, the other of χάρις; see Shedd,
Homiletics, 11. _Rom. 1:32—_“knowing the ordinance of God”;
_2:15—_“they show the work of the law written in their hearts.”
Therefore even the heathen are “without excuse”_ (Rom. 1:20)_.
There are two books: Nature and Scripture—one written, the other
unwritten: and there is need of studying both. On the passages in
Romans, see the Commentary of Hodge.

Spurgeon told of a godly person who, when sailing down the Rhine,
closed his eyes, lest the beauty of the scene should divert his
mind from spiritual themes. The Puritan turned away from the
moss-rose, saying that he would count nothing on earth lovely. But
this is to despise God’s works. J. H. Barrows: “The Himalayas are
the raised letters upon which we blind children put our fingers to
spell out the name of God.” To despise the works of God is to
despise God himself. God is present in nature, and is now
speaking. _Ps. 19:1—_“The heavens declare the glory of God, and
the firmament showeth his handiwork”—present tenses. Nature is not
so much a _book_, as a _voice_. Hutton, Essays, 2:236—“The direct
knowledge of spiritual communion must be supplemented by knowledge
of God’s ways gained from the study of nature. To neglect the
study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an
arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions
into a different world. This is the lesson of the book of Job.”
Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 85—“Man, the servant and interpreter of
nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of
the living God.” Books of science are the record of man’s past
interpretations of God’s works.

(_b_) Natural theology supplemented.—The Christian revelation is the chief
source of theology. The Scriptures plainly declare that the revelation of
God in nature does not supply all the knowledge which a sinner needs (Acts
17:23; Eph. 3:9). This revelation is therefore supplemented by another, in
which divine attributes and merciful provisions only dimly shadowed forth
in nature are made known to men. This latter revelation consists of a
series of supernatural events and communications, the record of which is
presented in the Scriptures.

_Acts 17:23_—Paul shows that, though the Athenians, in the
erection of an altar to an unknown God, “acknowledged a divine
existence beyond any which the ordinary rites of their worship
recognized, that Being was still unknown to them; they had no just
conception of his nature and perfections” (Hackett, _in loco_).
_Eph. 3:9—_“the mystery which hath been hid in God”—this mystery
is in the gospel made known for man’s salvation. Hegel, in his
Philosophy of Religion, says that Christianity is the only
revealed religion, because the Christian God is the only one from
whom a revelation can come. We may add that as science is the
record of man’s progressive interpretation of God’s revelation in
the realm of nature, so Scripture is the record of man’s
progressive interpretation of God’s revelation in the realm of
spirit. The phrase “word of God” does not primarily denote a
_record_,—it is the _spoken_ word, the _doctrine_, the vitalizing
_truth_, disclosed by Christ; see _Mat. 13:19—_“heareth the word
of the kingdom”; _Luke 5:1—_“heard the word of God”; _Acts
8:25—_“spoken the word of the Lord”; _13:48, 49—_“glorified the
word of God: ... the word of the Lord was spread abroad”; _19:10,
20—_“heard the word of the Lord, ... mightily grew the word of the
Lord”; _1 Cor. 1:18—_“the word of the cross”—all designating not a
document, but an unwritten word; _cf.__ Jer. 1:4—_“the word of
Jehovah came unto me”; _Ez. 1:3—_“the word of Jehovah came
expressly unto Ezekiel, the priest.”

(_c_) The Scriptures the final standard of appeal.—Science and Scripture
throw light upon each other. The same divine Spirit who gave both
revelations is still present, enabling the believer to interpret the one
by the other and thus progressively to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Because of our finiteness and sin, the total record in Scripture of God’s
past communications is a more trustworthy source of theology than are our
conclusions from nature or our private impressions of the teaching of the
Spirit. Theology therefore looks to the Scripture itself as its chief
source of material and its final standard of appeal.

There is an internal work of the divine Spirit by which the outer
word is made an inner word, and its truth and power are manifested
to the heart. Scripture represents this work of the Spirit, not as
a giving of new truth, but as an illumination of the mind to
perceive the fulness of meaning which lay wrapped up in the truth
already revealed. Christ is “the truth”_ (John 14:6)_; “in whom
are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”_ (Col.
2:3)_; the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, “shall take of mine, and shall
declare it unto you”_ (John 16:14)_. The incarnation and the Cross
express the heart of God and the secret of the universe; all
discoveries in theology are but the unfolding of truth involved in
these facts. The Spirit of Christ enables us to compare nature
with Scripture, and Scripture with nature, and to correct mistakes
in interpreting the one by light gained from the other. Because
the church as a whole, by which we mean the company of true
believers in all lands and ages, has the promise that it shall be
guided “into all the truth”_ (John 16:13)_, we may confidently
expect the progress of Christian doctrine.

Christian experience is sometimes regarded as an original source
of religious truth. Experience, however, is but a testing and
proving of the truth objectively contained in God’s revelation.
The word “experience” is derived from _experior_, to test, to try.
Christian consciousness is not “norma normans,” but “norma
normata.” Light, like life, comes to us through the mediation of
others. Yet the first comes from God as really as the last, of
which without hesitation we say: “God made me,” though we have
human parents. As I get through the service-pipe in my house the
same water which is stored in the reservoir upon the hillside, so
in the Scriptures I get the same truth which the Holy Spirit
originally communicated to prophets and apostles. Calvin,
Institutes, book I, chap. 7—“As nature has an immediate
manifestation of God in conscience, a mediate in his works, so
revelation has an immediate manifestation of God in the Spirit, a
mediate in the Scriptures.” “Man’s nature,” said Spurgeon, “is not
an organized lie, yet his inner consciousness has been warped by
sin, and though once it was an infallible guide to truth and duty,
sin has made it very deceptive. The standard of infallibility is
not in man’s consciousness, but in the Scriptures. When
consciousness in any matter is contrary to the word of God, we
must know that it is not God’s voice within us, but the devil’s.”
Dr. George A. Gordon says that “Christian history is a revelation
of Christ additional to that contained in the New Testament.”
Should we not say “illustrative,” instead of “additional”? On the
relation between Christian experience and Scripture, see Stearns,
Evidence of Christian Experience, 286-309: Twesten, Dogmatik,
1:344-348; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:15.

H. H. Bawden: “God is the ultimate authority, but there are
delegated authorities, such as family, state, church; instincts,
feelings, conscience; the general experience of the race,
traditions, utilities; revelation in nature and in Scripture. But
the highest authority available for men in morals and religion is
the truth concerning Christ contained in the Christian Scriptures.
What the truth concerning Christ _is_, is determined by: (1) the
human reason, conditioned by a right attitude of the feelings and
the will; (2) in the light of all the truth derived from nature,
including man; (3) in the light of the history of Christianity;
(4) in the light of the origin and development of the Scriptures
themselves. The authority of the generic reason and the authority
of the Bible are co-relative, since they both have been developed
in the providence of God, and since the latter is in large measure
but the reflection of the former. This view enables us to hold a
rational conception of the function of the Scripture in religion.
This view, further, enables us to rationalize what is called the
inspiration of the Bible, the nature and extent of inspiration,
the Bible as history—a record of the historic unfolding of
revelation; the Bible as literature—a compend of life-principles,
rather than a book of rules; the Bible Christocentric—an
incarnation of the divine thought and will in human thought and
language.”

(_d_) The theology of Scripture not unnatural.—Though we speak of the
systematized truths of nature as constituting natural theology, we are not
to infer that Scriptural theology is unnatural. Since the Scriptures have
the same author as nature, the same principles are illustrated in the one
as in the other. All the doctrines of the Bible have their reason in that
same nature of God which constitutes the basis of all material things.
Christianity is a supplementary dispensation, not as contradicting, or
correcting errors in, natural theology, but as more perfectly revealing
the truth. Christianity is indeed the ground-plan upon which the whole
creation is built—the original and eternal truth of which natural theology
is but a partial expression. Hence the theology of nature and the theology
of Scripture are mutually dependent. Natural theology not only prepares
the way for, but it receives stimulus and aid from, Scriptural theology.
Natural theology may now be a source of truth, which, before the
Scriptures came, it could not furnish.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such
thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from
revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more
comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest
principles of human nature and human thought than is natural
religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion
elevated and transmuted into revealed.” Peabody, Christianity the
Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling,
uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of
newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is
the natural religion of heaven.” Compare _Rev. 13:8—_“the Lamb
that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” = the
coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross
existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal
fact in the being of God.

Note Plato’s illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded
by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the
dim light from the cave’s mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to
Jacobi, in Jacobi’s Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously
taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have
obtained so perfect an insight into them.” Alexander McLaren:
“Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God’s love, and
even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down
the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that
taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of
Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the
universe, but they can never be sure of it.” The parrot fancies
that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he
invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has
gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the
Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure:
hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and
science.” See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen,
Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong,
Christ in Creation, 226, 227.

2. Scripture and Rationalism.

Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man’s
unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when
taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity
by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the
large sense, as including the mind’s power of cognizing God and moral
relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of
the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.

A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (_a_) To furnish
us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design,
right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge.
(_b_) To judge with regard to man’s need of a special and supernatural
revelation. (_c_) To examine the credentials of communications professing
to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (_d_) To
estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have
been found properly attested. (_e_) To deduce from these facts their
natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a
revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation
when once given.

Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the
proposition: Look for revelation.” Leibnitz: “Revelation is the
viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial
assembly (reason), and then himself presides.” Reason can
recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the
demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that
truth for itself. See Calderwood’s illustration of the party lost
in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the
tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the
Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the
forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks
blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason
could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a
manger and dying on a cross.” Lessing, Zur Geschichte und
Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that
reveals nothing?”

Ritschl denies the presuppositions of any theology based on the
Bible as the infallible word of God on the one hand, and on the
validity of the knowledge of God as obtained by scientific and
philosophic processes on the other. Because philosophers,
scientists, and even exegetes, are not agreed among themselves, he
concludes that no trustworthy results are attainable by human
reason. We grant that reason without love will fall into many
errors with regard to God, and that faith is therefore the organ
by which religious truth is to be apprehended. But we claim that
this faith includes reason, and is itself reason in its highest
form. Faith criticizes and judges the processes of natural science
as well as the contents of Scripture. But it also recognizes in
science and Scripture prior workings of that same Spirit of Christ
which is the source and authority of the Christian life. Ritschl
ignores Christ’s world-relations and therefore secularizes and
disparages science and philosophy. The faith to which he trusts as
the source of theology is unwarrantably sundered from reason. It
becomes a subjective and arbitrary standard, to which even the
teaching of Scripture must yield precedence. We hold on the
contrary, that there are ascertained results in science and in
philosophy, as well as in the interpretation of Scripture as a
whole, and that these results constitute an authoritative
revelation. See Orr, The Theology of Ritschl; Dorner, Hist. Prot.
Theol., 1:233—“The unreasonable in the empirical reason is taken
captive by faith, which is the nascent true reason that despairs
of itself and trustfully lays hold of objective Christianity.”

B. Rationalism, on the other hand, holds reason to be the ultimate source
of all religious truth, while Scripture is authoritative only so far as
its revelations agree with previous conclusions of reason, or can be
rationally demonstrated. Every form of rationalism, therefore, commits at
least one of the following errors: (_a_) That of confounding reason with
mere reasoning, or the exercise of the logical intelligence. (_b_) That of
ignoring the necessity of a holy affection as the condition of all right
reason in religious things. (_c_) That of denying our dependence in our
present state of sin upon God’s past revelations of himself. (_d_) That of
regarding the unaided reason, even its normal and unbiased state, as
capable of discovering, comprehending, and demonstrating all religious
truth.

Reason must not be confounded with ratiocination, or mere
reasoning. Shall we follow reason? Yes, but not individual
reasoning, against the testimony of those who are better informed
than we; nor by insisting on demonstration, where probable
evidence alone is possible; nor by trusting solely to the evidence
of the senses, when spiritual things are in question. Coleridge,
in replying to those who argued that all knowledge comes to us
from the senses, says: “At any rate we must bring to all facts the
light in which we see them.” This the Christian does. The light of
love reveals much that would otherwise be invisible. Wordsworth,
Excursion, book 5 (598)—“The mind’s repose On evidence is not to
be ensured By act of naked reason. Moral truth Is no mechanic
structure, built by rule.”

Rationalism is the mathematical theory of knowledge. Spinoza’s
Ethics is an illustration of it. It would deduce the universe from
an axiom. Dr. Hodge very wrongly described rationalism as “an
overuse of reason.” It is rather the use of an abnormal,
perverted, improperly conditioned reason; see Hodge, Syst. Theol.,
1:34, 39, 55, and criticism by Miller, in his Fetich in Theology.
The phrase “sanctified intellect” means simply intellect
accompanied by right affections toward God, and trained to work
under their influence. Bishop Butler: “Let reason be kept to, but
let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting to an
infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of
all its parts, and call that reasoning.” Newman Smyth, Death’s
Place in Evolution, 86—“Unbelief is a shaft sunk down into the
darkness of the earth. Drive the shaft deep enough, and it would
come out into the sunlight on the earth’s other side.” The most
unreasonable people in the world are those who depend solely upon
reason, in the narrow sense. “The better to exalt reason, they
make the world irrational.” “The hen that has hatched ducklings
walks with them to the water’s edge, but there she stops, and she
is amazed when they go on. So reason stops and faith goes on,
finding its proper element in the invisible. Reason is the feet
that stand on solid earth; faith is the wings that enable us to
fly; and normal man is a creature with wings.” Compare γνῶσις (_1
Tim. 6:20—_“the knowledge which is falsely so called”) with
ἐπίγνωσις (_2 Pet. 1:2—_“the knowledge of God and of Jesus our
Lord” = full knowledge, or true knowledge). See Twesten, Dogmatik,
1:467-500; Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 4, 5; Mansel, Limits of
Religious Thought, 96; Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution.

3. Scripture and Mysticism.

As rationalism recognizes too little as coming from God, so mysticism
recognizes too much.

A. True mysticism.—We have seen that there is an illumination of the minds
of all believers by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, however, makes no new
revelation of truth, but uses for his instrument the truth already
revealed by Christ in nature and in the Scriptures. The illuminating work
of the Spirit is therefore an opening of men’s minds to understand
Christ’s previous revelations. As one initiated into the mysteries of
Christianity, every true believer may be called a mystic. True mysticism
is that higher knowledge and fellowship which the Holy Spirit gives
through the use of nature and Scripture as subordinate and principal
means.

“Mystic” = one initiated, from μύω, “to close the eyes”—probably
in order that the soul may have inward vision of truth. But divine
truth is a “mystery,” not only as something into which one must be
initiated, but as ὑπερβάλλουσα τῆς γνώσεως (_Eph.
3:19_)—surpassing full knowledge, even to the believer; see Meyer
on _Rom. 11:25—_“I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this
mystery.” The Germans have _Mystik_ with a favorable sense,
_Mysticismus_ with an unfavorable sense,—corresponding
respectively to our true and false mysticism. True mysticism is
intimated in _John 16:13—_“the spirit of truth ... shall guide you
into all the truth”; _Eph. 3:9—_“dispensation of the mystery”; _1
Cor. 2:10—_“unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.”
Nitzsch, Syst. of Christ. Doct., 35—“Whenever true religion
revives, there is an outcry against mysticism, _i. e._, higher
knowledge, fellowship, activity through the Spirit of God in the
heart.” Compare the charge against Paul that he was mad, in _Acts
26:24, 25_, with his self-vindication in _2 Cor. 5:13—_“whether we
are beside ourselves, it is unto God.”

Inge, Christian Mysticism, 21—“Harnack speaks of mysticism as
rationalism applied to a sphere above reason. He should have said
reason applied to a sphere above rationalism. Its fundamental
doctrine is the unity of all existence. Man can realize his
individuality only by transcending it and finding himself in the
larger unity of God’s being. Man is a microcosm. He recapitulates
the race, the universe, Christ himself.” _Ibid._, 5—Mysticism is
“the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of
the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal.
It implies (1) that the soul can see and perceive spiritual truth;
(2) that man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the
divine nature; (3) that without holiness no man can see the Lord;
(4) that the true hierophant of the mysteries of God is love. The
‘scala perfectionis’ is (_a_) the purgative life; (_b_) the
illuminative life; (_c_) the unitive life.” Stevens, Johannine
Theology, 239, 240—“The mysticism of John ... is not a subjective
mysticism which absorbs the soul in self-contemplation and revery,
but an objective and rational mysticism, which lives in a world of
realities, apprehends divinely revealed truth, and bases its
experience upon it. It is a mysticism which feeds, not upon its
own feelings and fancies, but upon Christ. It involves an
acceptance of him, and a life of obedience to him. Its motto is:
Abiding in Christ.” As the power press cannot dispense with the
type, so the Spirit of God does not dispense with Christ’s
external revelations in nature and in Scripture. E. G. Robinson,
Christian Theology, 364—“The word of God is a form or mould, into
which the Holy Spirit delivers us when he creates us anew”; _cf.__
Rom. 6:17—_“ye became obedient from the heart to that form of
teaching whereunto ye were delivered.”

B. False mysticism.—Mysticism, however, as the term is commonly used, errs
in holding to the attainment of religious knowledge by direct
communication from God, and by passive absorption of the human activities
into the divine. It either partially or wholly loses sight of (_a_) the
outward organs of revelation, nature and the Scriptures; (_b_) the
activity of the human powers in the reception of all religious knowledge;
(_c_) the personality of man, and, by consequence, the personality of God.

In opposition to false mysticism, we are to remember that the Holy
Spirit works through the truth externally revealed in nature and
in Scripture (_Acts 14:17—_“he left not himself without witness”;
_Rom. 1:20—_“the invisible things of him since the creation of the
world are clearly seen”; _Acts 7:51—_“ye do always resist the Holy
Spirit: as your fathers did, so do ye”; _Eph. 6:17—_“the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God”). By this truth already
given we are to test all new communications which would contradict
or supersede it (_1 John 4:1—_“believe not every spirit, but prove
the spirits, whether they are of God”; _Eph. 5:10—_“proving what
is well pleasing unto the Lord”). By these tests we may try
Spiritualism, Mormonism, Swedenborgianism. Note the mystical
tendency in Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon,
Thomas C. Upham. These writers seem at times to advocate an
unwarrantable abnegation of our reason and will, and a “swallowing
up of man in God.” But Christ does not deprive us of reason and
will; he only takes from us the perverseness of our reason and the
selfishness of our will; so reason and will are restored to their
normal clearness and strength. Compare _Ps. 16:7—_“Jehovah, who
hath given me counsel; yea, my heart instructeth me in the night
seasons”—God teaches his people through the exercise of their own
faculties.

False mysticism is sometimes present though unrecognized. All
expectation of results without the use of means partakes of it.
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 288—“The lazy will would like to
have the vision while the eye that apprehends it sleeps.”
Preaching without preparation is like throwing ourselves down from
a pinnacle of the temple and depending on God to send an angel to
hold us up. Christian Science would trust to supernatural
agencies, while casting aside the natural agencies God has already
provided; as if a drowning man should trust to prayer while
refusing to seize the rope. Using Scripture “ad aperturam libri”
is like guiding one’s actions by a throw of the dice. Allen,
Jonathan Edwards, 171, note—“Both Charles and John Wesley were
agreed in accepting the Moravian method of solving doubts as to
some course of action by opening the Bible at hazard and regarding
the passage on which the eye first alighted as a revelation of
God’s will in the matter”; _cf._ Wedgwood, Life of Wesley, 193;
Southey, Life of Wesley, 1:216. J. G. Paton, Life, 2:74—“After
many prayers and wrestlings and tears, I went alone before the
Lord, and on my knees cast lots, with a solemn appeal to God, and
the answer came: ‘Go home!’ ” He did this only once in his life,
in overwhelming perplexity, and finding no light from human
counsel. “To whomsoever this faith is given,” he says, “let him
obey it.”

F. B. Meyer, Christian Living, 18—“It is a mistake to seek a sign
from heaven; to run from counsellor to counsellor; to cast a lot;
or to trust in some chance coincidence. Not that God may not
reveal his will thus; but because it is hardly the behavior of a
child with its Father. There is a more excellent way,”—namely,
appropriate Christ who is wisdom, and then go forward, sure that
we shall be guided, as each new step must be taken, or word
spoken, or decision made. Our service is to be “rational service”_
(Rom. 12:1)_; blind and arbitrary action is inconsistent with the
spirit of Christianity. Such action makes us victims of temporary
feeling and a prey to Satanic deception. In cases of perplexity,
waiting for light and waiting upon God will commonly enable us to
make an intelligent decision, while “whatsoever is not of faith is
sin”_ (Rom. 14:23)_.

“False mysticism reached its logical result in the Buddhistic
theosophy. In that system man becomes most divine in the
extinction of his own personality. Nirvana is reached by the
eightfold path of right view, aspiration, speech, conduct,
livelihood, effort, mindfulness, rapture; and Nirvana is the loss
of ability to say: ‘This is I,’ and ‘This is mine.’ Such was
Hypatia’s attempt, by subjection of self, to be wafted away into
the arms of Jove. George Eliot was wrong when she said: ‘The
happiest woman has no history.’ Self-denial is not
self-effacement. The cracked bell has no individuality. In Christ
we become our complete selves.” _Col 2:9, 10—_“For in him dwelleth
all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made
full.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:248, 249—“Assert the spiritual man;
abnegate the natural man. The fleshly self is the root of all
evil; the spiritual self belongs to a higher realm. But this
spiritual self lies at first outside the soul; it becomes ours
only by grace. Plato rightly made the eternal Ideas the source of
all human truth and goodness. Wisdom comes into a man, like
Aristotle’s νοῦς.” A. H. Bradford, The Inner Light, in making the
direct teaching of the Holy Spirit the sufficient if not the sole
source of religious knowledge, seems to us to ignore the principle
of evolution in religion. God builds upon the past. His revelation
to prophets and apostles constitutes the norm and corrective of
our individual experience, even while our experience throws new
light upon that revelation. On Mysticism, true and false, see
Inge, Christian Mysticism, 4, 5, 11; Stearns, Evidence of
Christian Experience, 289-294; Dorner, Geschichte d. prot. Theol.,
48-59, 243; Herzog, Encycl., art.: Mystik, by Lange; Vaughan,
Hours with the Mystics, 1:199; Morell, Hist. Philos., 58, 191-215,
556-625, 726; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69, 97, 104; Fleming,
Vocab. Philos., _in voce_; Tholuck, Introd. to Blüthensammlung aus
der morgenländischen Mystik; William James, Varieties of Religious
Experience, 379-429.

4. Scripture and Romanism.

While the history of doctrine, as showing the progressive apprehension and
unfolding by the church of the truth contained in nature and Scripture, is
a subordinate source of theology, Protestantism recognizes the Bible as
under Christ the primary and final authority.

Romanism, on the other hand, commits the two-fold error (_a_) Of making
the church, and not the Scriptures, the immediate and sufficient source of
religious knowledge; and (_b_) Of making the relation of the individual to
Christ depend upon his relation to the church, instead of making his
relation to the church depend upon, follow, and express his relation to
Christ.

In Roman Catholicism there is a mystical element. The Scriptures
are not the complete or final standard of belief and practice. God
gives to the world from time to time, through popes and councils,
new communications of truth. Cyprian: “He who has not the church
for his mother, has not God for his Father.” Augustine: “I would
not believe the Scripture, unless the authority of the church also
influenced me.” Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola both
represented the truly obedient person as one dead, moving only as
moved by his superior; the true Christian has no life of his own,
but is the blind instrument of the church. John Henry Newman,
Tracts, Theol. and Eccl., 287—“The Christian dogmas were in the
church from the time of the apostles,—they were ever in their
substance what they are now.” But this is demonstrably untrue of
the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; of the treasury of
merits to be distributed in indulgences; of the infallibility of
the pope (see Gore, Incarnation, 186). In place of the true
doctrine, “Ubi Spiritus, ibi ecclesia,” Romanism substitutes her
maxim, “Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus.” Luther saw in this the
principle of mysticism, when he said: “Papatus est merus
enthusiasmus.” See Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:61-69.

In reply to the Romanist argument that the church was before the
Bible, and that the same body that gave the truth at the first can
make additions to that truth, we say that the unwritten word was
before the church and made the church possible. The word of God
existed before it was written down, and by that word the first
disciples as well as the latest were begotten (_1 Pet.
1:23—_“begotten again ... through the word of God”). The grain of
truth in Roman Catholic doctrine is expressed in _1 Tim.
3:15—_“the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the
truth” = the church is God’s appointed proclaimer of truth; _cf.__
Phil. 2:16—_“holding forth the word of life.” But the church can
proclaim the truth, only as it is built upon the truth. So we may
say that the American Republic is the pillar and ground of liberty
in the world; but this is true only so far as the Republic is
built upon the principle of liberty as its foundation. When the
Romanist asks: “Where was your church before Luther?” the
Protestant may reply: “Where yours is not now—in the word of God.
Where was your face before it was washed? Where was the fine flour
before the wheat went to the mill?” Lady Jane Grey, three days
before her execution, February 12, 1554, said: “I ground my faith
on God’s word, and not upon the church; for, if the church be a
good church, the faith of the church must be tried by God’s word,
and not God’s word by the church, nor yet my faith.”

The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to
her for truth instead of going directly to the Bible; “like the
foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub
his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever,
that she might mother him still.” Martensen, Christian Dogmatics,
30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees,
that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.”
George Herbert: “What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose
house is foul while he adores his broom!” It is a semi-parasitic
doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism
says: “Man for the machine!” Protestantism: “The machine for man!”
Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet
the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant
churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross,
in the Anglican Church, contains the following: “It is to the
priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he
desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is
because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone
the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor
of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.” But this
contradicts _John 10:7_—where Christ says “I am the door”; and _1
Cor. 3:11—_“other foundation can no man lay than that which is
laid, which is Jesus Christ” = Salvation is attained by immediate
access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him.
See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher,
Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher,
Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for
1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.

II. Limitations of Theology.

Although theology derives its material from God’s two-fold revelation, it
does not profess to give an exhaustive knowledge of God and of the
relations between God and the universe. After showing what material we
have, we must show what material we have not. We have indicated the
sources of theology; we now examine its limitations. Theology has its
limitations:

(_a_) _In the finiteness of the human understanding._ This gives rise to a
class of necessary mysteries, or mysteries connected with the infinity and
incomprehensibleness of the divine nature (Job 11:7; Rom. 11:33).

_Job 11:7—_“Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find
out the Almighty to perfection?” _Rom. 11:33—_“how unsearchable
are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” Every doctrine,
therefore, has its inexplicable side. Here is the proper meaning
of Tertullian’s sayings: “Certum est, quia impossible est: quo
absurdius, eo verius”; that of Anselm: “Credo, ut intelligam”; and
that of Abelard: “Qui credit cito, levis corde est.” Drummond,
Nat. Law in Spir. World: “A science without mystery is unknown; a
religion without mystery is absurd.” E. G. Robinson: “A finite
being cannot grasp even its own relations to the Infinite.” Hovey,
Manual of Christ. Theol., 7—“To infer from the perfection of God
that all his works [nature, man, inspiration] will be absolutely
and unchangeably perfect: to infer from the perfect love of God
that there can be no sin or suffering in the world; to infer from
the sovereignty of God that man is not a free moral agent;—all
these inferences are rash; they are inferences from the cause to
the effect, while the cause is imperfectly known.” See Calderwood,
Philos. of Infinite, 491; Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, 22.

(_b_) _In the imperfect state of science, both natural and metaphysical._
This gives rise to a class of accidental mysteries, or mysteries which
consist in the apparently irreconcilable nature of truths, which, taken
separately, are perfectly comprehensible.

We are the victims of a mental or moral astigmatism, which sees a
_single_ point of truth as _two_. We see God and man, divine
sovereignty and human freedom, Christ’s divine nature and Christ’s
human nature, the natural and the supernatural, respectively, as
two disconnected facts, when perhaps deeper insight would see but
one. Astronomy has its centripetal and centrifugal forces, yet
they are doubtless one force. The child cannot hold two oranges at
once in its little hand. Negro preacher: “You can’t carry two
watermelons under one arm.” Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra,
1:2—“In nature’s infinite book of secresy, A little I can read.”
Cooke, Credentials of Science, 34—“Man’s progress in knowledge has
been so constantly and rapidly accelerated that more has been
gained during the lifetime of men still living than during all
human history before.” And yet we may say with D’Arcy, Idealism
and Theology, 248—“Man’s position in the universe is eccentric.
God alone is at the centre. To him alone is the orbit of truth
completely displayed.... There are circumstances in which to us
the onward movement of truth may seem a retrogression.” William
Watson, Collected Poems, 271—“Think not thy wisdom can illume away
The ancient tanglement of night and day. Enough to acknowledge
both, and both revere: They see not clearliest who see all things
clear.”

(_c_) _In the inadequacy of language._ Since language is the medium
through which truth is expressed and formulated, the invention of a proper
terminology in theology, as in every other science, is a condition and
criterion of its progress. The Scriptures recognize a peculiar difficulty
in putting spiritual truths into earthly language (1 Cor. 2:13; 2 Cor.
3:6; 12:4).

_1 Cor. 2:13—_“not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth”; _2 Cor.
3:6—_“the letter killeth”; _12:4—_“unspeakable words.” God submits
to conditions of revelation; _cf.__ John 16:12—_“I have yet many
things to say into you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Language has
to be created. Words have to be taken from a common, and to be put
to a larger and more sacred, use, so that they “stagger under
their weight of meaning”—_e. g._, the word “day,” in _Genesis 1_,
and the word ἀγάπη in _1 Cor. 13_. See Gould, in Amer. Com., on _1
Cor. 13:12—_“now we see in a mirror, darkly”—in a metallic mirror
whose surface is dim and whose images are obscure = Now we behold
Christ, the truth, only as he is reflected in imperfect
speech—“but then face to face” = immediately, without the
intervention of an imperfect medium. “As fast as we tunnel into
the sandbank of thought, the stones of language must be built into
walls and arches, to allow further progress into the boundless
mine.”

(_d_) _In the incompleteness of our knowledge of the Scriptures._ Since it
is not the mere letter of the Scriptures that constitutes the truth, the
progress of theology is dependent upon hermeneutics, or the interpretation
of the word of God.

Notice the progress in commenting, from homiletical to
grammatical, historical, dogmatic, illustrated in Scott, Ellicott,
Stanley, Lightfoot. John Robinson: “I am verily persuaded that the
Lord hath more truth yet to break forth from his holy word.”
Recent criticism has shown the necessity of studying each portion
of Scripture in the light of its origin and connections. There has
been an evolution of Scripture, as truly as there has been an
evolution of natural science, and the Spirit of Christ who was in
the prophets has brought about a progress from germinal and
typical expression to expression that is complete and clear. Yet
we still need to offer the prayer of _Ps. 119:18—_“Open thou mine
eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” On New
Testament Interpretation, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and
Religion, 334-336.

(_e_) _In the silence of written revelation._ For our discipline and
probation, much is probably hidden from us, which we might even with our
present powers comprehend.

Instance the silence of Scripture with regard to the life and
death of Mary the Virgin, the personal appearance of Jesus and his
occupations in early life, the origin of evil, the method of the
atonement, the state after death. So also as to social and
political questions, such as slavery, the liquor traffic, domestic
virtues, governmental corruption. “Jesus was in heaven at the
revolt of the angels, yet he tells us little about angels or about
heaven. He does not discourse about Eden, or Adam, or the fall of
man, or death as the result of Adam’s sin; and he says little of
departed spirits, whether they are lost or saved.” It was better
to inculcate principles, and trust his followers to apply them.
His gospel is not intended to gratify a vain curiosity. He would
not divert men’s minds from pursuing the one thing needful; _cf.__
Luke 13:23, 24—_“Lord, are they few that are saved? And he said
unto them, Strive to enter in by the narrow door; for many, I say
unto you, shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able.” Paul’s
silence upon speculative questions which he must have pondered
with absorbing interest is a proof of his divine inspiration. John
Foster spent his life, “gathering questions for eternity”; _cf.__
John 13:7—_“What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt
understand hereafter.” The most beautiful thing in a countenance
is that which a picture can never express. He who would speak well
must omit well. Story: “Of every noble work the silent part is
best; Of all expressions that which cannot be expressed.” _Cf.__ 1
Cor. 2:9—_“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which
entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared
for them that love him”; _Deut 29:29—_“The secret things belong
unto Jehovah our God: but the things that are revealed belong unto
us and to our children.” For Luther’s view, see Hagenbach, Hist.
Doctrine, 2:388. See also B. D. Thomas, The Secret of the Divine
Silence.

(_f_) _In the lack of spiritual discernment caused by sin._ Since holy
affection is a condition of religious knowledge, all moral imperfection in
the individual Christian and in the church serves as a hindrance to the
working out of a complete theology.

_John 3:3—_“Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of
God.” The spiritual ages make most progress in theology,—witness
the half-century succeeding the Reformation, and the half-century
succeeding the great revival in New England in the time of
Jonathan Edwards. Ueberweg, Logic (Lindsay’s transl.),
514—“Science is much under the influence of the will; and the
truth of knowledge depends upon the purity of the conscience. The
will has no power to resist scientific evidence; but scientific
evidence is not obtained without the continuous loyalty of the
will.” Lord Bacon declared that man cannot enter the kingdom of
science, any more than he can enter the kingdom of heaven, without
becoming a little child. Darwin describes his own mind as having
become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts, with the result of producing “atrophy of
that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend.” But a
similar abnormal atrophy is possible in the case of the moral and
religious faculty (see Gore, Incarnation, 37). Dr. Allen said in
his Introductory Lecture at Lane Theological Seminary: “We are
very glad to see you if you wish to be students; but the
professors’ chairs are all filled.”

III. Relations of Material to Progress in Theology.

(_a_) _A perfect system of theology is impossible._ We do not expect to
construct such a system. All science but reflects the present attainment
of the human mind. No science is complete or finished. However it may be
with the sciences of nature and of man, the science of God will never
amount to an exhaustive knowledge. We must not expect to demonstrate all
Scripture doctrines upon rational grounds, or even in every case to see
the principle of connection between them. Where we cannot do this, we
must, as in every other science, set the revealed facts in their places
and wait for further light, instead of ignoring or rejecting any of them
because we cannot understand them or their relation to other parts of our
system.

Three problems left unsolved by the Egyptians have been handed
down to our generation: (1) the duplication of the cube; (2) the
trisection of the angle; (3) the quadrature of the circle. Dr.
Johnson: “Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than
none; and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” Hood
spoke of Dr. Johnson’s “Contradictionary,” which had both
“interiour” and “exterior.” Sir William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) at
the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship said: “One word
characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the
advancement of science which I have made perseveringly through
fifty-five years: that word is _failure_; I know no more of
electric and magnetic force, or of the relations between ether,
electricity and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity, than I
knew and tried to teach my students of natural philosophy fifty
years ago in my first session as professor.” Allen, Religious
Progress, mentions three tendencies. “The first says: Destroy the
new! The second says: Destroy the old! The third says: Destroy
nothing! Let the old gradually and quietly grow into the new, as
Erasmus wished. We should accept contradictions, whether they can
be intellectually reconciled or not. The truth has never prospered
by enforcing some ’via media.’ Truth lies rather in the union of
opposite propositions, as in Christ’s divinity and humanity, and
in grace and freedom. Blanco White went from Rome to infidelity;
Orestes Brownson from infidelity to Rome; so the brothers John
Henry Newman and Francis W. Newman, and the brothers George
Herbert of Bemerton and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. One would
secularize the divine, the other would divinize the secular. But
if one is true, so is the other. Let us adopt both. All progress
is a deeper penetration into the meaning of old truth, and a
larger appropriation of it.”

(_b_) _Theology is nevertheless progressive._ It is progressive in the
sense that our subjective understanding of the facts with regard to God,
and our consequent expositions of these facts, may and do become more
perfect. But theology is not progressive in the sense that its objective
facts change, either in their number or their nature. With Martineau we
may say: “Religion has been reproached with not being progressive; it
makes amends by being imperishable.” Though our knowledge may be
imperfect, it will have great value still. Our success in constructing a
theology will depend upon the proportion which clearly expressed facts of
Scripture bear to mere inferences, and upon the degree in which they all
cohere about Christ, the central person and theme.

The progress of theology is progress in apprehension by man, not
progress in communication by God. Originality in astronomy is not
man’s creation of new planets, but man’s discovery of planets that
were never seen before, or the bringing to light of relations
between them that were never before suspected. Robert Kerr Eccles:
“Originality is a habit of recurring to origins—the habit of
securing personal experience by personal application to original
facts. It is not an eduction of novelties either from nature,
Scripture, or inner consciousness; it is rather the habit of
resorting to primitive facts, and of securing the personal
experiences which arise from contact with these facts.” Fisher,
Nat. and Meth. of Revelation, 48—“The starry heavens are now what
they were of old; there is no enlargement of the stellar universe,
except that which comes through the increased power and use of the
telescope.” We must not imitate the green sailor who, when set to
steer, said he had “sailed _by_ that star.”

Martineau, Types, 1:492, 493—“Metaphysics, so far as they are true
to their work, are stationary, precisely because they have in
charge, not what begins and ceases to be, but what always _is_....
It is absurd to praise motion for always making way, while
disparaging space for still being what it ever was: as if the
motion you prefer could be, without the space which you reproach.”
Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 45, 67-70, 79—“True conservatism
is progress which takes direction from the past and fulfils its
good; false conservatism is a narrowing and hopeless reversion to
the past, which is a betrayal of the promise of the future. So
Jesus came not ‘to destroy the law or the prophets’; he ‘came not
to destroy, but to fulfil’_ (Mat. 5:17)_.... The last book on
Christian Ethics will not be written before the Judgment Day.”
John Milton, Areopagitica: “Truth is compared in the Scripture to
a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual
progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and
tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth.” Paul in _Rom.
2:16_, and in _2 Tim. 2:8_—speaks of “my gospel.” It is the duty
of every Christian to have his own conception of the truth, while
he respects the conceptions of others. Tennyson, Locksley Hall: “I
that rather held it better men should perish one by one, Than that
earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon at Ajalon.” We do
not expect any new worlds, and we need not expect any new
Scriptures; but we may expect progress in the interpretation of
both. Facts are final, but interpretation is not.

Chapter III. Method Of Theology.

I. Requisites to the study of Theology.

The requisites to the successful study of theology have already in part
been indicated in speaking of its limitations. In spite of some
repetition, however, we mention the following:

(_a_) _A disciplined mind._ Only such a mind can patiently collect the
facts, hold in its grasp many facts at once, educe by continuous
reflection their connecting principles, suspend final judgment until its
conclusions are verified by Scripture and experience.

Robert Browning, Ring and Book, 175 (Pope, 228)—“Truth nowhere
lies, yet everywhere, in these; Not absolutely in a portion, yet
Evolveable from the whole: evolved at last Painfully, held
tenaciously by me.” Teachers and students may be divided into two
classes: (1) those who know enough already; (2) those wish to
learn more than they now know. Motto of Winchester School in
England: “Disce, aut discede.” Butcher, Greek Genius, 213,
230—“The Sophists fancied that they were imparting education, when
they were only imparting results. Aristotle illustrates their
method by the example of a shoemaker who, professing to teach the
art of making painless shoes, puts into the apprentice’s hand a
large assortment of shoes ready-made. A witty Frenchman classes
together those who would make science popular, metaphysics
intelligible, and vice respectable. The word σχόλη, which first
meant ‘leisure,’ then ‘philosophical discussion,’ and finally
‘school,’ shows the pure love of learning among the Greeks.”
Robert G. Ingersoll said that the average provincial clergyman is
like the land of the upper Potomac spoken of by Tom Randolph, as
almost worthless in its original state, and rendered wholly so by
cultivation. Lotze, Metaphysics, 1:16—“the constant whetting of
the knife is tedious, if it is not proposed to cut anything with
it.” “To do their duty is their only holiday,” is the description
of Athenian character given by Thucydides. Chitty asked a father
inquiring as to his son’s qualifications for the law: “Can your
son eat sawdust without any butter?” On opportunities for culture
in the Christian ministry, see New Englander, Oct. 1875:644; A. H.
Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 273-275; Christ in Creation,
318-320.

(_b_) _An intuitional as distinguished from a merely logical habit of
mind_,—or, trust in the mind’s primitive convictions, as well as in its
processes of reasoning. The theologian must have insight as well as
understanding. He must accustom himself to ponder spiritual facts as well
as those which are sensible and material; to see things in their inner
relations as well as in their outward forms; to cherish confidence in the
reality and the unity of truth.

Vinet, Outlines of Philosophy, 39, 40—“If I do not feel that good
is good, who will ever prove it to me?” Pascal: “Logic, which is
an abstraction, may shake everything. A being purely intellectual
will be incurably sceptical.” Calvin: “Satan is an acute
theologian.” Some men can see a fly on a barn door a mile away,
and yet can never see the door. Zeller, Outlines of Greek
Philosophy, 93—“Gorgias the Sophist was able to show
metaphysically that nothing can exist; that what does exist cannot
be known by us; and that what is known by us cannot be imparted to
others” (quoted by Wenley, Socrates and Christ, 28). Aristotle
differed from those moderate men who thought it impossible to go
over the same river twice,—he held that it could not be done even
once (_cf._ Wordsworth, Prelude, 536). Dove, Logic of the
Christian Faith, 1-29, and especially 25, gives a demonstration of
the impossibility of motion: A thing cannot move in the place
where it is; it cannot move in the places where it is not; but the
place where it is and the places where it is not are all the
places that there are; therefore a thing cannot move at all.
Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, 109, shows that the bottom of
a wheel does not move, since it goes backward as fast as the top
goes forward. An instantaneous photograph makes the upper part a
confused blur, while the spokes of the lower part are distinctly
visible. Abp. Whately: “Weak arguments are often thrust before my
path; but, although they are most unsubstantial, it is not easy to
destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut
through a cushion with a sword.” _Cf.__ 1 Tim. 6:20—_“oppositions
of the knowledge which is falsely so called”; _3:2—_“the bishop
therefore must be ... sober-minded”—σώφρων = “well balanced.” The
Scripture speaks of “sound [ὑγιής = healthful] doctrine”_ (1 Tim.
1:10)_. Contrast _1 Tim. 6:4—[νοσῶν = ailing] _“diseased about
questionings and disputes of words.”

(_c_) _An acquaintance with physical, mental, and moral science._ The
method of conceiving and expressing Scripture truth is so affected by our
elementary notions of these sciences, and the weapons with which theology
is attacked and defended are so commonly drawn from them as arsenals, that
the student cannot afford to be ignorant of them.

Goethe explains his own greatness by his avoidance of metaphysics:
“Mein Kind, Ich habe es klug gemacht: Ich habe nie über’s Denken
gedacht”—“I have been wise in never thinking about thinking”; he
would have been wiser, had he pondered more deeply the fundamental
principles of his philosophy; see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets
and their Theology, 296-299, and Philosophy and Religion, 1-18;
also in Baptist Quarterly, 2:393 _sq._ Many a theological system
has fallen, like the Campanile at Venice, because its foundations
were insecure. Sir William Hamilton: “No difficulty arises in
theology which has not first emerged in philosophy.” N. W. Taylor:
“Give me a young man in metaphysics, and I care not who has him in
theology.” President Samson Talbot: “I love metaphysics, because
they have to do with realities.” The maxim “Ubi tres medici, ibi
duo athei,” witnesses to the truth of Galen’s words: ἄριστος
ἰατρὸς καὶ φιλόσοφος—“the best physician is also a philosopher.”
Theology cannot dispense with science, any more than science can
dispense with philosophy. E. G. Robinson: “Science has not
invalidated any fundamental truth of revelation, though it has
modified the statement of many.... Physical Science will
undoubtedly knock some of our crockery gods on the head, and the
sooner the better.” There is great advantage to the preacher in
taking up, as did Frederick W. Robertson, one science after
another. Chemistry entered into his mental structure, as he said,
“like iron into the blood.”

(_d_) _A knowledge of the original languages of the Bible._ This is
necessary to enable us not only to determine the meaning of the
fundamental terms of Scripture, such as holiness, sin, propitiation,
justification, but also to interpret statements of doctrine by their
connections with the context.

Emerson said that the man who reads a book in a strange tongue,
when he can have a good translation, is a fool. Dr. Behrends
replied that he is a fool who is satisfied with the substitute. E.
G. Robinson: “Language is a great organism, and no study so
disciplines the mind as the dissection of an organism.”
Chrysostom: “This is the cause of all our evils—our not knowing
the Scriptures.” Yet a modern scholar has said: “The Bible is the
most dangerous of all God’s gifts to men.” It is possible to adore
the letter, while we fail to perceive its spirit. A narrow
interpretation may contradict its meaning. Much depends upon
connecting phrases, as for example, the διὰ τοῦτο and ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, in
_Rom. 5:12_. Professor Philip Lindsley of Princeton, 1813-1853,
said to his pupils: “One of the best preparations for death is a
thorough knowledge of the Greek grammar.” The youthful Erasmus:
“When I get some money, I will get me some Greek books, and, after
that, some clothes.” The dead languages are the only really living
ones—free from danger of misunderstanding from changing usage.
Divine Providence has put revelation into fixed forms in the
Hebrew and the Greek. Sir William Hamilton, Discussions, 330—“To
be a competent divine is in fact to be a scholar.” On the true
idea of a Theological Seminary Course, see A. H. Strong, Philos.
and Religion, 302-313.

(_e_) _A holy affection toward God._ Only the renewed heart can properly
feel its need of divine revelation, or understand that revelation when
given.

_Ps. 25:14—_“The secret of Jehovah is with them that fear him”;
_Rom. 12:2—_“prove what is the ... will of God”; _cf._ _Ps.
36:1—_“the transgression of the wicked speaks in his heart like an
oracle.” “It is the heart and not the brain That to the highest
doth attain.” To “learn by heart” is something more than to learn
by mind, or by head. All heterodoxy is preceded by heteropraxy. In
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Faithful does not go through the
Slough of Despond, as Christian did; and it is by getting over the
fence to find an easier road, that Christian and Hopeful get into
Doubting Castle and the hands of Giant Despair. “Great thoughts
come from the heart,” said Vauvenargues. The preacher cannot, like
Dr. Kane, kindle fire with a lens of ice. Aristotle: “The power of
attaining moral truth is dependent upon our acting rightly.”
Pascal: “We know truth, not only by the reason, but by the
heart.... The heart has its reasons, which the reason knows
nothing of.” Hobbes: “Even the axioms of geometry would be
disputed, if men’s passions were concerned in them.” Macaulay:
“The law of gravitation would still be controverted, if it
interfered with vested interests.” Nordau, Degeneracy:
“Philosophic systems simply furnish the excuses reason demands for
the unconscious impulses of the race during a given period of
time.”

Lord Bacon: “A tortoise on the right path will beat a racer on the
wrong path.” Goethe: “As are the inclinations, so also are the
opinions.... A work of art can be comprehended by the head only
with the assistance of the heart.... Only law can give us
liberty.” Fichte: “Our system of thought is very often only the
history of our heart.... Truth is descended from conscience....
Men do not will according to their reason, but they reason
according to their will.” Neander’s motto was: “Pectus est quod
theologum facit”—“It is the heart that makes the theologian.” John
Stirling: “That is a dreadful eye which can be divided from a
living human heavenly heart, and still retain its all-penetrating
vision,—such was the eye of the Gorgons.” But such an eye, we add,
is not all-penetrating. E. G. Robinson: “Never study theology in
cold blood.” W. C. Wilkinson: “The head is a magnetic needle with
truth for its pole. But the heart is a hidden mass of magnetic
iron. The head is drawn somewhat toward its natural pole, the
truth; but more it is drawn by that nearer magnetism.” See an
affecting instance of Thomas Carlyle’s enlightenment, after the
death of his wife, as to the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer, in
Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Revelation, 165. On the importance of
feeling, in association of ideas, see Dewey, Psychology, 106, 107.

(_f_) _The enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit._ As only the Spirit
fathoms the things of God, so only he can illuminate our minds to
apprehend them.

_1 Cor. 2:11, 12—_“the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit
of God. But we received ... the Spirit which is from God; that we
might know.” Cicero, Nat. Deorum, 66—“Nemo igitur vir magnus sine
aliquo adfiatu divino unquam fuit.” Professor Beck of Tübingen:
“For the student, there is no privileged path leading to the
truth; the only one which leads to it is also that of the
unlearned; it is that of regeneration and of gradual illumination
by the Holy Spirit; and without the Holy Spirit, theology is not
only a cold stone, it is a deadly poison.” As all the truths of
the differential and integral calculus are wrapped up in the
simplest mathematical axiom, so all theology is wrapped up in the
declaration that God is holiness and love, or in the
protevangelium uttered at the gates of Eden. But dull minds cannot
of themselves evolve the calculus from the axiom, nor can sinful
hearts evolve theology from the first prophecy. Teachers are
needed to demonstrate geometrical theorems, and the Holy Spirit is
needed to show us that the “new commandment” illustrated by the
death of Christ is only an “old commandment which ye had from the
beginning”_ (1 John 2:7)_. The Principia of Newton is a revelation
of Christ, and so are the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit enables us
to enter into the meaning of Christ’s revelations in both
Scripture and nature; to interpret the one by the other; and so to
work out original demonstrations and applications of the truth;
_Mat. 13:52—_“Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple
of the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder,
who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” See
Adolph Monod’s sermons on Christ’s Temptation, addressed to the
theological students of Montauban, in Select Sermons from the
French and German, 117-179.

II. Divisions of Theology.

Theology is commonly divided into Biblical, Historical, Systematic, and
Practical.

1. _Biblical Theology_ aims to arrange and classify the facts of
revelation, confining itself to the Scriptures for its material, and
treating of doctrine only so far as it was developed at the close of the
apostolic age.

Instance DeWette, Biblische Theologie; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis;
Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine. The last, however, has more
of the philosophical element than properly belongs to Biblical
Theology. The third volume of Ritschl’s Justification and
Reconciliation is intended as a system of Biblical Theology, the
first and second volumes being little more than an historical
introduction. But metaphysics, of a Kantian relativity and
phenomenalism, enter so largely into Ritschl’s estimates and
interpretations, as to render his conclusions both partial and
rationalistic. Notice a questionable use of the term Biblical
Theology to designate the theology of a part of Scripture severed
from the rest, as Steudel’s Biblical Theology of the Old
Testament; Schmidt’s Biblical Theology of the New Testament; and
in the common phrases: Biblical Theology of Christ, or of Paul.
These phrases are objectionable as intimating that the books of
Scripture have only a human origin. Upon the assumption that there
is no common divine authorship of Scripture, Biblical Theology is
conceived of as a series of fragments, corresponding to the
differing teachings of the various prophets and apostles, and the
theology of Paul is held to be an unwarranted and incongruous
addition to the theology of Jesus. See Reuss, History of Christian
Theology in the Apostolic Age.

2. _Historical Theology_ traces the development of the Biblical doctrines
from the time of the apostles to the present day, and gives account of the
results of this development in the life of the church.

By doctrinal development we mean the progressive unfolding and
apprehension, by the church, of the truth explicitly or implicitly
contained in Scripture. As giving account of the shaping of the
Christian faith into doctrinal statements, Historical Theology is
called the History of Doctrine. As describing the resulting and
accompanying changes in the life of the church, outward and
inward, Historical Theology is called Church History. Instance
Cunningham’s Historical Theology; Hagenbach’s and Shedd’s
Histories of Doctrine; Neander’s Church History. There is always a
danger that the historian will see his own views too clearly
reflected in the history of the church. Shedd’s History of
Christian Doctrine has been called “The History of Dr. Shedd’s
Christian Doctrine.” But if Dr. Shedd’s Augustinianism colors his
History, Dr. Sheldon’s Arminianism also colors his. G. P. Fisher’s
History of Christian Doctrine is unusually lucid and impartial.
See Neander’s Introduction and Shedd’s Philosophy of History.

3. _Systematic Theology_ takes the material furnished by Biblical and by
Historical Theology, and with this material seeks to build up into an
organic and consistent whole all our knowledge of God and of the relations
between God and the universe, whether this knowledge be originally derived
from nature or from the Scriptures.

Systematic Theology is therefore theology proper, of which
Biblical and Historical Theology are the incomplete and
preparatory stages. Systematic Theology is to be clearly
distinguished from Dogmatic Theology. Dogmatic Theology is, in
strict usage, the systematizing of the doctrines as expressed in
the symbols of the church, together with the grounding of these in
the Scriptures, and the exhibition, so far as may be, of their
rational necessity. Systematic Theology begins, on the other hand,
not with the symbols, but with the Scriptures. It asks first, not
what the church has believed, but what is the truth of God’s
revealed word. It examines that word with all the aids which
nature and the Spirit have given it, using Biblical and Historical
Theology as its servants and helpers, but not as its masters.
Notice here the technical use of the word “symbol,” from συμβάλλω,
= a brief throwing together, or condensed statement of the
essentials of Christian doctrine. Synonyms are: Confession, creed,
consensus, declaration, formulary, canons, articles of faith.

Dogmatism argues to foregone conclusions. The word is not,
however, derived from “dog,” as Douglas Jerrold facetiously
suggested, when he said that “dogmatism is puppyism full grown,”
but from δοκέω to think, to opine. Dogmatic Theology has two
principles: (1) The absolute authority of creeds, as decisions of
the church: (2) The application to these creeds of formal logic,
for the purpose of demonstrating their truth to the understanding.
In the Roman Catholic Church, not the Scripture but the church,
and the dogma given by it, is the decisive authority. The
Protestant principle, on the contrary, is that Scripture decides,
and that dogma is to be judged by it. Following Schleiermacher,
Al. Schweizer thinks that the term “Dogmatik” should be discarded
as essentially unprotestant, and that “Glaubenslehre” should take
its place; and Harnack, Hist. Dogma, 6, remarks that “dogma has
ever, in the progress of history, devoured its own progenitors.”
While it is true that every new and advanced thinker in theology
has been counted a heretic, there has always been a common
faith—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the
saints”_ (Jude 3)_—and the study of Systematic Theology has been
one of the chief means of preserving this faith in the world.
_Mat. 15:13, 14—_“Every plant which my heavenly Father planted
not, shall be rooted up. Let them alone: they are blind guides” =
there is truth planted by God, and it has permanent divine life.
Human errors have no permanent vitality and they perish of
themselves. See Kaftan, Dogmatik, 2, 3.

4. _Practical Theology_ is the system of truth considered as a means of
renewing and sanctifying men, or, in other words, theology in its
publication and enforcement.

To this department of theology belong Homiletics and Pastoral
Theology, since these are but scientific presentations of the
right methods of unfolding Christian truth, and of bringing it to
bear upon men individually and in the church. See Van Oosterzee,
Practical Theology; T. Harwood Pattison, The Making of the Sermon,
and Public Prayer; Yale Lectures on Preaching by H. W. Beecher, R.
W. Dale, Phillips Brooks, E. G. Robinson, A. J. F. Behrends, John
Watson, and others; and the work on Pastoral Theology, by Harvey.

It is sometimes asserted that there are other departments of
theology not included in those above mentioned. But most of these,
if not all, belong to other spheres of research, and cannot
properly be classed under theology at all. Moral Theology, so
called, or the science of Christian morals, ethics, or theological
ethics, is indeed the proper result of theology, but is not to be
confounded with it. Speculative theology, so called, respecting,
as it does, such truth as is mere matter of opinion, is either
extra-scriptural, and so belongs to the province of the philosophy
of religion, or is an attempt to explain truth already revealed,
and so falls within the province of Systematic Theology.
“Speculative theology starts from certain _a priori_ principles,
and from them undertakes to determine what is and must be. It
deduces its scheme of doctrine from the laws of mind or from
axioms supposed to be inwrought into its constitution.” Bib. Sac.,
1852:376—“Speculative theology tries to show that the dogmas agree
with the laws of thought, while the philosophy of religion tries
to show that the laws of thought agree with the dogmas.”
Theological Encyclopædia (the word signifies “instruction in a
circle”) is a general introduction to all the divisions of
Theology, together with an account of the relations between them.
Hegel’s Encyclopædia was an attempted exhibition of the principles
and connections of all the sciences. See Crooks and Hurst,
Theological Encyclopædia and Methodology; Zöckler, Handb. der
theol. Wissenschaften, 2:606-769.

The relations of theology to science and philosophy have been
variously stated, but by none better than by H. B. Smith, Faith
and Philosophy, 18—“Philosophy is a mode of human knowledge—not
the whole of that knowledge, but a mode of it—the knowing of
things rationally.” Science asks: “What _do_ I know?” Philosophy
asks: “What _can_ I know?” William James, Psychology,
1:145—“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort
to think clearly.” Aristotle: “The particular sciences are toiling
workmen, while philosophy is the architect. The workmen are
slaves, existing for the free master. So philosophy rules the
sciences.” With regard to philosophy and science Lord Bacon
remarks: “Those who have handled knowledge have been too much
either men of mere observation or abstract reasoners. The former
are like the ant: they only collect material and put it to
immediate use. The abstract reasoners are like spiders, who make
cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle
course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and
the field, while it transforms and digests what it gathers by a
power of its own. Not unlike this is the work of the philosopher.”
Novalis: “Philosophy can bake no bread; but it can give us God,
freedom and immortality.” Prof. DeWitt of Princeton: “Science,
philosophy, and theology are the three great modes of organizing
the universe into an intellectual system. Science never goes below
second causes; if it does, it is no longer science,—it becomes
philosophy. Philosophy views the universe as a unity, and the goal
it is always seeking to reach is the source and centre of this
unity—the Absolute, the First Cause. This goal of philosophy is
the point of departure for theology. What philosophy is striving
to find, theology asserts has been found. Theology therefore
starts with the Absolute, the First Cause.” W. N. Clarke,
Christian Theology, 48—“Science examines and classifies facts;
philosophy inquires concerning spiritual meanings. Science seeks
to know the universe; philosophy to understand it.”

Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 7—“Natural science has for its
subject matter things and events. Philosophy is the systematic
exhibition of the grounds of our knowledge. Metaphysics is our
knowledge respecting realities which are not phenomenal, _e. g._,
God and the soul.” Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 81—“The aim of
the sciences is increase of knowledge, by the discovery of laws
within which all phenomena may be embraced and by means of which
they may be explained. The aim of philosophy, on the other hand,
is to explain the sciences, by at once including and transcending
them. Its sphere is substance and essence.” Bowne, Theory of
Thought and Knowledge, 3-5—“Philosophy = _doctrine of knowledge_
(is mind passive or active in knowing?—Epistemology) + _doctrine
of being_ (is fundamental being mechanical and unintelligent, or
purposive and intelligent?—Metaphysics). The systems of Locke,
Hume, and Kant are preëminently theories of knowing; the systems
of Spinoza and Leibnitz are preëminently theories of being.
Historically theories of being come first, because the object is
the only determinant for reflective thought. But the instrument of
philosophy is thought itself. First then, we must study Logic, or
the theory of thought; secondly, Epistemology, or the theory of
knowledge; thirdly, Metaphysics, or the theory of being.”

Professor George M. Forbes on the New Psychology: “Locke and Kant
represent the two tendencies in philosophy—the empirical,
physical, scientific, on the one hand, and the rational,
metaphysical, logical, on the other. Locke furnishes the basis for
the associational schemes of Hartley, the Mills, and Bain; Kant
for the idealistic scheme of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The two
are not contradictory, but complementary, and the Scotch Reid and
Hamilton combine them both, reacting against the extreme
empiricism and scepticism of Hume. Hickok, Porter, and McCosh
represented the Scotch school in America. It was exclusively
_analytical_; its psychology was the faculty-psychology; it
represented the mind as a bundle of faculties. The unitary
philosophy of T. H. Green, Edward Caird, in Great Britain, and in
America, of W. T. Harris, George S. Morris, and John Dewey, was a
reaction against this faculty-psychology, under the influence of
Hegel. A second reaction under the influence of the Herbartian
doctrine of apperception substituted function for faculty, making
all processes phases of apperception. G. F. Stout and J. Mark
Baldwin represent this psychology. A third reaction comes from the
influence of physical science. All attempts to unify are relegated
to a metaphysical Hades. There is nothing but states and
processes. The only unity is the laws of their coëxistence and
succession. There is nothing _a priori_. Wundt identifies
apperception with will, and regards it as the unitary principle.
Külpe and Titchener find no self, or will, or soul, but treat
these as inferences little warranted. Their psychology is
psychology without a soul. The old psychology was exclusively
_static_, while the new emphasizes the genetic point of view.
Growth and development are the leading ideas of Herbert Spencer,
Preyer, Tracy and Stanley Hall. William James is explanatory,
while George T. Ladd is descriptive. Cattell, Scripture, and
Münsterberg apply the methods of Fechner, and the Psychological
Review is their organ. Their error is in their negative attitude.
The old psychology is needed to supplement the new. It has greater
scope and more practical significance.” On the relation of
theology to philosophy and to science, see Luthardt, Compend. der
Dogmatik, 4; Hagenbach, Encyclopädie, 109.

III. History of Systematic Theology.

1. _In the Eastern Church_, Systematic Theology may be said to have had
its beginning and end in John of Damascus (700-760).

Ignatius († 115—Ad Trall., c. 9) gives us “the first distinct
statement of the faith drawn up in a series of propositions. This
systematizing formed the basis of all later efforts” (Prof. A. H.
Newman). Origen of Alexandria (186-254) wrote his Περὶ Ἀρχῶν;
Athanasius of Alexandria (300-373) his Treatises on the Trinity
and the Deity of Christ; and Gregory of Nyssa in Cappadocia
(332-398) his Λόγος κατηχητικὸς ὁ μέγας. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures,
323, regards the “De Principiis” of Origen as the “first complete
system of dogma,” and speaks of Origen as “the disciple of Clement
of Alexandria, the first great teacher of philosophical
Christianity.” But while the Fathers just mentioned seem to have
conceived the plan of expounding the doctrines in order and of
showing their relation to one another, it was John of Damascus
(700-760) who first actually carried out such a plan. His Ἔκδοσις
ἀκριβὴς τῆς ὀρθοδόξου Πίστεως, or Summary of the Orthodox Faith,
may be considered the earliest work of Systematic Theology.
Neander calls it “the most important doctrinal text-book of the
Greek Church.” John, like the Greek Church in general, was
speculative, theological, semi-pelagian, sacramentarian. The
Apostles’ Creed, so called, is, in its present form, not earlier
than the fifth century; see Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 1:19.
Mr. Gladstone suggested that the Apostles’ Creed was a development
of the baptismal formula. McGiffert, Apostles’ Creed, assigns to
the meagre original form a date of the third quarter of the second
century, and regards the Roman origin of the symbol as proved. It
was framed as a baptismal formula, but specifically in opposition
to the teachings of Marcion, which were at that time causing much
trouble at Rome. Harnack however dates the original Apostles’
Creed at 150, and Zahn places it at 120. See also J. C. Long, in
Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892: 89-101.

2. _In the Western Church_, we may (with Hagenbach) distinguish three
periods:

(_a_) The period of Scholasticism,—introduced by Peter Lombard
(1100-1160), and reaching its culmination in Thomas Aquinas (1221-1274)
and Duns Scotus (1265-1308).

Though Systematic Theology had its beginning in the Eastern
Church, its development has been confined almost wholly to the
Western. Augustine (353-430) wrote his “Encheiridion ad
Laurentium” and his “De Civitate Dei,” and John Scotus Erigena (†
850), Roscelin (1092-1122), and Abelard (1079-1142), in their
attempts at the rational explanation of the Christian doctrine
foreshadowed the works of the great scholastic teachers. Anselm of
Canterbury (1034-1109), with his “Proslogion de Dei Existentia”
and his “Cur Deus Homo,” has sometimes, but wrongly, been called
the founder of Scholasticism. Allen, in his Continuity of
Christian Thought, represents the transcendence of God as the
controlling principle of the Augustinian and of the Western
theology. The Eastern Church, he maintains, had founded its
theology on God’s immanence. Paine, in his Evolution of
Trinitarianism, shows that this is erroneous. Augustine was a
theistic monist. He declares that “Dei voluntas rerum natura est,”
and regards God’s upholding as a continuous creation. Western
theology recognized the immanence of God as well as his
transcendence.

Peter Lombard, however, (1100-1160), the “magister sententiarum,”
was the first great systematizer of the Western Church, and his
“Libri Sententiarum Quatuor” was the theological text-book of the
Middle Ages. Teachers lectured on the “Sentences” (_Sententia_ =
sentence, _Satz_, _locus_, point, article of faith), as they did
on the books of Aristotle, who furnished to Scholasticism its
impulse and guide. Every doctrine was treated in the order of
Aristotle’s four causes: the material, the formal, the efficient,
the final. (“Cause” here = requisite: (1) matter of which a thing
consists, _e. g._, bricks and mortar; (2) form it assumes, _e.
g._, plan or design; (3) producing agent, _e. g._, builder; (4)
end for which made, _e. g._, house.) The organization of physical
as well as of theological science was due to Aristotle. Dante
called him “the master of those who know.” James Ten Broeke, Bap.
Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-26—“The Revival of Learning showed the
world that the real Aristotle was much broader than the Scholastic
Aristotle—information very unwelcome to the Roman Church.” For the
influence of Scholasticism, compare the literary methods of
Augustine and of Calvin,—the former giving us his materials in
disorder, like soldiers bivouacked for the night; the latter
arranging them like those same soldiers drawn up in battle array;
see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 4, and Christ in
Creation, 188, 189.

Candlish, art.: Dogmatic, in Encycl. Brit., 7:340—“By and by a
mighty intellectual force took hold of the whole collected
dogmatic material, and reared out of it the great scholastic
systems, which have been compared to the grand Gothic cathedrals
that were the work of the same ages.” Thomas Aquinas (1221-1274),
the Dominican, “doctor angelicus,” Augustinian and Realist,—and
Duns Scotus (1265-1308), the Franciscan, “doctor
subtilis,”—wrought out the scholastic theology more fully, and
left behind them, in their _Summæ_, gigantic monuments of
intellectual industry and acumen. Scholasticism aimed at the proof
and systematizing of the doctrines of the Church by means of
Aristotle’s philosophy. It became at last an illimitable morass of
useless subtilities and abstractions, and it finally ended in the
nominalistic scepticism of William of Occam (1270-1347). See
Townsend, The Great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages.

(_b_) The period of Symbolism,—represented by the Lutheran theology of
Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), and the Reformed theology of John Calvin
(1509-1564); the former connecting itself with the Analytic theology of
Calixtus (1585-1656), and the latter with the Federal theology of Cocceius
(1603-1669).

_The Lutheran Theology._—Preachers precede theologians, and Luther
(1485-1546) was preacher rather than theologian. But Melanchthon
(1497-1560), “the preceptor of Germany,” as he was called,
embodied the theology of the Lutheran church in his “Loci
Communes” = points of doctrine common to believers (first edition
Augustinian, afterwards substantially Arminian; grew out of
lectures on the Epistle to the Romans). He was followed by
Chemnitz (1522-1586), “clear and accurate,” the most learned of
the disciples of Melanchthon. Leonhard Hutter (1563-1616), called
“Lutherus redivivus,” and John Gerhard (1582-1637) followed Luther
rather than Melanchthon. “Fifty years after the death of
Melanchthon, Leonhard Hutter, his successor in the chair of
theology at Wittenberg, on an occasion when the authority of
Melanchthon was appealed to, tore down from the wall the portrait
of the great Reformer, and trampled it under foot in the presence
of the assemblage” (E. D. Morris, paper at the 60th Anniversary of
Lane Seminary). George Calixtus (1586-1656) followed Melanchthon
rather than Luther. He taught a theology which recognized the good
element in both the Reformed and the Romanist doctrine and which
was called “Syncretism.” He separated Ethics from Systematic
Theology, and applied the analytical method of investigation to
the latter, beginning with the end, or final cause, of all things,
viz.: blessedness. He was followed in his analytic method by
Dannhauer (1603-1666), who treated theology allegorically,
Calovius (1612-1686), “the most uncompromising defender of
Lutheran orthodoxy and the most drastic polemicist against
Calixtus,” Quenstedt (1617-1688), whom Hovey calls “learned,
comprehensive and logical,” and Hollaz († 1730). The Lutheran
theology aimed to purify the _existing_ church, maintaining that
what is not against the gospel is for it. It emphasized the
material principle of the Reformation, justification by faith; but
it retained many Romanist customs not expressly forbidden in
Scripture. Kaftan, Am. Jour. Theol., 1900:716—“Because the
mediæval school-philosophy mainly held sway, the Protestant
theology representing the new faith was meanwhile necessarily
accommodated to forms of knowledge thereby conditioned, that is,
to forms essentially Catholic.”

_The Reformed Theology._—The word “Reformed” is here used in its
technical sense, as designating that phase of the new theology
which originated in Switzerland. Zwingle, the Swiss reformer
(1484-1531), differing from Luther as to the Lord’s Supper and as
to Scripture, was more than Luther entitled to the name of
systematic theologian. Certain writings of his may be considered
the beginning of Reformed theology. But it was left to John Calvin
(1509-1564), after the death of Zwingle, to arrange the principles
of that theology in systematic form. Calvin dug channels for
Zwingle’s flood to flow in, as Melanchthon did for Luther’s. His
Institutes (“Institutio Religionis Christianæ”), is one of the
great works in theology (superior as a systematic work to
Melanchthon’s “Loci”). Calvin was followed by Peter Martyr
(1500-1562), Chamier (1565-1621), and Theodore Beza (1519-1605).
Beza carried Calvin’s doctrine of predestination to an extreme
supralapsarianism, which is hyper-Calvinistic rather than
Calvinistic. Cocceius (1603-1669), and after him Witsius
(1626-1708), made theology centre about the idea of the covenants,
and founded the Federal theology. Leydecker (1642-1721) treated
theology in the order of the persons of the Trinity. Amyraldus
(1596-1664) and Placeus of Saumur (1596-1632) modified the
Calvinistic doctrine, the latter by his theory of mediate
imputation, and the former by advocating the hypothetic
universalism of divine grace. Turretin (1671-1737), a clear and
strong theologian whose work is still a text-book at Princeton,
and Pictet (1655-1725), both of them Federalists, showed the
influence of the Cartesian philosophy. The Reformed theology aimed
to build a _new_ church, affirming that what is not derived from
the Bible is against it. It emphasized the formal principle of the
Reformation, the sole authority of Scripture.

In general, while the line between Catholic and Protestant in
Europe runs from west to east, the line between Lutheran and
Reformed runs from south to north, the Reformed theology flowing
with the current of the Rhine northward from Switzerland to
Holland and to England, in which latter country the Thirty-nine
Articles represent the Reformed faith, while the Prayer-book of
the English Church is substantially Arminian; see Dorner, Gesch.
prot. Theologie, Einleit., 9. On the difference between Lutheran
and Reformed doctrine, see Schaff, Germany, its Universities,
Theology and Religion, 167-177. On the Reformed Churches of Europe
and America, see H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 87-124.

(_c_) The period of Criticism and Speculation,—in its three divisions: the
Rationalistic, represented by Semler (1725-1791); the Transitional, by
Schleiermacher (1768-1834); the Evangelical, by Nitzsch, Müller, Tholuck
and Dorner.

_First Division._ Rationalistic theologies: Though the Reformation
had freed theology in great part from the bonds of scholasticism,
other philosophies after a time took its place. The Leibnitz-
(1646-1754) Wolffian (1679-1754) exaggeration of the powers of
natural religion prepared the way for rationalistic systems of
theology. Buddeus (1667-1729) combated the new principles, but
Semler’s (1725-1791) theology was built upon them, and represented
the Scriptures as having a merely local and temporary character.
Michaelis (1716-1784) and Doederlein (1714-1789) followed Semler,
and the tendency toward rationalism was greatly assisted by the
critical philosophy of Kant (1724-1804), to whom “revelation was
problematical, and positive religion merely the medium through
which the practical truths of reason are communicated” (Hagenbach,
Hist. Doct., 2:397). Ammon (1766-1850) and Wegscheider (1771-1848)
were representatives of this philosophy. Daub, Marheinecke and
Strauss (1808-1874) were the Hegelian dogmatists. The system of
Strauss resembled “Christian theology as a cemetery resembles a
town.” Storr (1746-1805), Reinhard (1753-1812), and Knapp
(1753-1825), in the main evangelical, endeavored to reconcile
revelation with reason, but were more or less influenced by this
rationalizing spirit. Bretschneider (1776-1828) and De Wette
(1780-1849) may be said to have held middle ground.

_Second Division._ Transition to a more Scriptural theology.
Herder (1744-1803) and Jacobi (1743-1819), by their more spiritual
philosophy, prepared the way for Schleiermacher’s (1768-1834)
grounding of doctrine in the facts of Christian experience. The
writings of Schleiermacher constituted an epoch, and had great
influence in delivering Germany from the rationalistic toils into
which it had fallen. We may now speak of a

_Third Division_—and in this division we may put the names of
Neander and Tholuck, Twesten and Nitzsch, Müller and Luthardt,
Dorner and Philippi, Ebrard and Thomasius, Lange and Kahnis, all
of them exponents of a far more pure and evangelical theology than
was common in Germany a century ago. Two new forms of rationalism,
however, have appeared in Germany, the one based upon the
philosophy of Hegel, and numbering among its adherents Strauss and
Baur, Biedermann, Lipsius and Pfleiderer; the other based upon the
philosophy of Kant, and advocated by Ritschl and his followers,
Harnack, Hermann and Kaftan; the former emphasizing the ideal
Christ, the latter emphasizing the historical Christ; but neither
of the two fully recognizing the living Christ present in every
believer (see Johnson’s Cyclopædia, art.: Theology, by A. H.
Strong).

3. _Among theologians of views diverse from the prevailing Protestant
faith_, may be mentioned:

(_a_) Bellarmine (1542-1621), the Roman Catholic.

Besides Bellarmine, “the best controversial writer of his age”
(Bayle), the Roman Catholic Church numbers among its noted modern
theologians:—Petavius (1583-1652), whose dogmatic theology Gibbon
calls “a work of incredible labor and compass”; Melchior Canus
(1523-1560), an opponent of the Jesuits and their scholastic
method; Bossuet (1627-1704), who idealized Catholicism in his
Exposition of Doctrine, and attacked Protestantism in his History
of Variations of Protestant Churches; Jansen (1585-1638), who
attempted, in opposition to the Jesuits, to reproduce the theology
of Augustine, and who had in this the powerful assistance of
Pascal (1623-1662). Jansenism, so far as the doctrines of grace
are concerned, but not as respects the sacraments, is virtual
Protestantism within the Roman Catholic Church. Moehler’s
Symbolism, Perrone’s “Prelectiones Theologicæ,” and Hurter’s
“Compendium Theologiæ Dogmaticæ” are the latest and most approved
expositions of Roman Catholic doctrine.

(_b_) Arminius (1560-1609), the opponent of predestination.

Among the followers of Arminius (1560-1609) must be reckoned
Episcopius (1583-1643), who carried Arminianism to almost Pelagian
extremes; Hugo Grotius (1553-1645), the jurist and statesman,
author of the governmental theory of the atonement; and Limborch
(1633-1712), the most thorough expositor of the Arminian doctrine.

(_c_) Laelius Socinus (1525-1562), and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), the
leaders of the modern Unitarian movement.

The works of Laelius Socinus (1525-1562) and his nephew, Faustus
Socinus (1539-1604) constituted the beginnings of modern
Unitarianism. Laelius Socinus was the preacher and reformer, as
Faustus Socinus was the theologian; or, as Baumgarten Crusius
expresses it: “the former was the spiritual founder of
Socinianism, and the latter the founder of the sect.” Their
writings are collected in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. The
Racovian Catechism, taking its name from the Polish town Racow,
contains the most succinct exposition of their views. In 1660, the
Unitarian church of the Socini in Poland was destroyed by
persecution, but its Hungarian offshoot has still more than a
hundred congregations.

4. _British Theology_, represented by:

(_a_) The Baptists, John Bunyan (1628-1688), John Gill (1697-1771), and
Andrew Fuller (1754-1815).

Some of the best British theology is Baptist. Among John Bunyan’s
works we may mention his “Gospel Truths Opened,” though his
“Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Holy War” are theological treatises in
allegorical form. Macaulay calls Milton and Bunyan the two great
creative minds of England during the latter part of the 17th
century. John Gill’s “Body of Practical Divinity” shows much
ability, although the Rabbinical learning of the author
occasionally displays itself in a curious exegesis, as when on the
word “Abba” he remarks: “You see that this word which means
’Father’ reads the same whether we read forward or backward; which
suggests that God is the same whichever way we look at him.”
Andrew Fuller’s “Letters on Systematic Divinity” is a brief
compend of theology. His treatises upon special doctrines are
marked by sound judgment and clear insight. They were the most
influential factor in rescuing the evangelical churches of England
from antinomianism. They justify the epithets which Robert Hall,
one of the greatest of Baptist preachers, gives him: “sagacious,”
“luminous,” “powerful.”

(_b_) The Puritans, John Owen (1616-1683), Richard Baxter (1615-1691),
John Howe (1630-1705), and Thomas Ridgeley (1666-1734).

Owen was the most rigid, as Baxter was the most liberal, of the
Puritans. The Encyclopædia Britannica remarks: “As a theological
thinker and writer, John Owen holds his own distinctly defined
place among those titanic intellects with which the age abounded.
Surpassed by Baxter in point and pathos, by Howe in imagination
and the higher philosophy, he is unrivaled in his power of
unfolding the rich meanings of Scripture. In his writings he was
preëminently the great theologian.” Baxter wrote a “Methodus
Theologiæ,” and a “Catholic Theology”; John Howe is chiefly known
by his “Living Temple”; Thomas Ridgeley by his “Body of Divinity.”
Charles H. Spurgeon never ceased to urge his students to become
familiar with the Puritan Adams, Ambrose, Bowden, Manton and
Sibbes.

(_c_) The Scotch Presbyterians, Thomas Boston (1676-1732), John Dick
(1764-1833), and Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847).

Of the Scotch Presbyterians, Boston is the most voluminous, Dick
the most calm and fair, Chalmers the most fervid and popular.

(_d_) The Methodists, John Wesley (1703-1791), and Richard Watson
(1781-1833).

Of the Methodists, John Wesley’s doctrine is presented in
“Christian Theology,” collected from his writings by the Rev.
Thornley Smith. The great Methodist text-book, however, is the
“Institutes” of Watson, who systematized and expounded the
Wesleyan theology. Pope, a recent English theologian, follows
Watson’s modified and improved Arminianism, while Whedon and
Raymond, recent American writers, hold rather to a radical and
extreme Arminianism.

(_e_) The Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691), and Robert Barclay (1648-1690).

As Jesus, the preacher and reformer, preceded Paul the theologian;
as Luther preceded Melanchthon; as Zwingle preceded Calvin; as
Laelius Socinus preceded Faustus Socinus; as Wesley preceded
Watson; so Fox preceded Barclay. Barclay wrote an “Apology for the
true Christian Divinity,” which Dr. E. G. Robinson described as
“not a formal treatise of Systematic Theology, but the ablest
exposition of the views of the Quakers.” George Fox was the
reformer, William Penn the social founder, Robert Barclay the
theologian, of Quakerism.

(_f_) The English Churchmen, Richard Hooker (1553-1600), Gilbert Burnet
(1643-1715), and John Pearson (1613-1686).

The English church has produced no great systematic theologian
(see reasons assigned in Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theologie, 470). The
“judicious” Hooker is still its greatest theological writer,
although his work is only on “Ecclesiastical Polity.” Bishop
Burnet is the author of the “Exposition of the XXXIX Articles,”
and Bishop Pearson of the “Exposition of the Creed.” Both these
are common English text-books. A recent “Compendium of Dogmatic
Theology,” by Litton, shows a tendency to return from the usual
Arminianism of the Anglican church to the old Augustinianism; so
also Bishop Moule’s “Outlines of Christian Doctrine,” and Mason’s
“Faith of the Gospel.”

5. _American theology_, running in two lines:

(_a_) The Reformed system of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), modified
successively by Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803),
Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Nathanael Emmons (1745-1840), Leonard Woods
(1774-1854), Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), Nathaniel W. Taylor
(1786-1858), and Horace Bushnell (1802-1876). Calvinism, as thus modified,
is often called the New England, or New School, theology.

Jonathan Edwards, one of the greatest of metaphysicians and
theologians, was an idealist who held that God is the only real
cause, either in the realm of matter or in the realm of mind. He
regarded the chief good as happiness—a form of sensibility. Virtue
was voluntary choice of this good. Hence union with Adam in acts
and exercises was sufficient. Thus God’s will made identity of
being with Adam. This led to the exercise-system of Hopkins and
Emmons, on the one hand, and to Bellamy’s and Dwight’s denial of
any imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity, on the
other—in which last denial agree many other New England
theologians who reject the exercise-scheme, as for example,
Strong, Tyler, Smalley, Burton, Woods, and Park. Dr. N. W. Taylor
added a more distinctly Arminian element, the power of contrary
choice—and with this tenet of the New Haven theology, Charles G.
Finney, of Oberlin, substantially agreed. Horace Bushnell held to
a practically Sabellian view of the Trinity, and to a
moral-influence theory of the atonement. Thus from certain
principles admitted by Edwards, who held in the main to an Old
School theology, the New School theology has been gradually
developed.

Robert Hall called Edwards “the greatest of the sons of men.” Dr.
Chalmers regarded him as the “greatest of theologians.” Dr.
Fairbairn says: “He is not only the greatest of all the thinkers
that America has produced, but also the highest speculative genius
of the eighteenth century. In a far higher degree than Spinoza, he
was a ’God-intoxicated man.’” His fundamental notion that there is
no causality except the divine was made the basis of a theory of
necessity which played into the hands of the deists whom he
opposed and was alien not only to Christianity but even to theism.
Edwards could not have gotten his idealism from Berkeley; it may
have been suggested to him by the writings of Locke or Newton,
Cudworth or Descartes, John Norris or Arthur Collier. See Prof. H.
N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596; Prof. E. C.
Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Allen, Jonathan
Edwards, 16, 308-310, and in Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1891:767;
Sanborn, in Jour. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420; G. P. Fisher,
Edwards on the Trinity, 18, 19.

(_b_) The older Calvinism, represented by Charles Hodge the father
(1797-1878) and A. A. Hodge the son (1823-1886), together with Henry B.
Smith (1815-1877), Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871), Samuel J. Baird,
and William G. T. Shedd (1820-1894). All these, although with minor
differences, hold to views of human depravity and divine grace more nearly
conformed to the doctrine of Augustine and Calvin, and are for this reason
distinguished from the New England theologians and their followers by the
popular title of Old School.

Old School theology, in its view of predestination, exalts God;
New School theology, by emphasizing the freedom of the will,
exalts man. It is yet more important to notice that Old School
theology has for its characteristic tenet the guilt of inborn
depravity. But among those who hold this view, some are
federalists and creationists, and justify God’s condemnation of
all men upon the ground that Adam represented his posterity. Such
are the Princeton theologians generally, including Charles Hodge,
A. A. Hodge, and the brothers Alexander. Among those who hold to
the Old School doctrine of the guilt of inborn depravity, however,
there are others who are traducians, and who explain the
imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity upon the ground of the
natural union between him and them. Baird’s “Elohim Revealed” and
Shedd’s essay on “Original Sin” (Sin a Nature and that Nature
Guilt) represent this realistic conception of the relation of the
race to its first father. R. J. Breckinridge, R. L. Dabney, and J.
H. Thornwell assert the fact of inherent corruption and guilt, but
refuse to assign any _rationale_ for it, though they tend to
realism. H. B. Smith holds guardedly to the theory of mediate
imputation.

On the history of Systematic Theology in general, see Hagenbach,
History of Doctrine (from which many of the facts above given are
taken), and Shedd, History of Doctrine; also, Ebrard, Dogmatik,
1:44-100; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 1:15-128; Hase, Hutterus Redivivus,
24-52. Gretillat, Théologie Systématique, 3:24-120, has given an
excellent history of theology, brought down to the present time.
On the history of New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions
and Essays, 285-354.

IV. Order of Treatment in Systematic Theology.

1. _Various methods of arranging the topics of a theological system._

(_a_) The Analytical method of Calixtus begins with the assumed end of all
things, blessedness, and thence passes to the means by which it is
secured. (_b_) The Trinitarian method of Leydecker and Martensen regards
Christian doctrine as a manifestation successively of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. (_c_) The Federal method of Cocceius, Witsius, and Boston
treats theology under the two covenants. (_d_) The Anthropological method
of Chalmers and Rothe; the former beginning with the Disease of Man and
passing to the Remedy; the latter dividing his Dogmatik into the
Consciousness of Sin and the Consciousness of Redemption. (_e_) The
Christological method of Hase, Thomasius and Andrew Fuller treats of God,
man, and sin, as presuppositions of the person and work of Christ. Mention
may also be made of (_f_) The Historical method, followed by Ursinus, and
adopted in Jonathan Edwards’s History of Redemption; and (_g_) The
Allegorical method of Dannhauer, in which man is described as a wanderer,
life as a road, the Holy Spirit as a light, the church as a candlestick,
God as the end, and heaven as the home; so Bunyan’s Holy War, and Howe’s
Living Temple.

See Calixtus, Epitome Theologiæ; Leydecker, De Œconomia trium
Personarum in Negotio Salutis humanæ; Martensen (1808-1884),
Christian Dogmatics; Cocceius, Summa Theologiæ, and Summa Doctrinæ
de Fœdere et Testamento Dei, in Works, vol. vi; Witsius, The
Economy of the Covenants; Boston, A Complete Body of Divinity (in
Works, vol. 1 and 2), Questions in Divinity (vol. 6), Human Nature
in its Fourfold State (vol. 8); Chalmers, Institutes of Theology;
Rothe (1799-1867), Dogmatik, and Theologische Ethik; Hase
(1800-1890), Evangelische Dogmatik; Thomasius (1802-1875), Christi
Person und Werk; Fuller, Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation (in
Works, 2:328-416), and Letters on Systematic Divinity (1:684-711);
Ursinus (1534-1583), Loci Theologici (in Works, 1:426-909);
Dannhauer (1603-1666) Hodosophia Christiana, seu Theologia
Positiva in Methodum redacta. Jonathan Edwards’s so-called History
of Redemption was in reality a system of theology in historical
form. It “was to begin and end with eternity, all great events and
epochs in time being viewed ‘sub specie eternitatis.’ The three
worlds—heaven, earth and hell—were to be the scenes of this grand
drama. It was to include the topics of theology as living factors,
each in its own place,” and all forming a complete and harmonious
whole; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 379, 380.

2. _The Synthetic Method_, which we adopt in this compendium, is both the
most common and the most logical method of arranging the topics of
theology. This method proceeds from causes to effects, or, in the language
of Hagenbach (Hist. Doctrine, 2:152), “starts from the highest principle,
God, and proceeds to man, Christ, redemption, and finally to the end of
all things.” In such a treatment of theology we may best arrange our
topics in the following order:

1st. The existence of God.
2d. The Scriptures a revelation from God.
3d. The nature, decrees and works of God.
4th. Man, in his original likeness to God and subsequent apostasy.
5th. Redemption, through the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit.
6th. The nature and laws of the Christian church.
7th. The end of the present system of things.

V. Text-Books in Theology.

1. _Confessions_: Schaff, Creeds of Christendom.

2. _Compendiums_: H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology; A. A. Hodge,
Outlines of Theology; E. H. Johnson, Outline of Systematic Theology;
Hovey, Manual of Theology and Ethics; W. N. Clarke, Outline of Christian
Theology; Hase, Hutterus Redivivus; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik;
Kurtz, Religionslehre.

3. _Extended Treatises_: Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine; Shedd,
Dogmatic Theology; Calvin, Institutes; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology;
Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics; Baird, Elohim Revealed; Luthardt,
Fundamental, Saving, and Moral Truths; Phillippi, Glaubenslehre;
Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk.

4. _Collected Works_: Jonathan Edwards; Andrew Fuller.

5. _Histories of Doctrine_: Harnack; Hagenbach; Shedd; Fisher; Sheldon;
Orr, Progress of Dogma.

6. _Monographs_: Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin; Shedd, Discourses and
Essays; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity; Dorner, History of the Doctrine of
the Person of Christ; Dale, Atonement; Strong, Christ in Creation; Upton,
Hibbert Lectures.

7. _Theism_: Martineau, Study of Religion; Harris, Philosophical Basis of
Theism; Strong, Philosophy and Religion; Bruce, Apologetics; Drummond,
Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

8. _Christian Evidences_: Butler, Analogy of Natural and Revealed
Religion; Fisher, Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief; Row, Bampton
Lectures for 1877; Peabody, Evidences of Christianity; Mair, Christian
Evidences; Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion; Matheson,
Spiritual Development of St. Paul.

9. _Intellectual Philosophy_: Stout, Handbook of Psychology; Bowne,
Metaphysics; Porter, Human Intellect; Hill, Elements of Psychology; Dewey,
Psychology.

10. _Moral Philosophy_: Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality;
Smyth, Christian Ethics; Porter, Elements of Moral Science; Calderwood,
Moral Philosophy; Alexander, Moral Science; Robins, Ethics of the
Christian Life.

11. _General Science_: Todd, Astronomy; Wentworth and Hill, Physics;
Remsen, Chemistry; Brigham, Geology; Parker, Biology; Martin, Physiology;
Ward, Fairbanks, or West, Sociology; Walker, Political Economy.

12. _Theological Encyclopædias_: Schaff-Herzog (English); McClintock and
Strong; Herzog (Second German Edition).

13. _Bible Dictionaries_: Hastings; Davis; Cheyne; Smith (edited by
Hackett).

14. _Commentaries_: Meyer, on the New Testament; Philippi, Lange, Shedd,
Sanday, on the Epistle to the Romans; Godet, on John’s Gospel; Lightfoot,
on Philippians and Colossians; Expositor’s Bible, on the Old Testament
books.

15. _Bibles_: American Revision (standard edition); Revised Greek-English
New Testament (published by Harper & Brothers); Annotated Paragraph Bible
(published by the London Religious Tract Society) Stier and Theile,
Polyglotten-Bibel.

An attempt has been made, in the list of text-books given above,
to put first in each class the book best worth purchasing by the
average theological student, and to arrange the books that follow
this first one in the order of their value. German books, however,
when they are not yet accessible in an English translation, are
put last, simply because they are less likely to be used as books
of reference by the average student.

PART II. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.

Chapter I. Origin Of Our Idea Of God’s Existence.

God is the infinite and perfect Spirit in whom all things have their
source, support, and end.

On the definition of the term God, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:366.
Other definitions are those of Calovius: “Essentia spiritualis
infinite”; Ebrard: “The eternal source of all that is temporal”;
Kahnis: “The infinite Spirit”; John Howe: “An eternal, uncaused,
independent, necessary Being, that hath active power, life,
wisdom, goodness, and whatsoever other supposable excellency, in
the highest perfection, in and of itself”; Westminster Catechism:
“A Spirit infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom,
power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth”; Andrew Fuller: “The
first cause and last end of all things.”

The existence of God is a first truth; in other words, the knowledge of
God’s existence is a rational intuition. Logically, it precedes and
conditions all observation and reasoning. Chronologically, only reflection
upon the phenomena of nature and of mind occasions its rise in
consciousness.

The term intuition means simply direct knowledge. Lowndes (Philos.
of Primary Beliefs, 78) and Mansel (Metaphysics, 52) would use the
term only of our direct knowledge of substances, as self and body;
Porter applies it by preference to our cognition of first truths,
such as have been already mentioned. Harris (Philos. Basis of
Theism, 44-151, but esp. 45, 46) makes it include both. He divides
intuitions into two classes: 1. _Presentative_ intuitions, as
self-consciousness (in virtue of which I perceive the existence of
spirit and already come in contact with the supernatural), and
sense-perception (in virtue of which I perceive the existence of
matter, at least in my own organism, and come in contact with
nature); 2. _Rational_ intuitions, as space, time, substance,
cause, final cause, right, absolute being. We may accept this
nomenclature, using the terms “first truths” and “rational
intuitions” as equivalent to each other, and classifying rational
intuitions under the heads of (1) intuitions of relations, as
space and time; (2) intuitions of principles, as substance, cause,
final cause, right; and (3) intuition of absolute Being, Power,
Reason, Perfection, Personality, as God. We hold that, as upon
occasion of the senses cognizing (_a_) extended matter, (_b_)
succession, (_c_) qualities, (_d_) change, (_e_) order, (_f_)
action, respectively, the mind cognizes (_a_) space, (_b_) time,
(_c_) substance, (_d_) cause, (_e_) design, (_f_) obligation, so
upon occasion of our cognizing our finiteness, dependence and
responsibility, the mind directly cognizes the existence of an
Infinite and Absolute Authority, Perfection, Personality, upon
whom we are dependent and to whom we are responsible.

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 60—“As we walk in entire
ignorance of our muscles, so we often think in entire ignorance of
the principles which underlie and determine thinking. But as
anatomy reveals that the apparently simple act of walking involves
a highly complex muscular activity, so analysis reveals that the
apparently simple act of thinking involves a system of mental
principles.” Dewey, Psychology, 238, 244—“Perception, memory,
imagination, conception—each of these is an act of intuition....
Every concrete act of knowledge involves an intuition of God.”
Martineau, Types, 1:459—The attempt to divest experience of either
percepts or intuitions is “like the attempt to peel a bubble in
search for its colors and contents: in tenuem ex oculis evanuit
auram”; Study, 1:199—“Try with all your might to do something
difficult, _e. g._, to shut a door against a furious wind, and you
recognize Self and Nature—causal will, over against external
causality”; 201—“Hence our fellow-feeling with Nature”; 65—“As
Perception gives us Will in the shape of Causality over against us
in the non-ego, so Conscience gives us Will in the shape of
Authority over against us in the non-ego”; Types, 2:5—“In
perception it is self and nature, in morals it is self and God,
that stand face to face in the subjective and objective
antithesis”; Study, 2:2, 3—“In volitional experience we meet with
objective _causality_; in moral experience we meet with objective
_authority_,—both being objects of immediate knowledge, on the
same footing of certainty with the apprehension of the external
material world. I know of no logical advantage which the belief in
finite objects around us can boast over the belief in the infinite
and righteous Cause of all”; 51—“In recognition of God as Cause,
we raise the University; in recognition of God as Authority, we
raise the Church.”

Kant declares that the idea of freedom is the source of our idea
of personality,—personality consists in the freedom of the whole
soul from the mechanism of nature. Lotze, Metaphysics, § 244—“So
far as, and so long as, the soul knows itself as the identical
subject of inward experience, it is, and is named simply for that
reason, substance.” Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine,
32—“Our conception of substance is derived, not from the physical,
but from the mental world. Substance is first of all that which
underlies our _mental_ affections and manifestations.” James, Will
to Believe, 80—“Substance, as Kant says, means ‘das Beharrliche,’
the abiding, that which will be as it has been, because its being
is essential and eternal.” In this sense we have an intuitive
belief in an abiding substance which underlies our own thoughts
and volitions, and this we call the soul. But we also have an
intuitive belief in an abiding substance which underlies all
natural phenomena and all the events of history, and this we call
God. Among those who hold to this general view of an intuitive
knowledge of God may be mentioned the following:—Calvin,
Institutes, book I, chap. 3; Nitzsch, System of Christian
Doctrine, 15-26, 133-140; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:78-84;
Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688-725; Porter, Human Intellect, 497;
Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 58-89; Farrar, Science in Theology,
27-29; Bib. Sac., July, 1872:533, and January, 1873:204; Miller,
Fetich in Theology, 110-122; Fisher, Essays, 565-572; Tulloch,
Theism, 314-336; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:191-203;
Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 75, 76; Raymond,
Syst. Theology, 1:247-262; Bascom, Science of Mind, 246, 247;
Knight, Studies in Philos. and Lit., 155-224; A. H. Strong,
Philosophy and Religion, 76-89.

I. First Truths in General.

1. _Their nature._

A. Negatively.—A first truth is not (_a_) Truth written prior to
consciousness upon the substance of the soul—for such passive knowledge
implies a materialistic view of the soul; (_b_) Actual knowledge of which
the soul finds itself in possession at birth—for it cannot be proved that
the soul has such knowledge; (_c_) An idea, undeveloped at birth, but
which has the power of self-development apart from observation and
experience—for this is contrary to all we know of the laws of mental
growth.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 1:17—“Intelligi necesse est esse deos,
quoniam insitas eorum vel potius innatas cogitationes habemus.”
Origen, Adv. Celsum, 1:4—“Men would not be guilty, if they did not
carry in their minds common notions of morality, innate and
written in divine letters.” Calvin, Institutes, 1:3:3—“Those who
rightly judge will always agree that there is an indelible sense
of divinity engraven upon men’s minds.” Fleming, Vocab. of
Philosophy, art.: “Innate Ideas”—“Descartes is supposed to have
taught (and Locke devoted the first book of his Essays to refuting
the doctrine) that these ideas are innate or connate with the
soul; _i. e._, the intellect finds itself at birth, or as soon as
it wakes to conscious activity, to be possessed of ideas to which
it has only to attach the appropriate names, or of judgments which
it only needs to express in fit propositions—_i. e._, prior to any
experience of individual objects.”

Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 77—“In certain families,
Descartes teaches, good breeding and the gout are innate. Yet, of
course, the children of such families have to be instructed in
deportment, and the infants just learning to walk seem happily
quite free from gout. Even so geometry is innate in us, but it
does not come to our consciousness without much trouble”; 79—Locke
found no innate ideas. He maintained, in reply, that “infants,
with their rattles, showed no sign of being aware that things
which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”
Schopenhauer said that “Jacobi had the trifling weakness of taking
all he had learned and approved before his fifteenth year for
inborn ideas of the human mind.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics,
5—“That the rational ideas are conditioned by the sense experience
and are sequent to it, is unquestioned by any one; and that
experience shows a successive order of manifestation is equally
undoubted. But the sensationalist has always shown a curious
blindness to the ambiguity of such a fact. He will have it that
what comes after must be a modification of what went before;
whereas it might be _that_, _and_ it might be a new, though
conditioned, manifestation of an immanent nature or law. Chemical
affinity is not gravity, although affinity cannot manifest itself
until gravity has brought the elements into certain relations.”

Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:103—“This principle was not
from the beginning in the consciousness of men; for, in order to
think ideas, reason must be clearly developed, which in the first
of mankind it could just as little be as in children. This however
does not exclude the fact that there was from the beginning the
unconscious rational impulse which lay at the basis of the
formation of the belief in God, however manifold may have been the
direct motives which co-operated with it.” Self is implied in the
simplest act of knowledge. Sensation gives us two things, _e. g._,
black and white; but I cannot compare them without asserting
difference _for me_. Different sensations make no _knowledge_,
without a _self_ to bring them together. Upton, Hibbert Lectures,
lecture 2—“You could as easily prove the existence of an external
world to a man who had no senses to perceive it, as you could
prove the existence of God to one who had no consciousness of
God.”

B. Positively.—A first truth is a knowledge which, though developed upon
occasion of observation and reflection, is not derived from observation
and reflection,—a knowledge on the contrary which has such logical
priority that it must be assumed or supposed, in order to make any
observation or reflection possible. Such truths are not, therefore,
recognized first in order of time; some of them are assented to somewhat
late in the mind’s growth; by the great majority of men they are never
consciously formulated at all. Yet they constitute the necessary
assumptions upon which all other knowledge rests, and the mind has not
only the inborn capacity to evolve them so soon as the proper occasions
are presented, but the recognition of them is inevitable so soon as the
mind begins to give account to itself of its own knowledge.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 52, 279—“To describe experience as the cause
of the idea of space would be as inaccurate as to speak of the
soil in which it was planted as the cause of the oak—though the
planting in the soil is the condition which brings into
manifestation the latent power of the acorn.” Coleridge: “We see
before we know that we have eyes; but when once this is known, we
perceive that eyes must have preëxisted in order to enable us to
see.” Coleridge speaks of first truths as “those necessities of
mind or forms of thinking, which, though revealed to us by
experience, must yet have preëxisted in order to make experience
possible.” McCosh, Intuitions, 48, 49—Intuitions are “like flower
and fruit, which are in the plant from its embryo, but may not be
actually formed till there have been a stalk and branches and
leaves.” Porter, Human Intellect, 501, 519—“Such truths cannot be
acquired or assented to first of all.” Some are reached last of
all. The moral intuition is often developed late, and sometimes,
even then, only upon occasion of corporal punishment. “Every man
is as lazy as circumstances will admit.” Our physical laziness is
occasional; our mental laziness frequent; our moral laziness
incessant. We are too lazy to think, and especially to think of
religion. On account of this depravity of human nature we should
expect the intuition of God to be developed last of all. Men
shrink from contact with God and from the thought of God. In fact,
their dislike for the intuition of God leads them not seldom to
deny all their other intuitions, even those of freedom and of
right. Hence the modern “psychology without a soul.”

Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 105-115—“The idea of God ...
is latest to develop into clear consciousness ... and must be
latest, for it is the unity of the difference of the self and the
not-self, which are therefore presupposed.” But “it has not less
validity in itself, it gives no less trustworthy assurance of
actuality, than the consciousness of the self, or the
consciousness of the not-self.... The consciousness of God is the
logical _prius_ of the consciousness of self and of the world. But
not, as already observed, the chronological; for, according to the
profound observation of Aristotle, what in the nature of things is
first, is in the order of development last. Just because God is
the first principle of being and knowing, he is the last to be
manifested and known.... The finite and the infinite are both
known together, and it is as impossible to know one without the
other as it is to apprehend an angle without the sides which
contain it.” For account of the relation of the intuitions to
experience, see especially Cousin, True, Beautiful and Good,
39-64, and History of Philosophy, 2:199-245. Compare Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, Introd., 1. See also Bascom, in Bib.
Sac., 23:1-47; 27:68-90.

2. _Their criteria._ The criteria by which first truths are to be tested
are three:

A. Their universality. By this we mean, not that all men assent to them or
understand them when propounded in scientific form, but that all men
manifest a practical belief in them by their language, actions, and
expectations.

B. Their necessity. By this we mean, not that it is impossible to deny
these truths, but that the mind is compelled by its very constitution to
recognize them upon the occurrence of the proper conditions, and to employ
them in its arguments to prove their non-existence.

C. Their logical independence and priority. By this we mean that these
truths can be resolved into no others, and proved by no others; that they
are presupposed in the acquisition of all other knowledge, and can
therefore be derived from no other source than an original cognitive power
of the mind.

Instances of the professed and formal denial of first truths:—the
positivist denies causality; the idealist denies substance; the
pantheist denies personality; the necessitarian denies freedom;
the nihilist denies his own existence. A man may in like manner
argue that there is no necessity for an atmosphere; but even while
he argues, he breathes it. Instance the knock-down argument to
demonstrate the freedom of the will. I grant my own existence in
the very doubting of it; for “cogito, ergo sum,” as Descartes
himself insisted, really means “cogito, scilicet sum”; H. B.
Smith: “The statement is analysis, not proof.” Ladd, Philosophy of
Knowledge, 59—“The _cogito_, in barbarous Latin = _cogitans sum_:
thinking is self-conscious _being_.” Bentham: “The word _ought_ is
an authoritative imposture, and ought to be banished from the
realm of morals.” Spinoza and Hegel really deny self-consciousness
when they make man a phenomenon of the infinite. Royce likens the
denier of personality to the man who goes outside of his own house
and declares that no one lives there because, when he looks in at
the window, he sees no one inside.

Professor James, in his Psychology, assumes the reality of a
brain, but refuses to assume the reality of a soul. This is
essentially the position of materialism. But this assumption of a
brain is metaphysics, although the author claims to be writing a
psychology without metaphysics. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 3—“The
materialist believes in causation proper so long as he is
explaining the origin of mind from matter, but when he is asked to
see in mind the cause of physical change he at once becomes a mere
phenomenalist.” Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 400—“I know
that all beings, if only they can count, must find that three and
two make five. Perhaps the angels cannot count; but, if they can,
this axiom is true for them. If I met an angel who declared that
his experience had occasionally shown him a three and two that did
_not_ make five, I should know at once what sort of an angel he
was.” On the criteria of first truths, see Porter, Human
Intellect, 510, 511. On denial of them, see Shedd, Dogmatic
Theology, 1:213.

II. The Existence of God a first truth.

1. Its universality.

That _the knowledge of God’s existence answers the first criterion of
universality_, is evident from the following considerations:

A. It is an acknowledged fact that the vast majority of men have actually
recognized the existence of a spiritual being or beings, upon whom they
conceived themselves to be dependent.

The Vedas declare: “There is but one Being—no second.” Max Müller,
Origin and Growth of Religion, 34—“Not the visible sun, moon and
stars are invoked, but something else that cannot be seen.” The
lowest tribes have conscience, fear death, believe in witches,
propitiate or frighten away evil fates. Even the fetich-worshiper,
who calls the stone or the tree a god, shows that he has already
the idea of a God. We must not measure the ideas of the heathen by
their capacity for expression, any more than we should judge the
child’s belief in the existence of his father by his success in
drawing the father’s picture. On heathenism, its origin and
nature, see Tholuck, in Bib. Repos., 1832:86; Scholz, Götzendienst
und Zauberwesen.

B. Those races and nations which have at first seemed destitute of such
knowledge have uniformly, upon further investigation, been found to
possess it, so that no tribe of men with which we have thorough
acquaintance can be said to be without an object of worship. We may
presume that further knowledge will show this to be true of all.

Moffat, who reported that certain African tribes were destitute of
religion, was corrected by the testimony of his son-in-law,
Livingstone: “The existence of God and of a future life is
everywhere recognized in Africa.” Where men are most nearly
destitute of any formulated knowledge of God, the conditions for
the awakening of the idea are most nearly absent. An apple-tree
may be so conditioned that it never bears apples. “We do not judge
of the oak by the stunted, flowerless specimens on the edge of the
Arctic Circle.” The presence of an occasional blind, deaf or dumb
man does not disprove the definition that man is a seeing, hearing
and speaking creature. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 154—“We need
not tremble for mathematics, even if some tribes should be found
without the multiplication-table.... Sub-moral and sub-rational
existence is always with us in the case of young children; and, if
we should find it elsewhere, it would have no greater
significance.”

Victor Hugo: “Some men deny the Infinite; some, too, deny the sun;
they are the blind.” Gladden, What is Left? 148—“A man may escape
from his shadow by going into the dark; if he comes under the
light of the sun, the shadow is there. A man may be so mentally
undisciplined that he does not recognize these ideas; but let him
learn the use of his reason, let him reflect on his own mental
processes, and he will know that they are necessary ideas.” On an
original monotheism, see Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche
Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5:669; Max Müller, Chips, 1:337;
Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, No. 11; Legge, Religions of
China, 8-11; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:201-208. _Per contra_,
see Asmus, Indogerm. Relig., 2:1-8; and synopsis in Bib. Sac.,
Jan. 1877:167-172.

C. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that those individuals, in
heathen or in Christian lands, who profess themselves to be without any
knowledge of a spiritual power or powers above them, do yet indirectly
manifest the existence of such an idea in their minds and its positive
influence over them.

Comte said that science would conduct God to the frontier and then
bow him out, with thanks for his provisional services. But Herbert
Spencer affirms the existence of a “Power to which no limit in
time or space is conceivable, of which all phenomena as presented
in consciousness are manifestations.” The intuition of God, though
formally excluded, is implicitly contained in Spencer’s system, in
the shape of the “irresistible belief” in Absolute Being, which
distinguishes his position from that of Comte; see H. Spencer, who
says: “One truth must ever grow clearer—the truth that there is an
inscrutable existence everywhere manifested, to which we can
neither find nor conceive beginning or end—the one absolute
certainty that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and
eternal energy from which all things proceed.” Mr. Spencer assumes
unity in the underlying Reality. Frederick Harrison sneeringly
asks him: “Why not say ‘forces,’ instead of ‘force’?” While
Harrison gives us a supreme moral ideal without a metaphysical
ground, Spencer gives us an ultimate metaphysical principle
without a final moral purpose. The idea of God is the synthesis of
the two,—“They are but broken lights of Thee, And thou, O Lord,
art more than they” (Tennyson, In Memoriam).

Solon spoke of ὁ θεός and of τὸ θεῖον, and Sophocles of ὁ μέγας
θεός. The term for “God” is identical in all the Indo-European
languages, and therefore belonged to the time before those
languages separated; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:201-208. In
Virgil’s Æneid, Mezentius is an atheist, a despiser of the gods,
trusting only in his spear and in his right arm; but, when the
corpse of his son is brought to him, his first act is to raise his
hands to heaven. Hume was a sceptic, but he said to Ferguson, as
they walked on a starry night: “Adam, there is a God!” Voltaire
prayed in an Alpine thunderstorm. Shelley wrote his name in the
visitors’ book of the inn at Montanvert, and added: “Democrat,
philanthropist, atheist”; yet he loved to think of a “fine
intellectual spirit pervading the universe”; and he also wrote:
“The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever
shines, Earth’s shadows fly.” Strauss worships the Cosmos, because
“order and law, reason and goodness” are the soul of it. Renan
trusts in goodness, design, ends. Charles Darwin, Life, 1:274—“In
my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist, in the
sense of denying the existence of a God.”

D. This agreement among individuals and nations so widely separated in
time and place can be most satisfactorily explained by supposing that it
has its ground, not in accidental circumstances, but in the nature of man
as man. The diverse and imperfectly developed ideas of the supreme Being
which prevail among men are best accounted for as misinterpretations and
perversions of an intuitive conviction common to all.

Huxley, Lay Sermons, 163—“There are savages without God, in any
proper sense of the word; but there are none without ghosts.”
Martineau, Study, 2:353, well replies: “Instead of turning other
people into ghosts, and then appropriating one to ourselves [and
attributing another to God, we may add] by way of imitation, we
start from the sense of personal continuity, and then predicate
the same of others, under the figures which keep most clear of the
physical and perishable.” Grant Allen describes the higher
religions as “a grotesque fungoid growth,” that has gathered about
a primitive thread of ancestor-worship. But this is to derive the
greater from the less. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 358—“I can find no
trace of ancestor-worship in the earliest literature of Babylonia
which has survived to us”—this seems fatal to Huxley’s and Allen’s
view that the idea of God is derived from man’s prior belief in
spirits of the dead. C. M. Tyler, in Am. Jour. Theo., Jan.
1899:144—“It seems impossible to deify a dead man, unless there is
embryonic in primitive consciousness a prior concept of Deity.”

Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, 93—“The whole mythology of
Egypt ... turns on the histories of Ra and Osiris.... Texts are
discovered which identify Osiris and Ra.... Other texts are known
wherein Ra, Osiris, Amon, and all other gods disappear, except as
simple _names_, and the unity of God is asserted in the noblest
language of monotheistic religion.” These facts are earlier than
any known ancestor-worship. “They point to an original idea of
divinity above humanity” (see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 317). We
must add the idea of the superhuman, before we can turn any
animism or ancestor-worship into a religion. This superhuman
element was suggested to early man by all he saw of nature about
him, especially by the sight of the heavens above, and by what he
knew of causality within. For the evidence of a universal
recognition of a superior power, see Flint, Anti-theistic
Theories, 250-289, 522-533; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures for 1879:100;
Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:132-157; Peschel, Races of Men, 261; Ulrici,
Leib und Seele, 688, and Gott und die Natur, 658-670, 758; Tylor,
Primitive Culture, 1:377, 381, 418; Alexander, Evidences of
Christianity, 22; Calderwood, Philosophy of the Infinite, 512;
Liddon, Elements of Religion, 50; Methodist Quar. Rev., Jan.
1875:1; J. F. Clark, Ten Great Religions, 2:17-21.

2. Its necessity.

That _the knowledge of God’s existence answers the second criterion of
necessity_, will be seen by considering:

A. That men, under circumstances fitted to call forth this knowledge,
cannot avoid recognizing the existence of God. In contemplating finite
existence, there is inevitably suggested the idea of an infinite Being as
its correlative. Upon occasion of the mind’s perceiving its own
finiteness, dependence, responsibility, it immediately and necessarily
perceives the existence of an infinite and unconditioned Being upon whom
it is dependent and to whom it is responsible.

We could not recognize the finite as finite, except by comparing
it with an already existing standard—the Infinite. Mansel, Limits
of Religious Thought, lect. 3—“We are compelled by the
constitution of our minds to believe in the existence of an
Absolute and Infinite Being—a belief which appears forced upon us
as the complement of our consciousness of the relative and
finite.” Fisher, Journ. Chr. Philos., Jan. 1883:113—“Ego and
non-ego, each being conditioned by the other, presuppose
unconditioned being on which both are dependent. Unconditioned
being is the silent presupposition of all our knowing.” Perceived
dependent being implies an independent; independent being is
perfectly self-determining; self-determination is personality;
perfect self-determination is infinite Personality. John Watson,
in Philos. Rev., Sept. 1893:526—“There is no consciousness of self
apart from the consciousness of other selves and things; and no
consciousness of the world apart from the consciousness of the
single Reality presupposed in both.” E. Caird, Evolution of
Religion, 64-68—In every act of consciousness the primary elements
are implied: “the idea of the object, or not-self; the idea of the
subject, or self; and the idea of the unity which is presupposed
in the difference of the self and not-self, and within which they
act and react on each other.” See Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite,
46, and Moral Philos., 77; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285;
Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:211.

B. That men, in virtue of their humanity, have a capacity for religion.
This recognized capacity for religion is proof that the idea of God is a
necessary one. If the mind upon proper occasion did not evolve this idea,
there would be nothing in man to which religion could appeal.

“It is the suggestion of the Infinite that makes the line of the
far horizon, seen over land or sea, so much more impressive than
the beauties of any limited landscape.” In times of sudden shock
and danger, this rational intuition becomes a presentative
intuition,—men become more conscious of God’s existence than of
the existence of their fellow-men and they instinctively cry to
God for help. In the commands and reproaches of the moral nature
the soul recognizes a Lawgiver and Judge whose voice conscience
merely echoes. Aristotle called man “a political animal”; it is
still more true, as Sabatier declares, that “man is incurably
religious.” St. Bernard: “Noverim me, noverim te.” O. P. Gifford:
“As milk, from which under proper conditions cream does not rise,
is not milk, so the man, who upon proper occasion shows no
knowledge of God, is not man, but brute.” We must not however
expect cream from frozen milk. Proper environment and conditions
are needed.

It is the recognition of a divine Personality in nature which
constitutes the greatest merit and charm of Wordsworth’s poetry.
In his Tintern Abbey, he speaks of “A presence that disturbs me
with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something
far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and
in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking
things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”
Robert Browning sees God in humanity, as Wordsworth sees God in
nature. In his Hohenstiel-Schwangau he writes: “This is the glory,
that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind—Not
mine, but like mine—for the double joy Making all things for me,
and me for Him.” John Ruskin held that the foundation of beauty in
the world is the presence of God in it. In his youth he tells us
that he had “a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of
nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest—an instinctive awe
mixed with delight, an indefinable thrill such as we sometimes
imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit.” But it
was not a disembodied, but an embodied, Spirit that he saw.
Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, § 7—“Unless education and culture
were preceded by an innate consciousness of God as an operative
predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture
to work upon.” On Wordsworth’s recognition of a divine personality
in nature, see Knight, Studies, 282-317, 405-426; Hutton, Essays,
2:113.

C. That he who denies God’s existence must tacitly assume that existence
in his very argument, by employing logical processes whose validity rests
upon the fact of God’s existence. The full proof of this belongs under the
next head.

“I am an atheist, God knows”—was the absurd beginning of an
argument to disprove the divine existence. Cutler, Beginnings of
Ethics, 22—“Even the Nihilists, whose first principle is that God
and duty are great bugbears to be abolished, assume that God and
duty exist, and they are impelled by a sense of duty to abolish
them.” Mrs. Browning, The Cry of the Human: “ ‘There is no God,’
the foolish saith; But none, ‘There is no sorrow’; And nature oft
the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow: Eyes which the
preacher could not school By wayside graves are raised; And lips
say, ‘God be pitiful,’ Who ne’er said, ‘God be praised.’ ” Dr. W.
W. Keen, when called to treat an Irishman’s aphasia, said: “Well,
Dennis, how are you?” “Oh, doctor, I cannot spake!” “But, Dennis,
you _are_ speaking.” “Oh, doctor, it’s many a word I cannot
spake!” “Well, Dennis, now I will try you. See if you cannot say,
‘Horse.’ ” “Oh, doctor dear, ‘horse’ is the very word I cannot
spake!” On this whole section, see A. M. Fairbairn, Origin and
Development of the Idea of God, in Studies in Philos. of Relig.
and History; Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 45; Bishop
Temple, Bampton Lectures, 1884:37-65.

3. Its logical independence and priority.

That _the knowledge of God’s existence answers the third criterion of
logical independence and priority_, may be shown as follows:

A. It is presupposed in all other knowledge as its logical condition and
foundation. The validity of the simplest mental acts, such as
sense-perception, self-consciousness, and memory, depends upon the
assumption that a God exists who has so constituted our minds that they
give us knowledge of things as they are.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:88—“The ground of science and
of cognition generally is to be found neither in the subject nor
in the object _per se_, but only in the divine thinking that
combines the two, which, as the common ground of the forms of
thinking in all finite minds, and of the forms of being in all
things, makes possible the correspondence or agreement between the
former and the latter, or in a word makes knowledge of truth
possible.” 91—“Religious belief is presupposed in all scientific
knowledge as the basis of its possibility.” This is the thought of
_Psalm 36:10—_“In thy light shall we see light.” A. J. Balfour,
Foundations of Belief, 303—“The uniformity of nature cannot be
proved from experience, for it is what makes proof from experience
possible.... Assume it, and we shall find that facts conform to
it.... 309—The uniformity of nature can be established only by the
aid of that principle itself, and is necessarily involved in all
attempts to prove it.... There must be a God, to justify our
confidence in innate ideas.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 276—“Reflection shows that
the community of individual intelligences is possible only through
an all-embracing Intelligence, the source and creator of finite
minds.” Science rests upon the postulate of a world-order. Huxley:
“The object of science is the discovery of the rational order
which pervades the universe.” This rational order presupposes a
rational Author. Dubois, in New Englander, Nov. 1890:468—“We
assume uniformity and continuity, or we can have no science. An
intelligent Creative Will is a genuine scientific hypothesis
[postulate?], suggested by analogy and confirmed by experience,
not contradicting the fundamental law of uniformity but accounting
for it.” Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 18—“That nature is a system,
is the assumption underlying the earliest mythologies: to fill up
this conception is the aim of the latest science.” Royce, Relig.
Aspect of Philosophy, 435—“There is such a thing as error; but
error is inconceivable unless there be such a thing as truth; and
truth is inconceivable unless there be a seat of truth, an
infinite all-including Thought or Mind; therefore such a Mind
exists.”

B. The more complex processes of the mind, such as induction and
deduction, can be relied on only by presupposing a thinking Deity who has
made the various parts of the universe and the various aspects of truth to
correspond to each other and to the investigating faculties of man.

We argue from one apple to the others on the tree. Newton argued
from the fall of an apple to gravitation in the moon and
throughout the solar system. Rowland argued from the chemistry of
our world to that of Sirius. In all such argument there is assumed
a unifying thought and a thinking Deity. This is Tyndall’s
“scientific use of the imagination.” “Nourished,” he says, “by
knowledge partially won, and bounded by coöperant reason,
imagination is the mightiest instrument of the physical
discoverer.” What Tyndall calls “imagination”, is really insight
into the thoughts of God, the great Thinker. It prepares the way
for logical reasoning,—it is not the product of mere reasoning.
For this reason Goethe called imagination “die Vorschule des
Denkens,” or “thought’s preparatory school.”

Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 23—“Induction is
syllogism, with the immutable attributes of God for a constant
term.” Porter, Hum. Intellect, 492—“Induction rests upon the
assumption, as it demands for its ground, that a personal or
thinking Deity exists”; 658—“It has no meaning or validity unless
we assume that the universe is constituted in such a way as to
presuppose an absolute and unconditioned originator of its forces
and laws”; 662—“We analyze the several processes of knowledge into
their underlying assumptions, and we find that the assumption
which underlies them all is that of a self-existent Intelligence
who not only can be known by man, but must be known by man in
order that man may know anything besides”; see also pages 486,
508, 509, 518, 519, 585, 616. Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism,
81—“The processes of reflective thought imply that the universe is
grounded in, and is the manifestation of, reason”; 560—“The
existence of a personal God is a necessary datum of scientific
knowledge.” So also, Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of
Christianity, 564, and in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:129,
130.

C. Our primitive belief in final cause, or, in other words, our conviction
that all things have their ends, that design pervades the universe,
involves a belief in God’s existence. In assuming that there is a
universe, that the universe is a rational whole, a system of
thought-relations, we assume the existence of an absolute Thinker, of
whose thought the universe is an expression.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:81—“The real can only be
thinkable if it is realized thought, a thought previously thought,
which our thinking has only to think again. Therefore the real, in
order to be thinkable for us, must be the realized thought of the
creative thinking of an eternal divine Reason which is presented
to our cognitive thinking.” Royce, World and Individual,
2:41—“Universal teleology constitutes the essence of all facts.”
A. H. Bradford, The Age of Faith, 142—“Suffering and sorrow are
universal. Either God could prevent them and would not, and
therefore he is neither beneficent nor loving; or else he cannot
prevent them and therefore something is greater than God, and
therefore there is no God? But here is the use of reason in the
individual reasoning. Reasoning in the individual necessitates the
absolute or universal reason. If there is the absolute reason,
then the universe and history are ordered and administered in
harmony with reason; then suffering and sorrow can be neither
meaningless nor final, since that would be the contradiction of
reason. That cannot be possible in the universal and absolute
which contradicts reason in man.”

D. Our primitive belief in moral obligation, or, in other words, our
conviction that right has universal authority, involves the belief in
God’s existence. In assuming that the universe is a moral whole, we assume
the existence of an absolute Will, of whose righteousness the universe is
an expression.

Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:88—“The ground of moral
obligation is found neither in the subject nor in society, but
only in the universal or divine Will that combines both....
103—The idea of God is the unity of the true and the good, or of
the two highest ideas which our reason thinks as theoretical
reason, but demands as practical reason.... In the idea of God we
find the only synthesis of the world that _is_—the world of
science, and of the world that _ought to be_—the world of
religion.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 425—“This is not a
mathematical demonstration. Philosophy never is an exact science.
Rather is it offered as the only sufficient foundation of the
moral life.... The life of goodness ... is a life based on the
conviction that its source and its issues are in the Eternal and
the Infinite.” As finite truth and goodness are comprehensible
only in the light of some absolute principle which furnishes for
them an ideal standard, so finite beauty is inexplicable except as
there exists a perfect standard with which it may be compared. The
beautiful is more than the agreeable or the useful. Proportion,
order, harmony, unity in diversity—all these are characteristics
of beauty. But they all imply an intellectual and spiritual Being,
from whom they proceed and by whom they can be measured. Both
physical and moral beauty, in finite things and beings, are
symbols and manifestations of Him who is the author and lover of
beauty, and who is himself the infinite and absolute Beauty. The
beautiful in nature and in art shows that the idea of God’s
existence is logically independent and prior. See Cousin, The
True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 140-153; Kant, Metaphysic of
Ethics, who holds that belief in God is the necessary
presupposition of the belief in duty.

To repeat these four points in another form—the intuition of an Absolute
Reason is (_a_) the necessary presupposition of all other knowledge, so
that we cannot know anything else to exist except by assuming first of all
that God exists; (_b_) the necessary basis of all logical thought, so that
we cannot put confidence in any one of our reasoning processes except by
taking for granted that a thinking Deity has constructed our minds with
reference to the universe and to truth; (_c_) the necessary implication of
our primitive belief in design, so that we can assume all things to exist
for a purpose, only by making the prior assumption that a purposing God
exists—can regard the universe as a thought, only by postulating the
existence of an absolute Thinker; and (_d_) the necessary foundation of
our conviction of moral obligation, so that we can believe in the
universal authority of right, only by assuming that there exists a God of
righteousness who reveals his will both in the individual conscience and
in the moral universe at large. We cannot _prove_ that God is; but we can
show that, in order to show the existence of any knowledge, thought,
reason, conscience, in man, man must _assume_ that God is.

As Jacobi said of the beautiful: “Es kann gewiesen aber nicht
bewiesen werden”—it can be shown, but not proved. Bowne,
Metaphysics, 472—“Our objective knowledge of the finite must rest
upon ethical trust in the infinite”; 480—“Theism is the absolute
postulate of all knowledge, science and philosophy”; “God is the
most certain fact of objective knowledge.” Ladd, Bib. Sac., Oct.
1877:611-616—“Cogito, ergo Deus est. We are obliged to postulate a
not-ourselves which makes for rationality, as well as for
righteousness.” W. T. Harris: “Even natural science is impossible,
where philosophy has not yet taught that reason made the world,
and that nature is a revelation of the rational.” Whately, Logic,
270; New Englander, Oct. 1871, art. on Grounds of Confidence in
Inductive Reasoning; Bib. Sac., 7:415-425; Dorner, Glaubenslehre,
1:197; Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, ch. “Zweck”;
Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, 540-626; Lachelier, Du Fondement de
l’Induction, 78. _Per contra_, see Janet, Final Causes, 174, note,
and 457-464, who holds final cause to be, not an intuition, but
the result of applying the principle of causality to cases which
mechanical laws alone will not explain.

Pascal: “Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and Reason confounds the
Dogmatist. We have an incapacity of demonstration, which the
former cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the
latter cannot disturb.” “There is no Unbelief! Whoever says.
‘To-morrow,’ ‘The Unknown,’ ‘The Future,’ trusts that Power alone.
Nor dares disown.” Jones, Robert Browning, 314—“We cannot indeed
prove God as the conclusion of a syllogism, for he is the primary
hypothesis of all proof.” Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau:
“I know that he is there, as I am here, By the same proof, which
seems no proof at all, It so exceeds familiar forms of proof”;
Paracelsus, 27—“To know Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape Than in effecting
entrance for a light Supposed to be without.” Tennyson, Holy
Grail: “Let visions of the night or day Come as they will, and
many a time they come.... In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision,
nor that One Who rose again”; The Ancient Sage, 548—“Thou canst
not prove the Nameless, O my son! Nor canst thou prove the world
thou movest in. Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor
canst Thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove
that thou art both in one. Thou canst not prove that thou art
immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal. Nay, my son, 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: Wherefore be thou wise, Cleave ever to the
sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of
Faith.”

III. Other Supposed Sources of our Idea of God’s Existence.

Our proof that the idea of God’s existence is a rational intuition will
not be complete, until we show that attempts to account in other ways for
the origin of the idea are insufficient, and require as their
presupposition the very intuition which they would supplant or reduce to a
secondary place. We claim that it cannot be derived from any other source
than an original cognitive power of the mind.

1. Not from external revelation,—whether communicated (_a_) through the
Scriptures, or (_b_)through tradition; for, unless man had from another
source a previous knowledge of the existence of a God from whom such a
revelation might come, the revelation itself could have no authority for
him.

(_a_) See Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God, 10; Ebrard,
Dogmatik, 1:117; H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 18—“A
revelation takes for granted that he to whom it is made has some
knowledge of God, though it may enlarge and purify that
knowledge.” We cannot prove God from the authority of the
Scriptures, and then also prove the Scriptures from the authority
of God. The very idea of Scripture as a revelation presupposes
belief in a God who can make it. Newman Smyth, in New Englander,
1878:355—We cannot derive from a sun-dial our knowledge of the
existence of a sun. The sun-dial presupposes the sun, and cannot
be understood without previous knowledge of the sun. Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 2:103—“The voice of the divine ego does not
first come to the consciousness of the individual ego from
without; rather does every external revelation presuppose already
this inner one; there must echo out from within man something
kindred to the outer revelation, in order to its being recognized
and accepted as divine.”

Fairbairn, Studies in Philos. of Relig. and Hist., 21, 22—“If man
is dependent on an outer revelation for his idea of God, then he
must have what Schelling happily termed ‘an original atheism of
consciousness.’ Religion cannot, in that case, be rooted in the
nature of man,—it must be implanted from without.” Schurman,
Belief in God, 78—“A primitive revelation of God could only mean
that God had endowed man with the capacity of apprehending his
divine original. This capacity, like every other, is innate, and
like every other, it realizes itself only in the presence of
appropriate conditions.” Clarke, Christian Theology,
112—“Revelation cannot demonstrate God’s existence, for it must
assume it; but it will manifest his existence and character to
men, and will serve them as the chief source of certainty
concerning him, for it will teach them what they could not know by
other means.”

(b) Nor does our idea of God come primarily from tradition, for
“tradition can perpetuate only what has already been originated”
(Patton). If the knowledge thus handed down is the knowledge of a
primitive revelation, then the argument just stated applies—that
very revelation presupposed in those who first received it, and
presupposes in those to whom it is handed down, some knowledge of
a Being from whom such a revelation might come. If the knowledge
thus handed down is simply knowledge of the results of the
reasonings of the race, then the knowledge of God comes originally
from reasoning—an explanation which we consider further on. On the
traditive theory of religion, see Flint, Theism, 23, 338; Cocker,
Christianity and Greek Philosophy, 86-96; Fairbairn, Studies in
Philos. of Relig. and Hist., 14, 15; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics,
453, and in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1876; Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos.,
312-322.

Similar answers must be returned to many common explanations of
man’s belief in God: “Primus in orbe deos fecit timor”;
Imagination made religion; Priests invented religion; Religion is
a matter of imitation and fashion. But we ask again: What caused
the fear? Who made the imagination? What made priests possible?
What made imitation and fashion natural? To say that man worships,
merely because he sees other men worshiping, is as absurd as to
say that a horse eats hay because he sees other horses eating it.
There must be a hunger in the soul to be satisfied, or external
things would never attract man to worship. Priests could never
impose upon men so continuously, unless there was in human nature
a universal belief in a God who might commission priests as his
representatives. Imagination itself requires some basis of
reality, and a larger basis as civilization advances. The fact
that belief in God’s existence gets a wider hold upon the race
with each added century, shows that, instead of fear having caused
belief in God, the truth is that belief in God has caused fear;
indeed, “the fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom”_ (Ps.
111:10)_.

2. Not from experience,—whether this mean (_a_) the sense-perception and
reflection of the individual (Locke), (_b_) the accumulated results of the
sensations and associations of past generations of the race (Herbert
Spencer), or (_c_) the actual contact of our sensitive nature with God,
the supersensible reality, through the religious feeling (Newman Smyth).

The first form of this theory is inconsistent with the fact that the idea
of God is not the idea of a sensible or material object, nor a combination
of such ideas. Since the spiritual and infinite are direct opposites of
the material and finite, no experience of the latter can account for our
idea of the former.

With Locke (Essay on Hum. Understanding, 2:1:4), experience is the
passive reception of ideas by sensation or by reflection. Locke’s
“tabula rasa” theory mistakes the occasion of our primitive ideas
for their cause. To his statement: “Nihil est in intellectu nisi
quod ante fuerit in sensu,” Leibnitz replied: “Nisi intellectus
ipse.” Consciousness is sometimes called the source of our
knowledge of God. But consciousness, as simply an accompanying
knowledge of ourselves and our states, is not properly the source
of any other knowledge. The German _Gottesbewusstsein_ = not
“consciousness of God,” but “knowledge of God”; _Bewusstsein_ here
= not a “conknowing,” but a “beknowing”; see Porter, Human
Intellect, 86; Cousin, True, Beautiful and Good, 48, 49.

Fraser, Locke, 143-147—Sensations are the bricks, and association
the mortar, of the mental house. Bowne, Theory of Thought and
Knowledge, 47—“Develope language by allowing sounds to associate
and evolve meaning for themselves? Yet this is the exact parallel
of the philosophy which aims to build intelligence out of
sensation....52—One who does not know how to read would look in
vain for meaning in a printed page, and in vain would he seek to
help his failure by using strong spectacles.” Yet even if the idea
of God were a product of experience, we should not be warranted in
rejecting it as irrational. See Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy,
132—“There is no antagonism between those who attribute knowledge
to experience and those who attribute it to our innate reason;
between those who attribute the development of the germ to
mechanical conditions and those who attribute it to the inherent
potency of the germ itself; between those who hold that all nature
was latent in the cosmic vapor and those who believe that
everything in nature is immediately intended rather than
predetermined.” All these may be methods of the immanent God.

The second form of the theory is open to the objection that the very first
experience of the first man, equally with man’s latest experience,
presupposes this intuition, as well as the other intuitions, and therefore
cannot be the cause of it. Moreover, even though this theory of its origin
were correct, it would still be impossible to think of the object of the
intuition as not existing, and the intuition would still represent to us
the highest measure of certitude at present attainable by man. If the
evolution of ideas is toward truth instead of falsehood, it is the part of
wisdom to act upon the hypothesis that our primitive belief is veracious.

Martineau, Study, 2:26—“Nature is as worthy of trust in her
processes, as in her gifts.” Bowne, Examination of Spencer, 163,
164—“Are we to seek truth in the minds of pre-human apes, or in
the blind stirrings of some primitive pulp? In that case we can
indeed put away all our science, but we must put away the great
doctrine of evolution along with it. The experience-philosophy
cannot escape this alternative: either the positive deliverances
of our mature consciousness must be accepted as they stand, or all
truth must be declared impossible.” See also Harris, Philos. Basis
Theism, 137-142.

Charles Darwin, in a letter written a year before his death,
referring to his doubts as to the existence of God, asks: “Can we
trust to the convictions of a monkey’s mind?” We may reply: “Can
we trust the conclusions of one who was once a baby?” Bowne,
Ethics, 3—“The genesis and emergence of an idea are one thing; its
validity is quite another. The logical value of chemistry cannot
be decided by reciting its beginnings in alchemy; and the logical
value of astronomy is independent of the fact that it began in
astrology.... 11—Even if man came from the ape, we need not
tremble for the validity of the multiplication-table or of the
Golden Rule. If we have moral insight, it is no matter how we got
it; and if we have no such insight, there is no help in any
psychological theory.... 159—We must not appeal to savages and
babies to find what is natural to the human mind.... In the case
of anything that is under the law of development we can find its
true nature, not by going back to its crude beginnings, but by
studying the finished outcome.” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution,
13—“If the idea of God be the phantom of an apelike brain, can we
trust to reason or conscience in any other matter? May not science
and philosophy themselves be similar phantasies, evolved by mere
chance and unreason?” Even though man came from the ape, there is
no explaining his ideas by the ideas of the ape: “A man ’s a man
for a’ that.”

We must judge beginnings by endings, not endings by beginnings. It
matters not how the development of the eye took place nor how
imperfect was the first sense of sight, if the eye now gives us
correct information of external objects. So it matters not how the
intuitions of right and of God originated, if they now give us
knowledge of objective truth. We must take for granted that
evolution of ideas is not from sense to nonsense. G. H. Lewes,
Study of Psychology, 122—“We can understand the amœba and the
polyp only by a light reflected from the study of man.” Seth,
Ethical Principles, 429—“The oak explains the acorn even more
truly than the acorn explains the oak.” Sidgwick: “No one appeals
from the artist’s sense of beauty to the child’s. Higher
mathematics are no less true, because they can be apprehended only
by trained intellect. No strange importance attaches to what was
_first_ felt or thought.” Robert Browning, Paracelsus: “Man, once
descried, imprints forever His presence on all lifeless things....
A supplementary reflux of light Illustrates all the inferior
grades, explains Each back step in the circle.” Man, with his
higher ideas, shows the meaning and content of all that led up to
him. He is the last round of the ascending ladder, and from this
highest product and from his ideas we may infer what his Maker is.

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 162, 245—“Evolution simply gave man such
_height_ that he could at last discern the stars of moral truth
which had previously been below the horizon. This is very
different from saying that moral truths are merely transmitted
products of the experiences of utility.... The germ of the idea of
God, as of the idea of right, must have been in man just so soon
as he became man,—the brute’s gaining it turned him into man.
Reason is not simply a register of physical phenomena and of
experiences of pleasure and pain: it is creative also. It discerns
the oneness of things and the supremacy of God.” Sir Charles
Lyell: “The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though
liable to err, are true in the main and point to real objects. The
religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It
existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before
advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger, and is
to-day more developed among the highest races than it ever was
before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great
truth.” Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 137, quotes Augustine:
“Securus judicat orbis terrarum,” and tells us that the intellect
is assumed to be an organ of knowledge, however the intellect may
have been evolved. But if the intellect is worthy of trust, so is
the moral nature. George A. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 103—“To
Herbert Spencer, human history is but an incident of natural
history, and force is supreme. To Christianity nature is only the
beginning, and man the consummation. Which gives the higher
revelation of the life of the tree—the seed, or the fruit?”

The third form of the theory seems to make God a sensuous object, to
reverse the proper order of knowing and feeling, to ignore the fact that
in all feeling there is at least some knowledge of an object, and to
forget that the validity of this very feeling can be maintained only by
previously assuming the existence of a rational Deity.

Newman Smyth tells us that feeling comes first; the idea is
secondary. Intuitive ideas are not denied, but they are declared
to be direct reflections, in thought, of the feelings. They are
the mind’s immediate perception of what it feels to exist. Direct
knowledge of God by intuition is considered to be idealistic,
reaching God by inference is regarded as rationalistic, in its
tendency. See Smyth, The Religious Feeling; reviewed by Harris, in
New Englander, Jan., 1878: reply by Smyth, in New Englander, May,
1878.

We grant that, even in the case of unregenerate men, great peril,
great joy, great sin often turn the rational intuition of God into
a presentative intuition. The presentative intuition, however,
cannot be affirmed to be common to all men. It does not furnish
the foundation or explanation of a universal capacity for
religion. Without the rational intuition, the presentative would
not be possible, since it is only the rational that enables man to
receive and to interpret the presentative. The very trust that we
put in feeling presupposes an intuitive belief in a true and good
God. Tennyson said in 1869: “Yes, it is true that there are
moments when the flesh is nothing to me; when I know and feel the
flesh to be the vision; God and the spiritual is the real; it
belongs to me more than the hand and the foot. You may tell me
that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my
existence,—I could believe you; but you never, never can convince
me that the _I_ is not an eternal Reality, and that the spiritual
is not the real and true part of me.”

3. Not from reasoning,—because

(_a_) The actual rise of this knowledge in the great majority of minds is
not the result of any conscious process of reasoning. On the other hand,
upon occurrence of the proper conditions, it flashes upon the soul with
the quickness and force of an immediate revelation.

(_b_) The strength of men’s faith in God’s existence is not proportioned
to the strength of the reasoning faculty. On the other hand, men of
greatest logical power are often inveterate sceptics, while men of
unwavering faith are found among those who cannot even understand the
arguments for God’s existence.

(_c_) There is more in this knowledge than reasoning could ever have
furnished. Men do not limit their belief in God to the just conclusions of
argument. The arguments for the divine existence, valuable as they are for
purposes to be shown hereafter, are not sufficient by themselves to
warrant our conviction that there exists an infinite and absolute Being.
It will appear upon examination that the _a priori_ argument is capable of
proving only an abstract and ideal proposition, but can never conduct us
to the existence of a real Being. It will appear that the _a posteriori_
arguments, from merely finite existence, can never demonstrate the
existence of the infinite. In the words of Sir Wm. Hamilton (Discussions,
23)—“A demonstration of the absolute from the relative is logically
absurd, as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is
not distributed in the premises”—in short, from finite premises we cannot
draw an infinite conclusion.

Whately, Logic, 290-292; Jevons, Lessons in Logic, 81; Thompson,
Outline Laws of Thought, sections 82-92; Calderwood, Philos. of
Infinite, 60-69, and Moral Philosophy, 238; Turnbull, in Bap.
Quarterly, July, 1872:271; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 239; Dove,
Logic of Christian Faith, 21. Sir Wm. Hamilton: “Departing from
the particular, we admit that we cannot, in our highest
generalizations, rise above the finite.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The
human mind turns out larger grists than are ever put in at the
hopper.” There is more in the idea of God than could have come out
so small a knot-hole as human reasoning. A single word, a chance
remark, or an attitude of prayer, suggests the idea to a child.
Helen Keller told Phillips Brooks that she had always known that
there was a God, but that she had not known his name. Ladd,
Philosophy of Mind, 119—“It is a foolish assumption that nothing
can be certainly known unless it be reached as the result of a
conscious syllogistic process, or that the more complicated and
subtle this process is, the more sure is the conclusion.
Inferential knowledge is always dependent upon the superior
certainty of immediate knowledge.” George M. Duncan, in Memorial
of Noah Porter, 246—“All deduction rests either on the previous
process of induction, or on the intuitions of time and space which
involve the Infinite and Absolute.”

(_d_) Neither do men arrive at the knowledge of God’s existence by
inference; for inference is condensed syllogism, and, as a form of
reasoning, is equally open to the objection just mentioned. We have seen,
moreover, that all logical processes are based upon the assumption of
God’s existence. Evidently that which is presupposed in all reasoning
cannot itself be proved by reasoning.

By inference, we of course mean mediate inference, for in
immediate inference (_e. g._, “All good rulers are just; therefore
no unjust rulers are good”) there is no reasoning, and no progress
in thought. Mediate inference is reasoning—is condensed syllogism;
and what is so condensed may be expanded into regular logical
form. Deductive inference: “A negro is a fellow-creature;
therefore he who strikes a negro strikes a fellow-creature.”
Inductive inference: “The first finger is before the second;
therefore it is before the third.” On inference, see Martineau,
Essays, 1:105-108; Porter, Human Intellect, 444-448; Jevons,
Principles of Science, 1:14, 136-139, 168, 262.

Flint, in his Theism, 77, and Herbert, in his Mod. Realism
Examined, would reach the knowledge of God’s existence by
inference. The latter says God is not demonstrable, but his
existence is inferred, like the existence of our fellow men. But
we reply that in this last case we infer only the finite from the
finite, while the difficulty in the case of God is in inferring
the infinite from the finite. This very process of reasoning,
moreover, presupposes the existence of God as the absolute Reason,
in the way already indicated.

Substantially the same error is committed by H. B. Smith, Introd.
to Chr. Theol., 84-133, and by Diman, Theistic Argument, 316, 364,
both of whom grant an intuitive element, but use it only to eke
out the insufficiency of reasoning. They consider that the
intuition gives us only an abstract idea, which contains in itself
no voucher for the existence of an actual being corresponding to
the idea, and that we reach real being only by inference from the
facts of our own spiritual natures and of the outward world. But
we reply, in the words of McCosh, that “the intuitions are
primarily directed to individual objects.” We know, not the
infinite in the abstract, but infinite space and time, and the
infinite God. See McCosh, Intuitions, 26, 199, who, however, holds
the view here combated.

Schurman, Belief in God, 43—“I am unable to assign to our belief
in God a higher certainty than that possessed by the working
hypotheses of science.... 57—The nearest approach made by science
to our hypothesis of the existence of God lies in the assertion of
the universality of law ... based on the conviction of the unity
and systematic connection of all reality.... 64—This unity can be
found only in self-conscious spirit.” The fault of this reasoning
is that it gives us nothing necessary or absolute. Instances of
working hypotheses are the nebular hypothesis in astronomy, the
law of gravitation, the atomic theory in chemistry, the principle
of evolution. No one of these is logically independent or prior.
Each of them is provisional, and each may be superseded by new
discovery. Not so with the idea of God. This idea is presupposed
by all the others, as the condition of every mental process and
the guarantee of its validity.

IV. Contents of this Intuition.

1. In this fundamental knowledge _that_ God is, it is necessarily implied
that to some extent men know intuitively _what_ God is, namely, (_a_) a
Reason in which their mental processes are grounded; (_b_) a Power above
them upon which they are dependent; (_c_) a Perfection which imposes law
upon their moral natures; (_d_) a Personality which they may recognize in
prayer and worship.

In maintaining that we have a rational intuition of God, we by no means
imply that a presentative intuition of God is impossible. Such a
presentative intuition was perhaps characteristic of unfallen man; it does
belong at times to the Christian; it will be the blessing of heaven (Mat.
5:8—“the pure in heart ... shall see God”; Rev. 22:4—“they shall see his
face”). Men’s experiences of face-to-face apprehension of God, in danger
and guilt, give some reason to believe that a presentative knowledge of
God is the normal condition of humanity. But, as this presentative
intuition of God is not in our present state universal, we here claim only
that all men have a rational intuition of God.

It is to be remembered, however, that the loss of love to God has greatly
obscured even this rational intuition, so that the revelation of nature
and the Scriptures is needed to awaken, confirm and enlarge it, and the
special work of the Spirit of Christ to make it the knowledge of
friendship and communion. Thus from knowing about God, we come to know God
(John 17:3—“This is life eternal, that they should know thee”; 2 Tim.
1:12—“I know him whom I have believed”).

Plato said, for substance, that there can be no ὅτι οἶδεν without
something of the ἁ οἶδεν. Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism,
208—“By rational intuition man knows that absolute Being _exists_;
his knowledge of _what_ it is, is progressive with his progressive
knowledge of man and of nature.” Hutton, Essays: “A haunting
presence besets man behind and before. He cannot evade it. It
gives new meanings to his thoughts, new terror to his sins. It
becomes intolerable. He is moved to set up some idol, carved out
of his own nature, that will take its place—a non-moral God who
will not disturb his dream of rest. It is a righteous Life and
Will, and not the mere _idea_ of righteousness that stirs men so.”
Porter, Hum. Int., 661—“The Absolute is a thinking Agent.” The
intuition does not grow in certainty; what grows is the mind’s
quickness in applying it and power of expressing it. The intuition
is not complex; what is complex is the Being intuitively cognized.
See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 232; Lowndes, Philos. of Primary
Beliefs, 108-112; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 157—Latent faculty of
speech is called forth by speech of others; the choked-up well
flows again when debris is cleared away. Bowen, in Bib. Sac.,
33:740-754; Bowne, Theism, 79.

Knowledge of a person is turned into personal knowledge by actual
communication or revelation. First, comes the intuitive knowledge
of God possessed by all men—the assumption that there exists a
Reason, Power, Perfection, Personality, that makes correct
thinking and acting possible. Secondly, comes the knowledge of
God’s being and attributes which nature and Scripture furnish.
Thirdly, comes the personal and presentative knowledge derived
from actual reconciliation and intercourse with God, through
Christ and the Holy Spirit. Stearns, Evidence of Christian
Experience, 208—“Christian experience verifies the claims of
doctrine by experiment,—so transforming probable knowledge into
real knowledge.” Biedermann, quoted by Pfleiderer, Grundriss,
18—“God reveals himself to the human spirit, 1. as its infinite
_Ground_, in the reason; 2. as its infinite _Norm_, in the
conscience; 3. as its infinite _Strength_, in elevation to
religious truth, blessedness, and freedom.”

Shall I object to this Christian experience, because only
comparatively few have it, and I am not among the number? Because
I have not seen the moons of Jupiter, shall I doubt the testimony
of the astronomer to their existence? Christian experience, like
the sight of the moons of Jupiter, is attainable by all. Clarke,
Christian Theology, 113—“One who will have full proof of the good
God’s reality must put it to the experimental test. He must take
the good God for real, and receive the confirmation that will
follow. When faith reaches out after God, it finds him.... They
who have found him will be the sanest and truest of their kind,
and their convictions will be among the safest convictions of
man.... Those who live in fellowship with the good God will grow
in goodness, and will give practical evidence of his existence
aside from their oral testimony.”

2. The Scriptures, therefore, do not attempt to prove the existence of
God, but, on the other hand, both assume and declare that the knowledge
that God is, is universal (Rom. 1:19-21, 28, 32; 2:15). God has inlaid the
evidence of this fundamental truth in the very nature of man, so that
nowhere is he without a witness. The preacher may confidently follow the
example of Scripture by assuming it. But he must also explicitly declare
it, as the Scripture does. “For the invisible things of him since the
creation of the world are clearly seen” (καθορᾶται—spiritually viewed);
the organ given for this purpose is the νοῦς (νοούμενα); but then—and this
forms the transition to our next division of the subject—they are
“perceived through the things that are made” (τοῖς ποιήμασιν, Rom. 1:20).

On _Rom. 1:19-21_, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. des N. T., 251, note;
also commentaries of Meyer, Alford, Tholuck, and Wordsworth; τὸ
γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ = not “that which may be known” (Rev. Vers.) but
“that which is known” of God; νοούμενα καθορᾶται = are clearly
seen in that they are perceived by the reason—νοούμενα expresses
the manner of the καθορᾶται (Meyer); compare _John 1:9_; _Acts
17:27_; _Rom. 1:28_; _2:15_. On _1 Cor. 15:34_, see Calderwood,
Philos. of Inf., 466—ἀγνωσίαν Θεοῦ τινὲς ἔχουσι = do not possess
the specially exalted knowledge of God which belongs to believers
in Christ (_cf._ _1 Jo. 4:7—_“every one that loveth is begotten of
God, and knoweth God”). On _Eph. 2:12_, see Pope, Theology,
1:240—ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ is opposed to being in Christ, and
signifies rather forsaken of God, than denying him or entirely
ignorant of him. On Scripture passages, see Schmid, Bib. Theol.
des N. T., 486; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:62.

E. G. Robinson: “The first statement of the Bible is, not that
there is a God, but that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth’_ (Gen. 1:1)_. The belief in God never was and never
can be the result of logical argument, else the Bible would give
us proofs.” Many texts relied upon as _proofs_ of God’s existence
are simply _explications_ of the idea of God, as for example: _Ps.
94:9, 10—_“He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that
formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the nations,
shall not he correct, even he that teacheth man knowledge?” Plato
says that God holds the soul by its roots,—he therefore does not
need to demonstrate to the soul the fact of his existence.
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 308, says well that Scripture and
preaching only interpret what is already in the heart which it
addresses: “Flinging a warm breath on the inward oracles hid in
invisible ink, it renders them articulate and dazzling as the
handwriting on the wall. The divine Seer does not convey to you
_his_ revelation, but qualifies you to receive _your own_. This
mutual relation is possible only through the common presence of
God in the conscience of mankind.” Shedd, Dogmatic Theology,
1:195-220—“The earth and sky make the same sensible impressions on
the organs of a brute that they do upon those of a man; but the
brute never discerns the ‘invisible things’ of God, his ‘eternal
power and godhood’_ (Rom. 1:20)_.”

Our subconscious activity, so far as it is normal, is under the
guidance of the immanent Reason. Sensation, before it results in
thought, has in it logical elements which are furnished by
mind—not ours, but that of the Infinite One. Christ, the Revealer
of God, reveals God in every man’s mental life, and the Holy
Spirit may be the principle of self-consciousness in man as in
God. Harris, God the Creator, tells us that “man finds the Reason
that is eternal and universal revealing itself in the exercise of
his own reason.” Savage, Life after Death, 268—“How do you know
that your subliminal consciousness does not tap Omniscience, and
get at the facts of the universe?” Savage negatives this
suggestion, however, and wrongly favors the spirit-theory. For his
own experience, see pages 295-329 of his book.

C. M. Barrows, in Proceedings of Soc. for Psychical Research, vol.
12, part 30, pages 34-36—“There is a subliminal agent. What if
this is simply one intelligent Actor, filling the universe with
his presence, as the ether fills space; the common Inspirer of all
mankind, a skilled Musician, presiding over many pipes and keys,
and playing through each what music he will? The subliminal self
is a universal fountain of energy, and each man is an outlet of
the stream. Each man’s personal self is contained in it, and thus
each man is made one with every other man. In that deep Force, the
last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all psychical and
bodily effects find their common origin.” This statement needs to
be qualified by the assertion of man’s ethical nature and distinct
personality; see section of this work on Ethical Monism, in
chapter III. But there is truth here like that which Coleridge
sought to express in his Æolian Harp: “And what if all of animated
Nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into
thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual
breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?” See F. W. H.
Myers, Human Personality.

Dorner, System of Theology, 1:75—“The consciousness of God is the
true fastness of our self-consciousness.... Since it is only in
the God-conscious man that the innermost personality comes to
light, in like manner, by means of the interweaving of that
consciousness of God and of the world, the world is viewed in God
(‘sub specie eternitatis’), and the certainty of the world first
obtains its absolute security for the spirit.” Royce, Spirit of
Mod. Philosophy, synopsis in N. Y. Nation: “The one indubitable
fact is the existence of an infinite self, a Logos or World-mind
(345). That it exists is clear, I. Because idealism shows that
real things are nothing more nor less than ideas, or
‘possibilities of experience’; but a mere ‘possibility’, as such,
is nothing, and a world of ‘possible’ experiences, in so far as it
is real, must be a world of actual experience to some self (367).
If then there be a real world, it has all the while existed as
ideal and mental, even before it became known to the particular
mind with which we conceive it as coming into connection (368).
II. But there is such a real world; for, when I _think_ of an
object, when I _mean_ it, I do not merely have in mind an idea
resembling it, for I aim at the object, I pick it out, I already
in some measure possess it. The object is then already present in
essence to my hidden self (370). As truth consists in knowledge of
the conformity of a cognition to its object, that alone can know a
truth which includes within itself both idea and object. This
inclusive Knower is the Infinite Self (374). With this I am in
essence identical (371); it is my larger self (372); and this
larger self alone _is_ (379). It includes all reality, and we know
other finite minds, because we are one with them in its unity”
(409).

The experience of George John Romanes is instructive. For years he
could recognize no personal Intelligence controlling the universe.
He made four mistakes: 1. _He forgot that only love can see_, that
God is not disclosed to the mere intellect, but only to the whole
man, to the integral mind, to what the Scripture calls “the eyes
of your heart”_ (Eph. 1:18)_. Experience of life taught him at
last the weakness of mere reasoning, and led him to depend more
upon the affections and intuitions. Then, as one might say, he
gave the X-rays of Christianity a chance to photograph God upon
his soul. 2. _He began at the wrong end_, with matter rather than
with mind, with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong,
and so got involved in the mechanical order and tried to interpret
the moral realm by it. The result was that instead of recognizing
freedom, responsibility, sin, guilt, he threw them out as
pretenders. But study of conscience and will set him right. He
learned to take what be found instead of trying to turn it into
something else, and so came to interpret nature by spirit, instead
of interpreting spirit by nature. 3. _He took the Cosmos by bits_,
instead of regarding it as a whole. His early thinking insisted on
finding design in each particular part, or nowhere. But his more
mature thought recognized wisdom and reason in the ordered whole.
As he realized that this is a universe, he could not get rid of
the idea of an organizing Mind. He came to see that the Universe,
as a thought, implies a Thinker. 4. _He fancied that nature
excludes God_, instead of being only the method of God’s working.
When he learned how a thing was done, he at first concluded that
God had not done it. His later thought recognized that God and
nature are not mutually exclusive. So he came to find no
difficulty even in miracles and inspiration; for the God who is in
man and of whose mind and will nature is only the expression, can
reveal himself, if need be, in special ways. So George John
Romanes came back to prayer, to Christ, to the church.

On the general subject of intuition as connected with our idea of
God, see Ladd, in Bib. Sac., 1877:1-36, 611-616; 1878:619; Fisher,
on Final Cause and Intuition, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan.
1883:113-134; Patton, on Genesis of Idea of God, in Jour. Christ.
Philos., Apl. 1883:283-307; McCosh, Christianity and Positivism,
124-140; Mansel, in Encyc. Brit., 8th ed., vol. 14:604 and 615;
Robert Hall, sermon on Atheism; Hutton, on Atheism, in Essays,
1:3-37; Shairp, in Princeton Rev., March, 1881:264.

Chapter II. Corroborative Evidences Of God’s Existence.

Although the knowledge of God’s existence is intuitive, it may be
explicated and confirmed by arguments drawn from the actual universe and
from the abstract ideas of the human mind.

Remark 1. These arguments are probable, not demonstrative. For this reason
they supplement each other, and constitute a series of evidences which is
cumulative in its nature. Though, taken singly, none of them can be
considered absolutely decisive, they together furnish a corroboration of
our primitive conviction of God’s existence, which is of great practical
value, and is in itself sufficient to bind the moral action of men.

Butler, Analogy, Introd., Bohn’s ed., 72—Probable evidence admits
of degrees, from the highest moral certainty to the lowest
presumption. Yet probability is the guide of life. In matters of
morals and religion, we are not to expect mathematical or
demonstrative, but only probable, evidence, and the slightest
preponderance of such evidence may be sufficient to bind our moral
action. The truth of our religion, like the truth of common
matters, is to be judged by the whole evidence taken together; for
probable proofs, by being added, not only increase the evidence,
but multiply it. Dove, Logic of Christ. Faith, 24—Value of the
arguments taken together is much greater than that of any single
one. Illustrated from water, air and food, together but not
separately, supporting life; value of £1000 note, not in paper,
stamp, writing, signature, taken separately. A whole bundle of
rods cannot be broken, though each rod in the bundle may be broken
separately. The strength of the bundle is the strength of the
whole. Lord Bacon, Essay on Atheism: “A little philosophy
inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth
men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh
upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go
no further, but, when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate
and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”
Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 221-223—“The proof of a God and
of a spiritual world which is to satisfy us must consist in a
number of different but converging lines of proof.”

In a case where only circumstantial evidence is attainable, many
lines of proof sometimes converge, and though no one of the lines
reaches the mark, the conclusion to which they all point becomes
the only rational one. To doubt that there is a London, or that
there was a Napoleon, would indicate insanity; yet London and
Napoleon are proved by only probable evidence. There is no
constraining efficacy in the arguments for God’s existence; but
the same can be said of all reasoning that is not demonstrative.
Another interpretation of the facts is _possible_, but no other
conclusion is so _satisfactory_, as that God is; see Fisher,
Nature and Method of Revelation, 129. Prof. Rogers: “If in
practical affairs we were to hesitate to act until we had absolute
and demonstrative certainty, we should never begin to move at
all.” For this reason an old Indian official advised a young
Indian judge “always to give his verdict, but always to avoid
giving the grounds of it.”

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 11-14—“Instead of doubting everything
that can be doubted, let us rather doubt nothing until we are
compelled to doubt.... In society we get on better by assuming
that men are truthful, and by doubting only for special reasons,
than we should if we assumed that all men are liars, and believed
them only when compelled. So in all our investigations we make
more progress if we assume the truthfulness of the universe and of
our own nature than we should if we doubted both.... The first
method seems the more rigorous, but it can be applied only to
mathematics, which is a purely subjective science. When we come to
deal with reality, the method brings thought to a standstill....
The law the logician lays down is this: Nothing may be believed
which is not proved. The law the mind actually follows is this:
Whatever the mind demands for the satisfaction of its subjective
interests and tendencies may be assumed as real, in default of
positive disproof.”

Remark 2. A consideration of these arguments may also serve to explicate
the contents of an intuition which has remained obscure and only half
conscious for lack of reflection. The arguments, indeed, are the efforts
of the mind that already has a conviction of God’s existence to give to
itself a formal account of its belief. An exact estimate of their logical
value and of their relation to the intuition which they seek to express in
syllogistic form, is essential to any proper refutation of the prevalent
atheistic and pantheistic reasoning.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 363—“Nor have I claimed that the
existence, even, of this Being can be demonstrated as we
demonstrate the abstract truths of science. I have only claimed
that the universe, as a great fact, demands a rational
explanation, and that the most rational explanation that can
possibly be given is that furnished in the conception of such a
Being. In this conclusion reason rests, and refuses to rest in any
other.” Rückert: “Wer Gott nicht fühlt in sich und allen
Lebenskreisen, Dem werdet ihr nicht ihn beweisen mit Beweisen.”
Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 307—“Theology depends on noetic
and empirical science to give the occasion on which the idea of
the Absolute Being arises, and to give content to the idea.”
Andrew Fuller, Part of Syst. of Divin., 4:283, questions “whether
argumentation in favor of the existence of God has not made more
sceptics than believers.” So far as this is true, it is due to an
overstatement of the arguments and an exaggerated notion of what
is to be expected from them. See Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine,
translation, 140; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:119, 120; Fisher, Essays on
Supernatural Origin of Christianity, 572, 573; Van Oosterzee, 238,
241.

“Evidences of Christianity?” said Coleridge, “I am weary of the
word.” The more Christianity was _proved_, the less it was
_believed_. The revival of religion under Whitefield and Wesley
did what all the apologists of the eighteenth century could not
do,—it quickened men’s intuitions into life, and made them
practically recognize God. Martineau, Types, 2:231—Men can “bow
the knee to the passing _Zeitgeist_, while turning the back to the
consensus of all the ages”; Seat of Authority, 312—“Our reasonings
lead to explicit Theism because they start from implicit Theism.”
Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality, 81—“The proofs are ...
attempts to account for and explain and justify something that
already exists; to decompose a highly complex though immediate
judgment into its constituent elements, none of which when
isolated can have the completeness or the cogency of the original
conviction taken as a whole.”

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 31, 32—“Demonstration is only a
makeshift for helping ignorance to insight.... When we come to an
argument in which the whole nature is addressed, the argument must
seem weak or strong, according as the nature is feebly, or fully,
developed. The moral argument for theism cannot seem strong to one
without a conscience. The argument from cognitive interests will
be empty when there is no cognitive interest. Little souls find
very little that calls for explanation or that excites surprise,
and they are satisfied with a correspondingly small view of life
and existence. In such a case we cannot hope for universal
agreement. We can only proclaim the faith that is in us, in hope
that this proclamation may not be without some response in other
minds and hearts.... We have only probable evidence for the
uniformity of nature or for the affection of friends. We cannot
logically prove either. The deepest convictions are not the
certainties of logic, but the certainties of life.”

Remark 3. The arguments for the divine existence may be reduced to four,
namely: I. The Cosmological; II. The Teleological; III. The
Anthropological; and IV. The Ontological. We shall examine these in order,
seeking first to determine the precise conclusions to which they
respectively lead, and then to ascertain in what manner the four may be
combined.

I. The Cosmological Argument, or Argument from Change in Nature.

This is not properly an argument from effect to cause; for the proposition
that every effect must have a cause is simply identical, and means only
that every caused event must have a cause. It is rather an argument from
begun existence to a sufficient cause of that beginning, and may be
accurately stated as follows:

Everything begun, whether substance or phenomenon, owes its existence to
some producing cause. The universe, at least so far as its present form is
concerned, is a thing begun, and owes its existence to a cause which is
equal to its production. This cause must be indefinitely great.

It is to be noticed that this argument moves wholly in the realm
of nature. The argument from man’s constitution and beginning upon
the planet is treated under another head (see Anthropological
Argument). That the present form of the universe is not eternal in
the past, but has begun to be, not only personal observation but
the testimony of geology assures us. For statements of the
argument, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Bohn’s transl.), 370;
Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God, 8:34-44; Bib. Sac.,
1849:613; 1850:613; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 570; Herbert Spencer,
First Principles, 93. It has often been claimed, as by Locke,
Clarke, and Robert Hall, that this argument is sufficient to
conduct the mind to an Eternal and Infinite First Cause. We
proceed therefore to mention

1. _The defects of the Cosmological Argument._

A. It is impossible to show that the universe, so far as its substance is
concerned, has had a beginning. The law of causality declares, not that
everything has a cause—for then God himself must have a cause—but rather
that everything begun has a cause, or in other words, that every event or
change has a cause.

Hume, Philos. Works, 2:411 _sq._, urges with reason that we never
saw a world made. Many philosophers in Christian lands, as
Martineau, Essays, 1:206, and the prevailing opinions of
ante-Christian times, have held matter to be eternal. Bowne,
Metaphysics, 107—“For being itself, the reflective reason never
asks a cause, unless the being show signs of dependence. It is
change that first gives rise to the demand for cause.” Martineau,
Types, 1:291—“It is not existence, as such, that demands a cause,
but the coming into existence of what did not exist before. The
intellectual law of causality is a law for phenomena, and not for
entity.” See also McCosh, Intuitions, 225-241; Calderwood, Philos.
of Infinite, 61. _Per contra_, see Murphy, Scient. Bases of Faith,
49, 195, and Habit and Intelligence, 1:55-67; Knight, Lect. on
Metaphysics, lect. ii, p. 19.

B. Granting that the universe, so far as its phenomena are concerned, has
had a cause, it is impossible to show that any other cause is required
than a cause within itself, such as the pantheist supposes.

Flint, Theism, 65—“The cosmological argument alone proves only
force, and no mere force is God. Intelligence must go with power
to make a Being that can be called God.” Diman, Theistic Argument:
“The cosmological argument alone cannot decide whether the force
that causes change is permanent self-existent mind, or permanent
self-existent matter.” Only intelligence gives the basis for an
answer. Only mind in the universe enables us to infer mind in the
maker. But the argument from intelligence is not the Cosmological,
but the Teleological, and to this last belong all proofs of Deity
from order and combination in nature.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 201-296—Science has to do with those
changes which one portion of the visible universe causes in
another portion. Philosophy and theology deal with the Infinite
Cause which brings into existence and sustains the entire series
of finite causes. Do we ask the cause of the stars? Science says:
Fire-mist, or an infinite regress of causes. Theology says:
Granted; but this infinite regress demands for its explanation the
belief in God. We must believe both in God, and in an endless
series of finite causes. God is the cause of all causes, the soul
of all souls: “Centre and soul of every sphere, Yet to each loving
heart how near!” We do not need, as mere matter of science, to
think of any beginning.

C. Granting that the universe most have had a cause outside of itself, it
is impossible to show that this cause has not itself been caused, _i. e._,
consists of an infinite series of dependent causes. The principle of
causality does not require that everything begun should be traced back to
an uncaused cause; it demands that we should assign a cause, but not that
we should assign a first cause.

So with the whole series of causes. The materialist is bound to
find a cause for this series, only when the series is shown to
have had a beginning. But the very hypothesis of an infinite
series of causes excludes the idea of such a beginning. An
infinite chain has no topmost link (_versus_ Robert Hall); an
uncaused and eternal succession does not need a cause (_versus_
Clarke and Locke). See Whately, Logic, 270; New Englander, Jan.
1874:75; Alexander, Moral Science, 221; Pfleiderer, Die Religion,
1:160-164; Calderwood, Moral Philos., 225; Herbert Spencer, First
Principles, 37—criticized by Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 36.
Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:128, says that the causal principle is
not satisfied till by regress we come to a cause which is not
itself an effect—to one who is _causa sui_; Aids to Study of
German Theology, 15-17—Even if the universe be eternal, its
contingent and relative nature requires us to postulate an eternal
Creator; Diman, Theistic Argument, 86—“While the law of causation
does not lead logically up to the conclusion of a first cause, it
compels us to affirm it.” We reply that it is not the law of
causation which compels us to affirm it, for this certainly “does
not lead logically up to the conclusion.” If we infer an uncaused
cause, we do it, not by logical process, but by virtue of the
intuitive belief within us. So substantially Secretan, and
Whewell, in Indications of a Creator, and in Hist. of Scientific
Ideas, 2:321, 322—“The mind takes refuge, in the assumption of a
First Cause, from an employment inconsistent with its own nature”;
“we necessarily infer a First Cause, although the palætiological
sciences only point toward it, but do not lead us to it.”

D. Granting that the cause of the universe has not itself been caused, it
is impossible to show that this cause is not finite, like the universe
itself. The causal principle requires a cause no greater than just
sufficient to account for the effect.

We cannot therefore infer an infinite cause, unless the universe
is infinite—which cannot be proved, but can only be assumed—and
this is assuming an infinite in order to prove an infinite. All we
know of the universe is finite. An infinite universe implies
infinite number. But no number can be infinite, for to any number,
however great, a unit can be added, which shows that it was not
infinite before. Here again we see that the most approved forms of
the Cosmological Argument are obliged to avail themselves of the
intuition of the infinite, to supplement the logical process.
_Versus_ Martineau, Study, 1:416—“Though we cannot directly infer
the infinitude of God from a limited creation, indirectly we may
exclude every other position by resort to its unlimited scene of
existence (space).” But this would equally warrant our belief in
the infinitude of our fellow men. Or, it is the argument of Clarke
and Gillespie (see Ontological Argument below). Schiller, Die
Grösse der Welt, seems to hold to a boundless universe. He
represents a tired spirit as seeking the last limit of creation. A
second pilgrim meets him from the spaces beyond with the words:
“Steh! du segelst umsonst,—vor dir Unendlichkeit”—“Hold! thou
journeyest in vain,—before thee is only Infinity.” On the law of
parsimony, see Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, 628.

2. _The value of the Cosmological Argument_, then, is simply this,—it
proves the existence of some cause of the universe indefinitely great.
When we go beyond this and ask whether this cause is a cause of being, or
merely a cause of change, to the universe; whether it is a cause apart
from the universe, or one with it; whether it is an eternal cause, or a
cause dependent upon some other cause; whether it is intelligent or
unintelligent, infinite or finite, one or many,—this argument cannot
assure us.

On the whole argument, see Flint, Theism, 93-130; Mozley, Essays,
Hist. and Theol., 2:414-444; Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 148-154;
Studien und Kritiken, 1876:9-31.

II. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Order and Useful
Collocation in Nature.

This is not properly an argument from design to a designer; for that
design implies a designer is simply an identical proposition. It may be
more correctly stated as follows: Order and useful collocation pervading a
system respectively imply intelligence and purpose as the cause of that
order and collocation. Since order and useful collocation pervade the
universe, there must exist an intelligence adequate to the production of
this order, and a will adequate to direct this collocation to useful ends.

Etymologically, “teleological argument” = argument to ends or
final causes, that is, “causes which, beginning as a thought, work
themselves out into a fact as an end or result” (Porter, Hum.
Intellect, 592-618);—health, for example, is the final cause of
exercise, while exercise is the efficient cause of health. This
definition of the argument would be broad enough to cover the
proof of a designing intelligence drawn from the constitution of
man. This last, however, is treated as a part of the
Anthropological Argument, which follows this, and the Teleological
Argument covers only the proof of a designing intelligence drawn
from nature. Hence Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Bohn’s trans.),
381, calls it the physico-theological argument. On methods of
stating the argument, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:625. See also
Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 155-185; Mozley, Essays Hist. and
Theol., 2:365-413.

Hicks, in his Critique of Design-Arguments, 347-389, makes two
arguments instead of one: (1) the argument from _order_ to
_intelligence_, to which he gives the name Eutaxiological; (2) the
argument from _adaptation_ to _purpose_, to which he would
restrict the name Teleological. He holds that teleology proper
cannot prove _intelligence_, because in speaking of “ends” at all,
it must assume the very intelligence which it seeks to prove; that
it actually does prove simply the _intentional exercise_ of an
intelligence whose existence has been previously established.
“Circumstances, forces or agencies converging to a definite
rational result imply volition—imply that this result is
intended—is an end. This is the major premise of this new
teleology.” He objects to the term “final cause.” The end is not a
cause at all—it is a motive. The characteristic element of cause
is power to produce an effect. Ends have no such power. The will
may choose them or set them aside. As already assuming
intelligence, ends cannot prove intelligence.

With this in the main we agree, and count it a valuable help to
the statement and understanding of the argument. In the very
observation of _order_, however, as well as in arguing from it, we
are obliged to assume the same all-arranging intelligence. We see
no objection therefore to making Eutaxiology the first part of the
Teleological Argument, as we do above. See review of Hicks, in
Meth. Quar. Rev., July, 1883:569-576. We proceed however to
certain

1. _Further explanations._

A. The major premise expresses a primitive conviction. It is not
invalidated by the objections: (_a_) that order and useful collocation may
exist without being purposed—for we are compelled by our very mental
constitution to deny this in all cases where the order and collocation
pervade a system: (_b_) that order and useful collocation may result from
the mere operation of physical forces and laws—for these very forces and
laws imply, instead of excluding, an originating and superintending
intelligence and will.

Janet, in his work on Final Causes, 8, denies that finality is a
primitive conviction, like causality, and calls it the result of
an induction. He therefore proceeds from (1) marks of order and
useful collocation to (2) finality in nature, and then to (3) an
intelligent cause of this finality or “pre-conformity to future
event.” So Diman, Theistic Argument, 105, claims simply that, as
change requires cause, so orderly change requires intelligent
cause. We have shown, however, that induction and argument of
every kind presupposes intuitive belief in final cause. Nature
does not give us final cause; but no more does she give us
efficient cause. Mind gives us both, and gives them as clearly
upon one experience as after a thousand. Ladd: “Things have mind
in them: else they could not be minded by us.” The Duke of Argyll
told Darwin that it seemed to him wholly impossible to ascribe the
adjustments of nature to any other agency than that of mind.
“Well,” said Darwin, “that impression has often come upon me with
overpowering force. But then, at other times, it all seems—;” and
then he passed his hands over his eyes, as if to indicate the
passing of a vision out of sight. Darwinism is not a refutation of
ends in nature, but only of a particular theory with regard to the
way in which ends are realized in the organic world. Darwin would
begin with an infinitesimal germ, and make all the subsequent
development unteleological; see Schurman, Belief in God, 193.

(_a_) Illustration of unpurposed order in the single throwing of
“double sixes,”—constant throwing of double sixes indicates
design. So arrangement of detritus at mouth of river, and warming
pans sent to the West Indies,—useful but not purposed. Momerie,
Christianity and Evolution, 72—“It is only within narrow limits
that seemingly purposeful arrangements are produced by chance. And
therefore, as the signs of purpose increase, the presumption in
favor of their accidental origin diminishes.” Elder, Ideas from
Nature, 81, 82—“The uniformity of a boy’s marbles shows them to be
products of design. A single one might be accidental, but a dozen
cannot be. So atomic uniformity indicates manufacture.”
Illustrations of purposed order, in Beattie’s garden, Tillotson’s
blind men, Kepler’s salad. Dr. Carpenter: “The atheist is like a
man examining the machinery of a great mill, who, finding that the
whole is moved by a shaft proceeding from a brick wall, infers
that the shaft is a sufficient explanation of what he sees, and
that there is no moving power behind it.” Lord Kelvin: “The
atheistic idea is nonsensical.” J. G. Paton, Life, 2:191—The
sinking of a well on the island of Aniwa convinces the cannibal
chief Namakei that Jehovah God exists, the invisible One. See
Chauncey Wright, in N. Y. Nation, Jan. 15, 1874; Murphy,
Scientific Bases of Faith, 208.

(_b_) Bowne, Review of Herbert Spencer, 231-247—“Law is _method_,
not _cause_. A man cannot offer the very fact to be explained, as
its sufficient explanation.” Martineau, Essays, 1:144—“Patterned
damask, made not by the weaver, but by the loom?” Dr. Stevenson:
“House requires no architect, because it is built by stone-masons
and carpenters?” Joseph Cook: “Natural law without God behind it
is no more than a glove without a hand in it, and all that is done
by the gloved hand of God in nature is done by the hand and not by
the glove. Evolution is a process, not a power; a method of
operation, not an operator. A book is not written _by_ the laws of
spelling and grammar, but _according_ to those laws. So the book
of the universe is not written by the laws of heat, electricity,
gravitation, evolution, but according to those laws.” G. F.
Wright, Ant. and Orig. of Hum. Race, lecture IX—“It is impossible
for evolution to furnish evidence which shall drive design out of
nature. It can only drive it back to an earlier point of entrance,
thereby increasing our admiration for the power of the Creator to
accomplish ulterior designs by unlikely means.”

Evolution is only the method of God. It has to do with the _how_,
not with the _why_, of phenomena, and therefore is not
inconsistent with design, but rather is a new and higher
illustration of design. Henry Ward Beecher: “Design by wholesale
is greater than design by retail.” Frances Power Cobbe: “It is a
singular fact that, whenever we find out _how_ a thing is done,
our first conclusion seems to be that _God_ did not do it.” Why
should we say: “The more law, the less God?” The theist refers the
phenomena to a cause that knows itself and what it is doing; the
atheist refers them to a power which knows nothing of itself and
what it is doing (Bowne). George John Romanes said that, if God be
immanent, then all natural causation must appear to be mechanical,
and it is no argument against the divine origin of a thing to
prove it due to natural causation: “Causes in nature do not
obviate the necessity of a cause in nature.” Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 47—Evolution shows that the direction of
affairs is under control of something like our own intelligence:
“Evolution spells Purpose.” Clarke, Christ. Theology, 105—“The
modern doctrine of evolution has been awake to the existence of
innumerable ends _within_ the universe, but not to the one great
end _for_ the universe itself.” Huxley, Critiques and Addresses,
274, 275, 307—“The teleological and mechanical views of the
universe are not mutually exclusive.” Sir William Hamilton,
Metaphysics: “Intelligence stands first in the order of existence.
Efficient causes are preceded by final causes.” See also Thornton,
Old Fashioned Ethics, 199-265; Archbp. Temple, Bampton Lect.,
1884:99-123; Owen, Anat. of Vertebrates, 3:796; Peirce, Ideality
in the Physical Sciences, 1-35; Newman Smyth, Through Science to
Faith, 96; Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 135.

B. The minor premise expresses a working-principle of all science, namely,
that all things have their uses, that order pervades the universe, and
that the methods of nature are rational methods. Evidences of this appear
in the correlation of the chemical elements to each other; in the fitness
of the inanimate world to be the basis and support of life; in the typical
forms and unity of plan apparent in the organic creation; in the existence
and coöperation of natural laws; in cosmical order and compensations.

This minor premise is not invalidated by the objections: (_a_) That we
frequently misunderstand the end actually subserved by natural events and
objects; for the principle is, not that we necessarily know the actual
end, but that we necessarily believe that there is some end, in every case
of systematic order and collocation. (_b_) That the order of the universe
is manifestly imperfect; for this, if granted, would argue, not absence of
contrivance, but some special reason for imperfection, either in the
limitations of the contriving intelligence itself, or in the nature of the
end sought (as, for example, correspondence with the moral state and
probation of sinners).

The evidences of order and useful collocation are found both in
the indefinitely small and the indefinitely great. The molecules
are manufactured articles; and the compensations of the solar
system which provide that a secular flattening of the earth’s
orbit shall be made up for by a secular rounding of that same
orbit, alike show an intelligence far transcending our own; see
Cooke, Religion and Chemistry, and Credentials of Science,
23—“Beauty is the harmony of relations which perfect fitness
produces; law is the prevailing principle which underlies that
harmony. Hence both beauty and law imply design. From energy,
fitness, beauty, order, sacrifice, we argue might, skill,
perfection, law, and love in a Supreme Intelligence. Christianity
implies design, and is the completion of the design argument.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:168—“A good definition of beauty
is immanent purposiveness, the teleological ideal background of
reality, the shining of the Idea through phenomena.”

Bowne, Philos. Theism, 85—“Design is never causal. It is only
ideal, and it demands an efficient cause for its realization. If
ice is not to sink, and to freeze out life, there must be some
molecular structure which shall make its bulk greater than that of
an equal weight of water.” Jackson, Theodore Parker,
355—“Rudimentary organs are like the silent letters in many
words,—both are witnesses to a past history; and there is
intelligence in their preservation.” Diman, Theistic Argument:
“Not only do we observe in the world the change which is the basis
of the Cosmological Argument, but we perceive that this change
proceeds according to a fixed and invariable rule. In inorganic
nature, general order, or _regularity_; in organic nature, special
order or _adaptation_.” Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 113-115,
224-230: “Inductive science proceeds upon the postulate that the
reasonable and the natural are one.” This furnished the guiding
clue to Harvey and Cuvier; see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences,
2:489-491. Kant: “The anatomist must assume that nothing in man is
in vain.” Aristotle: “Nature makes nothing in vain.” On molecules
as manufactured articles, see Maxfield, in Nature, Sept. 25, 1873.
See also Tulloch, Theism, 116, 120; LeConte, Religion and Science,
lect. 2 and 3; McCosh, Typical Forms, 81, 420; Agassiz, Essay on
Classification, 9, 10; Bib. Sac., 1849:626 and 1850:613; Hopkins,
in Princeton Review, 1882:181.

(_a_) Design, in fact that rivers always run by large towns? that
springs are always found at gambling places? Plants made for man,
and man for worms? Voltaire: “Noses are made for spectacles—let us
wear them!” Pope: “While man exclaims ‘See all things for my use,’
‘See man for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.” Cherries do not
ripen in the cold of winter when they do not taste as well, and
grapes do not ripen in the heat of summer when the new wine would
turn to vinegar? Nature divides melons into sections for
convenience in family eating? Cork-tree made for bottle-stoppers?
The child who was asked the cause of salt in the ocean, attributed
it to codfish, thus dimly confounding final cause with efficient
cause. Teacher: “What are marsupials?” Pupil: “Animals that have
pouches in their stomachs.” Teacher: “And what do they have
pouches for?” Pupil: “To crawl into and conceal themselves in,
when they are pursued.” Why are the days longer in summer than in
winter? Because it is the property of all natural objects to
elongate under the influence of heat. A Jena professor held that
doctors do not exist because of disease, but that diseases exist
precisely in order that there may be doctors. Kepler was an
astronomical Don Quixote. He discussed the claims of eleven
different damsels to become his second wife, and he likened the
planets to huge animals rushing through the sky. Many of the
objections to design arise from confounding a part of the creation
with the whole, or a structure in the process of development with
a structure completed. For illustrations of mistaken ends, see
Janet, Final Causes.

(_b_) Alphonso of Castile took offense at the Ptolemaic System,
and intimated that, if he had been consulted at the creation, he
could have suggested valuable improvements. Lange, in his History
of Materialism, illustrates some of the methods of nature by
millions of gun barrels shot in all directions to kill a single
hare; by ten thousand keys bought at haphazard to get into a shut
room; by building a city in order to obtain a house. Is not the
ice a little overdone about the poles? See John Stuart Mill’s
indictment of nature, in his posthumous Essays on Religion,
29—“Nature impales men, breaks men as if on a wheel, casts them to
be devoured by wild beasts, crushes them with stones like the
first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them
with cold, poisons them with the quick or slow venom of her
exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve,
such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never
surpassed.” So argue Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.

The doctrine of evolution answers many of these objections, by
showing that order and useful collocation in the system as a whole
is necessarily and cheaply purchased by imperfection and suffering
in the initial stages of development. The question is: Does the
system as a whole imply design? My opinion is of no value as to
the usefulness of an intricate machine the purpose of which I do
not know. If I stand at the beginning of a road and do not know
whither it leads, it is presumptuous in me to point out a more
direct way to its destination. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 20-22—“In
order to counterbalance the impressions which apparent disorder
and immorality in nature make upon us, we have to assume that the
universe at its root is not only rational, but good. This is
faith, but it is an act on which our whole moral life depends.”
Metaphysics, 165—“The same argument which would deny mind in
nature denies mind in man.” Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev.,
264—“Fifty years ago, when the crane stood on top of the tower of
unfinished Cologne Cathedral, was there no evidence of design in
the whole structure?” Yet we concede that, so long as we cannot
with John Stuart Mill explain the imperfections of the universe by
any limitations in the Intelligence which contrived it, we are
shut up to regarding them as intended to correspond with the moral
state and probation of sinners which God foresaw and provided for
at the creation. Evil things in the universe are symbols of sin,
and helps to its overthrow. See Bowne, Review of H. Spencer, 264,
265; McCosh, Christ. and Positivism, 82 _sq._; Martineau, Essays,
1:50, and Study, 1:351-398; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 599; Mivart,
Lessons from Nature, 366-371; Princeton Rev., 1878:272-303; Shaw,
on Positivism.

2. _Defects of the Teleological Argument._ These attach not to the
premises but to the conclusion sought to be drawn therefrom.

A. The argument cannot prove a personal God. The order and useful
collocations of the universe may be only the changing phenomena of an
impersonal intelligence and will, such as pantheism supposes. The finality
may be only immanent finality.

There is such a thing as immanent and unconscious finality.
National spirit, without set purpose, constructs language. The bee
works unconsciously to ends. Strato of Lampsacus regarded the
world as a vast animal. Aristotle, Phys., 2:8—“Plant the
ship-builder’s skill within the timber itself, and you have the
mode in which nature produces.” Here we see a dim anticipation of
the modern doctrine of development from within instead of creation
from without. Neander: “The divine work goes on from within
outward.” John Fiske: “The argument from the watch has been
superseded by the argument from the flower.” Iverach, Theism,
91—“The effect of evolution has been simply to transfer the cause
from a mere external influence working from without to an immanent
rational principle.” Martineau, Study, 1:349, 350—“Theism is in no
way committed to the doctrine of a God external to the world ...
nor does intelligence require, in order to gain an object, to give
it externality.”

Newman Smyth, Place of Death, 62-80—“The universe exists in some
all-pervasive Intelligence. Suppose we could see a small heap of
brick, scraps of metal, and pieces of mortar, gradually shaping
themselves into the walls and interior structure of a building,
adding needed material as the work advanced, and at last
presenting in its completion a factory furnished with varied and
finely wrought machinery. Or, a locomotive carrying a process of
self-repair to compensate for wear, growing and increasing in
size, detaching from itself at intervals pieces of brass or iron
endowed with the power of growing up step by step into other
locomotives capable of running themselves and of reproducing new
locomotives in their turn.” So nature in its separate parts may
seem mechanical, but as a whole it is rational. Weismann does not
“disown a directive power,”—only this power is “behind the
mechanism as its final cause ... it must be teleological.”

Impressive as are these evidences of intelligence in the universe
as a whole, and increased in number as they are by the new light
of evolution, we must still hold that nature alone cannot prove
that this intelligence is personal. Hopkins, Miscellanies,
18-36—“So long as there is such a thing as impersonal and adapting
intelligence in the brute creation, we cannot necessarily infer
from unchanging laws a free and personal God.” See Fisher,
Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 576-578. Kant shows that the
argument does not prove intelligence apart from the world
(Critique, 370). We must bring mind to the world, if we would find
mind in it. Leave out man, and nature cannot be properly
interpreted: the intelligence and will in nature may still be
unconscious. But, taking in man, we are bound to get our idea of
the intelligence and will in nature from the highest type of
intelligence and will we know, and that is man’s. “Nullus in
microcosmo spiritus, nullus in macrocosmo Deus.” “We receive but
what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.”

The Teleological Argument therefore needs to be supplemented by
the Anthropological Argument, or the argument from the mental and
moral constitution of man. By itself, it does not prove a Creator.
See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 26; Ritter, Hist. Anc. Philos.,
bk. 9, chap. 6; Foundations of our Faith, 38; Murphy, Scientific
Bases, 215; Habit and Intelligence, 2:6, and chap. 27. On immanent
finality, see Janet, Final Causes, 345-415; Diman, Theistic
Argument, 201-203. Since righteousness belongs only to
personality, this argument cannot prove righteousness in God.
Flint, Theism, 66—“Power and Intelligence alone do not constitute
God, though they be infinite. A being may have these, and, if
lacking righteousness, may be a devil.” Here again we see the need
of the Anthropological Argument to supplement this.

B. Even if this argument could prove personality in the intelligence and
will that originated the order of the universe, it could not prove either
the unity, the eternity, or the infinity of God; not the unity—for the
useful collocations of the universe might be the result of oneness of
counsel, instead of oneness of essence, in the contriving intelligence;
not the eternity—for a created demiurge might conceivably have designed
the universe; not the infinity—since all marks of order and collocation
within our observation are simply finite.

Diman asserts (Theistic Argument, 114) that all the phenomena of
the universe must be due to the same source—since all alike are
subject to the same method of sequence, _e. g._, gravitation—and
that the evidence points us irresistibly to some _one_ explanatory
cause. We can regard this assertion only as the utterance of a
primitive belief in a first cause, not as the conclusion of
logical demonstration, for we know only an infinitesimal part of
the universe. From the point of view of the intuition of an
Absolute Reason, however, we can cordially assent to the words of
F. L. Patton: “When we consider Matthew Arnold’s ‘stream of
tendency,’ Spencer’s ‘unknowable,’ Schopenhauer’s ‘world as will,’
and Hartmann’s elaborate defence of finality as the product of
unconscious intelligence, we may well ask if the theists, with
their belief in one personal God, are not in possession of the
only hypothesis that can save the language of these writers from
the charge of meaningless and idiotic raving” (Journ. Christ.
Philos., April, 1883:283-307).

The ancient world, which had only the light of nature, believed in
many gods. William James, Will to Believe, 44—“If there be a
divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man. Either there is no spirit
revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and
(as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible
nature, or _this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose
full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen, or _other_ world.”
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 234—“But is not
intelligence itself the mystery of mysteries?... No doubt,
intellect is a great mystery.... But there is a choice in
mysteries. Some mysteries leave other things clear, and some leave
things as dark and impenetrable as ever. The former is the case
with the mystery of intelligence. It makes possible the
comprehension of everything but itself.”

3. _The value of the Teleological Argument_ is simply this,—it proves from
certain useful collocations and instances of order which have clearly had
a beginning, or in other words, from the present harmony of the universe,
that there exists an intelligence and will adequate to its contrivance.
But whether this intelligence and will is personal or impersonal, creator
or only fashioner, one or many, finite or infinite, eternal or owing its
being to another, necessary or free, this argument cannot assure us.

In it, however, we take a step forward. The causative power which we have
proved by the Cosmological Argument has now become an intelligent and
voluntary power.

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Theism, 168-170—“In the present
state of our knowledge, the adaptations in nature afford a large
balance of probability in favor of causation by intelligence.”
Ladd holds that, whenever one being acts upon its like, each being
undergoes changes of state that belong to its own nature under the
circumstances. Action of one body on another never consists in
transferring the state of one being to another. Therefore there is
no more difficulty in beings that are unlike acting on one another
than in beings that are like. We do not transfer ideas to other
minds,—we only rouse them to develop their own ideas. So force
also is positively not transferable. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 49,
begins with “the conception of things interacting according to law
and forming an intelligible system. Such a system cannot be
construed by thought without the assumption of a unitary being
which is the fundamental reality of the system. 53—No passage of
influences or forces will avail to bridge the gulf, so long as the
things are regarded as independent. 56—The system itself cannot
explain this interaction, for the system is only the members of
it. There must be some being in them which is their reality, and
of which they are in some sense phases or manifestations. In other
words, there must be a basal monism.” All this is substantially
the view of Lotze, of whose philosophy see criticism in Stählin’s
Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, 116-156, and especially 123.
Falckenberg, Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, 454, shows as to
Lotze’s view that his assumption of monistic unity and continuity
does not explain how change of condition in one thing should, as
equalization or compensation, follow change of condition in
another thing. Lotze explains this _actuality_ by the ethical
conception of an all-embracing Person. On the whole argument, see
Bib. Sac., 1849:634; Murphy, Sci. Bases, 216; Flint, Theism,
131-210; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:164-174; W. R. Benedict, on
Theism and Evolution, in Andover Rev., 1886:307-350, 607-622.

III. The Anthropological Argument, or Argument from Man’s Mental and Moral
Nature.

This is an argument from the mental and moral condition of man to the
existence of an Author, Lawgiver, and End. It is sometimes called the
Moral Argument.

The common title “Moral Argument” is much too narrow, for it seems
to take account only of conscience in man, whereas the argument
which this title so imperfectly designates really proceeds from
man’s intellectual and emotional, as well as from his moral,
nature. In choosing the designation we have adopted, we desire,
moreover, to rescue from the mere physicist the term
“Anthropology”—a term to which he has attached altogether too
limited a signification, and which, in his use of it, implies that
man is a mere animal,—to him Anthropology is simply the study of
_la bête humaine_. Anthropology means, not simply the science of
man’s physical nature, origin, and relations, but also the science
which treats of his higher spiritual being. Hence, in Theology,
the term Anthropology designates that division of the subject
which treats of man’s spiritual nature and endowments, his
original state and his subsequent apostasy. As an argument,
therefore, from man’s mental and moral nature, we can with perfect
propriety call the present argument the Anthropological Argument.

The argument is a complex one, and may be divided into three parts.

1. Man’s intellectual and moral nature must have had for its author an
intellectual and moral Being. The elements of the proof are as
follows:—(_a_) Man, as an intellectual and moral being, has had a
beginning upon the planet. (_b_) Material and unconscious forces do not
afford a sufficient cause for man’s reason, conscience, and free will.
(_c_) Man, as an effect, can be referred only to a cause possessing
self-consciousness and a moral nature, in other words, personality.

This argument is is part an application to man of the principles
of both the Cosmological and the Teleological Arguments. Flint,
Theism, 74—“Although causality does not involve design, nor design
goodness, yet design involves causality, and goodness both
causality and design.” Jacobi: “Nature conceals God; man reveals
him.”

Man is an effect. The history of the geologic ages proves that man
has not always existed, and even if the lower creatures were his
progenitors, his intellect and freedom are not eternal _a parte
ante_. We consider man, not as a physical, but as a spiritual,
being. Thompson, Christian Theism, 75—“Every true cause must be
sufficient to account for the effect.” Locke, Essay, book 4, chap.
10—“Cogitable existence cannot be produced out of incogitable.”
Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:258 _sq._

Even if man had always existed, however, we should not need to
abandon the argument. We might start, not from beginning of
existence, but from beginning of phenomena. I might see God in the
world, just as I see thought, feeling, will, in my fellow men.
Fullerton, Plain Argument for God: I do not infer you, as cause of
the _existence_ of your body: I recognize you as present and
_working_ through your body. Its changes of gesture and speech
reveal a personality behind them. So I do not need to argue back
to a Being who once _caused_ nature and history; I recognize a
_present_ Being, exercising wisdom and power, by signs such as
reveal personality in man. Nature is itself the Watchmaker
manifesting himself in the very process of making the watch. This
is the meaning of the noble Epilogue to Robert Browning’s Dramatis
Personæ, 252—“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or
decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and
knows.” “That Face,” said Mr. Browning to Mrs. Orr, “That Face is
the face of Christ; that is how I feel him.” Nature is an
expression of the mind and will of Christ, as my face is an
expression of my mind and will. But in both cases, behind and
above the face is a personality, of which the face is but the
partial and temporary expression.

Bowne, Philos. Theism, 104, 107—“My fellow beings act _as if_ they
had thought, feeling, and will. So nature looks _as if_ thought,
feeling, and will were behind it. If we deny mind in nature, we
must deny mind in man. If there be no controlling mind in nature,
moreover, there can be none in man, for if the basal power is
blind and necessary, then all that depends upon it is necessitated
also.” LeConte, in Royce’s Conception of God, 44—“There is only
one place in the world where we can get behind physical phenomena,
behind the veil of matter, namely, in our own brain, and we find
there a self, a person. Is it not reasonable that, if we could get
behind the veil of nature, we should find the same, that is, a
Person? But if so, we must conclude, an infinite Person, and
therefore the only complete Personality that exists. Perfect
personality is not only self-conscious, but self-existent. _They_
are only imperfect images, and, as it were, separated fragments,
of the infinite Personality of God.”

Personality = self-consciousness + self-determination in view of
moral ends. The brute has intelligence and will, but has neither
self-consciousness, conscience, nor free-will. See Julius Müller,
Doctrine of Sin, 1:76 _sq._ Diman, Theistic Argument, 91,
251—“Suppose ‘the intuitions of the moral faculty are the slowly
organized results of experience received from the race’; still,
having found that the universe affords evidence of a supremely
intelligent cause, we may believe that man’s moral nature affords
the highest illustration of its mode of working”; 358—“Shall we
explain the lower forms of will by the higher, or the higher by
the lower?”

2. Man’s moral nature proves the existence of a holy Lawgiver and Judge.
The elements of the proof are:—(_a_) Conscience recognizes the existence
of a moral law which has supreme authority. (_b_) Known violations of this
moral law are followed by feelings of ill-desert and fears of judgment.
(_c_) This moral law, since it is not self-imposed, and these threats of
judgment, since they are not self-executing, respectively argue the
existence of a holy will that has imposed the law, and of a punitive power
that will execute the threats of the moral nature.

See Bishop Butler’s Sermons on Human Nature, in Works, Bohn’s ed.,
385-414. Butler’s great discovery was that of the supremacy of
conscience in the moral constitution of man: “Had it strength as
it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would
absolutely govern the world.” Conscience = the moral judiciary of
the soul—not law, nor sheriff, but judge; see under Anthropology.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 251—“Conscience does not lay down a law;
it warns us of the existence of a law; and not only of a law, but
of a purpose—not our own, but the purpose of another, which it is
our mission to realize.” See Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith,
218 _sq._ It proves personality in the Lawgiver, because its
utterances are not abstract, like those of reason, but are in the
nature of command; they are not in the indicative, but in the
imperative, mood; it says, “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” This
argues _will_.

Hutton, Essays, 1:11—“Conscience is an ideal Moses, and thunders
from an invisible Sinai”; “the Atheist regards conscience not as a
skylight, opened to let in upon human nature an infinite dawn from
above, but as a polished arch or dome, completing and reflecting
the whole edifice beneath.” But conscience cannot be the mere
reflection and expression of nature, for it represses and condemns
nature. Tulloch, Theism: “Conscience, like the magnetic needle,
indicates the existence of an unknown Power which from afar
controls its vibrations and at whose presence it trembles.” Nero
spends nights of terror in wandering through the halls of his
Golden House. Kant holds that faith in duty requires faith in a
God who will defend and reward duty—see Critique of Pure Reason,
359-387. See also Porter, Human Intellect, 524.

Kant, in his Metaphysic of Ethics, represents the action of
conscience as like “conducting a case before a court,” and he
adds: “Now that he who is accused before his conscience should be
figured to be just the same person as his judge, is an absurd
representation of a tribunal; since, in such an event, the accuser
would always lose his suit. Conscience must therefore represent to
itself always some other than itself as Judge, unless it is to
arrive at a contradiction with itself.” See also his Critique of
the Practical Reason, Werke, 8:214—“Duty, thou sublime and mighty
name, that hast in thee nothing to attract or win, but challengest
submission; and yet dost threaten nothing to sway the will by that
which may arouse natural terror or aversion, but merely holdest
forth a Law; a Law which of itself finds entrance into the mind,
and even while we disobey, against our will compels our reverence,
a Law in presence of which all inclinations grow dumb, even while
they secretly rebel; what origin is there worthy of thee? Where
can we find the root of thy noble descent, which proudly rejects
all kinship with the inclinations?” Archbishop Temple answers, in
his Bampton Lectures, 58, 59, “This eternal Law is the Eternal
himself, the almighty God.” Robert Browning: “The sense within me
that I owe a debt Assures me—Somewhere must be Somebody, Ready to
take his due. All comes to this: Where due is, there acceptance
follows: find Him who accepts the due.”

Salter, Ethical Religion, quoted in Pfleiderer’s article on
Religionless Morality, Am. Jour. Theol., 3:237—“The earth and the
stars do not create the law of gravitation which they obey; no
more does man, or the united hosts of rational beings in the
universe, create the law of duty.” The will expressed in the moral
imperative is _superior_ to ours, for otherwise it would issue no
commands. Yet it is _one_ with ours as the life of an organism is
one with the life of its members. Theonomy is not heteronomy but
the highest autonomy, the guarantee of our personal freedom
against all servitude of man. Seneca: “Deo parere libertas est.”
Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 272—“In conscience we see an ‘alter
ego’, in us yet not of us, another Personality behind our own.”
Martineau, Types, 2:105—“Over a person only a person can have
authority.... A solitary being, with no other sentient nature in
the universe, would feel no duty”; Study, 1:26—“As Perception
gives us Will in the shape of _Causality_ over against us in the
Non-Ego, so Conscience gives us Will in the shape of _Authority_
over against us in the Non-Ego.... 2:7—We cannot deduce the
phenomena of character from an agent who has none.” Hutton,
Essays, 1:41, 42—“When we disobey conscience, the Power which has
therein ceased to _move_ us has retired only to _observe_—to keep
_watch_ over us as we mould ourselves.” Cardinal Newman, Apologia,
377—“Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my
conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist,
or a polytheist, when I looked into the world.”

3. Man’s emotional and voluntary nature proves the existence of a Being
who can furnish in himself a satisfying object of human affection and an
end which will call forth man’s highest activities and ensure his highest
progress.

Only a Being of power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness, and all these
indefinitely greater than any that we know upon the earth, can meet this
demand of the human soul. Such a Being must exist. Otherwise man’s
greatest need would be unsupplied, and belief in a lie be more productive
of virtue than belief in the truth.

Feuerbach calls God “the Brocken-shadow of man himself”;
“consciousness of God = self-consciousness”; “religion is a dream
of the human soul”; “all theology is anthropology”; “man made God
in his own image.” But conscience shows that man does not
recognize in God simply his like, but also his opposite. Not as
Galton: “Piety = conscience + instability.” The finest minds are
of the leaning type; see Murphy, Scientific Bases, 370; Augustine,
Confessions, 1:1—“Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is
restless till it finds rest in thee.” On John Stuart Mill—“a mind
that could not find God, and a heart that could not do without
him”—see his Autobiography, and Browne, in Strivings for the Faith
(Christ. Ev. Socy.), 259-287. Comte, in his later days,
constructed an object of worship in Universal Humanity, and
invented a ritual which Huxley calls “Catholicism _minus_
Christianity.” See also Tyndall, Belfast Address: “Did I not
believe, said a great man to me once, that an Intelligence exists
at the heart of things, my life on earth would be intolerable.”
Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1:505,506.

The last line of Schiller’s Pilgrim reads: “Und das Dort ist
niemals hier.” The finite never satisfies. Tennyson, Two Voices:
“’Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for
which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.” Seth, Ethical
Principles, 419—“A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the
indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it
cannot attain to its perfect growth.... There is a moral _God_, or
this is no _universe_.” James, Will to Believe, 116—“A God is the
most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to
conceive as lying at the root of the universe. Anything short of
God is not a rational object, anything more than God is not
possible, if man needs an object of knowledge, feeling, and will.”

Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 41—“To speak of the Religion of the
Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the Religion of Humanity,
where the personality of the First Cause is not recognized, is as
unmeaning as it would be to speak of the love of a triangle or the
rationality of the equator.” It was said of Comte’s system that,
“the wine of the real presence being poured out, we are asked to
adore the empty cup.” “We want an object of devotion, and Comte
presents us with a looking-glass” (Martineau). Huxley said he
would as soon adore a wilderness of apes as the Positivist’s
rationalized conception of humanity. It is only the ideal in
humanity, the divine element in humanity that can be worshiped.
And when we once conceive of this, we cannot be satisfied until we
find it somewhere realized, as in Jesus Christ.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265-272—Huxley believes that Evolution is
“a materialized logical process”; that nothing endures save the
flow of energy and “the rational order which pervades it.” In the
earlier part of this process, _nature_, there is no morality or
benevolence. But the process ends by producing _man_, who can make
progress only by waging moral war against the natural forces which
impel him. He must be benevolent and just. Shall we not say, in
spite of Mr. Huxley, that this shows what the nature of the system
is, and that there must be a benevolent and just Being who
ordained it? Martineau, Seat of Authority, 63-68—“Though the
authority of the higher incentive is self-known, it cannot be
self-created; for while it is in me, it is above me.... This
authority to which conscience introduces me, though emerging in
consciousness, is yet _objective_ to us all, and is necessarily
referred to the nature of things, irrespective of the accidents of
our mental constitution. It is not dependent on us, but
independent. All minds born into the universe are ushered into the
presence of a real righteousness, as surely as into a scene of
actual space. Perception reveals _another_ than ourselves;
conscience reveals _a higher_ than ourselves.”

We must freely grant, however, that this argument from man’s
aspirations has weight only upon the supposition that a wise,
truthful, holy, and benevolent God exists, who has so constituted
our minds that their thinking and their affections correspond to
truth and to himself. An evil being might have so constituted us
that all logic would lead us into error. The argument is therefore
the development and expression of our intuitive idea of God.
Luthardt, Fundamental Truths: “Nature is like a written document
containing only consonants. It is we who must furnish the vowels
that shall decipher it. Unless we bring with us the idea of God,
we shall find nature but dumb.” See also Pfleiderer, Die Religion,
1:174.

A. _The defects of the Anthropological Argument are_: (_a_) It cannot
prove a creator of the material universe. (_b_) It cannot prove the
infinity of God, since man from whom we argue is finite. (_c_) It cannot
prove the mercy of God. But,

B. _The value of the Argument_ is, that it assures us of the existence of
a personal Being, who rules us in righteousness, and who is the proper
object of supreme affection and service. But whether this Being is the
original creator of all things, or merely the author of our own existence,
whether he is infinite or finite, whether he is a Being of simple
righteousness or also of mercy, this argument cannot assure us.

Among the arguments for the existence of God, however, we assign to this
the chief place, since it adds to the ideas of causative power (which we
derived from the Cosmological Argument) and of contriving intelligence
(which we derived from the Teleological Argument), the far wider ideas of
personality and righteous lordship.

Sir Wm. Hamilton, Works of Reid, 2:974, note U; Lect. on Metaph.,
1:33—“The only valid arguments for the existence of God and for
the immortality of the soul rest upon the ground of man’s moral
nature”; “theology is wholly dependent upon psychology, for with
the proof of the moral nature of man stands or falls the proof of
the existence of a Deity.” But Diman, Theistic Argument, 244, very
properly objects to making this argument from the nature of man
the sole proof of Deity: “It should be rather used to show the
attributes of the Being whose existence has been already proved
from other sources”; “hence the Anthropological Argument is as
dependent upon the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as they
are upon it.”

Yet the Anthropological Argument is needed to supplement the
conclusions of the two others. Those who, like Herbert Spencer,
recognize an infinite and absolute Being, Power and Cause, may yet
fail to recognize this being as spiritual and personal, simply
because they do not recognize themselves as spiritual and personal
beings, that is, do not recognize reason, conscience and free-will
in man. Agnosticism in philosophy involves agnosticism in
religion. R. K. Eccles: “All the most advanced languages
capitalize the word ‘God,’ and the word ‘I.’ ” See Flint, Theism,
68; Mill, Criticism of Hamilton, 2:266; Dove, Logic of Christian
Faith, 211-236, 261-299; Martineau, Types, Introd., 3; Cooke,
Religion and Chemistry: “God is love; but nature could not prove
it, and the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world in
order to attest it.”

Everything in philosophy depends on where we begin, whether with
nature or with self, whether with the necessary or with the free.
In one sense, therefore, we should in practice begin with the
Anthropological Argument, and then use the Cosmological and
Teleological Arguments as warranting the application to nature of
the conclusions which we have drawn from man. As God stands over
against man in Conscience, and says to him: “Thou”; so man stands
over against God in Nature, and may say to him: “Thou.” Mulford,
Republic of God, 28—“As the personality of man has its foundation
in the personality of God, so the realization by man of his own
personality always brings man nearer to God.” Robert Browning:
“Quoth a young Sadducee: ‘Reader of many rolls, Is it so certain
we Have, as they tell us, souls?’ ‘Son, there is no reply!’ The
Rabbi bit his beard: ‘Certain, a soul have _I_—_We_ may have
none,’ he sneered. Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s Hammer, The
Right-hand Temple-column, Taught babes in grace their grammar, And
struck the simple, solemn.”

It is very common at this place to treat of what are called the
Historical and the Biblical Arguments for the existence of God—the
former arguing, from the unity of history, the latter arguing,
from the unity of the Bible, that this unity must in each case
have for its cause and explanation the existence of God. It is a
sufficient reason for not discussing these arguments, that,
without a previous belief in the existence of God, no one will see
unity either in history or in the Bible. Turner, the painter,
exhibited a picture which seemed all mist and cloud until he put a
dab of scarlet into it. That gave the true point of view, and all
the rest became intelligible. So Christ’s coming and Christ’s
blood make intelligible both the Scriptures and human history. He
carries in his girdle the key to all mysteries. Schopenhauer,
knowing no Christ, admitted no philosophy of history. He regarded
history as the mere fortuitous play of individual caprice. Pascal:
“Jesus Christ is the centre of everything, and the object of
everything, and he that does not know him knows nothing of nature,
and nothing of himself.”

IV. The Ontological Argument, or Argument from our Abstract and Necessary
Ideas.

This argument infers the existence of God from the abstract and necessary
ideas of the human mind. It has three forms:

1. That of Samuel Clarke. Space and time are attributes of substance or
being. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There
must therefore be an infinite and eternal substance or Being to whom these
attributes belong.

Gillespie states the argument somewhat differently. Space and time are
modes of existence. But space and time are respectively infinite and
eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal Being who
subsists in these modes. But we reply:

Space and time are neither attributes of substance nor modes of existence.
The argument, if valid, would prove that God is not mind but matter, for
that could not be mind, but only matter, of which space and time were
either attributes or modes.

The Ontological Argument is frequently called the _a priori_
argument, that is, the argument from that which is logically
prior, or earlier than experience, viz., our intuitive ideas. All
the forms of the Ontological Argument are in this sense _a
priori_. Space and time are _a priori_ ideas. See Samuel Clarke,
Works, 2:521; Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God. _Per contra_,
see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 364: Calderwood, Moral
Philosophy, 226—“To begin, as Clarke did, with the proposition
that ‘something has existed from eternity,’ is virtually to
propose an argument after having assumed what is to be proved.
Gillespie’s form of the _a priori_ argument, starting with the
proposition ‘infinity of extension is necessarily existing,’ is
liable to the same objection, with the additional disadvantage of
attributing a property of matter to the Deity.”

H. B. Smith says that Brougham misrepresented Clarke: “Clarke’s
argument is in his sixth proposition, and supposes the existence
proved in what goes before. He aims here to establish the
infinitude and omnipresence of this First Being. He does not prove
_existence_ from immensity.” But we reply, neither can he prove
the _infinity_ of God from the immensity of space. Space and time
are neither substances nor attributes, but are rather relations;
see Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 331-335; Cocker, Theistic
Conception of the World, 66-96. The doctrine that space and time
are attributes or modes of God’s existence tends to materialistic
pantheism like that of Spinoza, who held that “the one and simple
substance” (substantia una et unica) is known to us through the
two attributes of thought and extension; mind = God in the mode of
thought; matter = God in the mode of extension. Dove, Logic of the
Christian Faith, 127, says well that an extended God is a material
God; “space and time are attributes neither of matter nor mind”;
“we must carry the moral idea into the natural world, not the
natural idea into the moral world.” See also, Blunt, Dictionary
Doct. and Hist. Theol., 740; Porter, Human Intellect, 567. H. M.
Stanley, on Space and Science, in Philos. Rev., Nov.
1898:615—“Space is not full of things, but things are spaceful....
Space is a form of dynamic appearance.” Prof. C. A. Strong: “The
world composed of consciousness and other existences is not in
space, though it may be in something of which space is the
symbol.”

2. That of Descartes. We have the idea of an infinite and perfect Being.
This idea cannot be derived from imperfect and finite things. There must
therefore be an infinite and perfect Being who is its cause.

But we reply that this argument confounds the idea of the infinite with an
infinite idea. Man’s idea of the infinite is not infinite but finite, and
from a finite effect we cannot argue an infinite cause.

This form of the Ontological Argument, while it is _a priori_, as
based upon a necessary idea of the human mind, is, unlike the
other forms of the same argument, _a posteriori_, as arguing from
this idea, as an _effect_, to the existence of a Being who is its
_cause_. _A posteriori_ argument = from that which is later to
that which is earlier, that is, from effect to cause. The
Cosmological, Teleological, and Anthropological Arguments are
arguments _a posteriori_. Of this sort is the argument of
Descartes; see Descartes, Meditation 3: “Hæc idea quæ in nobis est
requirit Deum pro causa; Deusque proinde existit.” The idea in
men’s minds is the impression of the workman’s name stamped
indelibly on his work—the shadow cast upon the human soul by that
unseen One of whose being and presence it dimly informs us. Blunt,
Dict. of Theol., 739; Saisset, Pantheism, 1:54—“Descartes sets out
from a fact of consciousness, while Anselm sets out from an
abstract conception”; “Descartes’s argument might be considered a
branch of the Anthropological or Moral Argument, but for the fact
that this last proceeds from man’s constitution rather than from
his abstract ideas.” See Bib. Sac., 1849:637.

3. That of Anselm. We have the idea of an absolutely perfect Being. But
existence is an attribute of perfection. An absolutely perfect Being must
therefore exist.

But we reply that this argument confounds ideal existence with real
existence. Our ideas are not the measure of external reality.

Anselm, Proslogion, 2—“Id, quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest
esse in intellectu solo.” See translation of the Proslogion, in
Bib. Sac., 1851:529, 699; Kant, Critique, 368. The arguments of
Descartes and Anselm, with Kant’s reply, are given in their
original form by Harris, in Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:420-428. The
major premise here is not that all perfect ideas imply the
existence of the object which they represent, for then, as Kant
objects, I might argue from my perfect idea of a $100 bill that I
actually possessed the same, which would be far from the fact. So
I have a perfect idea of a perfectly evil being, of a centaur, of
nothing,—but it does not follow that the evil being, that the
centaur, that nothing, exists. The argument is rather from the
idea of absolute and perfect Being—of “that, no greater than which
can be conceived.” There can be but one such being, and there can
be but one such idea.

Yet, even thus understood, we cannot argue from the idea to the
actual existence of such a being. Case, Physical Realism, 173—“God
is not an idea, and consequently cannot be inferred from mere
ideas.” Bowne, Philos. Theism, 43—The Ontological Argument “only
points out that the idea of the perfect must include the idea of
existence; but there is nothing to show that the self-consistent
idea represents an objective reality.” I can imagine the
Sea-serpent, the Jinn of the Thousand and One Nights, “The
Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their
shoulders.” The winged horse of Uhland possessed every possible
virtue, and only one fault,—it was dead. If every perfect idea
implied the reality of its object, there might be horses with ten
legs, and trees with roots in the air.

“Anselm’s argument implies,” says Fisher, in Journ. Christ.
Philos., Jan. 1883:114, “that existence _in re_ is a constituent
of the concept. It would conclude the existence of a being from
the definition of a word. This inference is justified only on the
basis of philosophical realism.” Dove, Logic of the Christ. Faith,
141—“The Ontological Argument is the algebraic formula of the
universe, which leads to a valid conclusion with regard to real
existence, only when we fill it in with objects with which we
become acquainted in the arguments _a posteriori_.” See also
Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:331, Dogm. Theol., 1:221-241, and in Presb.
Rev., April, 1884:212-227 (favoring the argument); Fisher, Essays,
574; Thompson, Christian Theism, 171; H. B. Smith, Introd. to
Christ. Theol., 122; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:181-187; Studien
und Kritiken, 1875:611-655.

Dorner, in his Glaubenslehre, 1:197, gives us the best statement
of the Ontological Argument: “Reason thinks of God as existing.
Reason would not be reason, if it did not think of God as
existing. Reason only is, upon the assumption that God is.” But
this is evidently not argument, but only vivid statement of the
necessary assumption of the existence of an absolute Reason which
conditions and gives validity to ours.

Although this last must be considered the most perfect form of the
Ontological Argument, it is evident that it conducts us only to an ideal
conclusion, not to real existence. In common with the two preceding forms
of the argument, moreover, it tacitly assumes, as already existing in the
human mind, that very knowledge of God’s existence which it would derive
from logical demonstration. It has value, therefore, simply as showing
what God must be, if he exists at all.

But the existence of a Being indefinitely great, a personal Cause,
Contriver and Lawgiver, has been proved by the preceding arguments; for
the law of parsimony requires us to apply the conclusions of the first
three arguments to one Being, and not to many. To this one Being we may
now ascribe the infinity and perfection, the idea of which lies at the
basis of the Ontological Argument—ascribe them, not because they are
demonstrably his, but because our mental constitution will not allow us to
think otherwise. Thus clothing him with all perfections which the human
mind can conceive, and these in illimitable fullness, we have one whom we
may justly call God.

McCosh, Div. Govt., 12, note—“It is at this place, if we do not
mistake, that the idea of the Infinite comes in. The capacity of
the human mind to form such an idea, or rather its intuitive
belief in an Infinite of which it feels that it cannot form an
adequate conception, may be no proof (as Kant maintains) of the
existence of an infinite Being; but it is, we are convinced, the
means by which the mind is enabled to invest the Deity, shown on
other grounds to exist, with the attributes of infinity, _i. e._,
to look on his being, power, goodness, and all his perfections, as
infinite.” Even Flint, Theism, 68, who holds that we reach the
existence of God by inference, speaks of “necessary conditions of
thought and feeling, and ineradicable aspirations, which force on
us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will
neither permit us to deny these perfections to God, nor to ascribe
them to any other being.” Belief in God is not the conclusion of a
demonstration, but the solution of a problem. Calderwood, Moral
Philosophy, 226—“Either the whole question is assumed in starting,
or the Infinite is not reached in concluding.”

Clarke, Christian Theology, 97-114, divides his proof into two
parts: I. Evidence of the existence of God from the intellectual
starting-point: The discovery of _Mind_ in the universe is made,
1. through the intelligibleness of the universe to us; 2. through
the idea of cause; 3. through the presence of ends in the
universe. II. Evidence of the existence of God from the religious
starting-point: The discovery of the _good God_ is made, 1.
through the religious nature of man; 2. through the great
dilemma—God the best, or the worst; 3. through the spiritual
experience of men, especially in Christianity. So far as Dr.
Clarke’s proof is intended to be a statement, not of a primitive
belief, but of a logical process, we must hold it to be equally
defective with the three forms of proof which we have seen to
furnish some corroborative evidence of God’s existence. Dr. Clarke
therefore does well to add: “Religion was not produced by proof of
God’s existence, and will not be destroyed by its insufficiency to
some minds. Religion existed before argument; in fact, it is the
preciousness of religion that leads to the seeking for all
possible confirmations of the reality of God.”

The three forms of proof already mentioned—the Cosmological, the
Teleological, and the Anthropological Arguments—may be likened to
the three arches of a bridge over a wide and rushing river. The
bridge has only two defects, but these defects are very serious.
The first is that one cannot get on to the bridge; the end toward
the hither bank is wholly lacking; the bridge of logical argument
cannot be entered upon except by assuming the validity of logical
processes; this assumption takes for granted at the outset the
existence of a God who has made our faculties to act correctly; we
get on to the bridge, not by logical process, but only by a leap
of intuition, and by assuming at the beginning the very thing
which we set out to prove. The second defect of the so-called
bridge of argument is that when one has once gotten on, he can
never get off. The connection with the further bank is also
lacking. All the premises from which we argue being finite, we are
warranted in drawing only a finite conclusion. Argument cannot
reach the Infinite, and only an infinite Being is worthy to be
called God. We can get off from our logical bridge, not by logical
process, but only by another and final leap of intuition, and by
once more assuming the existence of the infinite Being whom we had
so vainly sought to reach by mere argument. The process seems to
be referred to in _Job 11:7—_“Canst thou by searching find out
God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?”

As a logical process this is indeed defective, since all logic as well as
all observation depends for its validity upon the presupposed existence of
God, and since this particular process, even granting the validity of
logic in general, does not warrant the conclusion that God exists, except
upon a second assumption that our abstract ideas of infinity and
perfection are to be applied to the Being to whom argument has actually
conducted us.

But although both ends of the logical bridge are confessedly wanting, the
process may serve and does serve a more useful purpose than that of mere
demonstration, namely, that of awakening, explicating, and confirming a
conviction which, though the most fundamental of all, may yet have been
partially slumbering for lack of thought.

Morell, Philos. Fragments, 177, 179—“We can, in fact, no more
prove the existence of a God by a logical argument, than we can
prove the existence of an external world; but none the less may we
obtain as strong a _practical_ conviction of the one, as the
other.” “We arrive at a scientific belief in the existence of God
just as we do at any other possible human truth. We _assume_ it,
as a hypothesis absolutely necessary to account for the phenomena
of the universe; and then evidences from every quarter begin to
converge upon it, until, in process of time, the common sense of
mankind, cultivated and enlightened by ever accumulating
knowledge, pronounces upon the validity of the hypothesis with a
voice scarcely less decided and universal than it does in the case
of our highest scientific convictions.”

Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 572—“What then is the
purport and force of the several arguments for the existence of
God? We reply that these proofs are the different modes in which
faith expresses itself and seeks confirmation. In them faith, or
the object of faith, is more exactly conceived and defined, and in
them is found a corroboration, not arbitrary but substantial and
valuable, of that faith which springs from the soul itself. Such
proofs, therefore, are neither on the one hand sufficient to
create and sustain faith, nor are they on the other hand to be set
aside as of no value.” A. J. Barrett: “The arguments are not so
much a bridge in themselves, as they are guys, to hold firm the
great suspension-bridge of intuition, by which we pass the gulf
from man to God. Or, while they are not a ladder by which we may
reach heaven, they are the Ossa on Pelion, from whose combined
height we may descry heaven.”

Anselm: “Negligentia mihi videtur, si postquam confirmati sumus in
fide non studemus quod credimus intelligere.” Bradley, Appearance
and Reality: “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what
we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an
instinct.” Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality, lect.
III—“Belief in a personal God is an instinctive judgment,
progressively justified by reason.” Knight, Essays in Philosophy,
241—The arguments are “historical memorials of the efforts of the
human race to vindicate to itself the existence of a reality of
which it is conscious, but which it cannot perfectly define.” H.
Fielding, The Hearts of Men, 313—“Creeds are the grammar of
religion. They are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words
are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed
afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse.
As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must
follow.” Pascal: “The heart has reasons of its own which the
reason does not know.” Frances Power Cobbe: “Intuitions are God’s
tuitions.” On the whole subject, see Cudworth, Intel. System,
3:42; Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 150 _sq._; Curtis, Human
Element in Inspiration, 242; Peabody, in Andover Rev., July, 1884;
Hahn, History of Arguments for Existence of God; Lotze, Philos. of
Religion, 8-34; Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906:53-71.

Hegel, in his Logic, page 3, speaking of the disposition to regard
the proofs of God’s existence as the only means of producing faith
in God, says: “Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we said
that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge of
the chemical, botanical and zoölogical qualities of our food; and
that we must delay digestion till we had finished the study of
anatomy and physiology.” It is a mistake to suppose that there can
be no religious _life_ without a correct _theory_ of life. Must I
refuse to drink water or to breathe air, until I can manufacture
both for myself? Some things are given to us. Among these things
are “grace and truth”_ (John 1:17; __cf.__ 9)_. But there are ever
those who are willing to take nothing as a free gift, and who
insist on working out all knowledge, as well as all salvation, by
processes of their own. Pelagianism, with its denial of the
doctrines of grace, is but the further development of a
rationalism which refuses to accept primitive truths unless these
can be logically demonstrated. Since the existence of the soul, of
the world, and of God cannot be proved in this way, rationalism is
led to curtail, or to misinterpret, the deliverances of
consciousness, and hence result certain systems now to be
mentioned.

Chapter III. Erroneous Explanations, And Conclusion.

Any correct explanation of the universe must postulate an intuitive
knowledge of the existence of the external world, of self, and of God. The
desire for scientific unity, however, has occasioned attempts to reduce
these three factors to one, and according as one or another of the three
has been regarded as the all-inclusive principle, the result has been
Materialism, Materialistic Idealism, or Idealistic Pantheism. This
scientific impulse is better satisfied by a system which we may designate
as Ethical Monism.

We may summarize the present chapter as follows: 1. _Materialism_:
Universe = Atoms. Reply: Atoms can do nothing without force, and
can be nothing (intelligible) without ideas. 2. _Materialistic
Idealism_: Universe = Force + Ideas. Reply: Ideas belong to Mind,
and Force can be exerted only by Will. 3. _Idealistic Pantheism_:
Universe = Immanent and Impersonal Mind and Will. Reply: Spirit in
man shows that the Infinite Spirit must be Transcendent and
Personal Mind and Will. We are led from these three forms of error
to a conclusion which we may denominate 4. _Ethical Monism_:
Universe = Finite, partial, graded manifestation of the divine
Life; Matter being God’s self-limitation under the law of
necessity, Humanity being God’s self-limitation under the law of
freedom, Incarnation and Atonement being God’s self-limitations
under the law of grace. Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of
one Substance, Principle, or Ground of Being, is consistent with
Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally
distinct from matter on the one hand and from God on the other.

I. Materialism.

Materialism is that method of thought which gives priority to matter,
rather than to mind, in its explanations of the universe. Upon this view,
material atoms constitute the ultimate and fundamental reality of which
all things, rational and irrational, are but combinations and phenomena.
Force is regarded as a universal and inseparable property of matter.

The element of truth in materialism is the reality of the external world.
Its error is in regarding the external world as having original and
independent existence, and in regarding mind as its product.

Materialism regards atoms as the bricks of which the material
universe, the house we inhabit, is built. Sir William Thomson
(Lord Kelvin) estimates that, if a drop of water were magnified to
the size of our earth, the atoms of which it consists would
certainly appear larger than boy’s marbles, and yet would be
smaller than billiard balls. Of these atoms, all things, visible
and invisible, are made. Mind, with all its activities, is a
combination or phenomenon of atoms. “Man ist was er iszt: ohne
Phosphor kein Gedanke”—“One _is_ what he _eats_: without
phosphorus, no thought.” Ethics is a bill of fare; and worship,
like heat, is a mode of motion. Agassiz, however, wittily asked:
“Are fishermen, then, more intelligent than farmers, because they
eat so much fish, and therefore take in more phosphorus?”

It is evident that much is here attributed to atoms which really
belongs to force. Deprive atoms of force, and all that remains is
extension, which = space = zero. Moreover, “if atoms _are_
extended, they cannot be ultimate, for extension implies
divisibility, and that which is conceivably divisible cannot be a
philosophical ultimate. But, if atoms _are not_ extended, then
even an infinite multiplication and combination of them could not
produce an extended substance. Furthermore, an atom that is
neither extended substance nor thinking substance is
inconceivable. The real ultimate is force, and this force cannot
be exerted by nothing, but, as we shall hereafter see, can be
exerted only by a personal Spirit, for this alone possesses the
characteristics of reality, namely, definiteness, unity, and
activity.”

Not only force but also intelligence must be attributed to atoms,
before they can explain any operation of nature. Herschel says not
only that “the force of gravitation seems like that of a universal
will,” but that the atoms themselves, in recognizing each other in
order to combine, show a great deal of “presence of mind.” Ladd,
Introd. to Philosophy, 269—“A distinguished astronomer has said
that every body in the solar system is behaving as if it knew
precisely how it ought to behave in consistency with its own
nature, and with the behavior of every other body in the same
system.... Each atom has danced countless millions of miles, with
countless millions of different partners, many of which required
an important modification of its mode of motion, without ever
departing from the correct step or the right time.” J. P. Cooke,
Credentials of Science, 104, 177, suggests that something more
than atoms is needed to explain the universe. A correlating
Intelligence and Will must be assumed. Atoms by themselves would
be like a heap of loose nails which need to be magnetized if they
are to hold together. All structures would be resolved, and all
forms of matter would disappear, if the Presence which sustains
them were withdrawn. The atom, like the monad of Leibnitz, is
“parvus in suo genere deus”—“a little god in its nature”—only
because it is the expression of the mind and will of an immanent
God.

Plato speaks of men who are “dazzled by too near a look at
material things.” They do not perceive that these very material
things, since they can be interpreted only in terms of spirit,
must themselves be essentially spiritual. Materialism is the
explanation of a world of which we know something—the world of
mind—by a world of which we know next to nothing—the world of
matter. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 297, 298—“How about your material
atoms and brain-molecules? They have no real existence save as
objects of thought, and therefore the very thought, which you say
your atoms produce, turns out to be the essential precondition of
their own existence.” With this agree the words of Dr. Ladd:
“Knowledge of matter involves repeated activities of sensation and
reflection, of inductive and deductive inference, of intuitional
belief in substance. These are all activities of mind. Only as the
mind has a self-conscious life, is any knowledge of what matter
is, or can do, to be gained.... Everything is real which is the
permanent subject of changing states. That which touches, feels,
sees, is more real than that which is touched, felt, seen.”

H. N. Gardner, Presb. Rev., 1885:301, 665, 666—“Mind gives to
matter its chief meaning,—hence matter alone can never explain the
universe.” Gore, Incarnation, 31—“Mind is not the _product_ of
nature, but the necessary _constituent_ of nature, considered as
an ordered knowable system.” Fraser, Philos. of Theism: “An
immoral act must originate in the immoral agent; a physical effect
is not _known_ to originate in its physical cause.” Matter,
inorganic and organic, presupposes mind; but it is not true that
mind presupposes matter. LeConte: “If I could remove your brain
cap, what would I see? Only physical changes. But you—what do you
perceive? Consciousness, thought, emotion, will. Now take external
nature, the Cosmos. The observer from the outside sees only
physical phenomena. But must there not be in this case also—on the
other side—psychical phenomena, a Self, a Person, a Will?”

The impossibility of finding in matter, regarded as mere atoms,
any of the attributes of a cause, has led to a general abandonment
of this old Materialism of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius,
Condillac, Holbach, Feuerbach, Büchner; and Materialistic Idealism
has taken its place, which instead of regarding force as a
property of matter, regards matter as a manifestation of force.
From this section we therefore pass to Materialistic Idealism, and
inquire whether the universe can be interpreted simply as a system
of force and of ideas. A quarter of a century ago, John Tyndall,
in his opening address as President of the British Association at
Belfast, declared that in matter was to be found the promise and
potency of every form of life. But in 1898, Sir William Crookes,
in his address as President of that same British Association,
reversed the apothegm, and declared that in life he saw the
promise and potency of every form of matter. See Lange, History of
Materialism; Janet, Materialism; Fabri, Materialismus; Herzog,
Encyclopädie, art.: Materialismus; but esp., Stallo, Modern
Physics, 148-170.

In addition to the general error indicated above, we object to this system
as follows:

1. In knowing matter, the mind necessarily judges itself to be different
in kind, and higher in rank, than the matter which it knows.

We here state simply an intuitive conviction. The mind, in using
its physical organism and through it bringing external nature into
its service, recognizes itself as different from and superior to
matter. See Martineau, quoted in Brit. Quar., April, 1882:173, and
the article of President Thomas Hill in the Bibliotheca Sacra,
April, 1852:353—“All that is really given by the act of
sense-perception is the existence of the conscious self, floating
in boundless space and boundless time, surrounded and sustained by
boundless power. The material moved, which we at first think the
great reality, is only the shadow of a real being, which is
immaterial.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 317—“Imagine an
infinitesimal being in the brain, watching the action of the
molecules, but missing the thought. So science observes the
universe, but misses God.” Hebberd, in Journ. Spec. Philos.,
April, 1886:135.

Robert Browning, “the subtlest assertor of the soul in song,”
makes the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, say: “Mind is not
matter, nor from matter, but above.” So President Francis Wayland:
“What is mind?” “No matter.” “What is matter?” “Never mind.”
Sully, The Human Mind, 2:369—“Consciousness is a reality wholly
disparate from material processes, and cannot therefore be
resolved into these. Materialism makes that which is immediately
known (our mental states) subordinate to that which is only
indirectly or inferentially known (external things). Moreover, a
material entity existing _per se_ out of relation to a cogitant
mind is an absurdity.” As materialists work out their theory,
their so-called matter grows more and more ethereal, until at last
a stage is reached when it cannot be distinguished from what
others call spirit. Martineau: “The matter they describe is so
exceedingly clever that it is up to anything, even to writing
Hamlet and discovering its own evolution. In short, but for the
spelling of its name, it does not seem to differ appreciably from
our old friends, Mind and God.” A. W. Momerie, in Christianity and
Evolution, 54—“A being conscious of his unity cannot possibly be
formed out of a number of atoms unconscious of their diversity.
Any one who thinks this possible is capable of asserting that half
a dozen fools might be compounded into a single wise man.”

2. Since the mind’s attributes of (_a_) continuous identity, (_b_)
self-activity, (_c_) unrelatedness to space, are different in kind and
higher in rank than the attributes of matter, it is rational to conclude
that mind is itself different in kind from matter and higher in rank than
matter.

This is an argument from specific qualities to that which
underlies and explains the qualities. (_a_) Memory proves personal
identity. This is not an identity of material atoms, for atoms
change. The molecules that come cannot remember those that depart.
Some immutable part in the brain? organized or unorganized?
Organized decays; unorganized = soul. (_b_) Inertia shows that
matter is not self-moving. It acts only as it is acted upon. A
single atom would never move. Two portions are necessary, and
these, in order to useful action, require adjustment by a power
which does not belong to matter. Evolution of the universe
inexplicable, unless matter were first moved by some power outside
itself. See Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 92. (_c_) The highest
activities of mind are independent of known physical conditions.
Mind controls and subdues the body. It does not cease to grow when
the growth of the body ceases. When the body nears dissolution,
the mind often asserts itself most strikingly.

Kant: “Unity of apprehension is possible on account of the
transcendental unity of self-consciousness.” I get my idea of
unity from the indivisible self. Stout, Manual of Psychology,
53—“So far as matter exists independently of its presentation to a
cognitive subject, it cannot have material properties, such as
extension, hardness, color, weight, etc.... The world of material
phenomena presupposes a system of immaterial agency. In this
immaterial system the individual consciousness originates. This
agency, some say, is _thought_, others _will_.” A. J. Dubois, in
Century Magazine, Dec. 1894:228—Since each thought involves a
molecular movement in the brain, and this moves the whole
universe, mind is the secret of the universe, and we should
interpret nature as the expression of underlying purpose. Science
is mind following the traces of mind. There can be no mind without
antecedent mind. That all human beings have the same mental modes
shows that these modes are not due simply to environment. Bowne:
“Things act upon the mind and the mind reacts with knowledge.
Knowing is not a passive receiving, but an active construing.”
Wundt: “We are compelled to admit that the physical development is
not the cause, but much more the effect, of psychical
development.”

Paul Carus, Soul of Man, 52-64, defines soul as “the form of an
organism,” and memory as “the psychical aspect of the preservation
of form in living substance.” This seems to give priority to the
organism rather than to the soul, regardless of the fact that
without soul no organism is conceivable. Clay cannot be the
ancestor of the potter, nor stone the ancestor of the mason, nor
wood the ancestor of the carpenter. W. N. Clarke, Christian
Theology, 99—“The intelligibleness of the universe to us is strong
and ever present evidence that there is an all-pervading rational
Mind, from which the universe received its character.” We must add
to the maxim, “Cogito, ergo sum,” the other maxim, “Intelligo,
ergo Deus est.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:273—“The whole
idealistic philosophy of modern times is in fact only the carrying
out and grounding of the conviction that Nature is ordered by
Spirit and for Spirit, as a subservient means for its eternal
ends; that it is therefore not, as the heathen naturalism thought,
the one and all, the last and highest of things, but has the
Spirit, and the moral Ends over it, as its Lord and Master.” The
consciousness by which things are known precedes the things
themselves, in the order of logic, and therefore cannot be
explained by them or derived from them. See Porter, Human
Intellect, 22, 131, 132. McCosh, Christianity and Positivism,
chap. on Materialism; Divine Government, 71-94; Intuitions,
140-145. Hopkins, Study of Man, 53-56; Morell, Hist. of
Philosophy, 318-334; Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 403; Theol.
Eclectic, 6:555; Appleton, Works, 1:151-154; Calderwood, Moral
Philos., 235; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688-725, and synopsis, in
Bap. Quar., July, 1873:380.

3. Mind rather than matter must therefore be regarded as the original and
independent entity, unless it can be scientifically demonstrated that mind
is material in its origin and nature. But all attempts to explain the
psychical from the physical, or the organic from the inorganic, are
acknowledged failures. The most that can be claimed is, that psychical are
always accompanied by physical changes, and that the inorganic is the
basis and support of the organic. Although the precise connection between
the mind and the body is unknown, the fact that the continuity of physical
changes is unbroken in times of psychical activity renders it certain that
mind is not transformed physical force. If the facts of sensation indicate
the dependence of mind upon body, the facts of volition equally indicate
the dependence of body upon mind.

The chemist can produce _organic_, but not _organized_,
substances. The _life_ cannot be produced from matter. Even in
living things progress is secured only by plan. Multiplication of
desired advantage, in the Darwinian scheme, requires a selecting
thought; in other words the natural selection is artificial
selection after all. John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature,
109—“Cerebral physiology tells us that, during the present life,
although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection
with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought
and feeling be in any sense the product of matter. Nothing could
be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis,
that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is
not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What
goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular
movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way
correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants.”

Leibnitz’s “preëstablished harmony” indicates the difficulty of
defining the relation between mind and matter. They are like two
entirely disconnected clocks, the one of which has a dial and
indicates the hour by its hands, while the other without a dial
simultaneously indicates the same hour by its striking apparatus.
To Leibnitz the world is an aggregate of atomic souls leading
absolutely separate lives. There is no real action of one upon
another. Everything in the monad is the development of its
individual unstimulated activity. Yet there is a preëstablished
harmony of them all, arranged from the beginning by the Creator.
The internal development of each monad is so adjusted to that of
all the other monads, as to produce the false impression that they
are mutually influenced by each other (see Johnson, in Andover
Rev., Apl. 1890:407, 408). Leibnitz’s theory involves the complete
rejection of the freedom of the human will in the libertarian
sense. To escape from this arbitrary connection of mind and matter
in Leibnitz’s preëstablished harmony, Spinoza rejected the
Cartesian doctrine of two God-created substances, and maintained
that there is but one fundamental substance, namely, God himself
(see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 172).

There is an increased flow of blood to the head in times of mental
activity. Sometimes, in intense heat of literary composition, the
blood fairly surges through the brain. No diminution, but further
increase, of physical activity accompanies the greatest efforts of
mind. Lay a man upon a balance; fire a pistol shot or inject
suddenly a great thought into his mind; at once he will tip the
balance, and tumble upon his head. Romanes, Mind and Motion,
21—“Consciousness causes physical changes, but not _vice versa_.
To say that mind is a function of motion is to say that mind is a
function of itself, since motion exists only for mind. Better
suppose the physical and the psychical to be only one, as in the
violin sound and vibration are one. Volition is a cause in nature
because it has cerebration for its obverse and inseparable side.
But if there is no motion without mind, then there can be no
universe without God.”... 34—“Because within the limits of human
experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does
not follow that mind cannot exist without brain. Helmholtz’s
explanation of the effect of one of Beethoven’s sonatas on the
brain may be perfectly correct, but the explanation of the effect
given by a musician may be equally correct within its category.”

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1:§ 56—“Two things,
mind and nervous action, exist together, but we cannot imagine how
they are related” (see review of Spencer’s Psychology, in N.
Englander, July, 1873). Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 120—“The
passage from the physics of the brain to the facts of
consciousness is unthinkable.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion,
95—“The metamorphosis of vibrations into conscious ideas is a
miracle, in comparison with which the floating of iron or the
turning of water into wine is easily credible.” Bain, Mind and
Body, 131—There is no break in the physical continuity. See Brit.
Quar., Jan. 1874; art. by Herbert, on Mind and the Science of
Energy; McCosh, Intuitions, 145; Talbot, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871.
On Geulincx’s “occasional causes” and Descartes’s dualism, see
Martineau, Types, 144, 145, 156-158, and Study, 2:77.

4. The materialistic theory, denying as it does the priority of spirit,
can furnish no sufficient cause for the highest features of the existing
universe, namely, its personal intelligences, its intuitive ideas, its
free-will, its moral progress, its beliefs in God and immortality.

Herbert, Modern Realism Examined: “Materialism has no physical
evidence of the existence of consciousness in others. As it
declares our fellow men to be destitute of free volition, so it
should declare them destitute of consciousness; should call them,
as well as brutes, pure automata. If physics are all, there is no
God, but there is also no man, existing.” Some of the early
followers of Descartes used to kick and beat their dogs, laughing
meanwhile at their cries and calling them the “creaking of the
machine.” Huxley, who calls the brutes “conscious automata,”
believes in the gradual banishment, from all regions of human
thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity: “A spontaneous
act is an absurdity; it is simply an effect that is uncaused.”

James, Psychology, 1:149—“The girl in Midshipman Easy could not
excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying that ‘it was a very
small one.’ And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate
birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes
to explain all facts by continued evolution.... Materialism denies
reality to almost all the impulses which we most cherish. Hence it
will fail of universal adoption.” Clerk Maxwell, Life, 391—“The
atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking
about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to
form a man of feeling.... 426—I have looked into most
philosophical systems, and I have seen none that will work without
a God.” President E. B. Andrews: “Mind is the only substantive
thing in this universe, and all else is adjective. Matter is not
primordial, but is a function of spirit.” Theodore Parker: “Man is
the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds
nothing so tall or grand as himself, nothing so valuable to him.
The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope—the star
that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at.”

Materialism makes men to be “a serio-comic procession of wax
figures or of cunning casts in clay” (Bowne). Man is “the
cunningest of clocks.” But if there were nothing but matter, there
could be no materialism, for a system of thought, like
materialism, implies consciousness. Martineau, Types, preface,
xii, xiii—“It was the irresistible pleading of the moral
consciousness which first drove me to rebel against the limits of
the merely scientific conception. It became incredible to me that
nothing was possible except the actual.... Is there then no _ought
to be_, other than _what is_?” Dewey, Psychology, 84—“A world
without ideal elements would be one in which the home would be
four walls and a roof to keep out cold and wet; the table a mess
for animals; and the grave a hole in the ground.” Omar Khayyám,
Rubaiyat, stanza 72—“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, Lift not your hands to
It for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.” Victor Hugo:
“You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers?
Why then is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to
fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart....
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear the immortal
symphonies of the worlds which invite me.”

Diman, Theistic Argument, 348—“Materialism can never explain the
fact that matter is always combined with force. Coördinate
principles? then dualism, instead of monism. Force cause of
matter? then we preserve unity, but destroy materialism; for we
trace matter to an immaterial source. Behind multiplicity of
natural forces we must postulate some single power—which can be
nothing but coördinating mind.” Mark Hopkins sums up Materialism
in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1879:490—“1. Man, who is a person, is made
by a thing, _i. e._, matter. 2. Matter is to be worshiped as man’s
maker, if anything is to be (_Rom. 1:25_). 3. Man is to worship
himself—his God is his belly.” See also Martineau, Religion and
Materialism, 25-31, Types, 1: preface, xii, xiii, and Study,
1:248, 250, 345; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief,
145-161; Buchanan, Modern Atheism, 247, 248; McCosh, in
International Rev., Jan. 1895; Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1875, art.: Man
Transcorporeal; Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain; Laycock,
Mind and Brain; Diman, Theistic Argument, 358; Wilkinson, in
Present Day Tracts, 3:no. 17; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:487-499; A.
H. Strong, Philos. and Relig., 31-38.

II. Materialistic Idealism.

Idealism proper is that method of thought which regards all knowledge as
conversant only with affections of the percipient mind.

Its element of truth is the fact that these affections of the percipient
mind are the conditions of our knowledge. Its error is in denying that
through these and in these we know that which exists independently of our
consciousness.

The idealism of the present day is mainly a materialistic idealism. It
defines matter and mind alike in terms of sensation, and regards both as
opposite sides or successive manifestations of one underlying and
unknowable force.

Modern subjective idealism is the development of a principle found
as far back as Locke. Locke derived all our knowledge from
sensation; the mind only combines ideas which sensation furnishes,
but gives no material of its own. Berkeley held that externally we
can be sure only of sensations,—cannot be sure that any external
world exists apart from mind. Berkeley’s idealism, however, was
objective; for he maintained that while things do not exist
independently of consciousness, they do exist independently of
_our_ consciousness, namely, in the mind of God, who in a correct
philosophy takes the place of a mindless external world as the
cause of our ideas. Kant, in like manner, held to existences
outside of our own minds, although he regarded these existences as
unknown and unknowable. Over against these forms of objective
idealism we must put the subjective idealism of Hume, who held
that internally also we cannot be sure of anything but mental
phenomena; we know thoughts, feelings and volitions, but we do not
know mental substance within, any more than we know material
substance without; our ideas are a string of beads, without any
string; we need no cause for these ideas, in an external world, a
soul, or God. Mill, Spencer, Bain and Tyndall are Humists, and it
is their subjective idealism which we oppose.

All these regard the material atom as a mere centre of force, or a
hypothetical cause of sensations. Matter is therefore a
manifestation of force, as to the old materialism force was a
property of matter. But if matter, mind and God are nothing but
sensations, then the body itself is nothing but sensations. There
is no _body_ to have the sensations, and no _spirit_, either human
or divine, to produce them. John Stuart Mill, in his Examination
of Sir William Hamilton, 1:234-253, makes sensations the only
original sources of knowledge. He defines matter as “a permanent
possibility of sensation,” and mind as “a series of feelings aware
of itself.” So Huxley calls matter “only a name for the unknown
cause of the states of consciousness”; although he also declares:
“If I am compelled to choose between the materialism of a man like
Büchner and the idealism of Berkeley, I would have to agree with
Berkeley.” He would hold to the priority of matter, and yet regard
matter as wholly ideal. Since John Stuart Mill, of all the
materialistic idealists, gives the most precise definitions of
matter and of mind, we attempt to show the inadequacy of his
treatment.

The most complete refutation of subjective idealism is that of Sir
William Hamilton, in his Metaphysics, 348-372, and Theories of
Sense-perception—the reply to Brown. See condensed statement of
Hamilton’s view, with estimate and criticism, in Porter, Human
Intellect, 236-240, and on Idealism, 129, 132. Porter holds that
original perception gives us simply affections of our own
sensorium; as cause of these, we gain knowledge of extended
externality. So Sir William Hamilton: “Sensation proper has no
object but a subject-object.” But both Porter and Hamilton hold
that through these sensations we know that which exists
independently of our sensations. Hamilton’s natural realism,
however, was an exaggeration of the truth. Bowne, Introd. to
Psych. Theory, 257, 258—“In Sir William Hamilton’s desire to have
no go-betweens in perception, he was forced to maintain that every
sensation is felt where it seems to be, and hence that the mind
fills out the entire body. Likewise he had to affirm that the
object in vision is not the thing, but the rays of light, and even
the object itself had, at last, to be brought into consciousness.
Thus he reached the absurdity that the true object in perception
is something of which we are totally unconscious.” Surely we
cannot be immediately conscious of what is outside of
consciousness. James, Psychology, 1:11—“The terminal organs are
telephones, and brain-cells are the receivers at which the mind
listens.” Berkeley’s view is to be found in his Principles of
Human Knowledge, § 18 _sq._ See also Presb. Rev., Apl.
1885:301-315; Journ. Spec. Philos., 1884:246-260, 383-399;
Tulloch, Mod. Theories, 360, 361; Encyc. Britannica, art.:
Berkeley.

There is, however, an idealism which is not open to Hamilton’s
objections, and to which most recent philosophers give their
adhesion. It is the objective idealism of Lotze. It argues that we
know nothing of the extended world except through the forces which
impress our nervous organism. These forces take the form of
vibrations of air or ether, and we interpret them as sound, light,
or motion, according as they affect our nerves of hearing, sight,
or touch. But the only force which we immediately know is that of
our own wills, and we can either not understand matter at all or
we must understand it as the product of a will comparable to our
own. Things are simply “concreted laws of action,” or divine ideas
to which permanent reality has been given by divine will. What we
perceive in the normal exercise of our faculties has existence not
only for us but for all intelligent beings and for God himself: in
other words, our idealism is not subjective, but objective. We
have seen in the previous section that atoms cannot explain the
universe,—they presuppose both ideas and force. We now see that
this force presupposes will, and these ideas presuppose mind. But,
as it still may be claimed that this mind is not self-conscious
mind and that this will is not personal will, we pass in the next
section to consider Idealistic Pantheism, of which these claims
are characteristic. Materialistic Idealism, in truth, is but a
half-way house between Materialism and Pantheism, in which no
permanent lodging is to be found by the logical intelligence.

Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 152—“The objectivity of our
cognition consists therefore in this, that it is not a meaningless
play of mere seeming; but it brings before us a world whose
coherency is ordered in pursuance of the injunction of the sole
Reality in the world, to wit, the Good. Our cognition thus
possesses more of truth than if it copied exactly a world that has
no value in itself. Although it does not comprehend in what manner
all that is phenomenon is presented to the view, still it
understands what is the meaning of it all; and is like to a
spectator who comprehends the æsthetic significance of that which
takes place on the stage of a theatre, and would gain nothing
essential if he were to see besides the machinery by means of
which the changes are effected on the stage.” Professor C. A.
Strong: “Perception is a shadow thrown upon the mind by a
thing-in-itself. The shadow is the symbol of the thing; and, as
shadows are soulless and dead, physical objects may seem soulless
and dead, while the reality symbolized is never so soulful and
alive. Consciousness is reality. The only existence of which we
can conceive is mental in its nature. All existence _for_
consciousness is existence _of_ consciousness. The horse’s shadow
accompanies him, but it does not help him to draw the cart. The
brain-event is simply the mental state itself regarded from the
point of view of the perception.”

Aristotle: “Substance is in its nature prior to relation” = there
can be no relation without things to be related. Fichte:
“Knowledge, just because it is knowledge, is not reality,—it comes
not first, but second.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 216, 217, 292,
293—“Thought can do nothing, except as it is a synonym for
Thinker.... Neither the finite nor the infinite consciousness,
alone or together, can constitute an object external, or explain
its existence. The existence of a thing logically precedes the
perception of it. Perception is not creation. It is not the
thinking that makes the ego, but the ego that makes the thinking.”
Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Divine thoughts presuppose a
divine Being. God’s thoughts do not constitute the real world. The
real force does not lie in them,—it lies in the divine Being, as
living, active Will.” Here was the fundamental error of Hegel,
that he regarded the Universe as mere Idea, and gave little
thought to the Love and the Will that constitute it. See John
Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, 1:75; 2:80; Contemp. Rev., Oct. 1872:
art. on Huxley; Lowndes, Philos. Primary Beliefs, 115-143; Atwater
(on Ferrier), in Princeton Rev., 1857:258, 280; Cousin, Hist.
Philosophy, 2:239-343; Veitch’s Hamilton, (Blackwood’s Philos.
Classics,) 176, 191; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 58-74.

To this view we make the following objections:

1. Its definition of matter as a “permanent possibility of sensation”
contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of
matter, we have direct knowledge of substance as underlying phenomena, as
distinct from our sensations, and as external to the mind which
experiences these sensations.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 432—“How the possibility of an odor and a
flavor can be the cause of the yellow color of an orange is
probably unknowable, except to a mind that can see that two and
two may make five.” See Iverach’s Philosophy of Spencer Examined,
in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 29. Martineau, Study, 1:102-112—“If
external impressions are telegraphed to the brain, intelligence
must receive the message at the beginning as well as deliver it at
the end.... It is the external object which gives the possibility,
not the possibility which gives the external object. The mind
cannot make both its _cognita_ and its _cognitio_. It cannot
dispense with standing-ground for its own feet, or with atmosphere
for its own wings.” Professor Charles A. Strong: “Kant held to
things-in-themselves back of physical phenomena, as well as to
things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena; he thought
things-in-themselves back of physical might be identical with
things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena. And since mental
phenomena, on this theory, are not specimens of reality, and
reality manifests itself indifferently through them and through
physical phenomena, he naturally concluded that we have no ground
for supposing reality to be like either—that we must conceive of
it as ‘weder Materie noch ein denkend Wesen’—‘neither matter nor a
thinking being’—a theory of the Unknowable. Would that it had been
also the Unthinkable and the Unmentionable!” Ralph Waldo Emerson
was a subjective idealist; but, when called to inspect a farmer’s
load of wood, he said to his company: “Excuse me a moment, my
friends; we have to attend to these matters, just as if they were
real.” See Mivart, On Truth, 71-141.

2. Its definition of mind as a “series of feelings aware of itself”
contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of mind,
we have direct knowledge of a spiritual substance of which these phenomena
are manifestations, which retains its identity independently of our
consciousness, and which, in its knowing, instead of being the passive
recipient of impressions from without, always acts from within by a power
of its own.

James, Psychology, 1:226—“It seems as if the elementary psychic
fact were not _thought_, or _this thought_, or _that thought_, but
_my thought_, every thought being owned. The universal conscious
fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think,’ and ‘I
feel.’ ” Professor James is compelled to say this, even though he
begins his Psychology without insisting upon the existence of a
soul. Hamilton’s Reid, 443—“Shall I think that thought can stand
by itself? or that ideas can feel pleasure or pain?” R. T. Smith,
Man’s Knowledge, 44—“We say ‘my notions and my passions,’ and when
we use these phrases we imply that our central self is felt to be
something different from the notions or passions which belong to
it or characterize it for a time.” Lichtenberg: “We should say,
‘It thinks;’ just as we say, ‘It lightens,’ or ‘It rains.’ In
saying ‘Cogito,’ the philosopher goes too far if he translates it,
‘I think.’ ” Are the faculties, then, an army without a general,
or an engine without a driver? In that case we should not _have_
sensations,—we should only _be_ sensations.

Professor C. A. Strong: “I have knowledge of _other minds_. This
non-empirical knowledge—transcendent knowledge of
things-in-themselves, derived neither from experience nor
reasoning, and assuming that like consequents (intelligent
movements) must have like antecedents (thoughts and feelings), and
also assuming instinctively that something exists outside of my
own mind—this refutes the post-Kantian phenomenalism. _Perception_
and _memory_ also involve transcendence. In both I transcend the
bounds of experience, as truly as in my knowledge of other minds.
In memory I recognize a _past_, as distinguished from the present.
In perception I cognize a possibility of _other_ experiences like
the present, and this alone gives the sense of permanence and
reality. Perception and memory refute phenomenalism.
Things-in-themselves must be assumed in order to fill the gaps
between individual minds, and to give coherence and
intelligibility to the universe, and so to avoid pluralism. If
matter can influence and even extinguish our minds, it must have
some force of its own, some existence in itself. If consciousness
is an evolutionary product, it must have arisen from simpler
mental facts. But these simpler mental facts are only another name
for things-in-themselves. A deep prerational instinct compels us
to recognize them, for they cannot be logically demonstrated. We
must assume them in order to give continuity and intelligibility
to our conceptions of the universe.” See, on Bain’s Cerebral
Psychology, Martineau’s Essays, 1:265. On the physiological method
of mental philosophy, see Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1871:1; Bowen, in
Princeton Rev., March, 1878:423-450; Murray, Psychology, 279-287.

3. In so far as this theory regards mind as the obverse side of matter, or
as a later and higher development from matter, the mere reference of both
mind and matter to an underlying force does not save the theory from any
of the difficulties of pure materialism already mentioned; since in this
case, equally with that, force is regarded as purely physical, and the
priority of spirit is denied.

Herbert Spencer, Psychology, quoted by Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy,
2:80—“Mind and nervous action are the subjective and objective
faces of the same thing. Yet we remain utterly incapable of
seeing, or even of imagining, how the two are related. Mind still
continues to us a something without kinship to other things.”
Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, quoted by Talbot, Bap. Quar., Jan.
1871:5—“All that I know of matter and mind in themselves is that
the former is an external centre of force, and the latter an
internal centre of force.” New Englander, Sept. 1883:636—“If the
atom be a mere centre of force and not a real thing in itself,
then the atom is a supersensual essence, an immaterial being. To
make immaterial matter the source of conscious mind is to make
matter as wonderful as an immortal soul or a personal Creator.”
See New Englander, July, 1875:532-535; Martineau, Study, 102-130,
and Relig. and Mod. Materialism, 25—“If it takes mind to construe
the universe, how can the negation of mind constitute it?”

David J. Hill, in his Genetic Philosophy, 200, 201, seems to deny
that thought precedes force, or that force precedes thought:
“Objects, or things in the external world, may be elements of a
thought-process in a cosmic subject, without themselves being
conscious.... A true analysis and a rational genesis require the
equal recognition of both the objective and the subjective
elements of experience, without priority in time, separation in
space or disruption of being. So far as our minds can penetrate
reality, as disclosed in the activities of thought, we are
everywhere confronted with a Dynamic Reason.” In Dr. Hill’s
account of the genesis of the universe, however, the unconscious
comes first, and from it the conscious seems to be derived.
Consciousness of the object is only the obverse side of the object
of consciousness. This is, as Martineau, Study, 1:341, remarks,
“to take the sea on board the boat.” We greatly prefer the view of
Lotze, 2:641—“Things are acts of the Infinite wrought within minds
alone, or states which the Infinite experiences nowhere but in
minds.... Things and events are the sum of those actions which the
highest Principle performs in all spirits so uniformly and
coherently, that to these spirits there must seem to be a world of
substantial and efficient things existing in space outside
themselves.” The data from which we draw our inferences as to the
nature of the external world being mental and spiritual, it is
more rational to attribute to that world a spiritual reality than
a kind of reality of which our experience knows nothing. See also
Schurman, Belief in God, 208, 225.

4. In so far as this theory holds the underlying force of which matter and
mind are manifestations to be in any sense intelligent or voluntary, it
renders necessary the assumption that there is an intelligent and
voluntary Being who exerts this force. Sensations and ideas, moreover, are
explicable only as manifestations of Mind.

Many recent Christian thinkers, as Murphy, Scientific Bases of
Faith, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52, would define mind as a function of
matter, matter as a function of force, force as a function of
will, and therefore as the power of an omnipresent and personal
God. All force, except that of man’s free will, is the will of
God. So Herschel, Lectures, 460; Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127;
Wallace on Nat. Selection, 363-371; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 121,
145, 265; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 146-162. These writers are
led to their conclusion in large part by the considerations that
nothing dead can be a proper cause; that will is the only cause of
which we have immediate knowledge; that the forces of nature are
intelligible only when they are regarded as exertions of will.
Matter, therefore, is simply centres of force—the regular and, as
it were, automatic expression of God’s mind and will. Second
causes in nature are only secondary activities of the great First
Cause.

This view is held also by Bowne, in his Metaphysics. He regards
only personality as real. Matter is phenomenal, although it is an
activity of the divine will outside of us. Bowne’s phenomenalism
is therefore an objective idealism, greatly preferable to that of
Berkeley who held to God’s energizing indeed, but only within the
soul. This idealism of Bowne is not pantheism, for it holds that,
while there are no second causes in nature, man is a second cause,
with a personality distinct from that of God, and lifted above
nature by his powers of free will. Royce, however, in his
Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in his The World and the
Individual, makes man’s consciousness a part or aspect of a
universal consciousness, and so, instead of making God come to
consciousness in man, makes man come to consciousness in God.
While this scheme seems, in one view, to save God’s personality,
it may be doubted whether it equally guarantees man’s personality
or leaves room for man’s freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt.
Bowne, Philos. Theism, 175—“ ‘Universal reason’ is a class-term
which denotes no possible existence, and which has reality only in
the specific existences from which it is abstracted.” Bowne claims
that the impersonal finite has only such otherness as a thought or
act has to its subject. There is no substantial existence except
in persons. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Neo-Kantianism
erects into a God the mere form of self-consciousness in general,
that is, confounds consciousness _überhaupt_ with a _universal_
consciousness.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 318-343, esp. 328—“Is
there anything in existence but myself? Yes. To escape solipsism I
must admit at least other persons. Does the world of apparent
objects exist for me only? No; it exists for others also, so that
we live in a common world. Does this common world consist in
anything more than a similarity of impressions in finite minds, so
that the world apart from these is nothing? This view cannot be
disproved, but it accords so ill with the impression of our total
experience that it is practically impossible. Is then the world of
things a continuous existence of some kind independent of finite
thought and consciousness? This claim cannot be demonstrated, but
it is the only view that does not involve insuperable
difficulties. What is the nature and where is the place of this
cosmic existence? That is the question between Realism and
Idealism. Realism views things as existing in a real space, and as
true ontological realities. Idealism views both them and the space
in which they are supposed to be existing as existing only in and
for a cosmic Intelligence, and apart from which they are absurd
and contradictory. Things are independent of _our_ thought, but
not independent of _all_ thought, in a lumpish materiality which
is the antithesis and negation of consciousness.” See also
Martineau, Study, 1:214-230, 341. For advocacy of the substantive
existence of second causes, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 582-588;
Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:596; Alden, Philosophy, 48-80; Hodgson,
Time and Space, 149-218; A. J. Balfour, in Mind, Oct. 1893: 430.

III. Idealistic Pantheism.

Pantheism is that method of thought which conceives of the universe as the
development of one intelligent and voluntary, yet impersonal, substance,
which reaches consciousness only in man. It therefore identifies God, not
with each individual object in the universe, but with the totality of
things. The current Pantheism of our day is idealistic.

The elements of truth in Pantheism are the intelligence and voluntariness
of God, and his immanence in the universe; its error lies in denying God’s
personality and transcendence.

Pantheism denies the real existence of the finite, at the same
time that it deprives the Infinite of self-consciousness and
freedom. See Hunt, History of Pantheism; Manning, Half-truths and
the Truth; Bayne, Christian Life, Social and Individual, 21-53;
Hutton, on Popular Pantheism, in Essays, 1:55-76—“The pantheist’s
‘I believe in God’, is a contradiction. He says: ‘I perceive the
external as different from myself; but on further reflection, I
perceive that this external was itself the percipient agency.’ So
the worshiped is really the worshiper after all.” Harris,
Philosophical Basis of Theism, 173—“Man is a bottle of the ocean’s
water, in the ocean, temporarily distinguishable by its limitation
within the bottle, but lost again in the ocean, so soon as these
fragile limits are broken.” Martineau, Types, 1:23—Mere immanency
excludes Theism; transcendency leaves it still possible;
211-225—Pantheism declares that “there is nothing but God; he is
not only sole cause but entire effect; he is all in all.” Spinoza
has been falsely called “the God-intoxicated man.” “Spinoza, on
the contrary, translated God into the universe; it was Malebranche
who transfigured the universe into God.”

The later Brahmanism is pantheistic. Rowland Williams,
Christianity and Hinduism, quoted in Mozley on Miracles, 284—“In
the final state personality vanishes. You will not, says the
Brahman, accept the term ‘void’ as an adequate description of the
mysterious nature of the soul, but you will clearly apprehend
soul, in the final state, to be unseen and ungrasped being,
thought, knowledge, joy—no other than very God.” Flint, Theism,
69—“Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed for as
the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there is marked
inability to think of God as cause or will, and constant
inveterate tendency to pantheism.”

Hegel denies God’s transcendence: “God is not a spirit beyond the
stars; he is spirit in all spirit”; which means that God, the
impersonal and unconscious Absolute, comes to consciousness only
in man. If the eternal system of abstract thoughts were itself
conscious, finite consciousness would disappear; hence the
alternative is either _no God_, or _no man_. Stirling: “The Idea,
so conceived, is a blind, dumb, invisible idol, and the theory is
the most hopeless theory that has ever been presented to
humanity.” It is practical autolatry, or self-deification. The
world is reduced to a mere process of logic; thought thinks; there
is thought without a thinker. To this doctrine of Hegel we may
well oppose the remarks of Lotze: “We cannot make mind the
equivalent of the infinitive _to think_,—we feel that it must be
that which thinks; the essence of things cannot be either
existence or activity,—it must be that which exists and that which
acts. Thinking means nothing, if it is not the thinking of a
thinker; acting and working mean nothing, if we leave out the
conception of a subject distinguishable from them and from which
they proceed.” To Hegel, Being _is_ Thought; to Spinoza, Being
_has_ Thought + Extension; the truth seems to be that Being _has_
Thought + Will, and _may_ reveal itself in Extension and Evolution
(Creation).

By other philosophers, however, Hegel is otherwise interpreted.
Prof. H. Jones, in Mind, July, 1893: 289-306, claims that Hegel’s
fundamental Idea is not Thought, but Thinking: “The universe to
him was not a system of thoughts, but a thinking reality,
manifested most fully in man.... The fundamental reality is the
universal intelligence whose operation we should seek to detect in
all things. All reality is ultimately explicable as Spirit, or
Intelligence,—hence our ontology must be a Logic, and the laws of
things must be laws of thinking.” Sterrett, in like manner, in his
Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, 17, quotes Hegel’s
Logic, Wallace’s translation, 89, 91, 236: “Spinoza’s _Substance_
is, as it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours all
definite content as utterly null, and produces from itself nothing
that has positive subsistence in itself.... God is Substance,—he
is, however, no less the Absolute Person.” This is essential to
religion, but this, says Hegel, Spinoza never perceived:
“Everything depends upon the Absolute Truth being perceived, not
merely as Substance, but as Subject.” God is self-conscious and
self-determining Spirit. Necessity is excluded. Man is free and
immortal. Men are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose
their identity, although they _find themselves_ truly only in him.
With this estimate of Hegel’s system, Caird, Erdmann and Mulford
substantially agree. This is Tennyson’s “Higher Pantheism.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 440—“Hegel conceived the superiority of
his system to Spinozism to lie in the substitution of Subject for
Substance. The true Absolute must contain, instead of abolishing,
relations; the true Monism must include, instead of excluding,
Pluralism. A One which, like Spinoza’s Substance, or the Hegelian
Absolute, does not enable us to think the Many, cannot be the true
One—the unity of the Manifold.... Since evil exists, Schopenhauer
substituted for Hegel’s Panlogism, which asserted the identity of
the rational and the real, a blind impulse of life,—for absolute
Reason he substituted a reasonless Will”—a system of practical
pessimism. Alexander, Theories of Will, 5—“Spinoza recognized no
distinction between will and intellectual affirmation or denial.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:107—“As there is no
reason in the conception of pure space why any figures or forms,
lines, surfaces, solids, should arise in it, so there is no reason
in the pure colorless abstraction of Infinite Substance why any
world of finite things and beings should ever come into existence.
It is the grave of all things, the productive source of nothing.”
Hegel called Schelling’s Identity or Absolute “the infinite night
in which all cows are black”—an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, part
2, act 1, where the words are added: “and cats are gray.” Although
Hegel’s preference of the term Subject, instead of the term
Substance, has led many to maintain that he believed in a
personality of God distinct from that of man, his over-emphasis of
the Idea, and his comparative ignoring of the elements of Love and
Will, leave it still doubtful whether his Idea was anything more
than unconscious and impersonal intelligence—less materialistic
than that of Spinoza indeed, yet open to many of the same
objections.

We object to this system as follows:

1. Its idea of God is self-contradictory, since it makes him infinite, yet
consisting only of the finite; absolute, yet existing in necessary
relation to the universe; supreme, yet shut up to a process of
self-evolution and dependent for self-consciousness on man; without
self-determination, yet the cause of all that is.

Saisset, Pantheism, 148—“An imperfect God, yet perfection arising
from imperfection.” Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:13—“Pantheism applies
to God a principle of growth and imperfection, which belongs only
to the finite.” Calderwood, Moral Philos., 245—“Its first
requisite is moment, or movement, which it assumes, but does not
account for.” Caro’s sarcasm applies here: “Your God is not yet
made—he is in process of manufacture.” See H. B. Smith, Faith and
Philosophy, 25. Pantheism is practical atheism, for impersonal
spirit is only blind and necessary force. Angelus Silesius: “Wir
beten ‘Es gescheh, mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille’; Und sieh’, Er
hat nicht Will’,—Er ist ein ew’ge Stille”—which Max Müller
translates as follows: “We pray, ‘O Lord our God, Do thou thy holy
Will’; and see! God has no will; He is at peace and still.”
Angelus Silesius consistently makes God dependent for
self-consciousness on man: “I know that God cannot live An instant
without me; He must give up the ghost, If I should cease to be.”
Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Hegelianism destroys both God
and man. It reduces man to an object of the universal Thinker, and
leaves this universal Thinker without any true personality.”
Pantheism is a game of solitaire, in which God plays both sides.

2. Its assumed unity of substance is not only without proof, but it
directly contradicts our intuitive judgments. These testify that we are
not parts and particles of God, but distinct personal subsistences.

Martineau, Essays, 1:158—“Even for immanency, there must be
something wherein to dwell, and for life, something whereon to
act.” Many systems of monism contradict consciousness; they
confound harmony between two with absorption in one. “In Scripture
we never find the universe called τὸ πᾶν, for this suggests the
idea of a self-contained unity: we have everywhere τὰ πάντα
instead.” The Bible recognizes the element of truth in
pantheism—God is “_through all_”; also the element of truth in
mysticism—God is “_in you all_”; but it adds the element of
transcendence which both these fail to recognize—God is “above
all”_ (Eph. 4:6)_. See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Orig. of
Christianity, 539. G. D. B. Pepper: “He who is over all and in all
is yet distinct from all. If one is over a thing, he is not that
very thing which he is over. If one is in something, he must be
distinct from that something. And so the universe, over which and
in which God is, must be thought of as something distinct from
God. The creation cannot be identical with God, or a mere form of
God.” We add, however, that it may be a manifestation of God and
dependent upon God, as our thoughts and acts are manifestations of
our mind and will and dependent upon our mind and will, yet are
not themselves our mind and will.

Pope wrote: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body
nature is and God the soul.” But Case, Physical Realism, 193,
replies: “Not so. Nature is to God as works are to a man; and as
man’s works are not his body, so neither is nature the body of
God.” Matthew Arnold, On Heine’s Grave: “What are we all but a
mood, A single mood of the life Of the Being in whom we exist, Who
alone is all things in one?” Hovey, Studies, 51—“Scripture
recognizes the element of truth in pantheism, but it also teaches
the existence of a world of things, animate and inanimate, in
distinction from God. It represents men as prone to worship the
creature more than the Creator. It describes them as sinners
worthy of death ... moral agents.... It no more thinks of men as
being literally parts of God, than it thinks of children as being
parts of their parents, or subjects as being parts of their king.”
A. J. F. Behrends: “The true doctrine lies between the two
extremes of a crass dualism which makes God and the world two
self-contained entities, and a substantial monism in which the
universe has only a phenomenal existence. There is no identity of
substance nor division of the divine substance. The universe is
eternally dependent, the product of the divine _Word_, not simply
_manufactured_. Creation is primarily a spiritual act.” Prof.
George M. Forbes: “Matter exists in subordinate dependence upon
God; spirit in coördinate dependence upon God. The body of Christ
was Christ externalized, made manifest to sense-perception. In
apprehending matter, I am apprehending the mind and will of God.
This is the highest sort of reality. Neither matter nor finite
spirits, then, are mere phenomena.”

3. It assigns no sufficient cause for that fact of the universe which is
highest in rank, and therefore most needs explanation, namely, the
existence of personal intelligences. A substance which is itself
unconscious, and under the law of necessity, cannot produce beings who are
self-conscious and free.

Gess, Foundations of our Faith, 36—“Animal instinct, and the
spirit of a nation working out its language, might furnish
analogies, if they produced personalities as their result, but not
otherwise. Nor were these tendencies self-originated, but received
from an external source.” McCosh, Intuitions, 215, 393, and
Christianity and Positivism, 180. Seth, Freedom as an Ethical
Postulate, 47—“If man is an ‘imperium in imperio,’ not a person,
but only an aspect or expression of the universe or God, then he
cannot be free. Man may be depersonalized either into nature or
into God. Through the conception of our own personality we reach
that of God. To resolve our personality into that of God would be
to negate the divine greatness itself by invalidating the
conception through which it was reached.” Bradley, Appearance and
Reality, 551, is more ambiguous: “The positive relation of every
appearance as an adjective to Reality; and the presence of Reality
among its appearances in different degrees and with diverse
values; this double truth we have found to be the centre of
philosophy.” He protests against both “an empty transcendence” and
“a shallow pantheism.” Hegelian immanence and knowledge, he
asserts, identified God and man. But God is more than man or man’s
thought. He is spirit and life—best understood from the human
_self_, with its thoughts, feelings, volitions. Immanence needs to
be qualified by transcendence. “God is not God till he has become
all-in-all, and a God which is all-in-all is not the God of
religion. God is an aspect, and that must mean but an appearance
of the Absolute.” Bradley’s Absolute, therefore, is not so much
personal as super-personal; to which we reply with Jackson, James
Martineau, 416—“Higher than personality is lower; beyond it is
regression from its height. From the equator we may travel
northward, gaining ever higher and higher latitudes; but, if ever
the pole is reached, pressing on from thence will be descending
into lower latitudes, not gaining higher.... Do I say, I am a
pantheist? Then, _ipso facto_, I deny pantheism; for, in the very
assertion of the Ego, I imply all else as objective to me.”

4. It therefore contradicts the affirmations of our moral and religious
natures by denying man’s freedom and responsibility; by making God to
include in himself all evil as well as all good; and by precluding all
prayer, worship, and hope of immortality.

Conscience is the eternal witness against pantheism. Conscience
witnesses to our freedom and responsibility, and declares that
moral distinctions are not illusory. Renouf, Hibbert Lect.,
234—“It is only out of condescension to popular language that
pantheistic systems can recognize the notions of right and wrong,
of iniquity and sin. If everything really emanates from God, there
can be no such thing as sin. And the ablest philosophers who have
been led to pantheistic views have vainly endeavored to harmonize
these views with what we understand by the notion of sin or moral
evil. The great systematic work of Spinoza is entitled ’Ethica’;
but for real ethics we might as profitably consult the Elements of
Euclid.” Hodge, System. Theology, 1:299-330—“Pantheism is
fatalistic. On this theory, duty = pleasure; right = might; sin =
good in the making. Satan, as well as Gabriel, is a
self-development of God. The practical effects of pantheism upon
popular morals and life, wherever it has prevailed, as in Buddhist
India and China, demonstrate its falsehood.” See also Dove, Logic
of the Christian Faith, 118; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith,
202; Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:603-615; Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. On
the fact of sin as refuting the pantheistic theory, see Bushnell,
Nature and the Supernat., 140-164.

Wordsworth: “Look up to heaven! the industrious sun Already half
his course hath run; He cannot halt or go astray; But our immortal
spirits may.” President John H. Harris; “You never ask a cyclone’s
opinion of the ten commandments.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism,
245—“Pantheism makes man an automaton. But how can an automaton
have duties?” Principles of Ethics, 18—“Ethics is defined as the
science of conduct, and the conventions of language are relied
upon to cover up the fact that there is no ‘conduct’ in the case.
If man be a proper automaton, we might as well speak of the
conduct of the winds as of human conduct; and a treatise on
planetary motions is as truly the ethics of the solar system as a
treatise on human movements is the ethics of man.” For lack of a
clear recognition of personality, either human or divine, Hegel’s
Ethics is devoid of all spiritual nourishment,—his
“Rechtsphilosophie” has been called “a repast of bran.” Yet
Professor Jones, in Mind, July, 1893:304, tells us that Hegel’s
task was “to discover what conception of the single principle or
fundamental unity which alone _is_, is adequate to the differences
which it carries within it. ‘_Being_,’ he found, leaves no room
for differences,—it is overpowered by them.... He found that the
Reality can exist only as absolute Self-consciousness, as a
Spirit, who is universal, and who knows himself in all things. In
all this he is dealing, not simply with thoughts, but with
Reality.” Prof. Jones’s vindication of Hegel, however, still
leaves it undecided whether that philosopher regarded the divine
self-consciousness as distinct from that of finite beings, or as
simply inclusive of theirs. See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of
Christianity, 1:109.

5. Our intuitive conviction of the existence of a God of absolute
perfection compels us to conceive of God as possessed of every highest
quality and attribute of men, and therefore, especially, of that which
constitutes the chief dignity of the human spirit, its personality.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 328—“We have no right to represent the
supreme Cause as inferior to ourselves, yet we do this when we
describe it under phrases derived from physical causation.”
Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 351—“We cannot conceive of anything
as impersonal, yet of higher nature than our own,—any being that
has not knowledge and will must be indefinitely inferior to one
who has them.” Lotze holds truly, not that God is
_supra_-personal, but that man is _infra_-personal, seeing that in
the infinite Being alone is self-subsistence, and therefore
perfect personality. Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 224—“The
radical feature of personality is the survival of a permanent
self, under all the fleeting or deciduous phases of experience; in
other words, the personal identity that is involved in the
assertion ‘I am.’... Is limitation a necessary adjunct of that
notion?” Seth, Hegelianism: “As in us there is more _for
ourselves_ than _for others_, so in God there is more of thought
_for himself_ than he manifests _to us_. Hegel’s doctrine is that
of immanence without transcendence.” Heinrich Heine was a pupil
and intimate friend of Hegel. He says: “I was young and proud, and
it pleased my vain-glory when I learned from Hegel that the true
God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lived in
heaven, but was rather _myself upon the earth_.” John Fiske, Idea
of God, xvi—“Since our notion of force is purely a generalization
from our subjective sensations of overcoming resistance, there is
scarcely less anthropomorphism in the phrase ‘Infinite Power’ than
in the phrase ‘Infinite Person.’ We must symbolize Deity in some
form that has meaning to us; we cannot symbolize it as physical;
we are bound to symbolize it as psychical. Hence we may say, God
is Spirit. This implies God’s personality.”

6. Its objection to the divine personality, that over against the Infinite
there can be in eternity past no non-ego to call forth self-consciousness,
is refuted by considering that even man’s cognition of the non-ego
logically presupposes knowledge of the ego, from which the non-ego is
distinguished; that, in an absolute mind, self-consciousness cannot be
conditioned, as in the case of finite mind, upon contact with a not-self;
and that, if the distinguishing of self from a not-self were an essential
condition of divine self-consciousness, the eternal personal distinctions
in the divine nature or the eternal states of the divine mind might
furnish such a condition.

Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:163, 190 _sq._—“Personal
self-consciousness is not primarily a distinguishing of the ego
from the non-ego, but rather a distinguishing of itself from
itself, _i. e._, of the unity of the self from the plurality of
its contents.... Before the soul distinguishes self from the
not-self, it must know self—else it could not see the distinction.
Its development is connected with the knowledge of the non-ego,
but this is due, not to the fact of _personality_, but to the fact
of _finite_ personality. The mature man can live for a long time
upon his own resources. God needs no other, to stir him up to
mental activity. Finiteness is a hindrance to the development of
our personality. Infiniteness is necessary to the highest
personality.” Lotze, Microcosmos, vol. 3, chapter 4; transl. in N.
Eng., March, 1881:191-200—“Finite spirit, not having conditions of
existence in itself, can know the ego only upon occasion of
knowing the non-ego. The Infinite is not so limited. He alone has
an independent existence, neither introduced nor developed through
anything not himself, but, in an inward activity without beginning
or end, maintains himself in himself.” See also Lotze, Philos. of
Religion, 55-69; H. N. Gardiner on Lotze, in Presb. Rev.,
1885:669-673; Webb, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:49-61.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Absolute Personality = perfect
consciousness of self, and perfect power over self. We need
something external to waken our consciousness—yet
self-consciousness comes [logically] before consciousness of the
world. It is the soul’s act. Only after it has distinguished self
from self, can it consciously distinguish self from another.”
British Quarterly, Jan. 1874:32, note; July, 1884:108—“The ego is
_thinkable_ only in relation to the non-ego; but the ego is
_liveable_ long before any such relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:185, 186—In the pantheistic scheme, “God distinguishes himself
from the _world_, and thereby finds the object required by the
subject; ... in the Christian scheme, God distinguishes himself
from _himself_, not from something that is not himself.” See
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:122-126; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt
and Christ. Belief, 161-190; Hanne, Idee der absoluten
Persönlichkeit; Eichhorn, Die Persönlichkeit Gottes; Seth,
Hegelianism and Personality; Knight, on Personality and the
Infinite, in Studies in Philos. and Lit., 70-118.

On the whole subject of Pantheism, see Martineau, Study of
Religion, 2:141-194, esp. 192—“The _personality_ of God consists
in his voluntary agency as free cause in an unpledged sphere, that
is, a sphere transcending that of immanent law. But precisely this
also it is that constitutes his _infinity_, extending his sway,
after it has filled the actual, over all the possible, and giving
command over indefinite alternatives. Though you might deny his
infinity without prejudice to his personality, you cannot deny his
personality without sacrificing his infinitude: for there is a
mode of action—the _preferential_, the very mode which
distinguishes rational beings—from which you exclude him”;
341—“The metaphysicians who, in their impatience of distinction,
insist on taking the sea on board the boat, swamp not only it but
the thought it holds, and leave an infinitude which, as it can
look into no eye and whisper into no ear, they contradict in the
very act of affirming.” Jean Paul Richter’s “Dream”: “I wandered
to the farthest verge of Creation, and there I saw a _Socket_,
where an _Eye_ should have been, and I heard the shriek of a
Fatherless World” (quoted in David Brown’s Memoir of John Duncan,
49-70). Shelley, Beatrice Cenci: “Sweet Heaven, forgive weak
thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the
void world—The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!”

For the opposite view, see Biedermann, Dogmatik, 638-647—“Only
man, as finite spirit, is personal; God, as absolute spirit, is
not personal. Yet in religion the mutual relations of intercourse
and communion are always personal.... Personality is the only
adequate term by which we can represent the theistic conception of
God.” Bruce, Providential Order, 76—“Schopenhauer does not level
up cosmic force to the human, but levels down human will-force to
the cosmic. Spinoza held intellect in God to be no more like man’s
than the dog-star is like a dog. Hartmann added intellect to
Schopenhauer’s will, but the intellect is unconscious and knows no
moral distinctions.” See also Bruce, Apologetics, 71-90; Bowne,
Philos. of Theism, 128-134, 171-186; J. M. Whiton, Am. Jour.
Theol., Apl. 1901:306—Pantheism = God consists in all things;
Theism = All things consist in God, their ground, not their sum.
Spirit in man shows that the infinite Spirit must be personal and
transcendent Mind and Will.

IV. Ethical Monism.

Ethical Monism is that method of thought which holds to a single
substance, ground, or principle of being, namely, God, but which also
holds to the ethical facts of God’s transcendence as well as his
immanence, and of God’s personality as distinct from, and as guaranteeing,
the personality of man.

Although we do not here assume the authority of the Bible,
reserving our proof of this to the next following division on The
Scriptures a Revelation from God, we may yet cite passages which
show that our doctrine is not inconsistent with the teachings of
holy Writ. The immanence of God is implied in all statements of
his omnipresence, as for example: _Ps. 139:7 sq.—_“Whither shall I
go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”
_Jer. 23:23, 24—_“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God
afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?” _Acts 17:27, 28—_“he
is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and
have our being.” The transcendence of God is implied in such
passages as: _1 Kings 8:27—_“the heaven and the heaven of heavens
cannot contain thee”; _Ps. 113:5—_“that hath his seat on high”;
_Is. 57:15—_“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”

This is the faith of Augustine: “O God, thou hast made us for
thyself, and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee.... I
could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert thou not in me;
rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are
all things, in whom are all things.” And Anselm, in his
Proslogion, says of the divine nature: “It is the essence of the
being, the principle of the existence, of all things.... Without
parts, without differences, without accidents, without changes, it
might be said in a certain sense alone to exist, for in respect to
it the other things which appear to be have no existence. The
unchangeable Spirit is all that is, and it is this without limit,
simply, interminably. It is the perfect and absolute Existence.
The rest has come from non-entity, and thither returns if not
supported by God. It does not exist by itself. In this sense the
Creator alone exists; created things do not.”

1. While Ethical Monism embraces the one element of truth contained in
Pantheism—the truth that God is in all things and that all things are in
God—it regards this scientific unity as entirely consistent with the facts
of ethics—man’s freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt; in other words,
Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of one substance, ground, or
principle of being, is qualified by Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine
that the soul is personally distinct from matter on the one hand, and from
God on the other.

Ethical Monism is a monism which holds to the ethical facts of the
freedom of man and the transcendence and personality of God; it is
the monism of free-will, in which personality, both human and
divine, sin and righteousness, God and the world, remain—two in
one, and one in two—in their moral antithesis as well as their
natural unity. Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy: “Dualism is yielding,
in history and in the judgment-halls of reason, to a monistic
philosophy.... Some form of philosophical monism is indicated by
the researches of psycho-physics, and by that philosophy of mind
which builds upon the principles ascertained by these researches.
Realities correlated as are the body and the mind must have, as it
were, a common ground.... They have their reality in the ultimate
one Reality; they have their interrelated lives as expressions of
the one Life which is immanent in the two.... Only some form of
monism that shall satisfy the facts and truths to which both
realism and idealism appeal can occupy the place of the true and
final philosophy.... Monism must so construct its tenets as to
preserve, or at least as not to contradict and destroy, the truths
implicated in the distinction between the _me_ and the _not-me_,
... between the morally good and the morally evil. No form of
monism can persistently maintain itself which erects its system
upon the ruins of fundamentally ethical principles and ideals.”...
Philosophy of Mind, 411—“Dualism must be dissolved in some
ultimate monistic solution. The Being of the world, of which all
particular beings are but parts, must be so conceived of as that
in it can be found the one ground of all interrelated existences
and activities.... This one Principle is an Other and an Absolute
Mind.”

Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, II, 3:101, 231—“The unity of
essence in God and man is the great discovery of the present
age.... The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies is
the endeavor to point out the essential unity of the divine and
human. To the theology of the present day, the divine and human
are not mutually exclusive, but are connected magnitudes.... Yet
faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between
whom religion seeks an union. Faith does not wish to be a relation
merely to itself, or to its own representations and thoughts; that
would be a monologue,—faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does
not consort with a monism which recognizes only God, or only the
world; it opposes such a monism as this. Duality is, in fact, a
condition of true and vital unity. But duality is not dualism. It
has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity.” Professor
Small of Chicago: “With rare exceptions on each side, all
philosophy to-day is monistic in its ontological presumptions; it
is dualistic in its methodological procedures.” A. H. Bradford,
Age of Faith, 71—“Men and God are the same in substance, though
not identical as individuals.” The theology of fifty years ago was
merely individualistic, and ignored the complementary truth of
solidarity. Similarly we think of the continents and islands of
our globe as disjoined from one another. The dissociable sea is
regarded as an absolute barrier between them. But if the ocean
could be dried, we should see that all the while there had been
submarine connections, and the hidden unity of all lands would
appear. So the individuality of human beings, real as it is, is
not the only reality. There is the profounder fact of a common
life. Even the great mountain-peaks of personality are superficial
distinctions, compared with the organic oneness in which they are
rooted, into which they all dip down, and from which they all,
like volcanoes, receive at times quick and overflowing impulses of
insight, emotion and energy; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation
and Ethical Monism, 189, 190.

2. In contrast then with the two errors of Pantheism—the denial of God’s
transcendence and the denial of God’s personality—Ethical Monism holds
that the universe, instead of being one with God and conterminous with
God, is but a finite, partial and progressive manifestation of the divine
Life: Matter being God’s self-limitation under the law of Necessity;
Humanity being God’s self-limitation under the law of Freedom; Incarnation
and Atonement being God’s self-limitations under the law of Grace.

The universe is related to God as my thoughts are related to me,
the thinker. I am greater than my thoughts, and my thoughts vary
in moral value. Ethical Monism traces the universe back to a
beginning, while Pantheism regards the universe as coëternal with
God. Ethical Monism asserts God’s transcendence, while Pantheism
regards God as imprisoned in the universe. Ethical Monism asserts
that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, but that
contrariwise the whole universe taken together, with its elements
and forces, its suns and systems, is but a light breath from his
mouth, or a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. Upton,
Hibbert Lectures: “The Eternal is present in every finite thing,
and is felt and known to be present in every rational soul; but
still is not broken up into individualities, but ever remains one
and the same eternal substance, one and the same unifying
principle, immanently and indivisibly present in every one of that
countless plurality of finite individuals into which man’s
analyzing understanding dissects the Cosmos.” James Martineau, in
19th Century, Apl. 1895:559—“What is Nature but the province of
God’s pledged and habitual causality? And what is Spirit, but the
province of his free causality, responding to the needs and
affections of his children?... God is not a retired architect, who
may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not
self-active, and God’s agency is not intrusive.” Calvin: Pie hoc
potest dici, Deum esse Naturam.

With this doctrine many poets show their sympathy. “Every fresh
and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God
proceeds.” Robert Browning asserts God’s immanence;
Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the glory that, in all conceived Or
felt, or known, I recognize a Mind—Not mine, but like mine—for the
double joy, Making all things for me, and me for him”; Ring and
Book, Pope: “O thou, as represented to me here In such conception
as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width! Man’s
mind, what is it but a convex glass, Wherein are gathered all the
scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite
there, be our heaven for earth, Our Known Unknown, our God
revealed to man?” But Browning also asserts God’s transcendence:
in Death in the Desert, we read: “Man is not God, but hath God’s
end to serve, A Master to obey, a Cause to take, Somewhat to cast
off, somewhat to become”; in Christmas Eve, the poet derides “The
important stumble Of adding, he, the sage and humble, Was also one
with the Creator”; he tells us that it was God’s plan to make man
in his image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own
word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere
machine could never do That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its
fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of
course.... God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands
away, As it were, a hand-breadth off, to give Room for the newly
made to live And look at him from a place apart And use his gifts
of brain and heart”; “Life’s business being just the terrible
choice.”

So Tennyson’s Higher Pantheism: “The sun, the moon, the stars, the
seas, the hills, and the plains, Are not these, O soul, the vision
of Him who reigns? Dark is the world to thee; thou thyself art the
reason why; For is not He all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I
am I’? Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit
can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and
feet. And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot
see; But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it not He?”
Also Tennyson’s Ancient Sage: “But that one ripple on the
boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
Forever changing form, but evermore One with the boundless motion
of the deep”; and In Memoriam: “One God, one law, one element, And
one far-off divine event, Toward which the whole creation moves.”
Emerson: “The day of days, the greatest day in the feast of life,
is that in which the inward eye opens to the unity of things”; “In
the mud and scum of things Something always, always sings.” Mrs.
Browning: “Earth is crammed with heaven, And every common bush
afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” So
manhood is itself potentially a divine thing. All life, in all its
vast variety, can have but one Source. It is either one God, above
all, through all, and in all, or it is no God at all. E. M.
Poteat, On Chesapeake Bay: “Night’s radiant glory overhead, A
softer glory there below, Deep answered unto deep, and said: A
kindred fire in us doth glow. For life is one—of sea and stars, Of
God and man, of earth and heaven—And by no theologic bars Shall my
scant life from God’s be riven.” See Professor Henry Jones, Robert
Browning.

3. The immanence of God, as the one substance, ground and principle of
being, does not destroy, but rather guarantees, the individuality and
rights of each portion of the universe, so that there is variety of rank
and endowment. In the case of moral beings, worth is determined by the
degree of their voluntary recognition and appropriation of the divine.
While God is all, he is also in all; so making the universe a graded and
progressive manifestation of himself, both in his love for righteousness
and his opposition to moral evil.

It has been charged that the doctrine of monism necessarily
involves moral indifference; that the divine presence in all
things breaks down all distinctions of rank and makes each thing
equal to every other; that the evil as well as the good is
legitimated and consecrated. Of pantheistic monism all this is
true,—it is not true of ethical monism; for ethical monism is the
monism that recognizes the ethical fact of personal intelligence
and will in both God and man, and with these God’s purpose in
making the universe a varied manifestation of himself. The worship
of cats and bulls and crocodiles in ancient Egypt, and the
deification of lust in the Brahmanic temples of India, were
expressions of a non-ethical monism, which saw in God no moral
attributes, and which identified God with his manifestations. As
an illustration of the mistakes into which the critics of monism
may fall for lack of discrimination between monism that is
pantheistic and monism that is ethical, we quote from Emma Marie
Caillard: “Integral parts of God are, on monistic premises, liars,
sensualists, murderers, evil livers and evil thinkers of every
description. Their crimes and their passions enter intrinsically
into the divine experience. The infinite Individual in his
wholeness may reject them indeed, but none the less are these evil
finite individuals constituent parts of him, even as the twigs of
a tree, though they are not the tree, and though the tree
transcends any or all of them, are yet constituent parts of it.
Can he whose universal consciousness includes and defines all
finite consciousnesses be other than responsible for all finite
actions and motives?”

To this indictment we may reply in the words of Bowne, The Divine
Immanence, 130-133—“Some weak heads have been so heated by the new
wine of immanence as to put all things on the same level, and make
men and mice of equal value. But there is nothing in the
dependence of all things on God to remove their distinctions of
value. One confused talker of this type was led to say that he had
no trouble with the notion of a divine man, as he believed in a
divine oyster. Others have used the doctrine to cancel moral
differences; for if God be in all things, and if all things
represent his will, then whatever is is right. But this too is
hasty. Of course even the evil will is not independent of God, but
lives and moves and has its being in and through the divine. But
through its mysterious power of selfhood and self-determination
the evil will is able to assume an attitude of hostility to the
divine law, which forthwith vindicates itself by appropriate
reactions.

“These reactions are not divine in the highest or ideal sense.
They represent nothing which God desires or in which he delights;
but they are divine in the sense that they are things to be done
under the circumstances. The divine reaction in the case of the
good is distinct from the divine reaction against evil. Both are
divine as representing God’s action, but only the former is divine
in the sense of representing God’s approval and sympathy. All
things serve, said Spinoza. The good serve, and are furthered by
their service. The bad also serve and are used up in the serving.
According to Jonathan Edwards, the wicked are useful ‘in being
acted upon and disposed of.’ As ‘vessels of dishonor’ they may
reveal the majesty of God. There is nothing therefore in the
divine immanence, in its only tenable form, to cancel moral
distinctions or to minify retribution. The divine reaction against
iniquity is even more solemn in this doctrine. The besetting God
is the eternal and unescapable environment; and only as we are in
harmony with him can there be any peace.... What God thinks of
sin, and what his will is concerning it can be plainly seen in the
natural consequences which attend it.... In law itself we are face
to face with God; and natural consequences have a supernatural
meaning.”

4. Since Christ is the Logos of God, the immanent God, God revealed in
Nature, in Humanity, in Redemption, Ethical Monism recognizes the universe
as created, upheld, and governed by the same Being who in the course of
history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by
his death on Calvary. The secret of the universe and the key to its
mysteries are to be found in the Cross.

_John 1:1-4 (marg.), 14, 18—_“In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the
beginning with God. All things were made through him; and without
him was not any thing made. That which hath been made was life in
him; and the life was the light of men.... And the Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us.... No man hath seen God at any time;
the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him.” _Col. 1:16, 17—_“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.” _Heb.
1:2, 3—_“his Son ... through whom also he made the worlds ...
upholding all things by the word of his power”; _Eph. 1:22,
23—_“the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that
filleth all in all” = fills all things with all that they contain
of truth, beauty, and goodness; _Col. 2:2, 3, 9—_“the mystery of
God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge hidden ... for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily.”

This view of the relation of the universe to God lays the
foundation for a Christian application of recent philosophical
doctrine. Matter is no longer blind and dead, but is spiritual in
its nature, not in the sense that it _is_ spirit, but in the sense
that it is the continual _manifestation_ of spirit, just as my
thoughts are a living and continual manifestation of myself. Yet
matter does not consist simply in _ideas_, for ideas, deprived of
an external object and of an internal subject, are left suspended
in the air. Ideas are the product of Mind. But matter is known
only as the operation of force, and force is the product of Will.
Since this force works in rational ways, it can be the product
only of Spirit. The system of forces which we call the universe is
the immediate product of the mind and will of God; and, since
Christ is the mind and will of God in exercise, Christ is the
Creator and Upholder of the universe. Nature is the omnipresent
Christ, manifesting God to creatures.

Christ is the principle of cohesion, attraction, interaction, not
only in the physical universe, but in the intellectual and moral
universe as well. In all our knowing, the knower and known are
“connected by some Being who is their reality,” and this being is
Christ, “the Light which lighteth every man”_ (John 1:9)_. We
_know_ in Christ, just as “in him we live, and move, and have our
being”_ (Acts 17:28)_. As the attraction of gravitation and the
principle of evolution are only other names for Christ, so he is
the basis of inductive reasoning and the ground of moral unity in
the creation. I am bound to love my neighbor as myself because he
has in him the same life that is in me, the life of God in Christ.
The Christ in whom all humanity is created, and in whom all
humanity consists, holds together the moral universe, drawing all
men to himself and so drawing them to God. Through him God
“reconciles all things unto himself ... whether things upon the
earth, or things in the heavens”_ (Col. 1:20)_.

As Pantheism = exclusive immanence = God imprisoned, so Deism =
exclusive transcendence = God banished. Ethical Monism holds to
the truth contained in each of these systems, while avoiding their
respective errors. It furnishes the basis for a new interpretation
of many theological as well as of many philosophical doctrines. It
helps our understanding of the Trinity. If within the bounds of
God’s being there can exist multitudinous finite personalities, it
becomes easier to comprehend how within those same bounds there
can be three eternal and infinite personalities,—indeed, the
integration of plural consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine
consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of
subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man; see
Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, Feeling and Will, 53, 54.

Ethical Monism, since it is ethical, leaves room for human wills
and for their freedom. While man could never break the natural
bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond
and introduce into creation a principle of discord and evil. Tie a
cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger,
diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. So there
has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power,
spiritually to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally
joined to God. As humanity is created in Christ and lives only in
Christ, man’s self-isolation is his moral separation from Christ.
Simon, Redemption of Man, 339—“Rejecting Christ is not so much
refusal to _become_ one with Christ as it is refusal to _remain_
one with him, refusal to let him be our life.” All men are
naturally one with Christ by physical birth, before they become
morally one with him by spiritual birth. They may set themselves
against him and may oppose him forever. This our Lord intimates,
when he tells us that there are natural branches of Christ, which
do not “abide in the vine” or “bear fruit,” and so are “cast
forth,” “withered,” and “burned”_ (John 15:4-6)_.

Ethical Monism, however, since it is Monism, enables us to
understand the principle of the Atonement. Though God’s holiness
binds him to punish sin, the Christ who has joined himself to the
sinner must share the sinner’s punishment. He who is the life of
humanity must take upon his own heart the burden of shame and
penalty that belongs to his members. Tie the cord about your
finger; not only the finger suffers pain, but also the heart; the
life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to
untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member.
Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Since
human nature is one of the “all things” that “consist” or hold
together in Christ (_Col 1:17_), and man’s sin is a
self-perversion of a part of Christ’s own body, the whole must be
injured by the self-inflicted injury of the part, and “it must
needs be that Christ should suffer”_ (Acts 17:3)_. Simon,
Redemption of Man, 321—“If the Logos is the Mediator of the divine
immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are
differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos
is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation—_i.
e._, the principle of all _form_—must not the self-perversion of
these human differentiations react on him who is their
constitutive principle?” A more full explanation of the relations
of Ethical Monism to other doctrines must be reserved to our
separate treatment of the Trinity, Creation, Sin, Atonement,
Regeneration. Portions of the subject are treated by Upton,
Hibbert Lectures; Le Conte, in Royce’s Conception of God, 43-50;
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 297-301, 311-317, and
Immanence of God, 5-32, 116-153; Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge,
574-590, and Theory of Reality, 525-529; Edward Caird, Evolution
of Religion, 2:48; Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:258-283;
Göschel, quoted in Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:170. An
attempt has been made to treat the whole subject by A. H. Strong,
Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 1-86, 141-162, 166-180,
186-208.

PART III. THE SCRIPTURES A REVELATION FROM GOD.

Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.

I. Reasons _a priori_ for expecting a Revelation from God.

1. _Needs of man’s nature._ Man’s intellectual and moral nature requires,
in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its
moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of
religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its
present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The
proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.

A. Psychological proof.—(_a_) Neither reason nor intuition throws light
upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us;
for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal
existence after death. (_b_) Even the truth to which we arrive by our
natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses
minds and wills perverted by sin. (_c_) To break this power of sin, and to
furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the
merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.

(_a_) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23;
Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου,
chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason
and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man
needs: “Renown is loud,” he says, “and not to lose one’s senses is
God’s greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave;
for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the
thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more
prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.” Though the gods
might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather,
envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in
Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and
beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of
evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there
be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her,
cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no
Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed
there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call
visible nature, or _this_ world, must be but a veil and
surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen
or _other_ world.”

(_b_) _Versus_ Socrates: Men will do right, if they only know the
right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the
opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle
already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not
always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends
also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of
knowledge, then those who are theoretically most cultivated must
also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.” W.
S. Lilly, On Shibboleths: “Ignorance is often held to be the root
of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It
cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will
from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and
render it less easy to detect. It does not change man’s natural
propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of
others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the
bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.” Gore,
Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument,
for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but
we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system
nor the primary method of Christianity.” Martineau, in Nineteenth
Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of
the right into that of the good, and this again was
indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the
beautiful.” See also Flint, Theism, 305.

(_c_) _Versus_ Thomas Paine: “Natural religion teaches us, without
the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper
to be known.” Plato, Laws, 9:854, _c_, for substance: “Be good;
but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.” Farrar, Darkness and
Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has
revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all
is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the
universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to
order.” Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered
“until some god descends for him into the black depths of
Tartarus.” Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save
himself. He says: “Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God
comes _to_ men, yes, _into_ men.” We are sinful, and God’s
thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways.
Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we
are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can
be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands
the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression
depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.” In other words,
we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the
manifestation of love.

B. Historical proof.—(_a_) The knowledge of moral and religious truth
possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is
grossly and increasingly imperfect. (_b_) Man’s actual condition in
ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme
moral depravity. (_c_) With this depravity is found a general conviction
of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after,
and hope of, aid from above.

Pythagoras: “It is not easy to know [duties], except men were
taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received
them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some
divine means.” Socrates: “Wait with patience, till we know with
certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”
Plato: “We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to
instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our
eyes.” Disciple of Plato: “Make probability our raft, while we
sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe
conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.” Plato
thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational
soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he
lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he
had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas
of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for “a more sure
word of prophecy”_ (2 Pet. 1:19)_. See references and quotations
in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in
Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers
after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.

2. _Presumption of supply._ What we know of God, by nature, affords ground
for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met
by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We
argue this:

(_a_) From our necessary conviction of God’s wisdom. Having made man a
spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish
the means needed to secure these ends. (_b_) From the actual, though
incomplete, revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually
undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish
the work he has begun. (_c_) From the general connection of want and
supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in
general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the
highest want will be all the more surely met. (_d_) From analogies of
nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of
forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice
is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.

(_a_) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan’s escape from
pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of
God, and “danced for joy upon the brig o’ Dee”; and 2. when, under
Malan’s influence, he came also to believe that “God meant that we
should know him.” In the story in the old Village Reader, the
mother broke completely down when she found that her son was
likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him
intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but
small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long
separation, went to her in Boston, the mother’s heart was in
distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last,
by some peculiar mother’s sign, she pierced the veil of
insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father,
tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The
agony of the Cross is the sign of God’s distress over the
insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker
of man’s being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion
with himself for which it was designed.

(_b_) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in
itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is
Christ.” (_c_) R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God,
228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert
where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to
keep the sense of want alive.” (_d_) In the natural arrangements
for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken
bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents
for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to
inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him
for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted
by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a
God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch’s treatise “De Sera Numinis
Vindicta” is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen.
It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even
continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope.
Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave
its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both
good and just. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on
the throne,” is a scandal to the divine government which only the
sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.

The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21,
and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; see _Job
21:7—_“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty
in power?” _24:1—_“Why are not judgment times determined by the
Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?” The
New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God’s
goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares
that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought
only by Christ. Compare _Acts 14:17—_“And yet he left not himself
without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven
rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and
gladness”; _17:25-27—_“he himself giveth to all life, and breath,
and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that
they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find
him”; _Rom. 2:4—_“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;
_3:25—_“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the
forbearance of God”; _Eph. 3:9—_“to make all men see what is the
dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;
_2 Tim. 1:10—_“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and
brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.” See
Hackett’s edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen,
Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.

We conclude this section upon the reasons _a priori_ for expecting a
revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that
degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree
of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that,
while conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not,
from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason
teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from
reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide
salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God’s own voice, assuring him
of “redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses” (Eph. 1:7) and
revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered
possible.

Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of
Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:
“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the
goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one
who undertakes the study of Christian theology.” We grant that
natural affection gives some clue to God’s goodness, but we regard
conscience as reflecting only God’s holiness and his hatred of
sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren: “Does God’s love need to be
proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless,
gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is
there a god who loves?”

II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.

1. _As to its substance._ We may expect this later revelation not to
contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we
derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and
throws light upon its problems.

Isaiah’s appeal is to God’s previous communications of truth: _Is.
8:20—_“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not
according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.” And
Malachi follows the example of Isaiah; _Mal. 4:4—_“Remember ye the
law of Moses my servant.” Our Lord himself based his claims upon
the former utterances of God: _Luke 24:27—_“beginning from Moses
and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the
scriptures the things concerning himself.”

2. _As to its method._ We may expect it to follow God’s methods of
procedure in other communications of truth.

Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there
is any possibility of judging _a priori_ how a divine revelation
will be given. “We are in no sort judges beforehand,” he says, “by
what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that
this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.” But
Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv)
shows that God’s progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in
the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in
nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain
presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for
example as those mentioned below.

Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler
answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity
was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust.
James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either
God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler
‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever
produced.’ So J. H. Newman’s ‘kill or cure’ argument is
essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made
revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument,
like Butler’s, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to
belief.” To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has
cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting
this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and
redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity
are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between
God’s methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature
becomes an argument in favor of the former.

(_a_) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in
germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is
prepared to receive it.

Instances of continuous development in God’s impartations are
found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the
progressive education of the individual and of the race. No other
religion but Christianity shows “a steady historical progress of
the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man
through a period of many centuries.” See sermon by Dr. Temple, on
the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers,
Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the
Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher,
Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John
Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual
approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of
finite humanity.” A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but
ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would
not kindle anything.

(_b_) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons
in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.

Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for
liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and
law, so the Hebrew nation had a “genius for religion” (Renan);
this last, however, would have been useless without special divine
aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same
Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament
Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later
still, the Talmud and the Koran.

The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second
time into the lions’ den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the
hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to
Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was
among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father’s
house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him.
On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour
him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns
successful to his father’s house, and his little dog goes in with
him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle
when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and,
when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion
with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his
teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that
Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him,
went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right
sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and
the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were
reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the
influence of environment nor a native genius for religion
furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame
on Elijah’s altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the
fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can
explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.

The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression
of their life we “must look beneath the surface, in the soul,
where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face
with God” (Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew
religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason,
and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of
knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek
Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it
was the Greeks who wrote.” Aristotle was the beginner of science,
and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the
scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by
striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would
never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not
been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has
contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood
suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God
is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to
every other. _Acts 17:26_—God “made of one every nation of men to
dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their
appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; _Rom.
3:12—_“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that
they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” God’s choice of the
Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious
truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the
repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific,
governmental truth.

Hegel: “No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the
world’s history has ever issued from the simple development of a
single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship.
There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed
forces.” The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek,
the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton,
must all be united to form a perfect whole. “While the Greek
church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic; while the
Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the
harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a
corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.” Brereton,
in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is
that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of
society; that of America, capital and labor.” Pfleiderer, Philos.
Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but
from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however,
awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been
slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.” The hour
strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God’s will in
nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who
interprets God’s will in morals and religion. The few grains of
wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have
been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second
in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being
planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a
garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer’s field, there
came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to
distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method
in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen
individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to
all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive
Theology.

(_c_) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed
down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.

Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the
history of the past; all the great religions of the world are
book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new
religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions
have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the
principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P.
Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed
discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of
their religion. He called them a ‘book-people,’ and endeavored to
construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only
speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct
revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is
incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and
history.” The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its
exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof
that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand,
makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole
and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke,
Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a
life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives
us the Bible.” Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ
we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his
revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of
communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents.
Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the
Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of
the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century
penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the
city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of
their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith,
73-96, 281-304.

3. _As to its attestation._ We may expect that this revelation will be
accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have
previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute
(_a_) a manifestation of God himself; (_b_) in the outward as well as the
inward world; (_c_) such as only God’s power or knowledge can make; and
(_d_) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the
candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by
prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he
communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be
necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed
revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the
revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare
Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah
asks a sign, for others). But in order that our positive proof of a divine
revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and
prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against
its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general
subject of miracles and prophecy.

III. Miracles, as attesting a Divine Revelation.

1. Definition of Miracle.

A. Preliminary Definition.—A miracle is an event palpable to the senses,
produced for a religious purpose by the immediate agency of God; an event
therefore which, though not contravening any law of nature, the laws of
nature, if fully known, would not without this agency of God be competent
to explain.

This definition corrects several erroneous conceptions of the
miracle:—(_a_) A miracle is not a suspension or violation of natural law;
since natural law is in operation at the time of the miracle just as much
as before. (_b_) A miracle is not a sudden product of natural agencies—a
product merely foreseen, by him who appears to work it; it is the effect
of a will outside of nature. (_c_) A miracle is not an event without a
cause; since it has for its cause a direct volition of God. (_d_) A
miracle is not an irrational or capricious act of God; but an act of
wisdom, performed in accordance with the immutable laws of his being, so
that in the same circumstances the same course would be again pursued.
(_e_) A miracle is not contrary to experience; since it is not contrary to
experience for a new cause to be followed by a new effect. (_f_) A miracle
is not a matter of internal experience, like regeneration or illumination;
but is an event palpable to the senses, which may serve as an objective
proof to all that the worker of it is divinely commissioned as a religious
teacher.

For various definitions of miracles, see Alexander, Christ and
Christianity, 302. On the whole subject, see Mozley, Miracles;
Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 285-339; Fisher, in
Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880, and Jan. 1881; A. H. Strong, Philosophy
and Religion, 129-147, and in Baptist Review, April, 1879. The
definition given above is intended simply as a definition of the
miracles of the Bible, or, in other words, of the events which
profess to attest a divine revelation in the Scriptures. The New
Testament designates these events in a two-fold way, viewing them
either subjectively, as producing effects upon men, or
objectively, as revealing the power and wisdom of God. In the
former aspect they are called τέρατα, “wonders,” and σημεῖα,
“signs,”_ (John 4:48; Acts 2:22)_. In the latter aspect they are
called δυνάμεις, “powers,” and ἔργα, “works,”_ (Mat 7:22; John
14:11)_. See H. B. Smith, Lect. on Apologetics, 90-116, esp.
94—“σημεῖον, sign, marking the purpose or object, the moral end,
placing the event in connection with revelation.” The Bible Union
Version uniformly and properly renders τέρας by “wonder,” δυνάμις
by “miracle,” ἔργον by “work,” and σημεῖον by “sign.” Goethe,
Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss: Das
Unzulängliche wird hier Ereigniss”—“Everything transitory is but a
parable; The unattainable appears as solid fact.” So the miracles
of the New Testament are acted parables,—Christ opens the eyes of
the blind to show that he is the Light of the world, multiplies
the loaves to show that he is the Bread of Life, and raises the
dead to show that he lifts men up from the death of trespasses and
sins. See Broadus on Matthew, 175.

A modification of this definition of the miracle, however, is
demanded by a large class of Christian physicists, in the supposed
interest of natural law. Such a modification is proposed by
Babbage, in the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, chap. viii. Babbage
illustrates the miracle by the action of his calculating machine,
which would present to the observer in regular succession the
series of units from one to ten million, but which would then make
a leap and show, not ten million and one, but a hundred million;
Ephraim Peabody illustrates the miracle from the cathedral clock
which strikes only once in a hundred years; yet both these results
are due simply to the original construction of the respective
machines. Bonnet held this view; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:591,
592; Eng. translation, 2:155, 156; so Matthew Arnold, quoted in
Bruce, Miraculous Element in Gospels, 52; see also A. H. Strong,
Philosophy and Religion, 129-147. Babbage and Peabody would deny
that the miracle is due to the direct and immediate agency of God,
and would regard it as belonging to a higher order of nature. God
is the author of the miracle only in the sense that he instituted
the laws of nature at the beginning and provided that at the
appropriate time miracle should be their outcome. In favor of this
view it has been claimed that it does not dispense with the divine
working, but only puts it further back at the origination of the
system, while it still holds God’s work to be essential, not only
to the upholding of the system, but also to the inspiring of the
religious teacher or leader with the knowledge needed to predict
the unusual working of the system. The wonder is confined to the
prophecy, which may equally attest a divine revelation. See
Matheson, in Christianity and Evolution, 1-26.

But it is plain that a miracle of this sort lacks to a large
degree the element of “signality” which is needed, if it is to
accomplish its purpose. It surrenders the great advantage which
miracle, as first defined, possessed over special providence, as
an attestation of revelation—the advantage, namely, that while
special providence affords _some_ warrant that this revelation
comes from God, miracle gives _full_ warrant that it comes from
God. Since man may by natural means possess himself of the
knowledge of physical laws, the true miracle which God works, and
the pretended miracle which only man works, are upon this theory
far less easy to distinguish from each other: Cortez, for example,
could deceive Montezuma by predicting an eclipse of the sun.
Certain typical miracles, like the resurrection of Lazarus, refuse
to be classed as events within the realm of nature, in the sense
in which the term nature is ordinarily used. Our Lord, moreover,
seems clearly to exclude such a theory as this, when he says: “If
I by the finger of God cast out demons”_ (Luke 11:20)_; _Mark
1:41—_“I will; be thou made clean.” The view of Babbage is
inadequate, not only because it fails to recognize any immediate
exercise of _will_ in the miracle, but because it regards nature
as a mere _machine_ which can operate apart from God—a purely
deistic method of conception. On this view, many of the products
of mere natural law might be called miracles. The miracle would be
only the occasional manifestation of a higher order of nature,
like the comet occasionally invading the solar system. William
Elder, Ideas from Nature: “The century-plant which we have seen
growing from our childhood may not unfold its blossoms until our
old age comes upon us, but the sudden wonder is natural
notwithstanding.” If, however, we interpret nature dynamically,
rather than mechanically, and regard it as the regular working of
the divine will instead of the automatic operation of a machine,
there is much in this view which we may adopt. Miracle may be both
natural and supernatural. We may hold, with Babbage, that it has
natural antecedents, while at the same time we hold that it is
produced by the immediate agency of God. We proceed therefore to
an alternative and preferable definition, which in our judgment
combines the merits of both that have been mentioned. On miracles
as already defined, see Mozley, Miracles, preface, ix-xxvi, 7,
143-166; Bushnell, Nature and Supernatural, 333-336; Smith’s and
Hastings’ Dict. of Bible, art.: Miracles; Abp. Temple, Bampton
Lectures for 1884:193-221; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:541, 542.

B. Alternative and Preferable Definition.—A miracle is an event in nature,
so extraordinary in itself and so coinciding with the prophecy or command
of a religious teacher or leader, as fully to warrant the conviction, on
the part of those who witness it, that God has wrought it with the design
of certifying that this teacher or leader has been commissioned by him.

This definition has certain marked advantages as compared with the
preliminary definition given above:—(_a_) It recognizes the immanence of
God and his immediate agency in nature, instead of assuming an antithesis
between the laws of nature and the will of God. (_b_) It regards the
miracle as simply an extraordinary act of that same God who is already
present in all natural operations and who in them is revealing his general
plan. (_c_) It holds that natural law, as the method of God’s regular
activity, in no way precludes unique exertions of his power when these
will best secure his purpose in creation. (_d_) It leaves it possible that
all miracles may have their natural explanations and may hereafter be
traced to natural causes, while both miracles and their natural causes may
be only names for the one and self-same will of God. (_e_) It reconciles
the claims of both science and religion: of science, by permitting any
possible or probable physical antecedents of the miracle; of religion, by
maintaining that these very antecedents together with the miracle itself
are to be interpreted as signs of God’s special commission to him under
whose teaching or leadership the miracle is wrought.

Augustine, who declares that “Dei voluntas rerum natura est,”
defines the miracle in De Civitate Dei, 21:8—“Portentum ergo fit
non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.” He says also
that a birth is more miraculous than a resurrection, because it is
more wonderful that something that never was should begin to be,
than that something that was and ceased to be should begin again.
E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 104—“The natural is God’s work.
He originated it. There is no separation between the natural and
the supernatural. The natural is supernatural. God works in
everything. Every end, even though attained by mechanical means,
is God’s end as truly as if he wrought by miracle.” Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 141, regards miracle as something
exceptional, yet under the control of natural law; the latent in
nature suddenly manifesting itself; the revolution resulting from
the slow accumulation of natural forces. In the Windsor Hotel
fire, the heated and charred woodwork suddenly burst into flame.
Flame is very different from mere heat, but it may be the result
of a regularly rising temperature. Nature may be God’s regular
action, miracle its unique result. God’s regular action may be
entirely free, and yet its extraordinary result may be entirely
natural. With these qualifications and explanations, we may adopt
the statement of Biedermann, Dogmatik, 581-591—“Everything is
miracle,—therefore faith sees God everywhere; Nothing is
miracle,—therefore science sees God nowhere.”

Miracles are never considered by the Scripture writers as
infractions of law. Bp. Southampton, Place of Miracles, 18—“The
Hebrew historian or prophet regarded miracles as only the
emergence into sensible experience of that divine force which was
all along, though invisibly, controlling the course of nature.”
Hastings, Bible Dictionary, 4:117—“The force of a miracle to us,
arising from our notion of law, would not be felt by a Hebrew,
because he had no notion of natural law.” _Ps. 77:19, 20—_“Thy way
was in the sea, And thy paths in the great waters, And thy
footsteps were not known”—They knew not, and we know not, by what
precise means the deliverance was wrought, or by what precise
track the passage through the Red Sea was effected; all we know is
that “Thou leddest thy people like a flock, By the hand of Moses
and Aaron.” J. M. Whiton, Miracles and Supernatural Religion: “The
supernatural is in nature itself, at its very heart, at its very
life; ... not an outside power interfering with the course of
nature, but an inside power vitalizing nature and operating
through it.” Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 35—“Miracle,
instead of spelling ‘monster’, as Emerson said, simply bears
witness to some otherwise unknown or unrecognized aspect of the
divine character.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:533—“To cause the sun to
rise and to cause Lazarus to rise, both demand omnipotence; but
the manner in which omnipotence works in one instance is unlike
the manner in the other.”

Miracle is an immediate operation of God; but, since all natural
processes are also immediate operations of God, we do not need to
deny the use of these natural processes, so far as they will go,
in miracle. Such wonders of the Old Testament as the overthrow of
Sodom and Gomorrah, the partings of the Red Sea and of the Jordan,
the calling down of fire from heaven by Elijah and the destruction
of the army of Sennacherib, are none the less works of God when
regarded as wrought by the use of natural means. In the New
Testament Christ took water to make wine, and took the five loaves
to make bread, just as in ten thousand vineyards to-day he is
turning the moisture of the earth into the juice of the grape, and
in ten thousand fields is turning carbon into corn. The
virgin-birth of Christ may be an extreme instance of
parthenogenesis, which Professor Loeb of Chicago has just
demonstrated to take place in other than the lowest forms of life
and which he believes to be possible in all. Christ’s resurrection
may be an illustration of the power of the normal and perfect
human spirit to take to itself a proper body, and so may be the
type and prophecy of that great change when we too shall lay down
our life and take it again. The scientist may yet find that his
disbelief is not only disbelief in Christ, but also disbelief in
science. All miracle may have its natural side, though we now are
not able to discern it; and, if this were true, the Christian
argument would not one whit be weakened, for still miracle would
evidence the extraordinary working of the immanent God, and the
impartation of his knowledge to the prophet or apostle who was his
instrument.

This view of the miracle renders entirely unnecessary and
irrational the treatment accorded to the Scripture narratives by
some modern theologians. There is a credulity of scepticism, which
minimizes the miraculous element in the Bible and treats it as
mythical or legendary, in spite of clear evidence that it belongs
to the realm of actual history. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig.,
1:295—“Miraculous legends arise in two ways, partly out of the
idealizing of the real, and partly out of the realizing of the
ideal.... Every occurrence may obtain for the religious judgment
the significance of a sign or proof of the world-governing power,
wisdom, justice or goodness of God.... Miraculous histories are a
poetic realizing of religious ideas.” Pfleiderer quotes Goethe’s
apothegm: “Miracle is faith’s dearest child.” Foster, Finality of
the Christian Religion, 128-138—“We most honor biblical miraculous
narratives when we seek to understand them as poesies.” Ritschl
defines miracles as “those striking _natural_ occurrences with
which the experience of God’s special help is connected.” He
leaves doubtful the bodily resurrection of Christ, and many of his
school deny it; see Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of
Doctrine, 11. We do not need to interpret Christ’s resurrection as
a mere appearance of his spirit to the disciples. Gladden, Seven
Puzzling Books, 202—“In the hands of perfect and spiritual man,
the forces of nature are pliant and tractable as they are not in
ours. The resurrection of Christ is only a sign of the superiority
of the life of the perfect spirit over external conditions. It may
be perfectly in accordance with nature.” Myers, Human Personality,
2:288—“I predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all
reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the resurrection of
Christ.” We may add that Jesus himself intimates that the working
of miracles is hereafter to be a common and natural manifestation
of the new life which he imparts: _John 14:12—_“He that believeth
on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works
than these shall he do, because I go unto the Father.”

We append a number of opinions, ancient and modern, with regard to
miracles, all tending to show the need of so defining them as not
to conflict with the just claims of science. Aristotle: “Nature is
not full of episodes, like a bad tragedy.” Shakespeare, All’s Well
that Ends Well, 2:3:1—“They say miracles are past; and we have our
philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things
supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of
terrors, ensconsing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we
should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” Keats, Lamia: “There
was an awful rainbow once in heaven; We know her woof, her
texture: she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.”
Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 334—“Biological and psychological
science unite in affirming that every event, organic or psychic,
is to be explained in the terms of its immediate antecedents, and
that it can be so explained. There is therefore no necessity,
there is even no room, for interference. If the existence of a
Deity depends upon the evidence of intervention and supernatural
agency, faith in the divine seems to be destroyed in the
scientific mind.” Theodore Parker: “No whim in God,—therefore no
miracle in nature.” Armour, Atonement and Law, 15-33—“The miracle
of redemption, like all miracles, is by intervention of adequate
power, not by suspension of law. Redemption is not ‘the great
exception.’ It is the fullest revelation and vindication of law.”
Gore, in Lux Mundi, 320—“Redemption is not natural but
supernatural—supernatural, that is, in view of the false nature
which man made for himself by excluding God. Otherwise, the work
of redemption is only the reconstitution of the nature which God
had designed.” Abp. Trench: “The world of nature is throughout a
witness for the world of spirit, proceeding from the same hand,
growing out of the same root, and being constituted for this very
end. The characters of nature which everywhere meet the eye are
not a common but a sacred writing,—they are the hieroglyphics of
God.” Pascal: “Nature is the image of grace.” President Mark
Hopkins: “Christianity and perfect Reason are identical.” See
Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 97-123; art.: Miracle, by Bernard,
in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. The modern and improved view
of the miracle is perhaps best presented by T. H. Wright, The
Finger of God; and by W. N. Rice, Christian Faith in an Age of
Science, 336.

2. Possibility of Miracle.

An event in nature may be caused by an agent in nature yet above nature.
This is evident from the following considerations:

(_a_) Lower forces and laws in nature are frequently counteracted and
transcended by the higher (as mechanical forces and laws by chemical, and
chemical by vital), while yet the lower forces and laws are not suspended
or annihilated, but are merged in the higher, and made to assist in
accomplishing purposes to which they are altogether unequal when left to
themselves.

By nature we mean nature in the proper sense—not “everything that
is not God,” but “everything that is not God or made in the image
of God”; see Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 258, 259. Man’s will
does not belong to nature, but is above nature. On the
transcending of lower forces by higher, see Murphy, Habit and
Intelligence, 1:88. James Robertson, Early Religion of Israel,
23—“Is it impossible that there should be unique things in the
world? Is it scientific to assert that there are not?” Ladd,
Philosophy of Knowledge, 406—“Why does not the projecting part of
the coping-stone fall, in obedience to the law of gravitation,
from the top of yonder building? Because, as physics declares, the
forces of cohesion, acting under quite different laws, thwart and
oppose for the time being the law of gravitation.... But now,
after a frosty night, the coping-stone actually breaks off and
tumbles to the ground; for that unique law which makes water
forcibly expand at 32° Fahrenheit has contradicted the laws of
cohesion and has restored to the law of gravitation its
temporarily suspended rights over this mass of matter.” Gore,
Incarnation, 48—“Evolution views nature as a progressive order in
which there are new departures, fresh levels won, phenomena
unknown before. When organic life appeared, the future did not
resemble the past. So when man came. Christ is a new nature—the
creative Word made flesh. It is to be expected that, as new
nature, he will exhibit new phenomena. New vital energy will
radiate from him, controlling the material forces. Miracles are
the proper accompaniments of his person.” We may add that, as
Christ is the immanent God, he is present in nature while at the
same time he is above nature, and he whose steady will is the
essence of all natural law can transcend all past exertions of
that will. The infinite One is not a being of endless monotony.
William Elder, Ideas from Nature, 156—“God is not bound hopelessly
to his process, like Ixion to his wheel.”

(_b_) The human will acts upon its physical organism, and so upon nature,
and produces results which nature left to herself never could accomplish,
while yet no law of nature is suspended or violated. Gravitation still
operates upon the axe, even while man holds it at the surface of the
water—for the axe still has weight (_cf._ 2 K. 6:5-7).

_Versus_ Hume, Philos. Works, 4:130—“A miracle is a violation of
the laws of nature.” Christian apologists have too often
needlessly embarrassed their argument by accepting Hume’s
definition. The stigma is entirely undeserved. If man can support
the axe at the surface of the water while gravitation still acts
upon it, God can certainly, at the prophet’s word, make the iron
to swim, while gravitation still acts upon it. But this last is
miracle. See Mansel, Essay on Miracles, in Aids to Faith, 26, 27:
After the greatest wave of the season has landed its pebble high
up on the beach, I can move the pebble a foot further without
altering the force of wind or wave or climate in a distant
continent. Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 471;
Hamilton, Autology, 685-690; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 445; Row,
Bampton Lectures on Christian Evidences, 54-74; A. A. Hodge:
Pulling out a new stop of the organ does not suspend the working
or destroy the harmony of the other stops. The pump does not
suspend the law of gravitation, nor does our throwing a ball into
the air. If gravitation did not act, the upward velocity of the
ball would not diminish and the ball would never return.
“Gravitation draws iron down. But the magnet overcomes that
attraction and draws the iron up. Yet here is no suspension or
violation of law, but rather a harmonious working of two laws,
each in its sphere. Death and not life is the order of nature. But
men live notwithstanding. Life is supernatural. Only as a force
additional to mere nature works against nature does life exist. So
spiritual life uses and transcends the laws of nature” (Sunday
School Times). Gladden, What Is Left? 60—“Wherever you find
thought, choice, love, you find something that is not under the
dominion of fixed law. These are the attributes of a free
personality.” William James: “We need to substitute the _personal_
view of life for the _impersonal_ and _mechanical_ view.
Mechanical rationalism is narrowness and partial induction of
facts,—it is not _science_.”

(_c_) In all free causation, there is an acting without means. Man acts
upon external nature through his physical organism, but, in moving his
physical organism, he acts directly upon matter. In other words, the human
will can _use_ means, only because it has the power of acting initially
_without_ means.

See Hopkins, on Prayer-gauge, 10, and in Princeton Review, Sept.
1882:188. A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 311—“Not Divinity
alone intervenes in the world of things. Each living soul, in its
measure and degree, does the same.” Each soul that acts in any way
on its surroundings does so on the principle of the miracle.
Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350—“The making of all events miraculous
is no more an abolition of miracle than the flooding of the world
with sunshine is an extinction of the sun.” George Adam Smith, on
_Is. 33:14—_“devouring fire ... everlasting burnings”: “If we look
at a conflagration through smoked glass, we see buildings
collapsing, but we see no fire. So science sees results, but not
the power which produces them; sees cause and effect, but does not
see God.” P. S. Henson: “The current in an electric wire is
invisible so long as it circulates uniformly. But cut the wire and
insert a piece of carbon between the two broken ends, and at once
you have an arc-light that drives away the darkness. So miracle is
only the momentary interruption in the operation of uniform laws,
which thus gives light to the ages,”—or, let us say rather, the
momentary change in the method of their operation whereby the will
of God takes a new form of manifestation. Pfleiderer, Grundriss,
100—“Spinoza leugnete ihre metaphysische Möglichkeit, Hume ihre
geschichtliche Erkennbarkeit, Kant ihre practische Brauchbarkeit,
Schleiermacher ihre religiöse Bedeutsamkeit, Hegel ihre geistige
Beweiskraft, Fichte ihre wahre Christlichkeit, und die kritische
Theologie ihre wahre Geschichtlichkeit.”

(_d_) What the human will, considered as a supernatural force, and what
the chemical and vital forces of nature itself, are demonstrably able to
accomplish, cannot be regarded as beyond the power of God, so long as God
dwells in and controls the universe. If man’s will can act directly upon
matter in his own physical organism, God’s will can work immediately upon
the system which he has created and which he sustains. In other words, if
there be a God, and if he be a personal being, miracles are possible. The
impossibility of miracles can be maintained only upon principles of
atheism or pantheism.

See Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 19; Cox, Miracles, an
Argument and a Challenge: “Anthropomorphism is preferable to
hylomorphism.” Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in a New Light, ch. 1—“A
miracle is not a sudden blow struck in the face of nature, but a
use of nature, according to its inherent capacities, by higher
powers.” See also Gloatz, Wunder und Naturgesetz, in Studien und
Kritiken, 1886:403-546; Gunsaulus, Transfiguration of Christ, 18,
19, 26; Andover Review, on “Robert Elsmere,” 1888:303; W. E.
Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, 1888:766-788; Dubois, on Science
and Miracle, in New Englander, July, 1889:1-32—Three postulates:
(1) Every particle attracts every other in the universe; (2) Man’s
will is free; (3) Every volition is accompanied by corresponding
brain-action. Hence every volition of ours causes changes
throughout the whole universe; also, in Century Magazine, Dec.
1894:229—Conditions are never twice the same in nature; all things
are the results of will, since we know that the least thought of
ours shakes the universe; miracle is simply the action of will in
unique conditions; the beginning of life, the origin of
consciousness, these are miracles, yet they are strictly natural;
prayer and the mind that frames it are conditions which _the Mind_
in nature cannot ignore. _Cf.__ Ps. 115:3—_“our God is in the
heavens: He hath done whatsoever he pleased” = his almighty power
and freedom do away with all _a priori_ objections to miracles. If
God is not a mere _force_, but a _person_, then miracles are
possible.

(_e_) This possibility of miracles becomes doubly sure to those who see in
Christ none other than the immanent God manifested to creatures. The Logos
or divine Reason who is the principle of all growth and evolution can make
God known only by means of successive new impartations of his energy.
Since all progress implies increment, and Christ is the only source of
life, the whole history of creation is a witness to the possibility of
miracle.

See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-166—“This conception of
evolution is that of Lotze. That great philosopher, whose
influence is more potent than any other in present thought, does
not regard the universe as a _plenum_ to which nothing can be
added in the way of force. He looks upon the universe rather as a
plastic organism to which new impulses can be imparted from him of
whose thought and will it is an expression. These impulses, once
imparted, abide in the organism and are thereafter subject to its
law. Though these impulses come from within, they come not from
the finite mechanism but from the immanent God. Robert Browning’s
phrase, ‘All’s love, but all’s law,’ must be interpreted as
meaning that the very movements of the planets and all the
operations of nature are revelations of a personal and present
God, but it must not be interpreted as meaning that God runs in a
rut, that he is confined to mechanism, that he is incapable of
unique and startling manifestations of power.

“The idea that gives to evolution its hold upon thinking minds is
the idea of continuity. But absolute continuity is inconsistent
with progress. If the future is not simply a reproduction of the
past, there must be some new cause of change. In order to progress
there must be either a new force, or a new combination of forces,
and the new combination of forces can be explained only by some
new force that causes the combination. This new force, moreover,
must be intelligent force, if the evolution is to be toward the
better instead of toward the worse. The continuity must be
continuity not of forces but of plan. The forces may increase,
nay, they must increase, unless the new is to be a mere repetition
of the old. There must be additional energy imparted, the new
combination brought about, and all this implies purpose and will.
But through all there runs one continuous plan, and upon this plan
the rationality of evolution depends.

“A man builds a house. In laying the foundation he uses stone and
mortar, but he makes the walls of wood and the roof of tin. In the
superstructure he brings into play different laws from those which
apply to the foundation. There is continuity, not of material, but
of plan. Progress from cellar to garret requires breaks here and
there, and the bringing in of new forces; in fact, without the
bringing in of these new forces the evolution of the house would
be impossible. Now substitute for the foundation and
superstructure living things like the chrysalis and the butterfly;
imagine the power to work from within and not from without; and
you see that true continuity does not exclude but involves new
beginnings.

“Evolution, then, depends on increments of force _plus_ continuity
of plan. New creations are possible because the immanent God has
not exhausted himself. Miracle is possible because God is not far
away, but is at hand to do whatever the needs of his moral
universe may require. Regeneration and answers to prayer are
possible for the very reason that these are the objects for which
the universe was built. If we were deists, believing in a distant
God and a mechanical universe, evolution and Christianity would be
irreconcilable. But since we believe in a dynamical universe, of
which the personal and living God is the inner source of energy,
evolution is but the basis, foundation and background of
Christianity, the silent and regular working of him who, in the
fulness of time, utters his voice in Christ and the Cross.”

Lotze’s own statement of his position may be found in his
Microcosmos, 2:479 _sq._ Professor James Ten Broeke has
interpreted him as follows: “He makes the possibility of the
miracle depend upon the close and intimate action and reaction
between the world and the personal Absolute, in consequence of
which the movements of the natural world are carried on only
_through_ the Absolute, with the possibility of a variation in the
general course of things, according to existing facts and the
purpose of the divine Governor.”

3. Probability of Miracles.

A. We acknowledge that, so long as we confine our attention to nature,
there is a presumption against miracles. Experience testifies to the
uniformity of natural law. A general uniformity is needful, in order to
make possible a rational calculation of the future, and a proper ordering
of life.

See Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. ii; F. W. Farrar, Witness of
History to Christ, 3-45; Modern Scepticism, 1:179-227; Chalmers,
Christian Revelation, 1:47. G. D. B. Pepper: “Where there is no
law, no settled order, there can be no miracle. The miracle
presupposes the law, and the importance assigned to miracles is
the recognition of the reign of law. But the making and launching
of a ship may be governed by law, no less than the sailing of the
ship after it is launched. So the introduction of a higher
spiritual order into a merely natural order constitutes a new and
unique event.” Some Christian apologists have erred in affirming
that the miracle was antecedently as probable as any other event,
whereas only its antecedent improbability gives it value as a
proof of revelation. Horace: “Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus
vindice nodus Inciderit.”

B. But we deny that this uniformity of nature is absolute and universal.
(_a_) It is not a truth of reason that can have no exceptions, like the
axiom that a whole is greater than its parts. (_b_) Experience could not
warrant a belief in absolute and universal uniformity, unless experience
were identical with absolute and universal knowledge. (_c_) We know, on
the contrary, from geology, that there have been breaks in this
uniformity, such as the introduction of vegetable, animal and human life,
which cannot be accounted for, except by the manifestation in nature of a
supernatural power.

(_a_) Compare the probability that the sun will rise to-morrow
morning with the certainty that two and two make four. Huxley, Lay
Sermons, 158, indignantly denies that there is any “must” about
the uniformity of nature: “No one is entitled to say _a priori_
that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible.” Ward,
Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:84—“There is no evidence for the
statement that the mass of the universe is a definite and
unchangeable quantity”; 108, 109—“Why so confidently assume that a
rigid and monotonous uniformity is the only, or the highest,
indication of order, the order of an ever living Spirit, above
all? How is it that we depreciate machine-made articles, and
prefer those in which the artistic impulse, or the fitness of the
individual case, is free to shape and to make what is literally
manufactured, hand-made?... Dangerous as teleological arguments in
general may be, we may at least safely say the world was not
designed to make science easy.... To call the verses of a poet,
the politics of a statesman, or the award of a judge mechanical,
implies, as Lotze has pointed out, marked disparagement, although
it implies, too, precisely those characteristics—exactness and
invariability—in which Maxwell would have us see a token of the
divine.” Surely then we must not insist that divine wisdom must
always run in a rut, must ever repeat itself, must never exhibit
itself in unique acts like incarnation and resurrection. See
Edward Hitchcock, in Bib. Sac., 20:489-561, on “The Law of
Nature’s Constancy Subordinate to the Higher Law of Change”;
Jevons, Principles of Science, 2:430-438; Mozley, Miracles, 26.

(_b_) S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 18 December, 1831—“The light
which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern of the ship,
which shines only on the waves behind us.” Hobbes: “Experience
concludeth nothing universally.” Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy,
131—“Evidence can tell us only what has happened, and it can never
assure us that the future _must_ be like the past; 132—Proof that
all nature is mechanical would not be inconsistent with the belief
that everything in nature is immediately sustained by Providence,
and that my volition counts for something in determining the
course of events.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:204—“Uniformity
is not absolute. Nature is a vaster realm of life and meaning, of
which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God’s
life. The rhythm of the heart-beat has its normal regularity, yet
its limited persistence. Nature may be merely the _habits of free
will_. Every region of this universally conscious world may be a
centre whence issues new conscious life for communication to all
the worlds.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is Spirit.” We prefer to
say: “Nature is the manifestation of spirit, the regularities of
freedom.”

(_c_) Other breaks in the uniformity of nature are the coming of
Christ and the regeneration of a human soul. Harnack, What is
Christianity, 18, holds that though there are no interruptions to
the working of natural law, natural law is not yet fully known.
While there are no miracles, there is plenty of the miraculous.
The power of mind over matter is beyond our present conceptions.
Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 210—The effects are no more
consequences of the laws than the laws are consequences of the
effects = both laws and effects are exercises of divine will.
King, Reconstruction in Theology, 56—We must hold, not to the
_uniformity_ of law, but to the _universality_ of law; for
evolution has successive stages with new laws coming in and
becoming dominant that had not before appeared. The new and higher
stage is practically a miracle from the point of view of the
lower. See British Quarterly Review, Oct. 1881:154; Martineau,
Study, 2:200, 203, 209.

C. Since the inworking of the moral law into the constitution and course
of nature shows that nature exists, not for itself, but for the
contemplation and use of moral beings, it is probable that the God of
nature will produce effects aside from those of natural law, whenever
there are sufficiently important moral ends to be served thereby.

Beneath the expectation of uniformity is the intuition of final
cause; the former may therefore give way to the latter. See
Porter, Human Intellect, 592-615—Efficient causes and final causes
may conflict, and then the efficient give place to the final. This
is miracle. See Hutton, in Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1885, and
Channing, Evidences of Revealed Religion, quoted in Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:534, 535—“The order of the universe is a means, not an
end, and like all other means must give way when the end can be
best promoted without it. It is the mark of a weak mind to make an
idol of order and method; to cling to established forms of
business when they clog instead of advancing it.” Balfour,
Foundations of Belief, 357—“The stability of the heavens is in the
sight of God of less importance than the moral growth of the human
spirit.” This is proved by the Incarnation. The Christian sees in
this little earth the scene of God’s greatest revelation. The
superiority of the spiritual to the physical helps us to see our
true dignity in the creation, to rule our bodies, to overcome our
sins. Christ’s suffering shows us that God is no indifferent
spectator of human pain. He subjects himself to our conditions, or
rather in this subjection reveals to us God’s own eternal
suffering for sin. The atonement enables us to solve the problem
of sin.

D. The existence of moral disorder consequent upon the free acts of man’s
will, therefore, changes the presumption against miracles into a
presumption in their favor. The non-appearance of miracles, in this case,
would be the greatest of wonders.

Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 331-335—So a man’s
personal consciousness of sin, and above all his personal
experience of regenerating grace, will constitute the best
preparation for the study of miracles. “Christianity cannot be
proved except to a bad conscience.” The dying Vinet said well:
“The greatest miracle that I know of is that of my conversion. I
was dead, and I live; I was blind, and I see; I was a slave, and I
am free; I was an enemy of God, and I love him; prayer, the Bible,
the society of Christians, these were to me a source of profound
_ennui_; whilst now it is the pleasures of the world that are
wearisome to me, and piety is the source of all my joy. Behold the
miracle! And if God has been able to work that one, there are none
of which he is not capable.”

Yet the physical and the moral are not “sundered as with an axe.”
Nature is but the lower stage or imperfect form of the revelation
of God’s truth and holiness and love. It prepares the way for the
miracle by suggesting, though more dimly, the same essential
characteristics of the divine nature. Ignorance and sin
necessitate a larger disclosure. G. S. Lee, The Shadow Christ,
84—“The pillar of cloud was the dim night-lamp that Jehovah kept
burning over his infant children, to show them that he was there.
They did not know that the night itself was God.” Why do we have
Christmas presents in Christian homes? Because the parents do not
love their children at other times? No; but because the mind
becomes sluggish in the presence of merely regular kindness, and
special gifts are needed to wake it to gratitude. So our sluggish
and unloving minds need special testimonies of the divine mercy.
Shall God alone be shut up to dull uniformities of action? Shall
the heavenly Father alone be unable to make special communications
of love? Why then are not miracles and revivals of religion
constant and uniform? Because uniform blessings would be regarded
simply as workings of a machine. See Mozley, Miracles, preface,
xxiv; Turner, Wish and Will, 291-315; N. W. Taylor, Moral
Government, 2:388-423.

E. As belief in the possibility of miracles rests upon our belief in the
existence of a personal God, so belief in the probability of miracles
rests upon our belief that God is a moral and benevolent being. He who has
no God but a God of physical order will regard miracles as an impertinent
intrusion upon that order. But he who yields to the testimony of
conscience and regards God as a God of holiness, will see that man’s
unholiness renders God’s miraculous interposition most necessary to man
and most becoming to God. Our view of miracles will therefore be
determined by our belief in a moral, or in a non-moral, God.

Philo, in his Life of Moses, 1:88, speaking of the miracles of the
quails and of the water from the rock, says that “all these
unexpected and extraordinary things are amusements or playthings
of God.” He believes that there is room for arbitrariness in the
divine procedure. Scripture however represents miracle as an
extraordinary, rather than as an arbitrary, act. It is “his work,
his strange work ... his act, his strange act”_ (Is. 28:21)_.
God’s ordinary method is that of regular growth and development.
Chadwick, Unitarianism, 72—“Nature is economical. If she wants an
apple, she develops a leaf; if she wants a brain, she develops a
vertebra. We always thought well of backbone; and, if Goethe’s was
a sound suggestion, we think better of it now.”

It is commonly, but very erroneously, taken for granted that
miracle requires a greater exercise of power than does God’s
upholding of the ordinary processes of nature. But to an
omnipotent Being our measures of power have no application. The
question is not a question of power, but of rationality and love.
Miracle implies self-restraint, as well as self-unfolding, on the
part of him who works it. It is therefore not God’s common method
of action; it is adopted only when regular methods will not
suffice; it often seems accompanied by a sacrifice of feeling on
the part of Christ _Mat. 17:17—_“O faithless and perverse
generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I bear
with you? bring him hither to me”; _Mark 7:34—_“looking up to
heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be
opened”; _cf.__ Mat. 12:39—_“An evil and adulterous generation
seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but
the sign of Jonah the prophet.”

F. From the point of view of ethical monism the probability of miracle
becomes even greater. Since God is not merely the intellectual but the
moral Reason of the world, the disturbances of the world-order which are
due to sin are the matters which most deeply affect him. Christ, the life
of the whole system and of humanity as well, must suffer; and, since we
have evidence that he is merciful as well as just, it is probable that he
will rectify the evil by extraordinary means, when merely ordinary means
do not avail.

Like creation and providence, like inspiration and regeneration,
miracle is a work in which God limits himself, by a new and
peculiar exercise of his power,—limits himself as part of a
process of condescending love and as a means of teaching
sense-environed and sin-burdened humanity what it would not learn
in any other way. Self-limitation, however, is the very perfection
and glory of God, for without it no self-sacrificing love would be
possible (see page 9, F.). The probability of miracles is
therefore argued not only from God’s holiness but also from his
love. His desire to save men from their sins must be as infinite
as his nature. The incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection,
when once made known to us, commend themselves, not only as
satisfying our human needs, but as worthy of a God of moral
perfection.

An argument for the probability of the miracle might be drawn from
the concessions of one of its chief modern opponents, Thomas H.
Huxley. He tells us in different places that the object of science
is “the discovery of the rational order that pervades the
universe,” which in spite of his professed agnosticism is an
unconscious testimony to Reason and Will at the basis of all
things. He tells us again that there is no necessity in the
uniformities of nature: “When we change ‘will’ into ‘must,’ we
introduce an idea of necessity which has no warrant in the
observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover
elsewhere.” He speaks of “the infinite wickedness that has
attended the course of human history.” Yet he has no hope in man’s
power to save himself: “I would as soon adore a wilderness of
apes,” as the Pantheist’s rationalized conception of humanity. He
grants that Jesus Christ is “the noblest ideal of humanity which
mankind has yet worshiped.” Why should he not go further and
concede that Jesus Christ most truly represents the infinite
Reason at the heart of things, and that his purity and love,
demonstrated by suffering and death, make it probable that God
will use extraordinary means for man’s deliverance? It is doubtful
whether Huxley recognized his own personal sinfulness as fully as
he recognized the sinfulness of humanity in general. If he had
done so, he would have been willing to accept miracle upon even a
slight preponderance of historical proof. As a matter of fact, he
rejected miracle upon the grounds assigned by Hume, which we now
proceed to mention.

4. Amount of Testimony necessary to prove a Miracle.

_The amount of testimony necessary to prove a miracle_ is no greater than
that which is requisite to prove the occurrence of any other unusual but
confessedly possible event.

Hume, indeed, argued that a miracle is so contradictory of all human
experience that it is more reasonable to believe any amount of testimony
false than to believe a miracle to be true.

The original form of the argument can be found in Hume’s
Philosophical Works, 4:124-150. See also Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:615.
For the most recent and plausible statement of it, see
Supernatural Religion, 1:55-94. The argument maintains for
substance that things are impossible because improbable. It
ridicules the credulity of those who “thrust their fists against
the posts, And still insist they see the ghosts,” and holds with
the German philosopher who declared that he would not believe in a
miracle, even if he saw one with his own eyes. Christianity is so
miraculous that it takes a miracle to make one believe it.

The argument is fallacious, because

(_a_) It is chargeable with a _petitio principii_, in making our own
personal experience the measure of all human experience. The same
principle would make the proof of any absolutely new fact impossible. Even
though God should work a miracle, he could never prove it.

(_b_) It involves a self-contradiction, since it seeks to overthrow our
faith in human testimony by adducing to the contrary the general
experience of men, of which we know only from testimony. This general
experience, moreover, is merely negative, and cannot neutralize that which
is positive, except upon principles which would invalidate all testimony
whatever.

(_c_) It requires belief in a greater wonder than those which it would
escape. That multitudes of intelligent and honest men should against all
their interests unite in deliberate and persistent falsehood, under the
circumstances narrated in the New Testament record, involves a change in
the sequences of nature far more incredible than the miracles of Christ
and his apostles.

(_a_) John Stuart Mill, Essays on Theism, 216-241, grants that,
even if a miracle were wrought, it would be impossible to prove
it. In this he only echoes Hume, Miracles, 112—“The ultimate
standard by which we determine all disputes that may arise is
always derived from experience and observation.” But here our own
personal experience is made the standard by which to judge all
human experience. Whately, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon
Buonaparte, shows that the same rule would require us to deny the
existence of the great Frenchman, since Napoleon’s conquests were
contrary to all experience, and civilized nations had never before
been so subdued. The London Times for June 18, 1888, for the first
time in at least a hundred years or in 31,200 issues, was
misdated, and certain pages read June 17, although June 17 was
Sunday. Yet the paper would have been admitted in a court of
justice as evidence of a marriage. The real wonder is, not the
break in experience, but the continuity without the break.

(_b_) Lyman Abbott: “If the Old Testament told the story of a
naval engagement between the Jewish people and a pagan people, in
which all the ships of the pagan people were absolutely destroyed
and not a single man was killed among the Jews, all the sceptics
would have scorned the narrative. Every one now believes it,
except those who live in Spain.” There are people who in a similar
way refuse to investigate the phenomena of hypnotism, second
sight, clairvoyance, and telepathy, declaring _a priori_ that all
these things are impossible. Prophecy, in the sense of prediction,
is discredited. Upon the same principle wireless telegraphy might
be denounced as an imposture. The son of Erin charged with murder
defended himself by saying: “Your honor, I can bring fifty people
who did not see me do it.” Our faith in testimony cannot be due to
experience.

(_c_) On this point, see Chalmers, Christian Revelation, 3:70;
Starkie on Evidence, 739; De Quincey, Theological Essays,
1:162-188; Thornton, Old-fashioned Ethics, 143-153; Campbell on
Miracles. South’s sermon on The Certainty of our Savior’s
Resurrection had stated and answered this objection long before
Hume propounded it.

5. Evidential force of Miracles.

(_a_) Miracles are the natural accompaniments and attestations of new
communications from God. The great epochs of miracles—represented by
Moses, the prophets, the first and second comings of Christ—are coincident
with the great epochs of revelation. Miracles serve to draw attention to
new truth, and cease when this truth has gained currency and foothold.

Miracles are not scattered evenly over the whole course of
history. Few miracles are recorded during the 2500 years from Adam
to Moses. When the N. T. Canon is completed and the internal
evidence of Scripture has attained its greatest strength, the
external attestations by miracle are either wholly withdrawn or
begin to disappear. The spiritual wonders of regeneration remain,
and for these the way has been prepared by the long progress from
the miracles of power wrought by Moses to the miracles of grace
wrought by Christ. Miracles disappeared because newer and higher
proofs rendered them unnecessary. Better things than these are now
in evidence. Thomas Fuller: “Miracles are the swaddling-clothes of
the infant church.” John Foster: “Miracles are the great bell of
the universe, which draws men to God’s sermon.” Henry Ward
Beecher: “Miracles are the midwives of great moral truths; candles
lit before the dawn but put out after the sun has risen.”
Illingworth, in Lux Mundi, 210—“When we are told that miracles
contradict experience, we point to the daily occurrence of the
spiritual miracle of regeneration and ask: ‘Which is easier to
say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise and walk?’_ (Mat.
9:5)_.”

Miracles and inspiration go together; if the former remain in the
church, the latter should remain also; see Marsh, in Bap. Quar.
Rev., 1887:225-242. On the cessation of miracles in the early
church, see Henderson, Inspiration, 443-490; Bückmann, in Zeitsch.
f. luth. Theol. u. Kirche, 1878:216. On miracles in the second
century, see Barnard, Literature of the Second Century, 139-180.
A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 167—“The apostles were
commissioned to speak for Christ till the N. T. Scriptures, his
authoritative voice, were completed. In the apostolate we have a
provisional inspiration; in the N. T. a stereotyped inspiration;
the first being endowed with authority _ad interim_ to forgive
sins, and the second having this authority _in perpetuo_.” Dr.
Gordon draws an analogy between coal, which is fossil sunlight,
and the New Testament, which is fossil inspiration. Sabatier,
Philos. Religion, 74—“The Bible is very free from the senseless
prodigies of oriental mythology. The great prophets, Isaiah, Amos,
Micah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, work no miracles. Jesus’
temptation in the wilderness is a victory of the moral
consciousness over the religion of mere physical prodigy.” Trench
says that miracles cluster about the _foundation_ of the
theocratic kingdom under Moses and Joshua, and about the
_restoration_ of that kingdom under Elijah and Elisha. In the O.
T., miracles confute the gods of Egypt under Moses, the Phœnician
Baal under Elijah and Elisha, and the gods of Babylon under
Daniel. See Diman, Theistic Argument, 376, and art.: Miracle, by
Bernard, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.

(_b_) Miracles generally certify to the truth of doctrine, not directly,
but indirectly; otherwise a new miracle must needs accompany each new
doctrine taught. Miracles primarily and directly certify to the divine
commission and authority of a religious teacher, and therefore warrant
acceptance of his doctrines and obedience to his commands as the doctrines
and commands of God, whether these be communicated at intervals or all
together, orally or in written documents.

The exceptions to the above statement are very few, and are found
only in cases where the whole commission and authority of Christ,
and not some fragmentary doctrine, are involved. Jesus appeals to
his miracles as proof of the truth of his teaching in _Mat. 9:5,
6—_“Which is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say,
Arise and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath
authority on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of
the palsy), Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house”;
_12:28—_“if I by the spirit of God cast out demons, then is the
kingdom of God come upon you.” So Paul in _Rom. 1:4_, says that
Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God with power, ... by the
resurrection from the dead.” Mair, Christian Evidences, 223,
quotes from Natural Religion, 181—“It is said that the
theo-philanthropist Larévellière-Lépeaux once confided to
Talleyrand his disappointment at the ill success of his attempt to
bring into vogue a sort of improved Christianity, a sort of
benevolent rationalism which he had invented to meet the wants of
a benevolent age. ‘His propaganda made no way,’ he said. ‘What was
he to do?’ he asked. The ex-bishop Talleyrand politely condoled
with him, feared it was a difficult task to found a new religion,
more difficult than he had imagined, so difficult that he hardly
knew what to advise. ‘Still,’—so he went on after a moment’s
reflection,—‘there is one plan which you might at least try: I
should recommend you to be crucified, and to rise again the third
day.’ ” See also Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 147-167;
Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:168-172.

(_c_) Miracles, therefore, do not stand alone as evidences. Power alone
cannot prove a divine commission. Purity of life and doctrine must go with
the miracles to assure us that a religious teacher has come from God. The
miracles and the doctrine in this manner mutually support each other, and
form parts of one whole. The internal evidence for the Christian system
may have greater power over certain minds and over certain ages than the
external evidence.

Pascal’s aphorism that “doctrines must be judged by miracles,
miracles by doctrine,” needs to be supplemented by Mozley’s
statement that “a supernatural fact is the proper proof of a
supernatural doctrine, while a supernatural doctrine is not the
proper proof of a supernatural fact.” E. G. Robinson, Christian
Theology, 107, would “defend miracles, but would not buttress up
Christianity by them.... No amount of miracles could convince a
good man of the divine commission of a known bad man; nor, on the
other hand, could any degree of miraculous power suffice to
silence the doubts of an evil-minded man.... The miracle is a
certification only to him who can perceive its significance....
The Christian church has the resurrection written all over it. Its
very existence is proof of the resurrection. Twelve men could
never have founded the church, if Christ had remained in the tomb.
The living church is the burning bush that is not consumed.” Gore,
Incarnation, 57—“Jesus did not appear after his resurrection to
unbelievers, but to believers only,—which means that this crowning
miracle was meant to confirm an existing faith, not to create one
where it did not exist.”

Christian Union, July 11, 1891—“If the anticipated resurrection of
Joseph Smith were to take place, it would add nothing whatever to
the authority of the Mormon religion.” Schurman, Agnosticism and
Religion, 57—“Miracles are merely the bells to call primitive
peoples to church. Sweet as the music they once made, modern ears
find them jangling and out of tune, and their dissonant notes
scare away pious souls who would fain enter the temple of
worship.” A new definition of miracle which recognizes their
possible classification as extraordinary occurrences in nature,
yet sees in all nature the working of the living God, may do much
to remove this prejudice. Bishop of Southampton, Place of Miracle,
53—“Miracles alone could not produce conviction. The Pharisees
ascribed them to Beelzebub. Though Jesus had done so many signs,
yet they believed not.... Though miracles were frequently wrought,
they were rarely appealed to as evidence of the truth of the
gospel. They are simply signs of God’s presence in his world. By
itself a miracle had no evidential force. The only test for
distinguishing divine from Satanic miracles is that of the moral
character and purpose of the worker; and therefore miracles depend
for all their force upon a previous appreciation of the character
and personality of Christ (79). The earliest apologists make no
use of miracles. They are of no value except in connection with
prophecy. Miracles _are_ the revelation of God, not the _proof_ of
revelation.” _Versus_ Supernatural Religion, 1:23, and Stearns, in
New Englander, Jan. 1882:80. See Mozley, Miracles, 15; Nicoll,
Life of Jesus Christ, 133; Mill, Logic, 374-382; H. B. Smith, Int.
to Christ. Theology, 167-169; Fisher, in Journ. Christ. Philos.,
April, 1883:270-283.

(_d_) Yet the Christian miracles do not lose their value as evidence in
the process of ages. The loftier the structure of Christian life and
doctrine the greater need that its foundation be secure. The authority of
Christ as a teacher of supernatural truth rests upon his miracles, and
especially upon the miracle of his resurrection. That one miracle to which
the church looks back as the source of her life carries with it
irresistibly all the other miracles of the Scripture record; upon it alone
we may safely rest the proof that the Scriptures are an authoritative
revelation from God.

The miracles of Christ are simple correlates of the
Incarnation—proper insignia of his royalty and divinity. By mere
external evidence however we can more easily prove the
resurrection than the incarnation. In our arguments with sceptics,
we should not begin with the ass that spoke to Balaam, or the fish
that swallowed Jonah, but with the resurrection of Christ; that
conceded, all other Biblical miracles will seem only natural
preparations, accompaniments, or consequences. G. F. Wright, in
Bib. Sac., 1889:707—“The difficulties created by the miraculous
character of Christianity may be compared to those assumed by a
builder when great permanence is desired in the structure erected.
It is easier to lay the foundation of a temporary structure than
of one which is to endure for the ages.” Pressensé: “The empty
tomb of Christ has been the cradle of the church, and if in this
foundation of her faith the church has been mistaken, she must
needs lay herself down by the side of the mortal remains, I say,
not of a man, but of a religion.”

President Schurman believes the resurrection of Christ to be “an
obsolete picture of an eternal truth—the fact of a continued life
with God.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 102, thinks no
consistent union of the gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection
can be attained; apparently doubts a literal and bodily rising;
yet traces Christianity back to an invincible faith in Christ’s
conquering of death and his continued life. But why believe the
gospels when they speak of the sympathy of Christ, yet disbelieve
them when they speak of his miraculous power? We have no right to
trust the narrative when it gives us Christ’s words “Weep not” to
the widow of Nain, (_Luke 7:13_), and then to distrust it when it
tells us of his raising the widow’s son. The words “Jesus wept”
belong inseparably to a story of which “Lazarus, come forth!”
forms a part (_John 11:35, 43_). It is improbable that the
disciples should have believed so stupendous a miracle as Christ’s
resurrection, if they had not previously seen other manifestations
of miraculous power on the part of Christ. Christ himself is the
great miracle. The conception of him as the risen and glorified
Savior can be explained only by the fact that he did so rise. E.
G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 109—“The Church attests the fact of
the resurrection quite as much as the resurrection attests the
divine origin of the church. Resurrection, as an evidence, depends
on the existence of the church which proclaims it.”

(_e_) The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ—by which we mean his
coming forth from the sepulchre in body as well as in spirit—is
demonstrated by evidence as varied and as conclusive as that which proves
to us any single fact of ancient history. Without it Christianity itself
is inexplicable, as is shown by the failure of all modern rationalistic
theories to account for its rise and progress.

In discussing the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, we are
confronted with three main rationalistic theories:

I. The _Swoon-theory_ of Strauss. This holds that Jesus did not
really die. The cold and the spices of the sepulchre revived him.
We reply that the blood and water, and the testimony of the
centurion (_Mark 15:45_), proved actual death (see Bib. Sac.,
April, 1889:228; Forrest, Christ of History and Experience,
137-170). The rolling away of the stone, and Jesus’ power
immediately after, are inconsistent with immediately preceding
swoon and suspended animation. How was his life preserved? where
did he go? when did he die? His not dying implies deceit on his
own part or on that of his disciples.

II. The _Spirit-theory_ of Keim. Jesus really died, but only his
spirit appeared. The spirit of Jesus gave the disciples a sign of
his continued life, a telegram from heaven. But we reply that the
telegram was untrue, for it asserted that his body had risen from
the tomb. The tomb was empty and the linen cloths showed an
orderly departure. Jesus himself denied that he was a bodiless
spirit: “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me having”_
(Luke 24:39)_. Did “his flesh see corruption”_ (Acts 2:31)_? Was
the penitent thief raised from the dead as much as he? Godet,
Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith, lect. i: A dilemma for
those who deny the fact of Christ’s resurrection: Either his body
remained in the hands of his disciples, or it was given up to the
Jews. If the disciples retained it, they were impostors: but this
is not maintained by modern rationalists. If the Jews retained it,
why did they not produce it as conclusive evidence against the
disciples?

III. The _Vision-theory_ of Renan. Jesus died, and there was no
objective appearance even of his spirit. Mary Magdalene was the
victim of subjective hallucination, and her hallucination became
contagious. This was natural because the Jews expected that the
Messiah would work miracles and would rise from the dead. We reply
that the disciples did not expect Jesus’ resurrection. The women
went to the sepulchre, not to see a risen Redeemer, but to embalm
a dead body. Thomas and those at Emmaus had given up all hope.
Four hundred years had passed since the days of miracles; John the
Baptist “did no miracle”_ (John 10:41)_; the Sadducees said “there
is no resurrection”_ (Mat. 22:23)_. There were thirteen different
appearances, to: 1. the Magdalen; 2. other women; 3. Peter; 4.
Emmaus; 5. the Twelve; 6. the Twelve after eight days; 7. Galilee
seashore; 8. Galilee mountain; 9. Galilee five hundred; 10. James;
11. ascension at Bethany; 12. Stephen; 13. Paul on way to
Damascus. Paul describes Christ’s appearance to him as something
objective, and he implies that Christ’s previous appearances to
others were objective also: “last of all [these bodily
appearances], ... he appeared to me also”_ (1 Cor. 15:8)_. Bruce,
Apologetics, 396—“Paul’s interest and intention in classing the
two together was to level his own vision [of Christ] up to the
objectivity of the early Christophanies. He believed that the
eleven, that Peter in particular, had seen the risen Christ with
the eye of the body, and he meant to claim for himself a vision of
the same kind.” Paul’s was a sane, strong nature. Subjective
visions do not transform human lives; the resurrection moulded the
apostles; they did not create the resurrection (see Gore,
Incarnation, 76). These appearances soon ceased, unlike the law of
hallucinations, which increase in frequency and intensity. It is
impossible to explain the ordinances, the Lord’s day, or
Christianity itself, if Jesus did not rise from the dead.

The resurrection of our Lord teaches three important lessons: (1)
It showed that his work of atonement was completed and was stamped
with the divine approval; (2) It showed him to be Lord of all and
gave the one sufficient external proof of Christianity; (3) It
furnished the ground and pledge of our own resurrection, and thus
“brought life and immortality to light”_ (2 Tim. 1:10)_. It must
be remembered that the resurrection was the one sign upon which
Jesus himself staked his claims—“the sign of Jonah”_ (Luke
11:29)_; and that the resurrection is proof, not simply of God’s
power, but of Christ’s own power: _John 10:18—_“I have power to
lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; _2:19—_“Destroy
this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”.... _21—_“he
spake of the temple of his body.” See Alexander, Christ and
Christianity, 9, 158-224, 302; Mill, Theism, 216; Auberlen, Div.
Revelation, 56; Boston Lectures, 203-239; Christlieb, Modern Doubt
and Christian Belief, 448-503; Row, Bampton Lectures,
1887:358-423; Hutton, Essays, 1:119; Schaff, in Princeton Rev.,
May, 1880; 411-419; Fisher, Christian Evidences, 41-46, 82-85;
West, in Defence and Conf. of Faith, 80-129; also special works on
the Resurrection of our Lord, by Milligan, Morrison, Kennedy, J.
Baldwin Brown.

6. Counterfeit Miracles.

Since only an act directly wrought by God can properly be called a
miracle, it follows that surprising events brought about by evil spirits
or by men, through the use of natural agencies beyond our knowledge, are
not entitled to this appellation. The Scriptures recognize the existence
of such, but denominate them “lying wonders” (2 Thess. 2:9).

These counterfeit miracles in various ages argue that the belief in
miracles is natural to the race, and that somewhere there must exist the
true. They serve to show that not all supernatural occurrences are divine,
and to impress upon us the necessity of careful examination before we
accept them as divine.

False miracles may commonly be distinguished from the true by (_a_) their
accompaniments of immoral conduct or of doctrine contradictory to truth
already revealed—as in modern spiritualism; (_b_) their internal
characteristics of inanity and extravagance—as in the liquefaction of the
blood of St. Januarius, or the miracles of the Apocryphal New Testament;
(_c_) the insufficiency of the object which they are designed to
further—as in the case of Apollonius of Tyana, or of the miracles said to
accompany the publication of the doctrines of the immaculate conception
and of the papal infallibility; (_d_) their lack of substantiating
evidence—as in mediæval miracles, so seldom attested by contemporary and
disinterested witnesses; (_e_) their denial or undervaluing of God’s
previous revelation of himself in nature—as shown by the neglect of
ordinary means, in the cases of Faith-cure and of so-called Christian
Science.

Only what is valuable is counterfeited. False miracles presuppose
the true. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 283—“The
miracles of Jesus originated faith in him, while mediæval miracles
follow established faith. The testimony of the apostles was given
in the face of incredulous Sadducees. They were ridiculed and
maltreated on account of it. It was no time for devout dreams and
the invention of romances.” The blood of St. Januarius at Naples
is said to be contained in a vial, one side of which is of thick
glass, while the other side is of thin. A similar miracle was
wrought at Hales in Gloucestershire. St. Alban, the first martyr
of Britain, after his head is cut off, carries it about in his
hand. In Ireland the place is shown where St. Patrick in the fifth
century drove all the toads and snakes over a precipice into the
nether regions. The legend however did not become current until
some hundreds of years after the saint’s bones had crumbled to
dust at Saul, near Downpatrick (see Hemphill, Literature of the
Second Century, 180-182). Compare the story of the book of Tobit
(6-8), which relates the expulsion of a demon by smoke from the
burning heart and liver of a fish caught in the Tigris, and the
story of the Apocryphal New Testament (I, Infancy), which tells of
the expulsion of Satan in the form of a mad dog from Judas by the
child Jesus. On counterfeit miracles in general, see Mozley,
Miracles, 15, 161; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 72;
A. S. Farrar, Science and Theology, 208; Tholuck, Vermischte
Schriften, 1:27; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:630; Presb. Rev.,
1881:687-719.

Some modern writers have maintained that the gift of miracles
still remains in the church. Bengel: “The reason why _many_
miracles are not now wrought is not so much because _faith_ is
established, as because _unbelief_ reigns.” Christlieb: “It is the
want of faith in our age which is the greatest hindrance to the
stronger and more marked appearance of that miraculous power which
is working here and there in quiet concealment. Unbelief is the
final and most important reason for the retrogression of
miracles.” Edward Irving, Works, 5:464—“Sickness is sin apparent
in the body, the presentiment of death, the forerunner of
corruption. Now, as Christ came to destroy death, and will yet
redeem the body from the bondage of corruption, if the church is
to have a first fruits or earnest of this power, it must be by
receiving power over diseases that are the first fruits and
earnest of death.” Dr. A. J. Gordon, in his Ministry of Healing,
held to this view. See also Boys, Proofs of the Miraculous in the
Experience of the Church; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural,
446-492; Review of Gordon, by Vincent, in Presb. Rev.,
1883:473-502; Review of Vincent, in Presb. Rev., 1884:49-79.

In reply to the advocates of faith-cure in general, we would grant
that nature is plastic in God’s hand; that he can work miracle
when and where it pleases him; and that he has given promises
which, with certain Scriptural and rational limitations, encourage
believing prayer for healing in cases of sickness. But we incline
to the belief that in these later ages God answers such prayer,
not by miracle, but by special providence, and by gifts of
courage, faith and will, thus acting by his Spirit directly upon
the soul and only indirectly upon the body. The laws of nature are
generic volitions of God, and to ignore them and disuse means is
presumption and disrespect to God himself. The Scripture promise
to faith is always expressly or impliedly conditioned upon our use
of means: we are to work out our own salvation, for the very
reason that it is God who works in us; it is vain for the drowning
man to pray, so long as he refuses to lay hold of the rope that is
thrown to him. Medicines and physicians are the rope thrown to us
by God; we cannot expect miraculous help, while we neglect the
help God has already given us; to refuse this help is practically
to deny Christ’s revelation in nature. Why not live without
eating, as well as recover from sickness without medicine?
Faith-feeding is quite as rational as faith-healing. To except
cases of disease from this general rule as to the use of means has
no warrant either in reason or in Scripture. The atonement has
purchased complete salvation, and some day salvation shall be
ours. But death and depravity still remain, not as penalty, but as
chastisement. So disease remains also. Hospitals for Incurables,
and the deaths even of advocates of faith-cure, show that they too
are compelled to recognize some limit to the application of the
New Testament promise.

In view of the preceding discussion we must regard the so-called
Christian Science as neither Christian nor scientific. Mrs. Mary
Baker G. Eddy denies the authority of all that part of revelation
which God has made to man in nature, and holds that the laws of
nature may be disregarded with impunity by those who have proper
faith; see G. F. Wright, in Bib. Sac., April, 1899:375. Bishop
Lawrence of Massachusetts: “One of the errors of Christian Science
is its neglect of accumulated knowledge, of the fund of
information stored up for these Christian centuries. That
knowledge is just as much God’s gift as is the knowledge obtained
from direct revelation. In rejecting accumulated knowledge and
professional skill, Christian Science rejects the gift of God.”
Most of the professed cures of Christian Science are explicable by
the influence of the mind upon the body, through hypnosis or
suggestion; (see A. A. Bennett, in Watchman, Feb. 13, 1903).
Mental disturbance may make the mother’s milk a poison to the
child; mental excitement is a common cause of indigestion; mental
depression induces bowel disorders; depressed mental and moral
conditions render a person more susceptible to grippe, pneumonia,
typhoid fever. Reading the account of an accident in which the
body is torn or maimed, we ourselves feel pain in the same spot;
when the child’s hand is crushed, the mother’s hand, though at a
distance, becomes swollen; the mediæval _stigmata_ probably
resulted from continuous brooding upon the sufferings of Christ
(see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 676-690).

But mental states may help as well as harm the body. Mental
expectancy facilitates cure in cases of sickness. The physician
helps the patient by inspiring hope and courage. Imagination works
wonders, especially in the case of nervous disorders. The diseases
said to be cured by Christian Science are commonly of this sort.
In every age fakirs, mesmerists, and quacks have availed
themselves of these underlying mental forces. By inducing
expectancy, imparting courage, rousing the paralyzed will, they
have indirectly caused bodily changes which have been mistaken for
miracle. Tacitus tells us of the healing of a blind man by the
Emperor Vespasian. Undoubted cures have been wrought by the royal
touch in England. Since such wonders have been performed by Indian
medicine-men, we cannot regard them as having any specific
Christian character, and when, as in the present case, we find
them used to aid in the spread of false doctrine with regard to
sin, Christ, atonement, and the church, we must class them with
the “lying wonders” of which we are warned in _2 Thess. 2:9_. See
Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 381-386; Buckley,
Faith-Healing, and in Century Magazine, June, 1886:221-236; Bruce,
Miraculous Element in Gospels, lecture 8; Andover Review,
1887:249-264.

IV. Prophecy as Attesting a Divine Revelation.

We here consider prophecy in its narrow sense of mere prediction,
reserving to a subsequent chapter the consideration of prophecy as
interpretation of the divine will in general.

1. _Definition._ Prophecy is the foretelling of future events by virtue of
direct communication from God—a foretelling, therefore, which, though not
contravening any laws of the human mind, those laws, if fully known, would
not, without this agency of God, be sufficient to explain.

In discussing the subject of prophecy, we are met at the outset by
the contention that there is not, and never has been, any real
foretelling of future events beyond that which is possible to
natural prescience. This is the view of Kuenen, Prophets and
Prophecy in Israel. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 2:42, denies any
direct prediction. Prophecy in Israel, he intimates, was simply
the consciousness of God’s righteousness, proclaiming its ideals
of the future, and declaring that the will of God is the moral
ideal of the good and the law of the world’s history, so that the
fates of nations are conditioned by their bearing toward this
moral purpose of God: “The fundamental error of the vulgar
apologetics is that it confounds prophecy with heathen
soothsaying—national salvation without character.” W. Robertson
Smith, in Encyc. Britannica, 19:821, tells us that “detailed
prediction occupies a very secondary place in the writings of the
prophets; or rather indeed what seem to be predictions in detail
are usually only free poetical illustrations of historical
principles, which neither received nor demanded exact fulfilment.”

As in the case of miracles, our faith in an immanent God, who is
none other than the Logos or larger Christ, gives us a point of
view from which we may reconcile the contentions of the
naturalists and supernaturalists. Prophecy is an immediate act of
God; but, since all natural genius is also due to God’s
energizing, we do not need to deny the employment of man’s natural
gifts in prophecy. The instances of telepathy, presentiment, and
second sight which the Society for Psychical Research has
demonstrated to be facts show that prediction, in the history of
divine revelation, may be only an intensification, under the
extraordinary impulse of the divine Spirit, of a power that is in
some degree latent in all men. The author of every great work of
creative imagination knows that a higher power than his own has
possessed him. In all human reason there is a natural activity of
the divine Reason or Logos, and he is “the light which lighteth
every man”_ (John 1:9)_. So there is a natural activity of the
Holy Spirit, and he who completes the circle of the divine
consciousness completes also the circle of human consciousness,
gives self-hood to every soul, makes available to man the natural
as well as the spiritual gifts of Christ; _cf.__ John 16:14—_“he
shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The same
Spirit who in the beginning “brooded over the face of the waters”_
(Gen. 1:2)_ also broods over humanity, and it is he who, according
to Christ’s promise, was to “declare unto you the things that are
to come”_ (John 16:13)_. The gift of prophecy may have its natural
side, like the gift of miracles, yet may be finally explicable
only as the result of an extraordinary working of that Spirit of
Christ who to some degree manifests himself in the reason and
conscience of every man; _cf.__ 1 Pet 1:11—_“searching what time
or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did
point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ,
and the glories that should follow them.” See Myers, Human
Personality, 2:262-292.

A. B. Davidson, in his article on Prophecy and Prophets, in
Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 4:120, 121, gives little weight to
this view that prophecy is based on a natural power of the human
mind: “The arguments by which Giesebrecht, Berufsgabung, 13 ff.,
supports the theory of a ‘faculty of presentiment’ have little
cogency. This faculty is supposed to reveal itself particularly on
the approach of death (_Gen. 28_ and _49_). The contemporaries of
most great religious personages have attributed to them a
prophetic gift. The answer of John Knox to those who credited him
with such a gift is worth reading: ‘My assurances are not marvels
of Merlin, nor yet the dark sentences of profane prophecy. But
_first_, the plain truth of God’s word; _second_, the invincible
justice of the everlasting God; and _third_, the ordinary course
of his punishments and plagues from the beginning, are my
assurances and grounds.’ ” While Davidson grants the fulfilment of
certain specific predictions of Scripture, to be hereafter
mentioned, he holds that “such presentiments as we can observe to
be authentic are chiefly products of the conscience or moral
reason. True prophecy is based on moral grounds. Everywhere the
menacing future is connected with the evil past by ‘therefore’_
(Micah 3:12; Is. 5:13; Amos 1:2)_.” We hold with Davidson to the
moral element in prophecy, but we also recognize a power in normal
humanity which he would minimize or deny. We claim that the human
mind even in its ordinary and secular working gives occasional
signs of transcending the limitations of the present. Believing in
the continual activity of the divine Reason in the reason of man,
we have no need to doubt the possibility of an extraordinary
insight into the future, and such insight is needed at the great
epochs of religious history. Expositor’s Gk. Test.,
2:34—“Savonarola foretold as early as 1496 the capture of Rome,
which happened in 1527, and he did this not only in general terms
but in detail; his words were realized to the letter when the
sacred churches of St. Peter and St. Paul became, as the prophet
foretold, stables for the conquerors’ horses.” On the general
subject, see Payne-Smith, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ;
Alexander, Christ and Christianity; Farrar, Science and Theology,
106; Newton on Prophecy; Fairbairn on Prophecy.

2. _Relation of Prophecy to Miracles._ Miracles are attestations of
revelation proceeding from divine power; prophecy is an attestation of
revelation proceeding from divine knowledge. Only God can know the
contingencies of the future. The possibility and probability of prophecy
may be argued upon the same grounds upon which we argue the possibility
and probability of miracles. As an evidence of divine revelation, however,
prophecy possesses two advantages over miracles, namely: (_a_) The proof,
in the case of prophecy, is not derived from ancient testimony, but is
under our eyes. (_b_) The evidence of miracles cannot become stronger,
whereas every new fulfilment adds to the argument from prophecy.

3. _Requirements in Prophecy, considered as an Evidence of Revelation._
(_a_) The utterance must be distant from the event. (_b_) Nothing must
exist to suggest the event to merely natural prescience. (_c_) The
utterance must be free from ambiguity. (_d_) Yet it must not be so precise
as to secure its own fulfilment. (_e_) It must be followed in due time by
the event predicted.

Hume: “All prophecies are real miracles, and only as such can be
admitted as proof of any revelation.” See Wardlaw, Syst. Theol.,
1:347. (_a_) Hundreds of years intervened between certain of the
O. T. predictions and their fulfilment. (_b_) Stanley instances
the natural sagacity of Burke, which enabled him to predict the
French Revolution. But Burke also predicted in 1793 that France
would be partitioned like Poland among a confederacy of hostile
powers. Canning predicted that South American colonies would grow
up as the United States had grown. D’Israeli predicted that our
Southern Confederacy would become an independent nation. Ingersoll
predicted that within ten years there would be two theatres for
one church. (_c_) Illustrate ambiguous prophecies by the Delphic
oracle to Crœsus: “Crossing the river, thou destroyest a great
nation”—whether his own or his enemy’s the oracle left
undetermined. “Ibis et redibis nunquam peribis in bello.” (_d_)
Strauss held that O. T. prophecy itself determined either the
events or the narratives of the gospels. See Greg, Creed of
Christendom, chap. 4. (_e_) Cardan, the Italian mathematician,
predicted the day and hour of his own death, and committed suicide
at the proper time to prove the prediction true. Jehovah makes the
fulfilment of his predictions the proof of his deity in the
controversy with false gods: _Is. 41:23—_“Declare the things that
are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods”;
_42:9—_“Behold, the former things are come to pass and new things
do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.”

4. _General Features of Prophecy in the Scriptures._ (_a_) Its large
amount—occupying a great portion of the Bible, and extending over many
hundred years. (_b_) Its ethical and religious nature—the events of the
future being regarded as outgrowths and results of men’s present attitude
toward God. (_c_) Its unity in diversity—finding its central point in
Christ the true servant of God and deliverer of his people. (_d_) Its
actual fulfilment as regards many of its predictions—while seeming
non-fulfilments are explicable from its figurative and conditional nature.

A. B. Davidson, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 4:125, has
suggested reasons for the apparent non-fulfilment of certain
predictions. Prophecy is poetical and figurative; its details are
not to be pressed; they are only drapery, needed for the
expression of the idea. In _Isa. 13:16—_“Their infants shall be
dashed in pieces ... and their wives ravished”—the prophet gives
an ideal picture of the sack of a city; these things did not
actually happen, but Cyrus entered Babylon “in peace.” Yet the
essential truth remained that the city fell into the enemy’s
hands. The prediction of Ezekiel with regard to Tyre, _Ez.
26:7-14_, is recognized in _Ez. 29:17-20_ as having been fulfilled
not in its details but in its essence—the actual event having been
the breaking of the power of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar. _Is.
17:1—_“Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it
shall be a ruinous heap”—must be interpreted as predicting the
blotting out of its dominion, since Damascus has probably never
ceased to be a city. The conditional nature of prophecy explains
other seeming non-fulfilments. Predictions were often threats,
which might be revoked upon repentance. _Jer. 26:13—_“amend your
ways ... and the Lord will repent him of the evil which he hath
pronounced against you.” _Jonah 3:4—_“Yet forty days, and Nineveh
shall be overthrown ...” _10—God saw their works, that they turned
from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, which he said
he would do unto them; and he did it not_; _cf.__ Jer. 18:8_;
_26:19_.

Instances of actual fulfilment of prophecy are found, according to
Davidson, in Samuel’s prediction of some things that would happen
to Saul, which the history declares did happen (_1 Sam. 1_ and
_10_). Jeremiah predicted the death of Hananiah within the year,
which took place (_Jer. 28_). Micaiah predicted the defeat and
death of Ahab at Ramoth-Gilead (_1 Kings 22_). Isaiah predicted
the failure of the northern coalition to subdue Jerusalem (_Is.
7_); the overthrow in two or three years of Damascus and Northern
Israel before the Assyrians (_Is. 8 and 17_); the failure of
Sennacherib to capture Jerusalem, and the melting away of his army
(_Is. 37:34-37_). “And in general, apart from details, the main
predictions of the prophets regarding Israel and the nations were
verified in history, for example, _Amos 1_ and _2_. The chief
predictions of the prophets relate to the imminent downfall of the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah; to what lies beyond this, namely,
the restoration of the kingdom of God; and to the state of the
people in their condition of final felicity.” For predictions of
the exile and the return of Israel, see especially _Amos
9:9—_“For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel
among all the nations, like as grain is sifted in a sieve, yet
shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth.... _14—_And I will
bring again the captivity of my people Israel, and they shall
build the waste cities and inhabit them.” Even if we accept the
theory of composite authorship of the book of Isaiah, we still
have a foretelling of the sending back of the Jews from Babylon,
and a designation of Cyrus as God’s agent, in _Is. 44:28—_“that
saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my
pleasure: even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the
temple, Thy foundation shall be laid”; see George Adam Smith, in
Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 2:493. Frederick the Great said to his
chaplain: “Give me in one word a proof of the divine origin of the
Bible”; and the chaplain well replied: “The Jews, your Majesty.”
In the case of the Jews we have even now the unique phenomena of a
people without a land, and a land without a people,—yet both these
were predicted centuries before the event.

5. _Messianic Prophecy in general._ (_a_) Direct predictions of events—as
in Old Testament prophecies of Christ’s birth, suffering and subsequent
glory. (_b_) General prophecy of the Kingdom in the Old Testament, and of
its gradual triumph. (_c_) Historical types in a nation and in
individuals—as Jonah and David. (_d_) Prefigurations of the future in
rites and ordinances—as in sacrifice, circumcision, and the passover.

6. _Special Prophecies uttered by Christ._ (_a_) As to his own death and
resurrection. (_b_) As to events occurring between his death and the
destruction of Jerusalem (multitudes of impostors; wars and rumors of
wars; famine and pestilence). (_c_) As to the destruction of Jerusalem and
the Jewish polity (Jerusalem compassed with armies; abomination of
desolation in the holy place; flight of Christians; misery; massacre;
dispersion). (_d_) As to the world-wide diffusion of his gospel (the Bible
already the most widely circulated book in the world).

The most important feature in prophecy is its Messianic element;
see _Luke 24:27—_“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets,
he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning
himself”; _Acts 10:43—_“to him bear all the prophets witness”;
_Rev. 19:10—_“the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”
Types are intended resemblances, designed prefigurations; for
example, Israel is a type of the Christian church; outside nations
are types of the hostile world; Jonah and David are types of
Christ. The typical nature of Israel rests upon the deeper fact of
the community of life. As the life of God the Logos lies at the
basis of universal humanity and interpenetrates it in every part,
so out of this universal humanity grows Israel in general; out of
Israel as a nation springs the spiritual Israel, and out of
spiritual Israel Christ according to the flesh,—the upward rising
pyramid finds its apex and culmination in him. Hence the
predictions with regard to “the servant of Jehovah”_ (Is.
42:1-7)_, and “the Messiah”_ (Is. 61:1; John 1:41)_, have partial
fulfilment in Israel, but perfect fulfilment only in Christ; so
Delitzsch, Oehler, and Cheyne on Isaiah, 2:253. Sabatier, Philos.
Religion, 59—“If humanity were not potentially and in some degree
Immanuel, God with us, there would never have issued from its
bosom he who bore and revealed this blessed name.” Gardiner, O. T.
and N. T. in their Mutual Relations, 170-194.

In the O. T., Jehovah is the Redeemer of his people. He works
through judges, prophets, kings, but he himself remains the
Savior; “it is only the Divine in them that saves”; “Salvation is
of Jehovah”_ (Jonah 2:9)_. Jehovah is manifested in the Davidic
King under the monarchy; in Israel, the Servant of the Lord,
during the exile; and in the Messiah, or Anointed One, in the
post-exilian period. Because of its conscious identification with
Jehovah, Israel is always a forward-looking people. Each new
judge, king, prophet is regarded as heralding the coming reign of
righteousness and peace. These earthly deliverers are saluted with
rapturous expectation; the prophets express this expectation in
terms that transcend the possibilities of the present; and, when
this expectation fails to be fully realized, the Messianic hope is
simply transferred to a larger future. Each separate prophecy has
its drapery furnished by the prophet’s immediate surroundings, and
finds its occasion in some event of contemporaneous history. But
by degrees it becomes evident that only an ideal and perfect King
and Savior can fill out the requirements of prophecy. Only when
Christ appears, does the real meaning of the various Old Testament
predictions become manifest. Only then are men able to combine the
seemingly inconsistent prophecies of a priest who is also a king
(_Psalm 110_), and of a royal but at the same time a suffering
Messiah (_Isaiah 53_). It is not enough for us to ask what the
prophet himself meant, or what his earliest hearers understood, by
his prophecy. This is to regard prophecy as having only a single,
and that a human, author. With the spirit of man coöperated the
Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit (_1 Pet. 1:11—_“the Spirit of
Christ which was in them”; _2 Pet. 1:21—_“no prophecy ever came by
the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy
Spirit”). All prophecy has a twofold authorship, human and divine;
the same Christ who spoke through the prophets brought about the
fulfilment of their words.

It is no wonder that he who through the prophets uttered
predictions with regard to himself should, when he became
incarnate, be the prophet _par excellence_ (_Deut. 18:15_; _Acts
3:22—_“Moses indeed said, A prophet shall the Lord God raise up
from among your brethren, like unto me; to him shall ye hearken”).
In the predictions of Jesus we find the proper key to the
interpretation of prophecy in general, and the evidence that while
no one of the three theories—the preterist, the continuist, the
futurist—furnishes an exhaustive explanation, each one of these
has its element of truth. Our Lord made the fulfilment of the
prediction of his own resurrection a test of his divine
commission: it was “the sign of Jonah the prophet”_ (Mat. 12:39)_.
He promised that his disciples should have prophetic gifts: _John
15:15—_“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth
not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all
things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you”;
_16:13—_“the Spirit of truth ... he shall declare unto you the
things that are to come.” Agabus predicted the famine and Paul’s
imprisonment (_Acts 11:28_; _21:10_); Paul predicted heresies
(_Acts 20:29, 30_), shipwreck (_Acts 27:10, 21-26_), “the man of
sin”_ (2 Thess. 2:3)_, Christ’s second coming, and the
resurrection of the saints (_1 Thess. 4:15-17_).

7. On the double sense of Prophecy.

(_a_) Certain prophecies apparently contain a fulness of meaning which is
not exhausted by the event to which they most obviously and literally
refer. A prophecy which had a partial fulfilment at a time not remote from
its utterance, may find its chief fulfilment in an event far distant.
Since the principles of God’s administration find ever recurring and ever
enlarging illustration in history, prophecies which have already had a
partial fulfilment may have whole cycles of fulfilment yet before them.

In prophecy there is an absence of perspective; as in Japanese
pictures the near and the far appear equally distant; as in
dissolving views, the immediate future melts into a future
immeasurably far away. The candle that shines through a narrow
aperture sends out its light through an ever-increasing area;
sections of the triangle correspond to each other, but the more
distant are far greater than the near. The châlet on the
mountain-side may turn out to be only a black cat on the woodpile,
or a speck upon the window pane. “A hill which appears to rise
close behind another is found on nearer approach to have receded a
great way from it.” The painter, by foreshortening, brings
together things or parts that are relatively distant from each
other. The prophet is a painter whose foreshortenings are
supernatural; he seems freed from the law of space and time, and,
rapt into the timelessness of God, he views the events of history
“sub specie eternitatis.” Prophecy was the sketching of an
outline-map. Even the prophet could not fill up the outline. The
absence of perspective in prophecy may account for Paul’s being
misunderstood by the Thessalonians, and for the necessity of his
explanations in _2 Thess. 2:1, 2_. In _Isaiah 10_ and _11_, the
fall of Lebanon (the Assyrian) is immediately connected with the
rise of the Branch (Christ); in _Jeremiah 51:41_, the first
capture and the complete destruction of Babylon are connected with
each other, without notice of the interval of a thousand years
between them.

Instances of the double sense of prophecy may be found in _Is.
7:14-16_; _9:6, 7—_“a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, ...
unto us a son is given”—compared with _Mat. 1:22, 23_, where the
prophecy is applied to Christ (see Meyer, _in loco_); _Hos.
11:1—_“I ... called my son out of Egypt”—referring originally to
the calling of the nation out of Egypt—is in _Mat. 2:15_ referred
to Christ, who embodied and consummated the mission of Israel;
_Psalm 118:22, 23—_“The stone which the builders rejected is
become the head of the corner”—which primarily referred to the
Jewish nation, conquered, carried away, and flung aside as of no
use, but divinely destined to a future of importance and grandeur,
is in _Mat. 21:42_ referred by Jesus to himself, as the true
embodiment of Israel. William Arnold Stevens, on The Man of Sin,
in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360—As in _Daniel 11:36_, the
great enemy of the faith, who “shall exalt himself, and magnify
himself above every god,” is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes,
so “the man of lawlessness” described by Paul in _2 Thess. 2:3_ is
the corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age. This had its
seat in the temple of God, but was doomed to destruction when the
Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But even this second
fulfilment of the prophecy does not preclude a future and final
fulfilment. Broadus on Mat., page 480—In _Isaiah 41:8_ to _chapter
53_, the predictions with regard to “the servant of Jehovah” make
a gradual transition from Israel to the Messiah, the former alone
being seen in _41:8_, the Messiah also appearing in _42:1 __sq._,
and Israel quite sinking out of sight in _chapter 53_.

The most marked illustration of the double sense of prophecy
however is to be found in _Matthew 24_ and _25_, especially
_24:34_ and _25:31_, where Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of
Jerusalem passes into a prophecy of the end of the world. Adamson,
The Mind in Christ, 183—“To him history was the robe of God, and
therefore a constant repetition of positions really similar,
kaleidoscopic combining of a few truths, as the facts varied in
which they were to be embodied.” A. J. Gordon: “Prophecy has no
sooner become history, than history in turn becomes prophecy.”
Lord Bacon: “Divine prophecies have springing and germinant
accomplishment through many ages, though the height or fulness of
them may refer to some one age.” In a similar manner there is a
manifoldness of meaning in Dante’s Divine Comedy. C. E. Norton,
Inferno, xvi—“The narrative of the poet’s spiritual journey is so
vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of
an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of
allegory not less consistent and hardly less continuous than the
narrative itself.” A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their
Theology, 116—“Dante himself has told us that there are four
separate senses which he intends his story to convey. There are
the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the analogical. In
_Psalm 114:1_ we have the words, ‘When Israel went forth out of
Egypt.’ This, says the poet, may be taken literally, of the actual
deliverance of God’s ancient people; or allegorically, of the
redemption of the world through Christ; or morally, of the rescue
of the sinner from the bondage of his sin; or anagogically, of the
passage of both soul and body from the lower life of earth to the
higher life of heaven. So from Scripture Dante illustrates the
method of his poem.” See further, our treatment of Eschatology.
See also Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Sermons on the Interpretation of
Scripture, Appendix A, pages 441-454; Aids to Faith, 449-462;
Smith’s Bible Dict., 4:2727. _Per contra_, see Elliott, Horæ
Apocalypticæ, 4:662. Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 262-274, denies
double sense, but affirms manifold applications of a single sense.
Broadus, on _Mat. 24:1_, denies double sense, but affirms the use
of types.

(_b_) The prophet was not always aware of the meaning of his own
prophecies (1 Pet. 1:11). It is enough to constitute his prophecies a
proof of divine revelation, if it can be shown that the correspondences
between them and the actual events are such as to indicate divine wisdom
and purpose in the giving of them—in other words, it is enough if the
inspiring Spirit knew their meaning, even though the inspired prophet did
not.

It is not inconsistent with this view, but rather confirms it,
that the near event, and not the distant fulfilment, was often
chiefly, if not exclusively, in the mind of the prophet when he
wrote. Scripture declares that the prophets did not always
understand their own predictions: _1 Pet. 1:11—_“searching what
time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them
did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of
Christ, and the glories that should follow them.” Emerson:
“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he
knew.” Keble: “As little children lisp and tell of heaven, So
thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given.”
Westcott: Preface to Com. on Hebrews, vi—“No one would limit the
teaching of a poet’s words to that which was definitely present to
his mind. Still less can we suppose that he who is inspired to
give a message of God to all ages sees himself the completeness of
the truth which all life serves to illuminate.” Alexander McLaren:
“Peter teaches that Jewish prophets foretold the events of
Christ’s life and especially his sufferings; that they did so as
organs of God’s Spirit; that they were so completely organs of a
higher voice that they did not understand the significance of
their own words, but were wiser than they knew and had to search
what were the date and the characteristics of the strange things
which they foretold; and that by further revelation they learned
that ‘the vision is yet for many days’_ (Is. 24:22; Dan. 10:14)_.
If Peter was right in his conception of the nature of Messianic
prophecy, a good many learned men of to-day are wrong.” Matthew
Arnold, Literature and Dogma: “Might not the prophetic ideals be
poetic dreams, and the correspondence between them and the life of
Jesus, so far as real, only a curious historical phenomenon?”
Bruce, Apologetics, 359, replies: “Such scepticism is possible
only to those who have no faith in a living God who works out
purposes in history.” It is comparable only to the unbelief of the
materialist who regards the physical constitution of the universe
as explicable by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.

8. _Purpose of Prophecy—so far as it is yet unfulfilled._ (_a_) Not to
enable us to map out the details of the future; but rather (_b_) To give
general assurance of God’s power and foreseeing wisdom, and of the
certainty of his triumph; and (_c_) To furnish, after fulfilment, the
proof that God saw the end from the beginning.

_Dan. 12:8, 9—_“And I heard, but I understood not; then said I, O
my Lord, what shall be the issue of these things? And he said, Go
thy way, Daniel; for the words are shut up and sealed till the
time of the end”; _2 Pet. 1:19_—prophecy is “a lamp shining in a
dark place, until the day dawn”—not until day dawns can distant
objects be seen; _20—_“no prophecy of scripture is of private
interpretation”—only God, by the event, can interpret it. Sir
Isaac Newton: “God gave the prophecies, not to gratify men’s
curiosity by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they
were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own
providence, not the interpreter’s, be thereby manifested to the
world.” Alexander McLaren: “Great tracts of Scripture are dark to
us till life explains them, and then they come on us with the
force of a new revelation, like the messages which of old were
sent by a strip of parchment coiled upon a bâton and then written
upon, and which were unintelligible unless the receiver had a
corresponding bâton to wrap them round.” A. H. Strong, The Great
Poets and their Theology, 23—“Archilochus, a poet of about 700 B.
C., speaks of ‘a grievous _scytale_’—the _scytale_ being the staff
on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled
slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not
be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of
the same size; since only the writer and the receiver possessed
staves of the proper size, the _scytale_ answered all the ends of
a message in cypher.”

Prophecy is like the German sentence,—it can be understood only
when we have read its last word. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
Spirit, 48—“God’s providence is like the Hebrew Bible; we must
begin at the end and read backward, in order to understand it.”
Yet Dr. Gordon seems to assert that such understanding is possible
even before fulfilment: “Christ did not know the day of the end
when here in his state of humiliation; but he does know now. He
has shown his knowledge in the Apocalypse, and we have received
‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show unto
his servants, even the things which must shortly come to pass’_
(Rev. 1:1)_.” A study however of the multitudinous and conflicting
views of the so-called interpreters of prophecy leads us to prefer
to Dr. Gordon’s view that of Briggs, Messianic Prophecies, 49—“The
first advent is the resolver of all Old Testament prophecy; ...
the second advent will give the key to New Testament prophecy. It
is ‘the Lamb that hath been slain’_ (Rev. 5:12)_ ... who alone
opens the sealed book, solves the riddles of time, and resolves
the symbols of prophecy.”

Nitzsch: “It is the essential condition of prophecy that it should
not disturb man’s relation to history.” In so far as this is
forgotten, and it is falsely assumed that the purpose of prophecy
is to enable us to map out the precise events of the future before
they occur, the study of prophecy ministers to a diseased
imagination and diverts attention from practical Christian duty.
Calvin: “Aut insanum inveniet aut faciet”; or, as Lord Brougham
translated it: “The study of prophecy either finds a man crazy, or
it leaves him so.” Second Adventists do not often seek
conversions. Dr. Cumming warned the women of his flock that they
must not study prophecy so much as to neglect their household
duties. Paul has such in mind in _2 Thess. 2:1, 2—_“touching the
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ ... that ye be not quickly shaken
from your mind ... as that the day of the Lord is just at hand”;
_3:11—_“For we hear of some that walk among you disorderly.”

9. _Evidential force of Prophecy—so far as it is fulfilled._ Prophecy,
like miracles, does not stand alone as evidence of the divine commission
of the Scripture writers and teachers. It is simply a corroborative
attestation, which unites with miracles to prove that a religious teacher
has come from God and speaks with divine authority. We cannot, however,
dispense with this portion of the evidences,—for unless the death and
resurrection of Christ are events foreknown and foretold by himself, as
well as by the ancient prophets, we lose one main proof of his authority
as a teacher sent from God.

Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 338—“The Christian’s
own life is the progressive fulfilment of the prophecy that
whoever accepts Christ’s grace shall be born again, sanctified,
and saved. Hence the Christian can believe in God’s power to
predict, and in God’s actual predictions.” See Stanley Leathes, O.
T. Prophecy, xvii—“Unless we have access to the supernatural, we
have no access to God.” In our discussions of prophecy, we are to
remember that before making the truth of Christianity stand or
fall with any particular passage that has been regarded as
prediction, we must be certain that the passage is meant as
prediction, and not as merely figurative description. Gladden,
Seven Puzzling Bible Books, 195—“The book of Daniel is not a
prophecy,—it is an apocalypse.... The author [of such books] puts
his words into the mouth of some historical or traditional writer
of eminence. Such are the Book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses,
Baruch, 1 and 2 Esdras, and the Sibylline Oracles. Enigmatic form
indicates persons without naming them, and historic events as
animal forms or as operations of nature.... The book of Daniel is
not intended to teach us history. It does not look forward from
the sixth century before Christ, but backward from the second
century before Christ. It is a kind of story which the Jews called
Haggada. It is aimed at Antiochus Epiphanes, who, from his
occasional fits of melancholy, was called Epimanes, or Antiochus
the Mad.”

Whatever may be our conclusion as to the authorship of the book of
Daniel, we must recognize in it an element of prediction which has
been actually fulfilled. The most radical interpreters do not
place its date later than 163 B. C. Our Lord sees in the book
clear reference to himself (_Mat. 26:64—_“the Son of man, sitting
at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven”;
_cf._ _Dan. 7:13_); and he repeats with emphasis certain
predictions of the prophet which were yet unfulfilled (_Mat.
24:15—_“When ye see the abomination of desolation, which was
spoken of through Daniel the prophet”; _cf._ _Dan. 9:27_; _11:31_;
_12:11_). The book of Daniel must therefore be counted profitable
not only for its moral and spiritual lessons, but also for its
actual predictions of Christ and of the universal triumph of his
kingdom (_Dan. 2:45—_“a stone cut out of the mountain without
hands”). See on Daniel, Hastings’ Bible Dictionary; Farrar, in
Expositor’s Bible. On the general subject see Annotated Paragraph
Bible, Introd. to Prophetical Books; Cairns, on Present State of
Christian Argument from Prophecy, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no.
27; Edersheim, Prophecy and History; Briggs, Messianic Prophecy;
Redford, Prophecy, its Nature and Evidence; Willis J. Beecher, the
Prophet and the Promise; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 455-465.

Having thus removed the presumption originally existing against miracles
and prophecy, we may now consider the ordinary laws of evidence and
determine the rules to be followed in estimating the weight of the
Scripture testimony.

V. Principles of Historical Evidence applicable to the Proof of a Divine
Revelation.

PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE APPLICABLE TO THE PROOF OF A DIVINE
REVELATION (mainly derived from Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists,
and from Starkie on Evidence).

1. As to documentary evidence.

(_a_) Documents apparently ancient, not bearing upon their face the marks
of forgery, and found in proper custody, are presumed to be genuine until
sufficient evidence is brought to the contrary. The New Testament
documents, since they are found in the custody of the church, their
natural and legitimate depository, must by this rule be presumed to be
genuine.

The Christian documents were not found, like the Book of Mormon,
in a cave, or in the custody of angels. Martineau, Seat of
Authority, 322—“The Mormon prophet, who cannot tell God from devil
close at hand, is well up with the history of both worlds, and
commissioned to get ready the second promised land.” Washington
Gladden, Who wrote the Bible?—“An angel appeared to Smith and told
him where he would find this book; he went to the spot designated
and found in a stone box a volume six inches thick, composed of
thin gold plates, eight inches by seven, held together by three
gold rings; these plates were covered with writing, in the
‘Reformed Egyptian tongue’; with this book were the ‘Urim and
Thummim’, a pair of supernatural spectacles, by means of which he
was able to read and translate this ‘Reformed Egyptian’ language.”
Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 113—“If the ledger of a business
firm has always been received and regarded as a ledger, its value
is not at all impeached if it is impossible to tell which
particular clerk kept this ledger.... The epistle to the Hebrews
would be no less valuable as evidence, if shown not to have been
written by Paul.” See Starkie on Evidence, 480 _sq._; Chalmers,
Christian Revelation, in Works, 3:147-171.

(_b_) Copies of ancient documents, made by those most interested in their
faithfulness, are presumed to correspond with the originals, even although
those originals no longer exist. Since it was the church’s interest to
have faithful copies, the burden of proof rests upon the objector to the
Christian documents.

Upon the evidence of a copy of its own records, the originals
having been lost, the House of Lords decided a claim to the
peerage; see Starkie on Evidence, 51. There is no manuscript of
Sophocles earlier than the tenth century, while at least two
manuscripts of the N. T. go back to the fourth century. Frederick
George Kenyon, Handbook to Textual Criticism of N. T.: “We owe our
knowledge of most of the great works of Greek and Latin
literature—Æschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Horace, Lucretius,
Tacitus, and many more—to manuscripts written from 900 to 1500
years after their authors’ deaths; while of the N. T. we have two
excellent and approximately complete copies at an interval of only
250 years. Again, of the classical writers we have as a rule only
a few score of copies (often less), of which one or two stand out
as decisively superior to all the rest; but of the N. T. we have
more than 3000 copies (besides a very large number of versions),
and many of these have distinct and independent value.” The mother
of Tischendorf named him Lobgott, because her fear that her babe
would be born blind had not come true. No man ever had keener
sight than he. He spent his life in deciphering old manuscripts
which other eyes could not read. The Sinaitic manuscript which he
discovered takes us back within three centuries of the time of the
apostles.

(_c_) In determining matters of fact, after the lapse of considerable
time, documentary evidence is to be allowed greater weight than oral
testimony. Neither memory nor tradition can long be trusted to give
absolutely correct accounts of particular facts. The New Testament
documents, therefore, are of greater weight in evidence than tradition
would be, even if only thirty years had elapsed since the death of the
actors in the scenes they relate.

See Starkie on Evidence, 51, 730. The Roman Catholic Church, in
its legends of the saints, shows how quickly mere tradition can
become corrupt. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, yet
sermons preached to-day on the anniversary of his birth make him
out to be Unitarian, Universalist, or Orthodox, according as the
preacher himself believes.

2. As to testimony in general.

(_a_) In questions as to matters of fact, the proper inquiry is not
whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there
is sufficient probability that it is true. It is unfair, therefore, to
allow our examination of the Scripture witnesses to be prejudiced by
suspicion, merely because their story is a sacred one.

There must be no prejudice against, there must be open-mindedness
to, truth; there must be a normal aspiration after the signs of
communication from God. Telepathy, forty days fasting,
parthenogenesis, all these might once have seemed antecedently
incredible. Now we see that it would have been more rational to
admit their existence on presentation of appropriate evidence.

(_b_) A proposition of fact is proved when its truth is established by
competent and satisfactory evidence. By competent evidence is meant such
evidence as the nature of the thing to be proved admits. By satisfactory
evidence is meant that amount of proof which ordinarily satisfies an
unprejudiced mind beyond a reasonable doubt. Scripture facts are therefore
proved when they are established by that kind and degree of evidence which
would in the affairs of ordinary life satisfy the mind and conscience of a
common man. When we have this kind and degree of evidence it is
unreasonable to require more.

In matters of morals and religion competent evidence need not be
mathematical or even logical. The majority of cases in criminal
courts are decided upon evidence that is circumstantial. We do not
determine our choice of friends or of partners in life by strict
processes of reasoning. The heart as well as the head must be
permitted a voice, and competent evidence includes considerations
arising from the moral needs of the soul. The evidence, moreover,
does not require to be demonstrative. Even a slight balance of
probability, when nothing more certain is attainable, may suffice
to constitute rational proof and to bind our moral action.

(_c_) In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every
witness is to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown; the
burden of impeaching his testimony lying upon the objector. The principle
which leads men to give true witness to facts is stronger than that which
leads them to give false witness. It is therefore unjust to compel the
Christian to establish the credibility of his witnesses before proceeding
to adduce their testimony, and it is equally unjust to allow the
uncorroborated testimony of a profane writer to outweigh that of a
Christian writer. Christian witnesses should not be considered interested,
and therefore untrustworthy; for they became Christians against their
worldly interests, and because they could not resist the force of
testimony. Varying accounts among them should be estimated as we estimate
the varying accounts of profane writers.

John’s account of Jesus differs from that of the synoptic gospels;
but in a very similar manner, and probably for a very similar
reason, Plato’s account of Socrates differs from that of Xenophon.
Each saw and described that side of his subject which he was by
nature best fitted to comprehend,—compare the Venice of Canaletto
with the Venice of Turner, the former the picture of an expert
draughtsman, the latter the vision of a poet who sees the palaces
of the Doges glorified by air and mist and distance. In Christ
there was a “hiding of his power”_ (Hab. 3:4)_; “how small a
whisper do we hear of him!”_ (Job 26:14)_; he, rather than
Shakespeare, is “the myriad-minded”; no one evangelist can be
expected to know or describe him except “in part”_ (1 Cor.
13:12)_. Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 2:402—“All of us human beings
resemble diamonds, in having several distinct facets to our
characters; and, as we always turn one of these to one person and
another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen
in a particularly brilliant gem.” E. P. Tenney, Coronation,
45—“The secret and powerful life he [the hero of the story] was
leading was like certain solitary streams, deep, wide, and swift,
which run unseen through vast and unfrequented forests. So wide
and varied was this man’s nature, that whole courses of life might
thrive in its secret places,—and his neighbors might touch him and
know him only on that side on which he was like them.”

(_d_) A slight amount of positive testimony, so long as it is
uncontradicted, outweighs a very great amount of testimony that is merely
negative. The silence of a second witness, or his testimony that he did
not see a certain alleged occurrence, cannot counterbalance the positive
testimony of a first witness that he did see it. We should therefore
estimate the silence of profane writers with regard to facts narrated in
Scripture precisely as we should estimate it if the facts about which they
are silent were narrated by other profane writers, instead of being
narrated by the writers of Scripture.

Egyptian monuments make no mention of the destruction of Pharaoh
and his army; but then, Napoleon’s dispatches also make no mention
of his defeat at Trafalgar. At the tomb of Napoleon in the
Invalides of Paris, the walls are inscribed with names of a
multitude of places where his battles were fought, but Waterloo,
the scene of his great defeat, is not recorded there. So
Sennacherib, in all his monuments, does not refer to the
destruction of his army in the time of Hezekiah. Napoleon gathered
450,000 men at Dresden to invade Russia. At Moscow the
soft-falling snow conquered him. In one night 20,000 horses
perished with cold. Not without reason at Moscow, on the
anniversary of the retreat of the French, the exultation of the
prophet over the fall of Sennacherib is read in the churches.
James Robertson, Early History of Israel, 395, note—“Whately, in
his Historic Doubts, draws attention to the fact that the
principal Parisian journal in 1814, on the very day on which the
allied armies entered Paris as conquerors, makes no mention of any
such event. The battle of Poictiers in 732, which effectually
checked the spread of Mohammedanism across Europe, is not once
referred to in the monastic annals of the period. Sir Thomas
Browne lived through the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, yet
there is no syllable in his writings with regard to them. Sale
says that circumcision is regarded by Mohammedans as an ancient
divine institution, the rite having been in use many years before
Mohammed, yet it is not so much as once mentioned in the Koran.”

Even though we should grant that Josephus does not mention Jesus,
we should have a parallel in Thucydides, who never once mentions
Socrates, the most important character of the twenty years
embraced in his history. Wieseler, however, in Jahrbuch f. d.
Theologie, 23:98, maintains the essential genuineness of the
commonly rejected passage with regard to Jesus in Josephus,
Antiq., 18:3:3, omitting, however, as interpolations, the phrases:
“if it be right to call him man”; “this was the Christ”; “he
appeared alive the third day according to prophecy”; for these, if
genuine, would prove Josephus a Christian, which he, by all
ancient accounts, was not. Josephus lived from A. D. 34 to
possibly 114. He does elsewhere speak of Christ; for he records
(20:9:1) that Albinus “assembled the Sanhedrim of judges, and
brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,
whose name was James, and some others ... and delivered them to be
stoned.” See Niese’s new edition of Josephus; also a monograph on
the subject by Gustav Adolph Müller, published at Innsbruck, 1890.
Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 22—“To mention Jesus more
fully would have required some approval of his life and teaching.
This would have been a condemnation of his own people whom he
desired to commend to Gentile regard, and he seems to have taken
the cowardly course of silence concerning a matter more
noteworthy, for that generation, than much else of which he writes
very fully.”

(_e_) “The credit due to the testimony of witnesses depends upon: first,
their ability; secondly, their honesty; thirdly, their number and the
consistency of their testimony; fourthly, the conformity of their
testimony with experience; and fifthly, the coincidence of their testimony
with collateral circumstances.” We confidently submit the New Testament
witnesses to each and all of these tests.

See Starkie on Evidence, 726.

Chapter II. Positive Proofs That The Scriptures Are A Divine Revelation.

I. Genuineness of the Christian Documents.

THE GENUINENESS OF THE CHRISTIAN DOCUMENTS, or proof that the books of the
Old and New Testaments were written at the age to which they are assigned
and by the men or class of men to whom they are ascribed.

Our present discussion comprises the first part, and only the
first part, of the doctrine of the Canon (κανών, a measuring-reed;
hence, a rule, a standard). It is important to observe that the
determination of the Canon, or list of the books of sacred
Scripture, is not the work of the church as an organized body. We
do not receive these books upon the authority of Fathers or
Councils. We receive them, only as the Fathers and Councils
received them, because we have evidence that they are the writings
of the men, or class of men, whose names they bear, and that they
are also credible and inspired. If the previous epistle alluded to
in _1 Cor. 5:9_ should be discovered and be universally judged
authentic, it could be placed with Paul’s other letters and could
form part of the Canon, even though it has been lost for 1800
years. Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“Abstractly the Canon is an open
question. It can never be anything else on the principles of
Protestantism which forbid us to accept the decisions of church
councils, whether ancient or modern, as final. But practically the
question of the Canon is closed.” The Westminster Confession says
that the authority of the word of God “does not rest upon historic
evidence; it does not rest upon the authority of Councils; it does
not rest upon the consent of the past or the excellence of the
matter; but it rests upon the Spirit of God bearing witness to our
hearts concerning its divine authority.” Clarke, Christian
Theology, 24—“The value of the Scriptures to us does not depend
upon our knowing who wrote them. In the O. T. half its pages are
of uncertain authorship. New dates mean new authorship. Criticism
is a duty, for dates of authorship give means of interpretation.
The Scriptures have power because God is in them, and because they
describe the entrance of God into the life of man.”

Saintine, Picciola, 782—“Has not a feeble reed provided man with
his first arrow, his first pen, his first instrument of music?”
Hugh Macmillan: “The idea of stringed instruments was first
derived from the twang of the well strung bow, as the archer shot
his arrows; the lyre and the harp which discourse the sweetest
music of peace were invented by those who first heard this
inspiring sound in the excitement of battle. And so there is no
music so delightful amid the jarring discord of the world, turning
everything to music and harmonizing earth and heaven, as when the
heart rises out of the gloom of anger and revenge, and converts
its bow into a harp, and sings to it the Lord’s song of infinite
forgiveness.” George Adam Smith, Mod. Criticism and Preaching of
O. T., 5—“The church has never renounced her liberty to revise the
Canon. The liberty at the beginning cannot be more than the
liberty thereafter. The Holy Spirit has not forsaken the leaders
of the church. Apostolic writers nowhere define the limits of the
Canon, any more than Jesus did. Indeed, they employed
extra-canonical writings. Christ and the apostles nowhere bound
the church to believe all the teachings of the O. T. Christ
discriminates, and forbids the literal interpretation of its
contents. Many of the apostolic interpretations challenge our
sense of truth. Much of their exegesis was temporary and false.
Their judgment was that much in the O. T. was rudimentary. This
opens the question of development in revelation, and justifies the
attempt to fix the historic order. The N. T. criticism of the O.
T. gives the liberty of criticism, and the need, and the
obligation of it. O. T. criticism is not, like Baur’s of the N.
T., the result of _a priori_ Hegelian reasoning. From the time of
Samuel we have real history. The prophets do not appeal to
miracles. There is more gospel in the book of Jonah, when it is
treated as a parable. The O. T. is a gradual ethical revelation of
God. Few realize that the church of Christ has a higher warrant
for her Canon of the O. T. than she has for her Canon of the N. T.
The O. T. was the result of criticism in the widest sense of that
word. But what the church thus once achieved, the church may at
any time revise.”

We reserve to a point somewhat later the proof of the credibility
and the inspiration of the Scriptures. We now show their
genuineness, as we would show the genuineness of other religious
books, like the Koran, or of secular documents, like Cicero’s
Orations against Catiline. Genuineness, in the sense in which we
use the term, does not necessarily imply authenticity (_i. e._,
truthfulness and authority); see Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist.
Theol., art.: Authenticity. Documents may be genuine which are
written in whole or in part by persons other than they whose names
they bear, provided these persons belong to the same class. The
Epistle to the Hebrews, though not written by Paul, is genuine,
because it proceeds from one of the apostolic class. The addition
of Deut. 34, after Moses’ death, does not invalidate the
genuineness of the Pentateuch; nor would the theory of a later
Isaiah, even if it were established, disprove the genuineness of
that prophecy; provided, in both cases, that the additions were
made by men of the prophetic class. On the general subject of the
genuineness of the Scripture documents, see Alexander, McIlvaine,
Chalmers, Dodge, and Peabody, on the Evidences of Christianity;
also Archibald, The Bible Verified.

1. Genuineness of the Books of the New Testament.

We do not need to adduce proof of the existence of the books of the New
Testament as far back as the third century, for we possess manuscripts of
them which are at least fourteen hundred years old, and, since the third
century, references to them have been inwoven into all history and
literature. We begin our proof, therefore, by showing that these documents
not only existed, but were generally accepted as genuine, before the close
of the second century.

Origen was born as early as 186 A. D.; yet Tregelles tells us that
Origen’s works contain citations embracing two-thirds of the New
Testament. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 12—“The early years of
Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our
lives.... Those early years are the most important in our
education. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and
struggle and innocent mistakes, to use our eyes and ears, to
measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by
unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our
maturity.... It was in some such unconscious way that the
Christian thought of the early centuries gradually acquired the
form which we find when it emerges as it were into the developed
manhood of the fourth century.”

A. All the books of the New Testament, with the single exception of 2
Peter, were not only received as genuine, but were used in more or less
collected form, in the latter half of the second century. These
collections of writings, so slowly transcribed and distributed, imply the
long continued previous existence of the separate books, and forbid us to
fix their origin later than the first half of the second century.

(_a_) Tertullian (160-230) appeals to the “New Testament” as made up of
the “Gospels” and “Apostles.” He vouches for the genuineness of the four
gospels, the Acts, 1 Peter, 1 John, thirteen epistles of Paul, and the
Apocalypse; in short, to twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of our
Canon.

Sanday, Bampton Lectures for 1893, is confident that the first
three gospels took their present shape before the destruction of
Jerusalem. Yet he thinks the first and third gospels of composite
origin, and probably the second. Not later than 125 A. D. the four
gospels of our Canon had gained a recognized and exceptional
authority. Andover Professors, Divinity of Jesus Christ, 40—“The
oldest of our gospels was written about the year 70. The earlier
one, now lost, a great part of which is preserved in Luke and
Matthew, was probably written a few years earlier.”

(_b_) The Muratorian Canon in the West and the Peshito Version in the East
(having a common date of about 160) in their catalogues of the New
Testament writings mutually complement each other’s slight deficiencies,
and together witness to the fact that at that time every book of our
present New Testament, with the exception of 2 Peter, was received as
genuine.

Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 50—“The fragment on the
Canon, discovered by Muratori in 1738, was probably written about
170 A. D., in Greek. It begins with the last words of a sentence
which must have referred to the Gospel of Mark, and proceeds to
speak of the Third Gospel as written by Luke the physician, who
did not see the Lord, and then of the Fourth Gospel as written by
John, a disciple of the Lord, at the request of his fellow
disciples and his elders.” Bacon, N. T. Introduction, 50, gives
the Muratorian Canon in full; 30—“Theophilus of Antioch (181-190)
is the first to cite a gospel by name, quoting _John 1:1_ as from
‘John, one of those who were vessels of the Spirit.’ ” On the
Muratorian Canon, see Tregelles, Muratorian Canon. On the Peshito
Version, see Schaff, Introd. to Rev. Gk.-Eng. N. T., xxxvii;
Smith’s Bible Dict., pp. 3388, 3389.

(_c_) The Canon of Marcion (140), though rejecting all the gospels but
that of Luke, and all the epistles but ten of Paul’s, shows, nevertheless,
that at that early day “apostolic writings were regarded as a complete
original rule of doctrine.” Even Marcion, moreover, does not deny the
genuineness of those writings which for doctrinal reasons he rejects.

Marcion, the Gnostic, was the enemy of all Judaism, and regarded
the God of the O. T. as a restricted divinity, entirely different
from the God of the N. T. Marcion was “ipso Paulo paulinior”—“plus
loyal que le roi.” He held that Christianity was something
entirely new, and that it stood in opposition to all that went
before it. His Canon consisted of two parts: the “Gospel” (Luke,
with its text curtailed by omission of the Hebraistic elements)
and the Apostolicon (the epistles of Paul). The epistle to
Diognetus by an unknown author, and the epistle of Barnabas,
shared the view of Marcion. The name of the Deity was changed from
Jehovah to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If Marcion’s view had
prevailed, the Old Testament would have been lost to the Christian
Church. God’s revelation would have been deprived of its proof
from prophecy. Development from the past, and divine conduct of
Jewish history, would have been denied. But without the Old
Testament, as H. W. Beecher maintained, the New Testament would
lack background; our chief source of knowledge with regard to
God’s natural attributes of power, wisdom, and truth would be
removed: the love and mercy revealed in the New Testament would
seem characteristics of a weak being, who could not enforce law or
inspire respect. A tree has as much breadth below ground as there
is above; so the O. T. roots of God’s revelation are as extensive
and necessary as are its N. T. trunk and branches and leaves. See
Allen, Religious Progress, 81; Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, and
art.: Canon, in Smith’s Bible Dictionary. Also Reuss, History of
Canon; Mitchell, Critical Handbook, part I.

B. The Christian and Apostolic Fathers who lived in the first half of the
second century not only quote from these books and allude to them, but
testify that they were written by the apostles themselves. We are
therefore compelled to refer their origin still further back, namely, to
the first century, when the apostles lived.

(_a_) Irenæus (120-200) mentions and quotes the four gospels by name, and
among them the gospel according to John: “Afterwards John, the disciple of
the Lord, who also leaned upon his breast, he likewise published a gospel,
while he dwelt in Ephesus in Asia.” And Irenæus was the disciple and
friend of Polycarp (80-166), who was himself a personal acquaintance of
the Apostle John. The testimony of Irenæus is virtually the evidence of
Polycarp, the contemporary and friend of the Apostle, that each of the
gospels was written by the person whose name it bears.

To this testimony it is objected that Irenæus says there are four
gospels because there are four quarters of the world and four
living creatures in the cherubim. But we reply that Irenæus is
here stating, not his own reason for accepting four and only four
gospels, but what he conceives to be God’s reason for ordaining
that there should be four. We are not warranted in supposing that
he accepted the four gospels on any other ground than that of
testimony that they were the productions of apostolic men.

Chrysostom, in a similar manner, compares the four gospels to a
chariot and four: When the King of Glory rides forth in it, he
shall receive the triumphal acclamations of all peoples. So
Jerome: God rides upon the cherubim, and since there are four
cherubim, there must be four gospels. All this however is an early
attempt at the philosophy of religion, and not an attempt to
demonstrate historical fact. L. L. Paine, Evolution of
Trinitarianism, 319-367, presents the radical view of the
authorship of the fourth gospel. He holds that John the apostle
died A. D. 70, or soon after, and that Irenæus confounded the two
Johns whom Papias so clearly distinguished—John the Apostle and
John the Elder. With Harnack, Paine supposes the gospel to have
been written by John the Elder, a contemporary of Papias. But we
reply that the testimony of Irenæus implies a long continued
previous tradition. R. W. Dale, Living Christ and Four Gospels,
145—“Religious veneration such as that with which Irenæus regarded
these books is of slow growth. They must have held a great place
in the Church as far back as the memory of living men extended.”
See Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 2:695.

(_b_) Justin Martyr (died 148) speaks of “memoirs (ἀπομνημονεύματα) of
Jesus Christ,” and his quotations, though sometimes made from memory, are
evidently cited from our gospels.

To this testimony it is objected: (1) That Justin Martyr uses the
term “memoirs” instead of “gospels.” We reply that he elsewhere
uses the term “gospels” and identifies the “memoirs” with them:
Apol., 1:66—“The apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which
are called gospels,” _i. e._, not memoirs, but gospels, was the
proper title of his written records. In writing his Apology to the
heathen Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Antoninus, he chooses
the term “memoirs”, or “memorabilia”, which Xenophon had used as
the title of his account of Socrates, simply in order that he may
avoid ecclesiastical expressions unfamiliar to his readers and may
commend his writing to lovers of classical literature. Notice that
Matthew must be added to John, to justify Justin’s repeated
statement that there were “memoirs” of our Lord “written by
apostles,” and that Mark and Luke must be added to justify his
further statement that these memoirs were compiled by “his
apostles and those who followed them.” Analogous to Justin’s use
of the word “memoirs” is his use of the term “Sunday”, instead of
Sabbath: Apol. 1:67—“On the day called Sunday, all who live in
cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the
memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.”
Here is the use of our gospels in public worship, as of equal
authority with the O. T. Scriptures; in fact, Justin constantly
quotes the words and acts of Jesus’ life from a written source,
using the word γέγραπται. See Morison, Com. on Mat., ix; Hemphill,
Literature of Second Century, 234.

To Justin’s testimony it is objected: (2) That in quoting the
words spoken from heaven at the Savior’s baptism, he makes them to
be: “My son, this day have I begotten thee,” so quoting _Psalm
2:7_, and showing that he was ignorant of our present gospel,
_Mat. 3:17_. We reply that this was probably a slip of the memory,
quite natural in a day when the gospels existed only in the
cumbrous form of manuscript rolls. Justin also refers to the
Pentateuch for two facts which it does not contain; but we should
not argue from this that he did not possess our present
Pentateuch. The plays of Terence are quoted by Cicero and Horace,
and we require neither more nor earlier witnesses to their
genuineness,—yet Cicero and Horace wrote a hundred years after
Terence. It is unfair to refuse similar evidence to the gospels.
Justin had a way of combining into one the sayings of the
different evangelists—a hint which Tatian, his pupil, probably
followed out in composing his Diatessaron. On Justin Martyr’s
testimony, see Ezra Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 49,
note. B. W. Bacon, Introd. to N. T., speaks of Justin as “writing
_circa_ 155 A. D.”

(_c_) Papias (80-164), whom Irenæus calls a “hearer of John,” testifies
that Matthew “wrote in the Hebrew dialect the sacred oracles (τὰ λόγια),”
and that “Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote after Peter, (ὕστερον
Πέτρῳ) [or under Peter’s direction], an unsystematic account (οὐ τάξει)”
of the same events and discourses.

To this testimony it is objected: (1) That Papias could not have
had our gospel of Matthew, for the reason that this is Greek. We
reply, either with Bleek, that Papias erroneously supposed a
Hebrew translation of Matthew, which he possessed, to be the
original; or with Weiss, that the original Matthew was in Hebrew,
while our present Matthew is an enlarged version of the same.
Palestine, like modern Wales, was bilingual; Matthew, like James,
might write both Hebrew and Greek. While B. W. Bacon gives to the
writing of Papias a date so late as 145-160 A. D., Lightfoot gives
that of 130 A. D. At this latter date Papias could easily remember
stories told him so far back as 80 A. D., by men who were youths
at the time when our Lord lived, died, rose and ascended. The work
of Papias had for its title Λογίων κυριακῶν ἐξήγησις—“Exposition
of Oracles relating to the Lord” = Commentaries on the Gospels.
Two of these gospels were Matthew and Mark. The view of Weiss
mentioned above has been criticized upon the ground that the
quotations from the O. T. in Jesus’ discourses in Matthew are all
taken from the Septuagint and not from the Hebrew. Westcott
answers this criticism by suggesting that, in translating his
Hebrew gospel into Greek, Matthew substituted for his own oral
version of Christ’s discourses the version of these already
existing in the oral common gospel. There was a common oral basis
of true teaching, the “deposit”—τὴν παραθήκην—committed to Timothy
(_1 Tim. 6:20_; _2 Tim. 1:12, 14_), the same story told many times
and getting to be told in the same way. The narratives of Matthew,
Mark and Luke are independent versions of this apostolic
testimony. First came belief; secondly, oral teaching; thirdly,
written gospels. That the original gospel was in Aramaic seems
probable from the fact that the Oriental name for “tares,”
_zawān_, (_Mat. 13:25_) has been transliterated into Greek,
ζιζάνια. Morison, Com. on Mat., thinks that Matthew originally
wrote in Hebrew a collection of Sayings of Jesus Christ, which the
Nazarenes and Ebionites added to, partly from tradition, and
partly from translating his full gospel, till the result was the
so-called Gospel of the Hebrews; but that Matthew wrote his own
gospel in Greek after he had written the Sayings in Hebrew.
Professor W. A. Stevens thinks that Papias probably alluded to the
original autograph which Matthew wrote in Aramaic, but which he
afterwards enlarged and translated into Greek. See Hemphill,
Literature of the Second Century, 267.

To the testimony of Papias it is also objected: (2) That Mark is
the most systematic of all evangelists, presenting events as a
true annalist, in chronological order. We reply that while, so far
as chronological order is concerned, Mark is systematic, so far as
logical order is concerned he is the most unsystematic of the
evangelists, showing little of the power of historical grouping
which is so discernible in Matthew. Matthew aimed to portray a
life, rather than to record a chronology. He groups Jesus’
teachings in chapters 5, 6, and 7; his miracles in chapters 8 and
9; his directions to the apostles in chapter 10; chapters 11 and
12 describe the growing opposition; chapter 13 meets this
opposition with his parables; the remainder of the gospel
describes our Lord’s preparation for his death, his progress to
Jerusalem, the consummation of his work in the Cross and in the
resurrection. Here is true system, a philosophical arrangement of
material, compared with which the method of Mark is eminently
unsystematic. Mark is a Froissart, while Matthew has the spirit of
J. R. Green. See Bleek, Introd. to N. T., 1:108, 126; Weiss, Life
of Jesus, 1:27-39.

(_d_) The Apostolic Fathers,—Clement of Rome (died 101), Ignatius of
Antioch (martyred 115), and Polycarp (80-166),—companions and friends of
the apostles, have left us in their writings over one hundred quotations
from or allusions to the New Testament writings, and among these every
book, except four minor epistles (2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John) is
represented.

Although these are single testimonies, we must remember that they
are the testimonies of the chief men of the churches of their day,
and that they express the opinion of the churches themselves.
“Like banners of a hidden army, or peaks of a distant mountain
range, they represent and are sustained by compact, continuous
bodies below.” In an article by P. W. Calkins, McClintock and
Strong’s Encyclopædia, 1:315-317, quotations from the Apostolic
Fathers in great numbers are put side by side with the New
Testament passages from which they quote or to which they allude.
An examination of these quotations and allusions convinces us that
these Fathers were in possession of all the principal books of our
New Testament. See Ante-Nicene Library of T. and T. Clark; Thayer,
in Boston Lectures for 1871:324; Nash, Ethics and Revelation,
11—“Ignatius says to Polycarp: ‘The times call for thee, as the
winds call for the pilot.’ So do the times call for reverent,
fearless scholarship in the church.” Such scholarship, we are
persuaded, has already demonstrated the genuineness of the N. T.
documents.

(_e_) In the synoptic gospels, the omission of all mention of the
fulfilment of Christ’s prophecies with regard to the destruction of
Jerusalem is evidence that these gospels were written before the
occurrence of that event. In the Acts of the Apostles, universally
attributed to Luke, we have an allusion to “the former treatise”, or the
gospel by the same author, which must, therefore, have been written before
the end of Paul’s first imprisonment at Rome, and probably with the help
and sanction of that apostle.

_Acts 1:1—_“The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning
all that Jesus began both to do and to teach.” If the Acts was
written A. D. 63, two years after Paul’s arrival at Rome, then
“the former treatise,” the gospel according to Luke, can hardly be
dated later than 60; and since the destruction of Jerusalem took
place in 70, Matthew and Mark must have published their gospels at
least as early as the year 68, when multitudes of men were still
living who had been eye-witnesses of the events of Jesus’ life.
Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 180—“At any considerably
later date [than the capture of Jerusalem] the apparent
conjunction of the fall of the city and the temple with the
Parousia would have been avoided or explained.... Matthew, in its
present form, appeared after the beginning of the mortal struggle
of the Romans with the Jews, or between 65 and 70. Mark’s gospel
was still earlier. The language of the passages relative to the
Parousia, in Luke, is consistent with the supposition that he
wrote after the fall of Jerusalem, but not with the supposition
that it was long after.” See Norton, Genuineness of the Gospels;
Alford, Greek Testament, Prolegomena, 30, 31, 36, 45-47.

C. It is to be presumed that this acceptance of the New Testament
documents as genuine, on the part of the Fathers of the churches, was for
good and sufficient reasons, both internal and external, and this
presumption is corroborated by the following considerations:

(_a_) There is evidence that the early churches took every care to assure
themselves of the genuineness of these writings before they accepted them.

Evidences of care are the following:—Paul, in _2 Thess. 2:2_,
urged the churches to use care, “to the end that ye be not quickly
shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled, either by spirit, or
by word, or by epistle as from us”; _1 Cor. 5:9—_“I wrote unto you
in my epistle to have no company with fornicators”; _Col.
4:16—_“when this epistle hath been read among you, cause that it
be read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye also
read the epistle from Laodicea.” Melito (169), Bishop of Sardis,
who wrote a treatise on the Revelation of John, went as far as
Palestine to ascertain on the spot the facts relating to the Canon
of the O. T., and as a result of his investigations excluded the
Apocrypha. Ryle, Canon of O. T., 203—“Melito, the Bishop of
Sardis, sent to a friend a list of the O. T. Scriptures which he
professed to have obtained from accurate inquiry, while traveling
in the East, in Syria. Its contents agree with those of the Hebrew
Canon, save in the omission of Esther.” Serapion, Bishop of
Antioch (191-213, Abbot), says: “We receive Peter and other
apostles as Christ, but as skilful men we reject those writings
which are falsely ascribed to them.” Geo. H. Ferris, Baptist
Congress, 1899:94—“Serapion, after permitting the reading of the
Gospel of Peter in public services, finally decided against it,
not because he thought there could be no fifth gospel, but because
he thought it was not written by Peter.” Tertullian (160-230)
gives an example of the deposition of a presbyter in Asia Minor
for publishing a pretended work of Paul; see Tertullian, De
Baptismo, referred to by Godet on John, Introduction; Lardner,
Works, 2:304, 305; McIlvaine, Evidences, 92.

(_b_) The style of the New Testament writings, and their complete
correspondence with all we know of the lands and times in which they
profess to have been written, affords convincing proof that they belong to
the apostolic age.

Notice the mingling of Latin and Greek, as in σπεκουλάτωρ (_Mark
6:27_) and κεντυρίων (_Mark 15:39_); of Greek and Aramæan, as in
πρασιαὶ πρασιαί (_Mark 6:40_) and βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως (_Mat.
24:15_); this could hardly have occurred after the first century.
Compare the anachronisms of style and description in Thackeray’s
“Henry Esmond,” which, in spite of the author’s special studies
and his determination to exclude all words and phrases that had
originated in his own century, was marred by historical errors
that Macaulay in his most remiss moments would hardly have made.
James Russell Lowell told Thackeray that “different to” was not a
century old. “Hang it, no!” replied Thackeray. In view of this
failure, on the part of an author of great literary skill, to
construct a story purporting to be written a century before his
time and that could stand the test of historical criticism, we may
well regard the success of our gospels in standing such tests as a
practical demonstration that they were written in, and not after,
the apostolic age. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 27-37;
Blunt, Scriptural Coincidences, 244-354.

(_c_) The genuineness of the fourth gospel is confirmed by the fact that
Tatian (155-170), the Assyrian, a disciple of Justin, repeatedly quoted it
without naming the author, and composed a Harmony of our four gospels
which he named the Diatessaron; while Basilides (130) and Valentinus
(150), the Gnostics, both quote from it.

The sceptical work entitled “Supernatural Religion” said in 1874;
“No one seems to have seen Tatian’s Harmony, probably for the very
simple reason that there was no such work”; and “There is no
evidence whatever connecting Tatian’s Gospel with those of our
Canon.” In 1876, however, there was published in a Latin form in
Venice the Commentary of Ephraem Syrus on Tatian, and the
commencement of it was: “In the beginning was the Word”_ (John
1:1)_. In 1888, the Diatessaron itself was published in Rome in
the form of an Arabic translation made in the eleventh century
from the Syriac. J. Rendel Harris, in Contemp. Rev., 1893:800
_sq._, says that the recovery of Tatian’s Diatessaron has
indefinitely postponed the literary funeral of St. John. Advanced
critics, he intimates, are so called, because they run ahead of
the facts they discuss. The gospels must have been well
established in the Christian church when Tatian undertook to
combine them. Mrs. A. S. Lewis, in S. S. Times, Jan. 23, 1904—“The
gospels were translated into Syriac before A. D. 160. It follows
that the Greek document from which they were translated was older
still, and since the one includes the gospel of St. John, so did
the other.” Hemphill, Literature of the Second Century, 183-231,
gives the birth of Tatian about 120, and the date of his
Diatessaron as 172 A. D.

The difference in style between the Revelation and the gospel of
John is due to the fact that the Revelation was written during
John’s exile in Patmos, under Nero, in 67 or 68, soon after John
had left Palestine and had taken up his residence at Ephesus. He
had hitherto spoken Aramæan, and Greek was comparatively
unfamiliar to him. The gospel was written thirty years after,
probably about 97, when Greek had become to him like a mother
tongue. See Lightfoot on Galatians, 343, 347; _per contra_, see
Milligan, Revelation of St. John. Phrases and ideas which indicate
a common authorship of the Revelation and the gospel are the
following: “the Lamb of God,” “the Word of God,” “the True” as an
epithet applied to Christ, “the Jews” as enemies of God, “manna,”
“him whom they pierced”; see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:4, 5.
In the fourth gospel we have ἀμνός, in Apoc. ἀρνίον, perhaps
better to distinguish “the Lamb” from the diminutive τὸ θηρίον,
“the beast.” Common to both Gospel and Rev. are ποιεῖν, “to do”
[the truth]; περιπατεῖν, of moral conduct; ἀληθινός, “genuine”;
διψᾷν, πεινᾷν, of the higher wants of the soul; σκηνοῦν ἐν,
ποιμαίνειν, ὁδηγεῖν; also “overcome,” “testimony,” “Bridegroom,”
“Shepherd,” “Water of life.” In the Revelation there are
grammatical solecisms: nominative for genitive, 1:4—ἀπὸ ὁ ὤν;
nominative for accusative, 7:9—εἶδον ... ὄχλος πολύς; accusative
for nominative, 20:2—τὸν δράκοντα ὁ ὄφις. Similarly we have in
_Rom. 12:5_—τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ εἶς instead of τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ ἕνα, where κατὰ
has lost its regimen—a frequent solecism in later Greek writers;
see Godet on John, 1:269, 270. Emerson reminded Jones Very that
the Holy Ghost surely writes good grammar. The Apocalypse seems to
show that Emerson was wrong.

The author of the fourth gospel speaks of John in the third
person, “and scorned to blot it with a name.” But so does Cæsar
speak of himself in his Commentaries. Harnack regards both the
fourth gospel and the Revelation as the work of John the Presbyter
or Elder, the former written not later than about 110 A. D.; the
latter from 93 to 96, but being a revision of one or more
underlying Jewish apocalypses. Vischer has expounded this view of
the Revelation; and Porter holds substantially the same, in his
article on the Book of Revelation in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary,
4:239-266. “It is the obvious advantage of the Vischer-Harnack
hypothesis that it places the original work under Nero and its
revised and Christianized edition under Domitian.” (Sanday,
Inspiration, 371, 372, nevertheless dismisses this hypothesis as
raising worse difficulties than it removes. He dates the
Apocalypse between the death of Nero and the destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus.) Martineau, Seat of Authority, 227, presents
the moral objections to the apostolic authorship, and regards the
Revelation, from chapter 4:1 to 22:5, as a purely Jewish document
of the date 66-70, supplemented and revised by a Christian, and
issued not earlier than 136: “How strange that we should ever have
thought it possible for a personal attendant upon the ministry of
Jesus to write or edit a book mixing up fierce Messianic
conflicts, in which, with the sword, the gory garment, the
blasting flame, the rod of iron, as his emblems, he leads the
war-march, and treads the winepress of the wrath of God until the
deluge of blood rises to the horses’ bits, with the speculative
Christology of the second century, without a memory of his life, a
feature of his look, a word from his voice, or a glance back at
the hillsides of Galilee, the courts of Jerusalem, the road to
Bethany, on which his image must be forever seen!”

The force of this statement, however, is greatly broken if we
consider that the apostle John, in his earlier days, was one of
the “Boanerges, which is, Sons of thunder”_ (Mark 3:17)_, but
became in his later years the apostle of love: _1 John
4:7—_“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God.” The
likeness of the fourth gospel to the epistle, which latter was
undoubtedly the work of John the apostle, indicates the same
authorship for the gospel. Thayer remarks that “the discovery of
the gospel according to Peter sweeps away half a century of
discussion. Brief as is the recovered fragment, it attests
indubitably all four of our canonical books.” Riddle, in Popular
Com., 1:25—“If a forger wrote the fourth gospel, then Beelzebub
has been casting out devils for these eighteen hundred years.” On
the genuineness of the fourth gospel, see Bleek, Introd. to N. T.,
1:250; Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 33,
also Beginnings of Christianity, 320-362, and Grounds of Theistic
and Christian Belief, 245-309; Sanday, Authorship of the Fourth
Gospel, Gospels in the Second Century, and Criticism of the Fourth
Gospel; Ezra Abbott, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80-87;
Row, Bampton Lectures on Christian Evidences, 249-287; British
Quarterly, Oct. 1872:216; Godet, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 25;
Westcott, in Bib. Com. on John’s Gospel, Introd., xxviii-xxxii;
Watkins, Bampton Lectures for 1890; W. L. Ferguson, in Bib. Sac.,
1896:1-27.

(_d_) The epistle to the Hebrews appears to have been accepted during the
first century after it was written (so Clement of Borne, Justin Martyr,
and the Peshito Version witness). Then for two centuries, especially in
the Roman and North African churches, and probably because its internal
characteristics were inconsistent with the tradition of a Pauline
authorship, its genuineness was doubted (so Tertullian, Cyprian, Irenæus,
Muratorian Canon). At the end of the fourth century, Jerome examined the
evidence and decided in its favor; Augustine did the same; the third
Council of Carthage formally recognized it (397); from that time the Latin
churches united with the East in receiving it, and thus the doubt was
finally and forever removed.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that
of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an
Alexandrian Jew, “a learned man” and “mighty in the Scriptures”_
(Acts 18:24)_; but it may notwithstanding have been written at the
suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially
Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points
out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and
only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of
the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free
from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that
these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast
also Paul’s method of quoting the O. T.: “it is written”_ (Rom.
11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)_ with that of the Hebrews: “he
saith”_ (8:5, 13)_, “he hath said”_ (4:4)_. Paul quotes the O. T.
fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way. _Heb.
2:3—_“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was
confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did
not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly
saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he
always insisted on the primary and independent character of his
gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas
to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he
attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint
authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable
to this view. William T. C. Hanna: “The words of the author ...
are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or
with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations
in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in
Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same
with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being
composed before, the former after, the writer’s conversion to
Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:
“God only knows who wrote it.” Harnack however remarks: “The time
in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was
considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The
oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in
most of its details, true and trustworthy.” See articles on
Hebrews, in Smith’s and in Hastings’ Bible Dictionaries.

(_e_) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently
held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive
external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none
earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their
genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and
moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third
century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names
they bear.

Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first
clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming
it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of
Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very
gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of
the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after
his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were
recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De
Wette’s first publication of certain letters of Luther after the
lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to
their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton’s Treatise on
Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in
London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir
William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth,
Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to
their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of
the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures
and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was
probably sent from the East shortly before Peter’s martyrdom;
distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation
in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger
may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted,
but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as
any other part of the _res gestæ_.” See Plumptre, Epistles of
Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157;
Westcott, on Canon, in Smith’s Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt,
Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.

It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the
epistle speaks of “your apostles”_ (3:2)_, just as _Jude 17_
speaks of “the apostles,” as if the writer did not number himself
among them. But 2 Peter begins with “Simon Peter, a servant and
apostle of Jesus Christ,” and Jude, “brother of James”_ (verse 1)_
was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to
N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter
appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman
Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian
homily from the middle of the second century.” Origen (born 186)
testifies that Peter left one epistle, “and perhaps a second, for
that is disputed.” He also says: “John wrote the Apocalypse, and
an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a
third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.” He quotes also
from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was
doubted.

Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written
respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to
whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being
later additions. Hort remarks: “If I were asked, I should say that
the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I
had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”
Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor
of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot
get beyond a _non liquet_. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T.,
529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later
conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on
Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter “is probably at least to
this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is
not that of its true author.”

Chase, in Hastings’ Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that “the first
piece of _certain_ evidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from
Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that
the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no
trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic
days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but
of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive
... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device
rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of
such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord’s promise
of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of
infallibility.” Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and
spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment
causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic
authorship.

(_f_) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the
general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century,
and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the
second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere
collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide
circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their
blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither
have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been
induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine.
Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with
their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length
the most important of these opposing views.

The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be
demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of
its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written
by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in
397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the
Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation: “It is not
a Biblical book,” and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of
James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy
than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To
hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by
other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to
forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been
several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully
agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able
men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of
the second century have been preserved.

G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In
civil law there are ‘statutes of limitations’ which provide that
the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain
period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for
example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for
a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid
claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.” Mair,
Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence
upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the
genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”
Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up
the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as
‘traditores,’ traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought
to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were
not equally sacred. Some were essential, and some were
non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction between
_canonical_ and _non-canonical_. The general consciousness of
Christians grew into a distinct registration.” Such registration
is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof
upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity,
Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary
on N. T.

D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are
attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament
records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of
naturalism.

Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in
their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New
Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural
development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make
history a matter, not of testimony, but of _a priori_ speculation. It
indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since
the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can
no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ’s
life or doctrine.

In Germany, half a century ago, “a man was famous according as he
had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”_ (Ps. 74:5, A. V.)_, just
as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could
not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other;
see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The
Church’s One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical
critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear
of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of
the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is
impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the
criticism begins to operate in earnest.” Matthew Arnold: “Our
popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and
death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of
miracle,—and _miracles do not happen_.” This presupposition
influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in
his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give
special attention to four of the theories based upon this
assumption.

1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).

According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of
Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of
imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas
are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and
deliberate deception is absent.

This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his
name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which
extended the meaning of the word “myths” so as to include all
narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted
the existence of “pious frauds” in the gospels. Baur, he says,
first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had “not
unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere
fictions.” The animating spirit of both the old view and the new
is the same. Strauss says: “We know with certainty what Jesus was
_not_, and what he has _not_ done, namely, nothing superhuman and
supernatural.” “No gospel can claim that degree of historic
credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our
reason to the point of believing miracles.” He calls the
resurrection of Christ “ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.” “If the
gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle
from the life-story of Jesus;” see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New
Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210,
211, distinguishes the myth from the _saga_ or legend: The
criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible,
while the _saga_ is a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has
in it the element only of belief, the _saga_ has in it an element
of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in
appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the
fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the
heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of
truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into
maturity and old age?”

It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the
animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that
of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the
supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the
previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled
them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus’
trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and
insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered
straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and
saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that “somehow she never
could get interested” in Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which her sceptical
son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost
altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss’s
own view of what Jesus was.

If Luther’s dictum is true that “the heart is the best
theologian,” Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main
qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss’s
mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth
of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical
sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was
dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian,
biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe’s
profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for
productive criticism.” Pfleiderer, Strauss’s Life of Jesus,
xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions
about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not
show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was
the Messiah.” See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato,
1:249.

We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that

(_a_) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the
gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such
mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman
and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.

(_b_) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was
possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age
of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.

Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of
the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that “Esse
aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.” Arnold of
Rugby: “The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times
of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for
realities!” Pilate’s sceptical inquiry, “What is truth?”_ (John
18:38)_, better represented the age. “The mythical age is past
when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.” The
Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit
was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the
Baptist, _Mat. 11:3—_“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for
another?” and our Lord’s answer, _Mat. 11:4, 5—_“Go and tell John
the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ...
the dead are raised up,” show that the Jews expected miracles to
be wrought by the Messiah; yet _John 10:41—_“John indeed did no
sign” shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular
teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian
Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman
Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.

(_c_) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and
expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter
to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of
the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could
their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a
suffering Messiah.

The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews.
2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world “for _our_
sakes”; other peoples, though they “also come from Adam,” to the
Eternal “are nothing, but be like unto spittle.” The whole
multitude of them are only, before him, “like a single foul drop
that oozes out of a cask” (C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ’s
kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in its
_spirituality_ and its _universality_ (Bruce, Apologetics, 3).
There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other
hand, it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his
god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The
Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would
have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to
depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the
Second Century, 99-136).

(_d_) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what
we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the
apostles.

(_e_) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels
among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.

(_f_) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ’s
crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these
facts.

(_d_) Witness Thomas’s doubting, and Paul’s shipwrecks and
scourgings. _Cf._ _2 Pet. 1:16_—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις
ἐξακολουθήσαντες = “we have not been on the false track of myths
artificially elaborated.” See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to
Christ, 49-88. (_e_) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel
Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels
are Historic? (_f_) As the existence of the American Republic is
proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of
Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the
seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have
come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been
the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish
Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord’s
Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and
remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian
church. See Muir, on the Lord’s Supper an abiding Witness to the
Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and
his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of
Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief,
379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith,
in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss’s New
Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern
Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof.
W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264;
Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity,
92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith’s Bible Dict., 2:954-958.

2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).

This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second
century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling
opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church. “These great
national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding
to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”

Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130;
Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was.
He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the
documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining
the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the
presupposition of his investigations, when he says: “The principal
argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain
this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they
give an account of the life of Jesus which involves
impossibilities”—_i. e._, miracles. He would therefore remove
their authorship far enough from Jesus’ time to permit regarding
the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united
the universalistic spirit of the new religion, _and_ the
particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his
disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first
conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the
Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in
Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as
follows: “Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James =
ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching
should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on
mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”

Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the
real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers
wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:
“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs
or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations
of Christianity.” The estimate of posterity is probably expressed
in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:
“The _possible_ picture it sketched was not the _real_, and the
key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice
for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been
compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the
development of the church in the second century, it may safely be
said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved
themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day
held by only a very few scholars.” See Baur, Die kanonischen
Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural
Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for
1885. For accounts of Baur’s position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie,
art.: Baur; Clarke’s transl. of Hase’s Life of Jesus, 34-36;
Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.

We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that

(_a_) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if
applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of
the past, and render all history impossible.

The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid
examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry
evidences of a hidden _animus_ in the most simple and ingenuous
literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of
“Jack and Jill.”

(_b_) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in
the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but
consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.

Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between
the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian,
but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine
appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable
extent by Paul’s (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an
exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the
gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The
evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view.
As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a
dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points
of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life
of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the
different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus
Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two
Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the
profile and front face, but one another’s complement rather than
contradiction.”

Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the
greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his
indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his
essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was
translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry
of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation
was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E.
D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark =
manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy;
Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most
impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to
Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition
alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other
fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts
and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F.
W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.

(_c_) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty
religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of
the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been
published under assumed names and for covert ends.

The general character of the literature of the second century is
illustrated by Ignatius’s fanatical desire for martyrdom, the
value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories
of Barnabas, Clement of Rome’s belief in the phœnix, and the
absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth
gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a
mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second
Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ
from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of
quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”
Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers
of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or
developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century
shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or
comprehend all that had been given them.” Martineau, Seat of
Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in
art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper,
and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of
Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the
rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of
Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if
he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of
thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of
the church.” We can apply to the writers of the second century the
question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:
“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on
Shakespeare’s doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”
On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith,
73-108.

(_d_) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a
faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of
fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the
ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.

“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart
enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same
time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their
writings every trace of the developments of church authority
belonging to the second century. The newly discovered “Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles,” if dating from the early part of that
century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical
theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not
possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John,
12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius
of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange
to the original apostles.” Fairbairn has well shown that if
Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human
Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the
Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been
simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it
would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or
Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son
of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be
and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy
of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of
the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been
either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical
conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have
ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so
powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has
been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The
two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name
‘Jesus Christ.’ ”

(_e_) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the
gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated
communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of
orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents
instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.

Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The
Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle
of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of
that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the
Logos, but to successive “Æons.” How did the Gnostics, without
“peep or mutter,” come to accept as genuine what had only in their
own time been first sprung upon the churches? While Basilides
(130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the
fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that
it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur
“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of
development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere.
Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and
teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development,
must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels
claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the
utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought
could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.” But such a
conception certainly existed in the second century, and it
directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W.
Farrar, on _Hebrews 1:2_—“The word _æon_ was used by the later
Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at
once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and
the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the
Incarnation, when he wrote: ‘The Word became flesh’_ (John
1:14)_.” A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings
could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics
themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not
been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle
John.

(_f_) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans,
Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is
fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at
the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus’
life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long
acknowledged in the Christian church.

Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest
suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2
Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of
Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the
assertion of critical doubts in their case.” Baur, in discussing
the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains
the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden
conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward
scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by
Paul’s companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here
mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144;
Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures
for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss,
Life of Jesus, 1:157 _sq._; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ.
Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic,
5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to
Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed.,
Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan.
1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day
Tracts, 7: no. 38.

3d. The Romance-theory of Renan (1823-1892).

This theory admits a basis of truth in the gospels and holds that they all
belong to the century following Jesus’ death. “According to” Matthew,
Mark, etc., however, means only that Matthew, Mark, etc., wrote these
gospels in substance. Renan claims that the facts of Jesus’ life were so
sublimated by enthusiasm, and so overlaid with pious fraud, that the
gospels in their present form cannot be accepted as genuine,—in short, the
gospels are to be regarded as historical romances which have only a
foundation in fact.

The _animus_ of this theory is plainly shown in Renan’s Life of
Jesus, preface to 13th ed.—“If miracles and the inspiration of
certain books are realities, my method is detestable. If miracles
and the inspiration of books are beliefs without reality, my
method is a good one. But the question of the supernatural is
decided for us with perfect certainty by the single consideration
that there is no room for believing in a thing of which the world
offers no experimental trace.” “On the whole,” says Renan, “I
admit as authentic the four canonical gospels. All, in my opinion,
date from the first century, and the authors are, generally
speaking, those to whom they are attributed.” He regards Gal., 1
and 2 Cor., and Rom., as “indisputable and undisputed.” He speaks
of them as “being texts of an absolute authenticity, of complete
sincerity, and without legends” (Les Apôtres, xxix; Les Évangiles,
xi). Yet he denies to Jesus “sincerity with himself”; attributes
to him “innocent artifice” and the toleration of pious fraud, as
for example in the case of the stories of Lazarus and of his own
resurrection. “To conceive the good is not sufficient: it must be
made to succeed; to accomplish this, less pure paths must be
followed.... Not by any fault of his own, his conscience lost
somewhat of its original purity,—his mission overwhelmed him....
Did he regret his too lofty nature, and, victim of his own
greatness, mourn that he had not remained a simple artizan?” So
Renan “pictures Christ’s later life as a misery and a lie, yet he
requests us to bow before this sinner and before his superior,
Sakya-Mouni, as demigods” (see Nicoll, The Church’s One
Foundation, 62, 63). Of the highly wrought imagination of Mary
Magdalene, he says: “O divine power of love! sacred moments, in
which the passion of one whose senses were deceived gives us a
resuscitated God!” See Renan, Life of Jesus, 21.

To this Romance-theory of Renan, we object that

(_a_) It involves an arbitrary and partial treatment of the Christian
documents. The claim that one writer not only borrowed from others, but
interpolated _ad libitum_, is contradicted by the essential agreement of
the manuscripts as quoted by the Fathers, and as now extant.

Renan, according to Mair, Christian Evidences, 153, dates Matthew
at 84 A. D.; Mark at 76; Luke at 94; John at 125. These dates mark
a considerable retreat from the advanced positions taken by Baur.
Mair, in his chapter on Recent Reverses in Negative Criticism,
attributes this result to the late discoveries with regard to the
Epistle of Barnabas, Hippolytus’s Refutation of all Heresies, the
Clementine Homilies, and Tatian’s Diatessaron: “According to Baur
and his immediate followers, we have less than one quarter of the
N. T. belonging to the first century. According to Hilgenfeld, the
present head of the Baur school, we have somewhat less than three
quarters belonging to the first century, while substantially the
same thing may be said with regard to Holzmann. According to
Renan, we have distinctly more than three quarters of the N. T.
falling within the first century, and therefore within the
apostolic age. This surely indicates a very decided and
extraordinary retreat since the time of Baur’s grand assault, that
is, within the last fifty years.” We may add that the concession
of authorship within the apostolic age renders nugatory Renan’s
hypothesis that the N. T. documents have been so enlarged by pious
fraud that they cannot be accepted as trustworthy accounts of such
events as miracles. The oral tradition itself had attained so
fixed a form that the many manuscripts used by the Fathers were in
substantial agreement in respect to these very events, and oral
tradition in the East hands down without serious alteration much
longer narratives than those of our gospels. The Pundita Ramabai
can repeat after the lapse of twenty years portions of the Hindu
sacred books exceeding in amount the whole contents of our Old
Testament. Many cultivated men in Athens knew by heart all the
Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. Memory and reverence alike kept
the gospel narratives free from the corruption which Renan
supposes.

(_b_) It attributes to Christ and to the apostles an alternate fervor of
romantic enthusiasm and a false pretense of miraculous power which are
utterly irreconcilable with the manifest sobriety and holiness of their
lives and teachings. If Jesus did not work miracles, he was an impostor.

On Ernest Renan, His Life and the Life of Jesus, see A. H. Strong,
Christ in Creation, 332-363, especially 356—“Renan attributes the
origin of Christianity to the predominance in Palestine of a
constitutional susceptibility to mystic excitements. Christ is to
him the incarnation of sympathy and tears, a being of tender
impulses and passionate ardors, whose native genius it was to play
upon the hearts of men. Truth or falsehood made little difference
to him; anything that would comfort the poor, or touch the finer
feelings of humanity, he availed himself of; ecstasies, visions,
melting moods, these were the secrets of his power. Religion was a
beneficent superstition, a sweet delusion—excellent as a balm and
solace for the ignorant crowd, who never could be philosophers if
they tried. And so the gospel river, as one has said, is traced
back to a fountain of weeping men and women whose brains had oozed
out at their eyes, and the perfection of spirituality is made to
be a sort of maudlin monasticism.... How different from the strong
and holy love of Christ, which would save men only by bringing
them to the truth, and which claims men’s imitation only because,
without love for God and for the soul, a man is without truth. How
inexplicable from this view the fact that a pure Christianity has
everywhere quickened the intellect of the nations, and that every
revival of it, as at the Reformation, has been followed by mighty
forward leaps of civilization. Was Paul a man carried away by
mystic dreams and irrational enthusiasms? Let the keen dialectic
skill of his epistles and his profound grasp of the great matters
of revelation answer. Has the Christian church been a company of
puling sentimentalists? Let the heroic deaths for the truth
suffered by the martyrs witness. Nay, he must have a low idea of
his kind, and a yet lower idea of the God who made them, who can
believe that the noblest spirits of the race have risen to
greatness by abnegating will and reason, and have gained influence
over all ages by resigning themselves to semi-idiocy.”

(_c_) It fails to account for the power and progress of the gospel, as a
system directly opposed to men’s natural tastes and prepossessions—a
system which substitutes truth for romance and law for impulse.

A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 358—“And if the later triumphs
of Christianity are inexplicable upon the theory of Renan, how can
we explain its founding? The sweet swain of Galilee, beloved by
women for his beauty, fascinating the unlettered crowd by his
gentle speech and his poetic ideals, giving comfort to the
sorrowing and hope to the poor, credited with supernatural power
which at first he thinks it not worth while to deny and finally
gratifies the multitude by pretending to exercise, roused by
opposition to polemics and invective until the delightful young
rabbi becomes a gloomy giant, an intractable fanatic, a fierce
revolutionist, whose denunciation of the powers that be brings him
to the Cross,—what is there in _him_ to account for the moral
wonder which we call Christianity and the beginnings of its empire
in the world? Neither delicious pastorals like those of Jesus’
first period, nor apocalyptic fevers like those of his second
period, according to Renan’s gospel, furnish any rational
explanation of that mighty movement which has swept through the
earth and has revolutionized the faith of mankind.”

Berdoe, Browning, 47—“If Christ were not God, his life at that
stage of the world’s history could by no possibility have had the
vitalizing force and love-compelling power that Renan’s pages
everywhere disclose. Renan has strengthened faith in Christ’s
deity while laboring to destroy it.”

Renan, in discussing Christ’s appearance to Paul on the way to
Damascus, explains the inward from the outward, thus precisely
reversing the conclusion of Baur. A sudden storm, a flash of
lightning, a sudden attack of ophthalmic fever, Paul took as an
appearance from heaven. But we reply that so keen an observer and
reasoner could not have been thus deceived. Nothing could have
made him the apostle to the Gentiles but a sight of the glorified
Christ and the accompanying revelation of the holiness of God, his
own sin, the sacrifice of the Son of God, its universal efficacy,
the obligation laid upon him to proclaim it to the ends of the
earth. For reviews of Renan, see Hutton, Essays, 261-281, and
Contemp. Thought and Thinkers, 1:227-234; H. B. Smith, Faith and
Philosophy, 401-441; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, 425-447; Pressensé,
in Theol. Eclectic, 1:199; Uhlhorn, Mod. Representations of Life
of Jesus, 1-33; Bib. Sac, 22:207; 23:353, 529; Present Day Tracts,
3: no. 16, and 4: no. 21; E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences,
43-48; A. H. Strong, Sermon before Baptist World Congress, 1905.

4th. The Development-theory of Harnack (born 1851).

This holds Christianity to be a historical development from germs which
were devoid of both dogma and miracle. Jesus was a teacher of ethics, and
the original gospel is most clearly represented by the Sermon on the
Mount. Greek influence, and especially that of the Alexandrian philosophy,
added to this gospel a theological and supernatural element, and so
changed Christianity from a life into a doctrine.

Harnack dates Matthew at 70-75; Mark at 65-70; Luke at 78-93; the
fourth gospel at 80-110. He regards both the fourth gospel and the
book of Revelation as the works, not of John the Apostle, but of
John the Presbyter. He separates the prologue of the fourth gospel
from the gospel itself, and considers the prologue as a preface
added after its original composition in order to enable the
Hellenistic reader to understand it. “The gospel itself,” says
Harnack, “contains no Logos-idea; it did not develop out of a
Logos-idea, such as flourished at Alexandria; it only connects
itself with such an idea. The gospel itself is based upon the
historic Christ; he is the subject of all its statements. This
historical trait can in no way be dissolved by any kind of
speculation. The memory of what was actually historical was still
too powerful to admit at this point any Gnostic influences. The
Logos-idea of the prologue is the Logos of Alexandrine Judaism,
the Logos of Philo, and it is derived ultimately from the ’Son of
man’ in the book of Daniel.... The fourth gospel, which does not
proceed from the Apostle John and does not so claim, cannot be
used as a historical source in the ordinary sense of that word....
The author has managed with sovereign freedom; has transposed
occurrences and has put them in a light that is foreign to them;
has of his own accord composed the discourses, and has illustrated
lofty thoughts by inventing situations for them. Difficult as it
is to recognize, an actual tradition in his work is not wholly
lacking. For the history of Jesus, however, it can hardly anywhere
be taken into account; only little can be taken from it, and that
with caution.... On the other hand it is a source of the first
rank for the answer of the question what living views of the
person of Jesus, what light and what warmth, the gospel has
brought into being.” See Harnack’s article in Zeitschrift für
Theol. u. Kirche, 2:189-231, and his Wesen des Christenthums, 13.
Kaftan also, who belongs to the same Ritschlian school with
Harnack, tells us in his Truth of the Christian Religion, 1:97,
that as the result of the Logos-speculation, “the centre of
gravity, instead of being placed in the historical Christ who
founded the kingdom of God, is placed in the Christ who as eternal
Logos of God was the mediator in the creation of the world.” This
view is elaborated by Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures for 1888, on
the Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church.

We object to the Development-theory of Harnack, that

(_a_) The Sermon on the Mount is not the sum of the gospel, nor its
original form. Mark is the most original of the gospels, yet Mark omits
the Sermon on the Mount, and Mark is preëminently the gospel of the
miracle-worker.

(_b_) All four gospels lay the emphasis, not on Jesus’ life and ethical
teaching, but on his death and resurrection. Matthew implies Christ’s
deity when it asserts his absolute knowledge of the Father (11:27), his
universal judgeship (25:32), his supreme authority (28:18), and his
omnipresence (28:20), while the phrase “Son of man” implies that he is
also “Son of God.”

_Mat. 11:27—_“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”; _25:32—_“and before him shall be gathered all the
nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the
shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats”; _28:18—_“All
authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth”;
_28:20—_“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the
world.” These sayings of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel show that the
conception of Christ’s greatness was not peculiar to John: “I am”
transcends time; “with you” transcends space. Jesus speaks “sub
specie eternitatis”; his utterance is equivalent to that of _John
8:58—_“Before Abraham was born, I am,” and to that of _Hebrews
13:8—_“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for
ever.” He is, as Paul declares in _Eph. 1:23_, one “that filleth
all in all,” that is, who is omnipresent.

A. H. Strong, Philos. and Religion, 206—The phrase “Son of man”
intimates that Christ was more than man: “Suppose I were to go
about proclaiming myself ‘Son of man.’ Who does not see that it
would be mere impertinence, unless I claimed to be something more.
‘Son of Man? But what of that? Cannot every human being call
himself the same?’ When one takes the title ‘Son of man’ for his
characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is
something strange in his being Son of man; that this is not his
original condition and dignity; that it is condescension on his
part to be Son of man. In short, when Christ calls himself Son of
man, it implies that he has come from a higher level of being to
inhabit this low earth of ours. And so, when we are asked ‘What
think ye of the Christ? whose son is he?’ we must answer, not
simply, He is Son of man, but also, He is Son of God.” On Son of
man, see Driver; on Son of God, see Sanday; both in Hastings’
Dictionary of the Bible. Sanday: “The Son is so called primarily
as incarnate. But that which is the essence of the Incarnation
must needs be also larger than the Incarnation. It must needs have
its roots in the eternity of Godhead.” Gore, Incarnation, 65,
73—“Christ, the final Judge, of the synoptics, is not dissociable
from the divine, eternal Being, of the fourth gospel.”

(_c_) The preëxistence and atonement of Christ cannot be regarded as
accretions upon the original gospel, since these find expression in Paul
who wrote before any of our evangelists, and in his epistles anticipated
the Logos-doctrine of John.

(_d_) We may grant that Greek influence, through the Alexandrian
philosophy, helped the New Testament writers to discern what was already
present in the life and work and teaching of Jesus; but, like the
microscope which discovers but does not create, it added nothing to the
substance of the faith.

Gore, Incarnation, 62—“The divinity, incarnation, resurrection of
Christ were not an accretion upon the original belief of the
apostles and their first disciples, for these are all recognized
as uncontroverted matters of faith in the four great epistles of
Paul, written at a date when the greater part of those who had
seen the risen Christ were still alive.” The Alexandrian
philosophy was not the source of apostolic doctrine, but only the
form in which that doctrine was cast, the light thrown upon it
which brought out its meaning. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation,
146—“When we come to John’s gospel, therefore, we find in it the
mere unfolding of truth that for substance had been in the world
for at least sixty years.... If the Platonizing philosophy of
Alexandria assisted in this genuine development of Christian
doctrine, then the Alexandrian philosophy was a providential help
to inspiration. The microscope does not invent; it only discovers.
Paul and John did not add to the truth of Christ; their
philosophical equipment was only a microscope which brought into
clear view the truth that was there already.”

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:126—“The metaphysical conception
of the Logos, as immanent in the world and ordering it according
to law, was filled with religious and moral contents. In Jesus the
cosmical principle of nature became a religious principle of
salvation.” See Kilpatrick’s article on Philosophy, in Hastings’
Bible Dictionary. Kilpatrick holds that Harnack ignores the
self-consciousness of Jesus; does not fairly interpret the Acts in
its mention of the early worship of Jesus by the church before
Greek philosophy had influenced it; refers to the intellectual
peculiarities of the N. T. writers conceptions which Paul insists
are simply the faith of all Christian people as such; forgets that
the Christian idea of union with God secured through the atoning
and reconciling work of a personal Redeemer utterly transcended
Greek thought, and furnished the solution of the problem after
which Greek philosophy was vainly groping.

(_e_) Though Mark says nothing of the virgin-birth because his story is
limited to what the apostles had witnessed of Jesus’ deeds, Matthew
apparently gives us Joseph’s story and Luke gives Mary’s story—both
stories naturally published only after Jesus’ resurrection.

(_f_) The larger understanding of doctrine after Jesus’ death was itself
predicted by our Lord (John 16:12). The Holy Spirit was to bring his
teachings to remembrance, and to guide into all the truth (16:13), and the
apostles were to continue the work of teaching which he had begun (Acts
1:1).

_John 16:12, 13—_“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye
cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is
come, he shall guide you into all the truth”; _Acts 1:1—_“The
former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus
began to do and to teach.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation,
146—“That the beloved disciple, after a half century of meditation
upon what he had seen and heard of God manifest in the flesh,
should have penetrated more deeply into the meaning of that
wonderful revelation is not only not surprising,—it is precisely
what Jesus himself foretold. Our Lord had many things to say to
his disciples, but then they could not bear them. He promised that
the Holy Spirit should bring to their remembrance both himself and
his words, and should lead them into all the truth. And this is
the whole secret of what are called accretions to original
Christianity. So far as they are contained in Scripture, they are
inspired discoveries and unfoldings, not mere speculations and
inventions. They are not additions, but elucidations, not vain
imaginings, but correct interpretations.... When the later
theology, then, throws out the supernatural and dogmatic, as
coming not from Jesus but from Paul’s epistles and from the fourth
gospel, our claim is that Paul and John are only inspired and
authoritative interpreters of Jesus, seeing themselves and making
us see the fulness of the Godhead that dwelt in him.”

While Harnack, in our judgment, errs in his view that Paul
contributed to the gospel elements which it did not originally
possess, he shows us very clearly many of the elements in that
gospel which he was the first to recognize. In his Wesen des
Christenthums, 111, he tells us that a few years ago a celebrated
Protestant theologian declared that Paul, with his Rabbinical
theology, was the destroyer of the Christian religion. Others have
regarded him as the founder of that religion. But the majority
have seen in him the apostle who best understood his Lord and did
most to continue his work. Paul, as Harnack maintains, first
comprehended the gospel definitely: (1) as an accomplished
redemption and a present salvation—the crucified and risen Christ
as giving access to God and righteousness and peace therewith; (2)
as something new, which does away with the religion of the law;
(3) as meant for all, and therefore for Gentiles also, indeed, as
superseding Judaism; (4) as expressed in terms which are not
simply Greek but also human,—Paul made the gospel comprehensible
to the world. Islam, rising in Arabia, is an Arabian religion
still. Buddhism remains an Indian religion. Christianity is at
home in all lands. Paul put new life into the Roman empire, and
inaugurated the Christian culture of the West. He turned a local
into a universal religion. His influence however, according to
Harnack, tended to the undue exaltation of organization and dogma
and O. T. inspiration—points in which, in our judgment, Paul took
sober middle ground and saved Christian truth for the world.

2. Genuineness of the Books of the Old Testament.

Since nearly one half of the Old Testament is of anonymous authorship and
certain of its books may be attributed to definite historic characters
only by way of convenient classification or of literary personification,
we here mean by genuineness honesty of purpose and freedom from anything
counterfeit or intentionally deceptive so far as respects the age or the
authorship of the documents.

We show the genuineness of the Old Testament books:

(_a_) From the witness of the New Testament, in which all but six books of
the Old Testament are either quoted or alluded to as genuine.

The N. T. shows coincidences of language with the O. T. Apocryphal
books, but it contains only one direct quotation from them; while,
with the exception of Judges, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Esther,
Ezra, and Nehemiah, every book in the Hebrew canon is used either
for illustration or proof. The single Apocryphal quotation is
found in _Jude 14_ and is in all probability taken from the book
of Enoch. Although Volkmar puts the date of this book at 132 A.
D., and although some critics hold that Jude quoted only the same
primitive tradition of which the author of the book of Enoch
afterwards made use, the weight of modern scholarship inclines to
the opinion that the book itself was written as early as 170-70 B.
C., and that Jude quoted from it; see Hastings’ Bible Dictionary:
Book of Enoch; Sanday, Bampton Lect. on Inspiration, 95. “If Paul
could quote from Gentile poets (_Acts 17:28_; _Titus 1:12_), it is
hard to understand why Jude could not cite a work which was
certainly in high standing among the faithful”; see Schodde, Book
of Enoch, 41, with the Introd. by Ezra Abbot. While _Jude 14_
gives us the only direct and express quotation from an Apocryphal
book, _Jude 6_ and _9_ contain allusions to the Book of Enoch and
to the Assumption of Moses; see Charles, Assumption of Moses, 62.
In _Hebrews 1:3_, we have words taken from Wisdom 7:26; and
_Hebrews 11:34-38_ is a reminiscence of 1 Maccabees.

(_b_) From the testimony of Jewish authorities, ancient and modern, who
declare the same books to be sacred, and only the same books, that are now
comprised in our Old Testament Scriptures.

Josephus enumerates twenty-two of these books “which are justly
accredited” (omit θεῖα—Niese, and Hastings’ Dict., 3:607). Our
present Hebrew Bible makes twenty-four, by separating Ruth from
Judges, and Lamentations from Jeremiah. See Josephus, Against
Apion, 1:8; Smith’s Bible Dictionary, article on the Canon, 1:359,
360. Philo (born 20 B. C.) never quotes an Apocryphal book,
although he does quote from nearly all the books of the O. T.; see
Ryle, Philo and Holy Scripture. George Adam Smith, Modern
Criticism and Preaching, 7—“The theory which ascribed the Canon of
the O. T. to a single decision of the Jewish church in the days of
its inspiration is not a theory supported by facts. The growth of
the O. T. Canon was very gradual. Virtually it began in 621 B. C.,
with the acceptance by all Judah of Deuteronomy, and the adoption
of the whole Law, or first five books of the O. T., under Nehemiah
in 445 B. C. Then came the prophets before 200 B. C., and the
Hagiographa from a century to two centuries later. The strict
definition of the last division was not complete by the time of
Christ. Christ seems to testify to the Law, the Prophets, and the
Psalms; yet neither Christ nor his apostles make any quotation
from Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Canticles, or Ecclesiastes, the last
of which books were not yet recognized by all the Jewish schools.
But while Christ is the chief authority for the O. T., he was also
its first critic. He rejected some parts of the Law and was
indifferent to many others. He enlarged the sixth and seventh
commandments, and reversed the eye for an eye, and the permission
of divorce; touched the leper, and reckoned all foods lawful;
broke away from literal observance of the Sabbath-day; left no
commands about sacrifice, temple-worship, circumcision, but, by
institution of the New Covenant, abrogated these sacraments of the
Old. The apostles appealed to extra-canonical writings.” Gladden,
Seven Puzzling Bible Books, 68-96—“Doubts were entertained in our
Lord’s day as to the canonicity of several parts of the O. T.,
especially Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther.”

(_c_) From the testimony of the Septuagint translation, dating from the
first half of the third century, or from 280 to 180 B. C.

MSS. of the Septuagint contain, indeed, the O. T. Apocrypha, but
the writers of the latter do not recognize their own work as on a
level with the canonical Scriptures, which they regard as distinct
from all other books (Ecclesiasticus, prologue, and 48:24; also
24:23-27; 1 Mac. 12:9; 2 Mac. 6:23; 1 Esd. 1:28; 6:1; Baruch
2:21). So both ancient and modern Jews. See Bissell, in Lange’s
Commentary on the Apocrypha, Introduction, 44. In the prologue to
the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, we read of “the Law and the
Prophets and the rest of the books,” which shows that as early as
130 B. C., the probable date of Ecclesiasticus, a threefold
division of the Jewish sacred books was recognized. That the
author, however, did not conceive of these books as constituting a
completed canon seems evident from his assertion in this
connection that his grandfather Jesus also wrote. 1 Mac. 12:9
(80-90 B. C.) speaks of “the sacred books which are now in our
hands.” Hastings, Bible Dictionary, 3:611—“The O. T. was the
result of a gradual process which began with the sanction of the
Hexateuch by Ezra and Nehemiah, and practically closed with the
decisions of the Council of Jamnia”—Jamnia is the ancient Jabneh,
7 miles south by west of Tiberias, where met a council of rabbins
at some time between 90 to 118 A. D. This Council decided in favor
of Canticles and Ecclesiastes, and closed the O. T. Canon.

The Greek version of the Pentateuch which forms a part of the
Septuagint is said by Josephus to have been made in the reign and
by the order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King of Egypt, about 270 or
280 B. C. “The legend is that it was made by seventy-two persons
in seventy-two days. It is supposed, however, by modern critics
that this version of the several books is the work not only of
different hands but of separate times. It is probable that at
first only the Pentateuch was translated, and the remaining books
gradually; but the translation is believed to have been completed
by the second century B. C.” (Century Dictionary, _in voce_). It
therefore furnishes an important witness to the genuineness of our
O. T. documents. Driver, Introd. to O. T. Lit., xxxi—“For the
opinion, often met with in modern books, that the Canon of the O.
T. was closed by Ezra, or in Ezra’s time, there is no foundation
in antiquity whatever.... All that can reasonably be treated as
historical in the accounts of Ezra’s literary labors is limited to
the Law.”

(_d_) From indications that soon after the exile, and so early as the
times of Ezra and Nehemiah (500-450 B. C.), the Pentateuch together with
the book of Joshua was not only in existence but was regarded as
authoritative.

2 Mac, 2:13-15 intimates that Nehemiah founded a library, and
there is a tradition that a “Great Synagogue” was gathered in his
time to determine the Canon. But Hastings’ Dictionary, 4:644,
asserts that “the Great Synagogue was originally a meeting, and
not an institution. It met once for all, and all that is told
about it, except what we read in Nehemiah, is pure fable of the
later Jews.” In like manner no dependence is to be placed upon the
tradition that Ezra miraculously restored the ancient Scriptures
that had been lost during the exile. Clement of Alexandria says:
“Since the Scriptures perished in the Captivity of Nebuchadnezzar,
Esdras (the Greek form of Ezra) the Levite, the priest, in the
time of Artaxerxes, King of the Persians, having become inspired
in the exercise of prophecy, restored again the whole of the
ancient Scriptures.” But the work now divided into 1 and 2
Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, mentions Darius Codomannus (_Neh.
12:22_), whose date is 336 B. C. The utmost the tradition proves
is that about 300 B. C. the Pentateuch was in some sense
attributed to Moses; see Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 35; Bib. Sac.,
1863:381, 660, 799; Smith, Bible Dict., art.: Pentateuch;
Theological Eclectic, 6:215; Bissell, Hist. Origin of the Bible,
398-403. On the Men of the Great Synagogue, see Wright,
Ecclesiastes, 5-12, 475-477.

(_e_) From the testimony of the Samaritan Pentateuch, dating from the time
of Ezra and Nehemiah (500-450 B. C.).

The Samaritans had been brought by the king of Assyria from
“Babylon, and from Cuthah and from Avva, and from Hamath and
Sepharvaim”_ (2 K. 17:6, 24, 26)_, to take the place of the people
of Israel whom the king had carried away captive to his own land.
The colonists had brought their heathen gods with them, and the
incursions of wild beasts which the intermission of tillage
occasioned gave rise to the belief that the God of Israel was
against them. One of the captive Jewish priests was therefore sent
to teach them “the law of the god of the land” and he “taught them
how they should fear Jehovah”_ (2 K. 17:27, 28)_. The result was
that they adopted the Jewish ritual, but combined the worship of
Jehovah with that of their graven images (_verse 33_). When the
Jews returned from Babylon and began to rebuild the walls of
Jerusalem, the Samaritans offered their aid, but this aid was
indignantly refused (_Ezra 4_ and _Nehemiah 4_). Hostility arose
between Jews and Samaritans—a hostility which continued not only
to the time of Christ (_John 4:9_), but even to the present day.
Since the Samaritan Pentateuch substantially coincides with the
Hebrew Pentateuch, it furnishes us with a definite past date at
which it certainly existed in nearly its present form. It
witnesses to the existence of our Pentateuch in essentially its
present form as far back as the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Green, Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, 44, 45—“After being
repulsed by the Jews, the Samaritans, to substantiate their claim
of being sprung from ancient Israel, eagerly accepted the
Pentateuch which was brought them by a renegade priest.” W.
Robertson Smith, in Encyc. Brit., 21:244—“The priestly law, which
is throughout based on the practice of the priests of Jerusalem
before the captivity, was reduced to form after the exile, and was
first published by Ezra as the law of the rebuilt temple of Zion.
The Samaritans must therefore have derived their Pentateuch from
the Jews after Ezra’s reforms, _i. e._, after 444 B. C. Before
that time Samaritanism cannot have existed in a form at all
similar to that which we know; but there must have been a
community ready to accept the Pentateuch.” See Smith’s Bible
Dictionary, art.: Samaritan Pentateuch; Hastings, Bible
Dictionary, art.: Samaria; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O.
T., 1-41.

(_f_) From the finding of “the book of the law” in the temple, in the
eighteenth year of King Josiah, or in 621 B. C.

_2 K. 22:8—_“And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the
scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jehovah.”
_23:2—_“The book of the covenant” was read before the people by
the king and proclaimed to be the law of the land. Curtis, in
Hastings’ Bible Dict., 3:596—“The earliest written law or book of
divine instruction of whose introduction or enactment an authentic
account is given, was Deuteronomy or its main portion, represented
as found in the temple in the 18th year of king Josiah (B. C. 621)
and proclaimed by the king as the law of the land. From that time
forward Israel had a written law which the pious believer was
commanded to ponder day and night (_Joshua 1:8_; _Ps. 1:2_); and
thus the Torah, as sacred literature, formally commenced in
Israel. This law aimed at a right application of Mosaic
principles.” Ryle, in Hastings’ Bible Dict., 1:602—“The law of
Deuteronomy represents an expansion and development of the ancient
code contained in _Exodus 20-23_, and precedes the final
formulation of the priestly ritual, which only received its
ultimate form in the last period of revising the structure of the
Pentateuch.”

Andrew Harper, on Deuteronomy, in Expositor’s Bible: “Deuteronomy
does not claim to have been written by Moses. He is spoken of in
the third person in the introduction and historical framework,
while the speeches of Moses are in the first person. In portions
where the author speaks for himself, the phrase ’beyond Jordan’
means east of Jordan; in the speeches of Moses the phrase ‘beyond
Jordan’ means west of Jordan; and the only exception is _Deut.
3:8_, which cannot originally have been part of the speech of
Moses. But the style of both parts is the same, and if the 3rd
person parts are by a later author, the 1st person parts are by a
later author also. Both differ from other speeches of Moses in the
Pentateuch. Can the author be a contemporary writer who gives
Moses’ words, as John gave the words of Jesus? No, for Deuteronomy
covers only the book of the Covenant, Exodus 20-23. It uses JE but
not P, with which JE is interwoven. But JE appears in Joshua and
contributes to it an account of Joshua’s death. JE speaks of kings
in Israel (_Gen. 36:31-39_). Deuteronomy plainly belongs to the
early centuries of the Kingdom, or to the middle of it.”

Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 43-49—“The Deuteronomic law was so
short that Shaphan could read it aloud before the king (_2 K.
22:10_) and the king could read ‘the whole of it’ before the
people (_23:2_); compare the reading of the Pentateuch for a whole
week (_Neh. 8:2-18_). It was in the form of a covenant; it was
distinguished by curses; it was an expansion and modification,
fully within the legitimate province of the prophet, of a Torah of
Moses codified from the traditional form of at least a century
before. Such a Torah existed, was attributed to Moses, and is now
incorporated as ‘the book of the covenant’ in _Exodus 20_ to _24_.
The year 620 is therefore the _terminus a quo_ of Deuteronomy. The
date of the priestly code is 444 B. C.” Sanday, Bampton Lectures
for 1893, grants “(1) the presence in the Pentateuch of a
considerable element which in its present shape is held by many to
be not earlier than the captivity; (2) the composition of the book
of Deuteronomy, not long, or at least not very long, before its
promulgation by king Josiah in the year 621, which thus becomes a
pivot-date in the history of Hebrew literature.”

(_g_) From references in the prophets Hosea (B. C. 743-737) and Amos
(759-745) to a course of divine teaching and revelation extending far back
of their day.

_Hosea 8:12—_“I wrote for him the ten thousand things of my law”;
here is asserted the existence prior to the time of the prophet,
not only of a law, but of a written law. All critics admit the
book of Hosea to be a genuine production of the prophet, dating
from the eighth century B. C.; see Green, in Presb. Rev.,
1886:585-608. _Amos 2:4—_“they have rejected the law of Jehovah,
and have not kept his statutes”; here is proof that, more than a
century before the finding of Deuteronomy in the temple, Israel
was acquainted with God’s law. Fisher, Nature and Method of
Revelation, 26, 27—“The lofty plane reached by the prophets was
not reached at a single bound.... There must have been a tap-root
extending far down into the earth.” Kurtz remarks that “the later
books of the O. T. would be a tree without roots, if the
composition of the Pentateuch were transferred to a later period
of Hebrew history.” If we substitute for the word “Pentateuch” the
words “Book of the covenant,” we may assent to this dictum of
Kurtz. There is sufficient evidence that, before the times of
Hosea and Amos, Israel possessed a written law—the law embraced in
_Exodus 20-24_—but the Pentateuch as we now have it, including
Leviticus, seems to date no further back than the time of
Jeremiah, 445 B. C. The Levitical law however was only the
codification of statutes and customs whose origin lay far back in
the past and which were believed to be only the natural expansion
of the principles of Mosaic legislation.

Leathes, Structure of O. T., 54—“Zeal for the restoration of the
temple after the exile implied that it had long before been the
centre of the national polity, that there had been a ritual and a
law before the exile.” Present Day Tracts, 3:52—Levitical
institutions could not have been first established by David. It is
inconceivable that he “could have taken a whole tribe, and no
trace remain of so revolutionary a measure as the dispossessing
them of their property to make them ministers of religion.” James
Robertson, Early History of Israel: “The varied literature of
850-750 B. C. implies the existence of reading and writing for
some time before. Amos and Hosea hold, for the period succeeding
Moses, the same scheme of history which modern critics pronounce
late and unhistorical. The eighth century B. C. was a time of
broad historic day, when Israel had a definite account to give of
itself and of its history. The critics appeal to the prophets, but
they reject the prophets when these tell us that other teachers
taught the same truth before them, and when they declare that
their nation had been taught a better religion and had declined
from it, in other words, that there had been law long before their
day. The kings did not _give law_. The priests _presupposed_ it.
There must have been a formal system of law much earlier than the
critics admit, and also an earlier reference in their worship to
the great events which made them a separate people.” And Dillman
goes yet further back and declares that the entire work of Moses
presupposes “a preparatory stage of higher religion in Abraham.”

(_h_) From the repeated assertions of Scripture that Moses himself wrote a
law for his people, confirmed as these are by evidence of literary and
legislative activity in other nations far antedating his time.

_Ex. 24:4—_“And Moses wrote all the words of Jehovah”;
_34:27—_“And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for
after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee
and with Israel”; _Num. 33:2—_“And Moses wrote their goings out
according to their journeys by the commandment of Jehovah”; _Deut.
31:9—_“And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests
the sons of Levi, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah,
and unto all the elders of Israel”; _22—_“So Moses wrote this song
the same day, and taught it the children of Israel”; _24-26—_“And
it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words
of this law in a book, until they were finished, that Moses
commanded the Levites, that bare the ark of the covenant of
Jehovah, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it by the side
of the ark of the covenant of Jehovah your God, that it may be
there for a witness against thee.” The law here mentioned may
possibly be only “the book of the covenant”_ (Ex. 20-24)_, and the
speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy may have been orally handed down.
But the fact that Moses was “instructed in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians”_ (Acts 7:22)_, together with the fact that the art of
writing was known in Egypt for many hundred years before his time,
make it more probable that a larger portion of the Pentateuch was
of his own composition.

Kenyon, in Hastings’ Dict., art.: Writing, dates the Proverbs of
Ptah-hotep, the first recorded literary composition in Egypt, at
3580-3536 B. C., and asserts the free use of writing among the
Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia as early as 4000 B. C. The
statutes of Hammurabi king of Babylon compare for extent with
those of Leviticus, yet they date back to the time of Abraham,
2200 B. C.,—indeed Hammurabi is now regarded by many as the
Amraphel of _Gen. 14:1_. Yet these statutes antedate Moses by 700
years. It is interesting to observe that Hammurabi professes to
have received his statutes directly from the Sun-god of Sippar,
his capital city. See translation by Winckler, in Der alte Orient,
97; Johns, The Oldest Code of Laws; Kelso, in Princeton Theol.
Rev., July, 1905:399-412—Facts “authenticate the traditional date
of the Book of the Covenant, overthrow the formula Prophets and
Law, restore the old order Law and Prophets, and put into
historical perspective the tradition that Moses was the author of
the Sinaitic legislation.”

As the controversy with regard to the genuineness of the Old Testament
books has turned of late upon the claims of the Higher Criticism in
general, and upon the claims of the Pentateuch in particular, we subjoin
separate notes upon these subjects.

_The Higher Criticism in general._ Higher Criticism does not mean
criticism in any invidious sense, any more than Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason was an unfavorable or destructive examination. It is
merely a dispassionate investigation of the authorship, date and
purpose of Scripture books, in the light of their composition,
style and internal characteristics. As the Lower Criticism is a
text-critique, the Higher Criticism is a structure-critique. A
bright Frenchman described a literary critic as one who rips open
the doll to get at the sawdust there is in it. This can be done
with a sceptical and hostile spirit, and there can be little doubt
that some of the higher critics of the Old Testament have begun
their studies with prepossessions against the supernatural, which
have vitiated all their conclusions. These presuppositions are
often unconscious, but none the less influential. When Bishop
Colenso examined the Pentateuch and Joshua, he disclaimed any
intention of assailing the miraculous narratives as such; as if he
had said: “My dear little fish, you need not fear me; I do not
wish to catch you; I only intend to drain the pond in which you
live.” To many scholars the waters at present seem very low in the
Hexateuch and indeed throughout the whole Old Testament.

Shakespeare made over and incorporated many old Chronicles of
Plutarch and Holinshed, and many Italian tales and early tragedies
of other writers; but Pericles and Titus Andronicus still pass
current under the name of Shakespeare. We speak even now of
“Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar,” although of its twenty-seven editions
the last fourteen have been published since his death, and more of
it has been written by other editors than Gesenius ever wrote
himself. We speak of “Webster’s Dictionary,” though there are in
the “Unabridged” thousands of words and definitions that Webster
never saw. Francis Brown: “A modern writer masters older records
and writes a wholly new book. Not so with eastern historians. The
latest comer, as Renan says, ‘absorbs his predecessors without
assimilating them, so that the most recent has in its belly the
fragments of the previous works in a raw state.’ The Diatessaron
of Tatian is a parallel to the composite structure of the O. T.
books. One passage yields the following: _Mat. 21:12a_; _John
2:14a_; _Mat. 21:12b_; _John 2:14b, 15_; _Mat. 21:12c, 13_; _John
2:16_; _Mark 11:16_; _John 2:17-22_; all succeeding each other
without a break.” Gore, Lux Mundi, 353—“There is nothing
materially untruthful, though there is something uncritical, in
attributing the whole legislation to Moses acting under the divine
command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution of the
collection of Psalms to David, and of Proverbs to Solomon.”

The opponents of the Higher Criticism have much to say in reply.
Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, holds that the early chapters
of Genesis were copied from Babylonian sources, but he insists
upon a Mosaic or pre-Mosaic date for the copying. Hilprecht
however declares that the monotheistic faith of Israel could never
have proceeded “from the Babylonian mountain of gods—that
charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.” Bissell,
Genesis Printed in Colors, Introd., iv—“It is improbable that so
many documentary histories existed so early, or if existing that
the compiler should have attempted to combine them. Strange that
the earlier should be J and should use the word ‘Jehovah,’ while
the later P should use the word ‘Elohim,’ when ‘Jehovah’ would
have far better suited the Priests’ Code.... xiii—The Babylonian
tablets contain in a continuous narrative the more prominent facts
of both the alleged Elohistic and Jehovistic sections of Genesis,
and present them mainly in the Biblical order. Several hundred
years before Moses what the critics call _two_ were already _one_.
It is absurd to say that the unity was due to a redactor at the
period of the exile, 444 B. C. He who believes that God revealed
himself to primitive man as one God, will see in the Akkadian
story a polytheistic corruption of the original monotheistic
account.” We must not estimate the antiquity of a pair of boots by
the last patch which the cobbler has added; nor must we estimate
the antiquity of a Scripture book by the glosses and explanations
added by later editors. As the London Spectator remarks on the
Homeric problem: “It is as impossible that a first-rate poem or
work of art should be produced without a great master-mind which
first conceives the whole, as that a fine living bull should be
developed out of beef-sausages.” As we shall proceed to show,
however, these utterances overestimate the unity of the Pentateuch
and ignore some striking evidences of its gradual growth and
composite structure.

_The Authorship of the Pentateuch in particular._ Recent critics,
especially Kuenen and Robertson Smith, have maintained that the
Pentateuch is Mosaic only in the sense of being a gradually
growing body of traditional law, which was codified as late as the
time of Ezekiel, and, as the development of the spirit and
teachings of the great law-giver, was called by a legal fiction
after the name of Moses and was attributed to him. The actual
order of composition is therefore: (1) Book of the Covenant
(_Exodus 20-23_); (2) Deuteronomy; (3) Leviticus. Among the
reasons assigned for this view are the facts (_a_) that
Deuteronomy ends with an account of Moses’ death, and therefore
could not have been written by Moses; (_b_) that in Leviticus
Levites are mere servants to the priests, while in Deuteronomy the
priests are officiating Levites, or, in other words, all the
Levites are priests; (_c_) that the books of Judges and of 1
Samuel, with their record of sacrifices offered in many places,
give no evidence that either Samuel or the nation of Israel had
any knowledge of a law confining worship to a local sanctuary. See
Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy in Israel; Wellhausen, Geschichte
Israels, Band 1; and art.: Israel, in Encyc. Brit., 13:398, 399,
415; W. Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jewish Church, 306, 386, and
Prophets of Israel; Hastings, Bible Dict., arts.: Deuteronomy,
Hexateuch, and Canon of the O. T.

It has been urged in reply, (1) that Moses may have written, not
autographically, but through a scribe (perhaps Joshua), and that
this scribe may have completed the history in Deuteronomy with the
account of Moses’ death; (2) that Ezra or subsequent prophets may
have subjected the whole Pentateuch to recension, and may have
added explanatory notes; (3) that documents of previous ages may
have been incorporated, in course of its composition by Moses, or
subsequently by his successors; (4) that the apparent lack of
distinction between the different classes of Levites in
Deuteronomy may be explained by the fact that, while Leviticus was
written with exact detail for the priests, Deuteronomy is the
record of a brief general and oral summary of the law, addressed
to the people at large and therefore naturally mentioning the
clergy as a whole; (5) that the silence of the book of Judges as
to the Mosaic ritual may be explained by the design of the book to
describe only general history, and by the probability that at the
tabernacle a ritual was observed of which the people in general
were ignorant. Sacrifices in other places only accompanied special
divine manifestations which made the recipient temporarily a
priest. Even if it were proved that the law with regard to a
central sanctuary was not observed, it would not show that the law
did not exist, any more than violation of the second commandment
by Solomon proves his ignorance of the decalogue, or the mediæval
neglect of the N. T. by the Roman church proves that the N. T. did
not then exist. We cannot argue that “where there was
transgression, there was no law” (Watts, New Apologetic, 83, and
The Newer Criticism).

In the light of recent research, however, we cannot regard these
replies as satisfactory. Woods, in his article on the Hexateuch,
Hastings’ Dictionary, 2:365, presents a moderate statement of the
results of the higher criticism which commends itself to us as
more trustworthy. He calls it a theory of stratification, and
holds that “certain more or less independent documents, dealing
largely with the same series of events, were composed at different
periods, or, at any rate, under different auspices, and were
afterwards combined, so that our present Hexateuch, which means
our Pentateuch with the addition of Joshua, contains these several
different literary strata.... The main grounds for accepting this
hypothesis of stratification are (1) that the various literary
pieces, with very few exceptions, will be found on examination to
arrange themselves by common characteristics into comparatively
few groups; (2) that an original consecution of narrative may be
frequently traced between what in their present form are isolated
fragments.

“This will be better understood by the following illustration. Let
us suppose a problem of this kind: Given a patchwork quilt,
explain the character of the original pieces out of which the bits
of stuff composing the quilt were cut. First, we notice that,
however well the colors may blend, however nice and complete the
whole may look, many of the adjoining pieces do not agree in
material, texture, pattern, color, or the like. Ergo, they have
been made up out of very different pieces of stuff.... But suppose
we further discover that many of the bits, though now separated,
are like one another in material, texture, etc., we may conjecture
that these have been cut out of one piece. But we shall prove this
beyond reasonable doubt if we find that several bits when unpicked
fit together, so that the pattern of one is continued in the
other; and, moreover, that if all of like character are sorted
out, they form, say, four groups, each of which was evidently once
a single piece of stuff, though parts of each are found missing,
because, no doubt, they have not been required to make the whole.
But we make the analogy of the Hexateuch even closer, if we
further suppose that in certain parts of the quilt the bits
belonging to, say, two of these groups are so combined as to form
a subsidiary pattern within the larger pattern of the whole quilt,
and had evidently been sewed together before being connected with
other parts of the quilt; and we may make it even closer still, if
we suppose that, besides the more important bits of stuff, smaller
embellishments, borderings, and the like, had been added so as to
improve the general effect of the whole.”

The author of this article goes on to point out three main
portions of the Hexateuch which essentially differ from each
other. There are three distinct codes: the Covenant code (C—_Ex.
20:22_ to _23:33_, and _24:3-8_), the Deuteronomic code (D), and
the Priestly code (P). These codes have peculiar relations to the
narrative portions of the Hexateuch. In Genesis, for example, “the
greater part of the book is divided into groups of longer or
shorter pieces, generally paragraphs or chapters, distinguished
respectively by the almost exclusive use of Elohim or Jehovah as
the name of God.” Let us call these portions J and E. But we find
such close affinities between C and JE, that we may regard them as
substantially one. “We shall find that the larger part of the
narratives, as distinct from the laws, of Exodus and Numbers
belong to JE; whereas, with special exceptions, the legal portions
belong to P. In the last chapters of Deuteronomy and in the whole
of Joshua we find elements of JE. In the latter book we also find
elements which connect it with D.

“It should be observed that not only do we find here and there
_separate pieces_ in the Hexateuch, shown by their characters to
belong to these three sources, JE, D, and P, but the pieces will
often be found connected together by an obvious continuity of
subject when pieced together, like the bits of patchwork in the
illustration with which we started. For example, if we read
continuously _Gen. 11:27-33_; _12:4b, 5_; _13:6a, 11b, 12a_;
_16:1a, 3, 15, 16_; _17_; _19:29_; _21:1a, 2b-5_; _23_;
_25:7-11a_—passages mainly, on other grounds, attributed to P, we
get an almost continuous and complete, though very concise,
account of Abraham’s life.” We may concede the substantial
correctness of the view thus propounded. It simply shows God’s
actual method in making up the record of his revelation. We may
add that any scholar who grants that Moses did not himself write
the account of his own death and burial in the last chapter of
Deuteronomy, or who recognizes two differing accounts of creation
in _Genesis 1_ and _2_, has already begun an analysis of the
Pentateuch and has accepted the essential principles of the higher
criticism.

In addition to the literature already referred to mention may also
be made of Driver’s Introd. to O. T., 118-150, and Deuteronomy,
Introd.; W. R. Harper, in Hebraica, Oct.-Dec. 1888, and W. H.
Green’s reply in Hebraica. Jan.-Apr. 1889; also Green, The Unity
of the Book of Genesis, Moses and the Prophets, Hebrew Feasts, and
Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch; with articles by Green in
Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882 and Oct. 1886; Howard Osgood, in Essays on
Pentateuchal Criticism, and in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1888, and July,
1893; Watts, The Newer Criticism, and New Apologetic, 83; Presb.
Rev., arts. by H. P. Smith, April, 1882, and by F. L. Patton,
1883:341-410; Bib. Sac., April, 1882:291-344, and by G. F. Wright,
July, 1898:515-525; Brit. Quar., July, 1881:123; Jan.
1884:138-143; Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 373-385; Stebbins, A
Study in the Pentateuch; Bissell, Historic Origin of the Bible,
277-342, and The Pentateuch, its Authorship and Structure;
Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 180-216, and The
Veracity of the Hexateuch; Murray, Origin and Growth of the
Psalms, 58; Payne-Smith, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 15;
Edersheim, Prophecy and History; Kurtz, Hist. Old Covenant, 1:46;
Perowne, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. and Feb. 1888; Chambers, Moses and
his Recent Critics; Terry, Moses and the Prophets; Davis,
Dictionary of the Bible, art.: Pentateuch; Willis J. Beecher, The
Prophets and the Promise; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 326-329.

II. Credibility of the Writers of the Scriptures.

We shall attempt to prove this only of the writers of the gospels; for if
they are credible witnesses, the credibility of the Old Testament, to
which they bore testimony, follows as a matter of course.

1. _They are capable or competent witnesses_,—that is, they possessed
actual knowledge with regard to the facts they professed to relate. (_a_)
They had opportunities of observation and inquiry. (_b_) They were men of
sobriety and discernment, and could not have been themselves deceived.
(_c_) Their circumstances were such as to impress deeply upon their minds
the events of which they were witnesses.

2. _They are honest witnesses._ This is evident when we consider that:
(_a_) Their testimony imperiled all their worldly interests. (_b_) The
moral elevation of their writings, and their manifest reverence for truth
and constant inculcation of it, show that they were not wilful deceivers,
but good men. (_c_) There are minor indications of the honesty of these
writers in the circumstantiality of their story, in the absence of any
expectation that their narratives would be questioned, in their freedom
from all disposition to screen themselves or the apostles from censure.

Lessing says that Homer never calls Helen beautiful, but he gives
the reader an impression of her surpassing loveliness by
portraying the effect produced by her presence. So the evangelists
do not describe Jesus’ appearance or character, but lead us to
conceive the cause that could produce such effects. Gore,
Incarnation, 77—“Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, Judas, are not
abused,—they are photographed. The sin of a Judas and a Peter is
told with equal simplicity. Such fairness, wherever you find it,
belongs to a trustworthy witness.”

3. _The writings of the evangelists mutually support each other._ We argue
their credibility upon the ground of their number and of the consistency
of their testimony. While there is enough of discrepancy to show that
there has been no collusion between them, there is concurrence enough to
make the falsehood of them all infinitely improbable. Four points under
this head deserve mention: (_a_) The evangelists are independent
witnesses. This is sufficiently shown by the futility of the attempts to
prove that any one of them has abridged or transcribed another. (_b_) The
discrepancies between them are none of them irreconcilable with the truth
of the recorded facts, but only present those facts in new lights or with
additional detail. (_c_) That these witnesses were friends of Christ does
not lessen the value of their united testimony, since they followed Christ
only because they were convinced that these facts were true. (_d_) While
one witness to the facts of Christianity might establish its truth, the
combined evidence of four witnesses gives us a warrant for faith in the
facts of the gospel such as we possess for no other facts in ancient
history whatsoever. The same rule which would refuse belief in the events
recorded in the gospels “would throw doubt on any event in history.”

No man does or can write his own signature twice precisely alike.
When two signatures, therefore, purporting to be written by the
same person, are precisely alike, it is safe to conclude that one
of them is a forgery. Compare the combined testimony of the
evangelists with the combined testimony of our five senses. “Let
us assume,” says Dr. C. E. Rider, “that the chances of deception
are as one to ten when we use our eyes alone, one to twenty when
we use our ears alone, and one to forty when we use our sense of
touch alone; what are the chances of mistake when we use all these
senses simultaneously? The true result is obtained by multiplying
these proportions together. This gives one to eight thousand.”

4. _The conformity of the gospel testimony with experience._ We have
already shown that, granting the fact of sin and the need of an attested
revelation from God, miracles can furnish no presumption against the
testimony of those who record such a revelation, but, as essentially
belonging to such a revelation, miracles may be proved by the same kind
and degree of evidence as is required in proof of any other extraordinary
facts. We may assert, then, that in the New Testament histories there is
no record of facts contrary to experience, but only a record of facts not
witnessed in ordinary experience—of facts, therefore, in which we may
believe, if the evidence in other respects is sufficient.

5. _Coincidence of this testimony with collateral facts and
circumstances._ Under this head we may refer to (_a_) the numberless
correspondences between the narratives of the evangelists and contemporary
history; (_b_) the failure of every attempt thus far to show that the
sacred history is contradicted by any single fact derived from other
trustworthy sources; (_c_) the infinite improbability that this minute and
complete harmony should ever have been secured in fictitious narratives.

6. _Conclusion from the argument for the credibility of the writers of the
gospels._ These writers having been proved to be credible witnesses, their
narratives, including the accounts of the miracles and prophecies of
Christ and his apostles, must be accepted as true. But God would not work
miracles or reveal the future to attest the claims of false teachers.
Christ and his apostles must, therefore, have been what they claimed to
be, teachers sent from God, and their doctrine must be what they claimed
it to be, a revelation from God to men.

On the whole subject, see Ebrard, Wissensch. Kritik der evang.
Geschichte; Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, 30, 31;
Starkie on Evidence, 734; Whately, Historic Doubts as to Napoleon
Buonaparte; Haley, Examination of Alleged Discrepancies; Smith’s
Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul; Paley, Horse Paulinæ; Birks, in
Strivings for the Faith, 37-72—“Discrepancies are like the slight
diversities of the different pictures of the stereoscope.” Renan
calls the land of Palestine a fifth gospel. Weiss contrasts the
Apocryphal Gospels, where there is no historical setting and all
is in the air, with the evangelists, where time and place are
always stated.

No modern apologist has stated the argument for the credibility of
the New Testament with greater clearness and force than
Paley,—Evidences, chapters 8 and 10—“No historical fact is more
certain than that the original propagators of the gospel
voluntarily subjected themselves to lives of fatigue, danger, and
suffering, in the prosecution of their undertaking. The nature of
the undertaking, the character of the persons employed in it, the
opposition of their tenets to the fixed expectations of the
country in which they at first advanced them, their undissembled
condemnation of the religion of all other countries, their total
want of power, authority, or force, render it in the highest
degree _probable_ that this must have been the case.

“The probability is increased by what we know of the fate of the
Founder of the institution, who was put to death for his attempt,
and by what we also know of the cruel treatment of the converts to
the institution within thirty years after its commencement—both
which points are attested by heathen writers, and, being once
admitted, leave it very incredible that the primitive emissaries
of the religion who exercised their ministry first amongst the
people who had destroyed their Master, and afterwards amongst
those who persecuted their converts, should themselves escape with
impunity or pursue their purpose in ease and safety.

“This probability, thus sustained by foreign testimony, is
advanced, I think, to historical certainty by the evidence of our
own books, by the accounts of a writer who was the companion of
the persons whose sufferings he relates, by the letters of the
persons themselves, by predictions of persecutions, ascribed to
the Founder of the religion, which predictions would not have been
inserted in this history, much less, studiously dwelt upon, if
they had not accorded with the event, and which, even if falsely
ascribed to him, could only have been so ascribed because the
event suggested them; lastly, by incessant exhortations to
fortitude and patience, and by an earnestness, repetition and
urgency upon the subject which were unlikely to have appeared, if
there had not been, at the time, some extraordinary call for the
exercise of such virtues. It is also made out, I think, with
sufficient evidence, that both the teachers and converts of the
religion, in consequence of their new profession, took up a new
course of life and conduct.

“The next great question is, what they did this _for_. It was for
a miraculous story of some kind, since for the proof that Jesus of
Nazareth ought to be received as the Messiah, or as a messenger
for God, they neither had nor could have anything but miracles to
stand upon.... If this be so, the religion must be true. These men
could not be deceivers. By only not bearing testimony, they might
have avoided all these sufferings and lived quietly. Would men in
such circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw,
assert facts which they had no knowledge of, go about lying to
teach virtue, and though not only convinced of Christ’s being an
impostor, but having seen the success of his imposture in his
crucifixion, yet persist in carrying it on, and so persist as to
bring upon themselves, for nothing, and with a full knowledge of
the consequences, enmity and hatred, danger and death?”

Those who maintain this, moreover, require us to believe that the
Scripture writers were “villains for no end but to teach honesty,
and martyrs without the least prospect of honor or advantage.”
Imposture must have a motive. The self-devotion of the apostles is
the strongest evidence of their truth, for even Hume declares that
“we cannot make use of a more convincing argument in proof of
honesty than to prove that the actions ascribed to any persons are
contrary to the course of nature, and that no human motives, in
such circumstances, could ever induce them to such conduct.”

III. The Supernatural Character of the Scripture Teaching.

1. Scripture teaching in general.

A. The Bible is the work of one mind.

(_a_) In spite of its variety of authorship and the vast separation of its
writers from one another in point of time, there is a unity of subject,
spirit, and aim throughout the whole.

We here begin a new department of Christian evidences. We have
thus far only adduced external evidence. We now turn our attention
to internal evidence. The relation of external to internal
evidence seems to be suggested in Christ’s two questions in _Mark
8:27, 29—_“Who do _men_ say that I am?... who say _ye_ that I am?”
The unity in variety displayed in Scripture is one of the chief
internal evidences. This unity is indicated in our word “Bible,”
in the singular number. Yet the original word was “Biblia,” a
plural number. The world has come to see a unity in what were once
scattered fragments: the many “Biblia” have become one “Bible.” In
one sense R. W. Emerson’s contention is true: “The Bible is not a
book,—it is a literature.” But we may also say, and with equal
truth: “The Bible is not simply a collection of books,—it is a
book.” The Bible is made up of sixty-six books, by forty writers,
of all ranks,—shepherds, fishermen, priests, warriors, statesmen,
kings,—composing their works at intervals through a period of
seventeen centuries. Evidently no collusion between them is
possible. Scepticism tends ever to ascribe to the Scriptures
greater variety of authorship and date, but all this only
increases the wonder of the Bible’s unity. If unity in a half
dozen writers is remarkable, in forty it is astounding. “The many
diverse instruments of this orchestra play one perfect tune: hence
we feel that they are led by one master and composer.” Yet it
takes the same Spirit who inspired the Bible to teach its unity.
The union is not an external or superficial one, but one that is
internal and spiritual.

(_b_) Not one moral or religious utterance of all these writers has been
contradicted or superseded by the utterances of those who have come later,
but all together constitute a consistent system.

Here we must distinguish between the external form and the moral
and religious substance. Jesus declares in _Mat. 5:21, 22, 27, 28,
33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, _“Ye have heard that it was said to them
of old time ... but I say unto you,” and then he seems at first
sight to abrogate certain original commands. But he also declares
in this connection, _Mat. 5:17, 18—_“Think not I am come to
destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to
fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass
away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the
law, till all things be accomplished.” Christ’s new commandments
only bring out the inner meaning of the old. He fulfils them not
in their literal form but in their essential spirit. So the New
Testament completes the revelation of the Old Testament and makes
the Bible a perfect unity. In this unity the Bible stands alone.
Hindu, Persian, and Chinese religious books contain no consistent
system of faith. There is progress in revelation from the earlier
to the later books of the Bible, but this is not progress through
successive steps of falsehood; it is rather progress from a less
to a more clear and full unfolding of the truth. The whole truth
lay germinally in the _protevangelium_ uttered to our first
parents (_Gen. 3:15_—the seed of the woman should bruise the
serpent’s head).

(_c_) Each of these writings, whether early or late, has represented moral
and religious ideas greatly in advance of the age in which it has
appeared, and these ideas still lead the world.

All our ideas of progress, with all the forward-looking spirit of
modern Christendom, are due to Scripture. The classic nations had
no such ideas and no such spirit, except as they caught them from
the Hebrews. Virgil’s prophecy, in his fourth Eclogue, of a coming
virgin and of the reign of Saturn and of the return of the golden
age, was only the echo of the Sibylline books and of the hope of a
Redeemer with which the Jews had leavened the whole Roman world;
see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 94-96.

(_d_) It is impossible to account for this unity without supposing such a
supernatural suggestion and control that the Bible, while in its various
parts written by human agents, is yet equally the work of a superhuman
intelligence.

We may contrast with the harmony between the different Scripture
writers the contradictions and refutations which follow merely
human philosophies—_e. g._, the Hegelian idealism and the
Spencerian materialism. Hegel is “a name to swear at, as well as
to swear by.” Dr. Stirling, in his Secret of Hegel, “kept all the
secret to himself, if he ever knew it.” A certain Frenchman once
asked Hegel if he could not gather up and express his philosophy
in one sentence for him. “No,” Hegel replied, “at least not in
French.” If Talleyrand’s maxim be true that whatever is not
intelligible is not French, Hegel’s answer was a correct one.
Hegel said of his disciples: “There is only one man living who
understands me, and he does not.”

Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, Marheinecke, Erdmann, are Hegel’s right
wing, or orthodox representatives and followers in theology; see
Sterrett, Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Hegel is followed by
Alexander and Bradley in England, but is opposed by Seth and
Schiller. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 279-300, gives a valuable
estimate of his position and influence: Hegel is all thought and
no will. Prayer has no effect on God,—it is a purely psychological
phenomenon. There is no free-will, and man’s sin as much as man’s
holiness is a manifestation of the Eternal. Evolution is a fact,
but it is only fatalistic evolution. Hegel notwithstanding did
great service by substituting knowledge of reality for the
oppressive Kantian relativity, and by banishing the old notion of
matter as a mysterious substance wholly unlike and incompatible
with the properties of mind. He did great service also by showing
that the interactions of matter and mind are explicable only by
the presence of the Absolute Whole in every part, though he erred
greatly by carrying that idea of the unity of God and man beyond
its proper limits, and by denying that God has given to the will
of man any power to put itself into antagonism to His Will. Hegel
did great service by showing that we cannot know even the part
without knowing the whole, but he erred in teaching, as T. H.
Green did, that the _relations_ constitute the _reality_ of the
thing. He deprives both physical and psychical existences of that
degree of selfhood or independent reality which is essential to
both science and religion. We want real force, and not the mere
idea of force; real will, and not mere thought.

B. This one mind that made the Bible is the same mind that made the soul,
for the Bible is divinely adapted to the soul,

(_a_) It shows complete acquaintance with the soul.

The Bible addresses all parts of man’s nature. There are Law and
Epistles for man’s reason; Psalms and Gospels for his affections;
Prophets and Revelations for his imagination. Hence the popularity
of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Bible has become
interwoven into modern life. Law, literature, art, all show its
moulding influence.

(_b_) It judges the soul—contradicting its passions, revealing its guilt,
and humbling its pride.

No product of mere human nature could thus look down upon human
nature and condemn it. The Bible speaks to us from a higher level.
The Samaritan woman’s words apply to the whole compass of divine
revelation; it tells us all things that ever we did (_John 4:29_).
The Brahmin declared that _Romans 1_, with its description of
heathen vices, must have been forged after the missionaries came
to India.

(_c_) It meets the deepest needs of the soul—by solutions of its problems,
disclosures of God’s character, presentations of the way of pardon,
consolations and promises for life and death.

Neither Socrates nor Seneca sets forth the nature, origin and
consequences of sin as committed against the holiness of God, nor
do they point out the way of pardon and renewal. The Bible teaches
us what nature cannot, viz.: God’s creatorship, the origin of
evil, the method of restoration, the certainty of a future state,
and the principle of rewards and punishments there.

(_d_) Yet it is silent upon many questions for which writings of merely
human origin seek first to provide solutions.

Compare the account of Christ’s infancy in the gospels with the
fables of the Apocryphal New Testament; compare the scant
utterances of Scripture with regard to the future state with
Mohammed’s and Swedenborg’s revelations of Paradise. See Alexander
McLaren’s sermon on The Silence of Scripture, in his book
entitled: Christ in the Heart, 131-141.

(_e_) There are infinite depths and inexhaustible reaches of meaning in
Scripture, which difference it from all other books, and which compel us
to believe that its author must be divine.

Sir Walter Scott, on his death bed: “Bring me the Book!” “What
book?” said Lockhart, his son-in-law. “There is but one book!”
said the dying man. Réville concludes an Essay in the Revue des
deux Mondes (1864): “One day the question was started, in an
assembly, what book a man condemned to lifelong imprisonment, and
to whom but one book would be permitted, had better take into his
cell with him. The company consisted of Catholics, Protestants,
philosophers and even materialists, but all agreed that their
choice would fall only on the Bible.”

On the whole subject, see Garbett, God’s Word Written, 3-56;
Luthardt, Saving Truths, 210; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of Bible,
155-181; W. L. Alexander, Connection and Harmony of O. T. and N.
T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T.; Bernard, Progress of
Doctrine in the N. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of
Doctrine; Titcomb, in Strivings for the Faith; Immer,
Hermeneutics, 91; Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 23; 5: no. 28; 6: no.
31; Lee on Inspiration, 26-32.

2. Moral System of the New Testament.

The perfection of this system is generally conceded. All will admit that
it greatly surpasses any other system known among men. Among its
distinguishing characteristics may be mentioned:

(_a_) Its comprehensiveness,—including all human duties in its code, even
the most generally misunderstood and neglected, while it permits no vice
whatsoever.

Buddhism regards family life as sinful. Suicide was commended by
many ancient philosophers. Among the Spartans to steal was
praiseworthy,—only to be caught stealing was criminal. Classic
times despised humility. Thomas Paine said that Christianity
cultivated “the spirit of a spaniel,” and John Stuart Mill
asserted that Christ ignored duty to the state. Yet Peter urges
Christians to add to their faith manliness, courage, heroism (_2
Pet. 1:5—_“in your faith supply virtue”), and Paul declares the
state to be God’s ordinance (_Rom. 13:1—_“Let every soul be in
subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God;
and the powers that be are ordained of God”). Patriotic defence of
a nation’s unity and freedom has always found its chief incitement
and ground in these injunctions of Scripture. E. G. Robinson:
“Christian ethics do not contain a particle of chaff,—all is pure
wheat.”

(_b_) Its spirituality,—accepting no merely external conformity to right
precepts, but judging all action by the thoughts and motives from which it
springs.

The superficiality of heathen morals is well illustrated by the
treatment of the corpse of a priest in Siam: the body is covered
with gold leaf, and then is left to rot and shine. Heathenism
divorces religion from ethics. External and ceremonial observances
take the place of purity of heart. The Sermon on the Mount on the
other hand pronounces blessing only upon inward states of the
soul. _Ps. 51:6—_“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts,
and in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”; _Micah
6:8—_“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

(_c_) Its simplicity,—inculcating principles rather than imposing rules;
reducing these principles to an organic system; and connecting this system
with religion by summing up all human duty in the one command of love to
God and man.

Christianity presents no extensive code of rules, like that of the
Pharisees or of the Jesuits. Such codes break down of their own
weight. The laws of the State of New York alone constitute a
library of themselves, which only the trained lawyer can master.
It is said that Mohammedanism has recorded sixty-five thousand
special instances in which the reader is directed to do right. It
is the merit of Jesus’ system that all its requisitions are
reduced to unity. _Mark 12:29-31—_“Hear, O Israel; The Lord our
God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and
with all thy strength. The second is this: Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than
these.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:384-814, calls attention to
the inner unity of Jesus’ teaching. The doctrine that God is a
loving Father is applied with unswerving consistency. Jesus
confirmed whatever was true in the O. T., and he set aside the
unworthy. He taught not so much about God, as about the kingdom of
God, and about the ideal fellowship between God and men. Morality
was the necessary and natural expression of religion. In Christ
teaching and life were perfectly blended. He was the
representative of the religion which he taught.

(_d_) Its practicality,—exemplifying its precepts in the life of Jesus
Christ; and, while it declares man’s depravity and inability in his own
strength to keep the law, furnishing motives to obedience, and the divine
aid of the Holy Spirit to make this obedience possible.

Revelation has two sides: Moral law, and provision for fulfilling
the moral law that has been broken. Heathen systems can incite to
temporary reformations, and they can terrify with fears of
retribution. But only God’s regenerating grace can make the tree
good, in such a way that its fruit will be good also (_Mat.
12:33_). There is a difference between touching the pendulum of
the clock and winding it up,—the former may set it temporarily
swinging, but only the latter secures its regular and permanent
motion. The moral system of the N. T. is not simply law,—it is
also grace: _John 1:17—_“the law was given through Moses; grace
and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Dr. William Ashmore’s tract
represents a Chinaman in a pit. Confucius looks into the pit and
says: “If you had done as I told you, you would never have gotten
in.” Buddha looks into the pit and says: “If you were up here I
would show you what to do.” So both Confucius and Buddha pass on.
But Jesus leaps down into the pit and helps the poor Chinaman out.

At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago there were many ideals
of life propounded, but no religion except Christianity attempted
to show that there was any power given to realize these ideals.
When Joseph Cook challenged the priests of the ancient religions
to answer Lady Macbeth’s question: “How cleanse this red right
hand?” the priests were dumb. But Christianity declares that “the
blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”_ (1 John 1:7)_.
E. G. Robinson: Christianity differs from all other religions in
being (1) a historical religion; (2) in turning abstract law into
a person to be loved; (3) in furnishing a demonstration of God’s
love in Christ; (4) in providing atonement for sin and forgiveness
for the sinner; (5) in giving a power to fulfil the law and
sanctify the life. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 249—“Christianity, by
making the moral law the expression of a holy Will, brought that
law out of its impersonal abstraction, and assured its ultimate
triumph. Moral principles may be what they were before, but moral
practice is forever different. Even the earth itself has another
look, now that it has heaven above it.” Frances Power Cobbe, Life,
92—“The achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a
_new_, still less of a _systematic_, morality; but the
introduction of a new _spirit_ into morality; as Christ himself
said, a leaven into the lump.”

We may justly argue that a moral system so pure and perfect, since it
surpasses all human powers of invention and runs counter to men’s natural
tastes and passions, must have had a supernatural, and if a supernatural,
then a divine, origin.

Heathen systems of morality are in general defective, in that they
furnish for man’s moral action no sufficient example, rule,
motive, or end. They cannot do this, for the reason that they
practically identify God with nature, and know of no clear
revelation of his holy will. Man is left to the law of his own
being, and since he is not conceived of as wholly responsible and
free, the lower impulses are allowed sway as well as the higher,
and selfishness is not regarded as sin. As heathendom does not
recognize man’s depravity, so it does not recognize his dependence
upon divine grace, and its virtue is self-righteousness.
Heathenism is man’s vain effort to lift himself to God;
Christianity is God’s coming down to man to save him; see
Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 11, 12. Martineau, 1:15, 16, calls
attention to the difference between the physiological ethics of
heathendom and the psychological ethics of Christianity.
Physiological ethics begins with nature; and, finding in nature
the uniform rule of necessity and the operation of cause and
effect, it comes at last to man and applies the same rule to him,
thus extinguishing all faith in personality, freedom,
responsibility, sin and guilt. Psychological ethics, on the
contrary, wisely begins with what we know best, with man; and
finding in him free-will and a moral purpose, it proceeds outward
to nature and interprets nature as the manifestation of the mind
and will of God.

“Psychological ethics are altogether peculiar to Christendom....
Other systems begin outside and regard the soul as a homogeneous
part of the _universe_, applying to the soul the principle of
necessity that prevails outside of it.... In the Christian
religion, on the other hand, the interest, the mystery of the
world are concentrated in _human nature_.... The sense of sin—a
sentiment that left no trace in Athens—involves a consciousness of
personal alienation from the Supreme Goodness; the aspiration
after holiness directs itself to a union of affection and will
with the source of all Perfection; the agency for transforming men
from their old estrangement to new reconciliation is a Person, in
whom the divine and human historically blend; and the sanctifying
Spirit by which they are sustained at the height of their purer
life is a living link of communion between their minds and the
Soul of souls.... So Nature, to the Christian consciousness, sank
into the accidental and the neutral.” Measuring ourselves by human
standards, we nourish pride; measuring ourselves by divine
standards, we nourish humility. Heathen nations, identifying God
with nature or with man, are unprogressive. The flat architecture
of the Parthenon, with its lines parallel to the earth, is the
type of heathen religion; the aspiring arches of the Gothic
cathedral symbolize Christianity.

Sterrett, Studies in Hegel, 33, says that Hegel characterized the
Chinese religion as that of Measure, or temperate conduct;
Brahmanism as that of Phantasy, or inebriate dream-life; Buddhism
as that of Self-involvement; that of Egypt as the imbruted
religion of Enigma, symbolized by the Sphynx; that of Greece, as
the religion of Beauty; the Jewish as that of Sublimity; and
Christianity as the Absolute religion, the fully revealed religion
of truth and freedom. In all this Hegel entirely fails to grasp
the elements of Will, Holiness, Love, Life, which characterize
Judaism and Christianity, and distinguish them from all other
religions. R. H. Hutton: “Judaism taught us that Nature must be
interpreted by our knowledge of God, not God by our knowledge of
Nature.” Lyman Abbott: “Christianity is not a new _life_, but a
new _power_; not a _summons_ to a new life, but an _offer_ of new
life; not a reënactment of the old law, but a power of God unto
salvation; not love to God and man, but Christ’s message that God
loves us, and will help us to the life of love.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 5, 6—“Christianity postulates an
opening of the heart of the eternal God to the heart of man coming
to meet him. Heathendom shows us the heart of man blunderingly
grasping the hem of God’s garment, and mistaking Nature, his
majestic raiment, for himself. Only in the Bible does man press
beyond God’s external manifestations to God himself.” See Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 1:37-173; Porter, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no.
19, pp. 33-64: Blackie, Four Phases of Morals; Faiths of the World
(St. Giles Lectures, second series); J. F. Clarke, Ten Great
Religions, 2:280-317; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith; Farrar, Witness of
History to Christ, 134, and Seekers after God, 181, 182, 320;
Curtis on Inspiration, 288. For denial of the all-comprehensive
character of Christian Morality, see John Stuart Mill, on Liberty;
_per contra_, see Review of Mill, in Theol. Eclectic, 6:508-512;
Row, in Strivings for the Faith, pub. by Christian Evidence
Society, 181-220; also, Bampton Lectures, 1877:130-176; Fisher,
Beginnings of Christianity, 28-38, 174.

In contrast with the Christian system of morality the defects of heathen
systems are so marked and fundamental, that they constitute a strong
corroborative evidence of the divine origin of the Scripture revelation.
We therefore append certain facts and references with regard to particular
heathen systems.

1. _Confucianism._ Confucius (_Kung-fu-tse_), B. C. 551-478,
contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha. Socrates was born ten
years after Confucius died. Mencius (371-278) was a disciple of
Confucius. Matheson, in Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures),
73-108, claims that Confucianism was “an attempt to substitute a
morality for theology.” Legge, however, in Present Day Tracts, 3:
no. 18, shows that this is a mistake. Confucius simply left
religion where he found it. God, or Heaven, is worshiped in China,
but only by the Emperor. Chinese religion is apparently a survival
of the worship of the patriarchal family. The father of the family
was its only head and priest. In China, though the family widened
into the tribe, and the tribe into the nation, the father still
retained his sole authority, and, as the father of his people, the
Emperor alone officially offered sacrifice to God. Between God and
the people the gulf has so widened that the people may be said to
have no practical knowledge of God or communication with him. Dr.
W. A. P. Martin: “Confucianism has degenerated into a pantheistic
medley, and renders worship to an impersonal ‘anima mundi,’ under
the leading forms of visible nature.”

Dr. William Ashmore, private letter: “The common people of China
have: (1) Ancestor-worship, and the worship of deified heroes: (2)
Geomancy, or belief in the controlling power of the elements of
nature; but back of these, and antedating them, is (3) the worship
of Heaven and Earth, or Father and Mother, a very ancient dualism;
this belongs to the common people also, though once a year the
Emperor, as a sort of high-priest of his people, offers sacrifice
on the altar of Heaven; in this he acts alone. ‘Joss’ is not a
Chinese word at all. It is the corrupted form of the Portuguese
word ‘Deos.’ The word ‘pidgin’ is similarly an attempt to say
‘business’ (big-i-ness or bidgin). ‘Joss-pidgin’ therefore means
simply ‘divine service,’ or service offered to Heaven and Earth,
or to spirits of any kind, good or bad. There are many gods, a
Queen of Heaven, King of Hades, God of War, god of literature,
gods of the hills, valleys, streams, a goddess of small-pox, of
child-bearing, and all the various trades have their gods. The
most lofty expression the Chinese have is ‘Heaven,’ or ‘Supreme
Heaven,’ or ‘Azure Heaven.’ This is the surviving indication that
in the most remote times they had knowledge of one supreme,
intelligent and personal Power who ruled over all.” Mr. Yugoro
Chiba has shown that the Chinese classics permit sacrifice by all
the people. But it still remains true that sacrifice to “Supreme
Heaven” is practically confined to the Emperor, who like the
Jewish high-priest offers for his people once a year.

Confucius did nothing to put morality upon a religious basis. In
practice, the relations between man and man are the only relations
considered. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom,
sincerity, are enjoined, but not a word is said with regard to
man’s relations to God. Love to God is not only not commanded—it
is not thought of as possible. Though man’s being is theoretically
an ordinance of God, man is practically a law to himself. The
first commandment of Confucius is that of filial piety. But this
includes worship of dead ancestors, and is so exaggerated as to
bury from sight the related duties of husband to wife and of
parent to child. Confucius made it the duty of a son to slay his
father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly
retaliatory penalty for bloodshed; see J. A. Farrer, Primitive
Manners and Customs, 80. He treated invisible and superior beings
with respect, but held them at a distance. He recognized the
“Heaven” of tradition; but, instead of adding to our knowledge of
it, he stifled inquiry. Dr. Legge: “I have been reading Chinese
books for more than forty years, and any general requirement to
love God, or the mention of any one as actually loving him, has
yet to come for the first time under my eye.”

Ezra Abbot asserts that Confucius gave the golden rule in positive
as well as negative form; see Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism,
222. This however seems to be denied by Dr. Legge, Religions of
China, 1-58. Wu Ting Fang, former Chinese minister to Washington,
assents to the statement that Confucius gave the golden rule only
in its negative form, and he says this difference is the
difference between a passive and an aggressive civilization, which
last is therefore dominant. The golden rule, as Confucius gives
it, is: “Do not unto others that which you would not they should
do unto you.” Compare with this, Isocrates: “Be to your parents
what you would have your children be to you.... Do not to others
the things which make you angry when others do them to you”;
Herodotus: “What I punish in another man, I will myself, as far as
I can, refrain from”; Aristotle: “We should behave toward our
friends as we should wish them to behave toward us”; Tobit,
4:15—“What thou hatest, do to no one”; Philo: “What one hates to
endure, let him not do”; Seneca bids us “give as we wish to
receive”; Rabbi Hillel: “Whatsoever is hateful to you, do not to
another; this is the whole law, and all the rest is explanation.”

Broadus, in Am. Com. on Matthew, 161—“The sayings of Confucius,
Isocrates, and the three Jewish teachers, are merely negative;
that of Seneca is confined to giving, and that of Aristotle to the
treatment of friends. Christ lays down a rule for positive action,
and that toward all men.” He teaches that I am bound to do to
others all that they could rightly desire me to do to them. The
golden rule therefore requires a supplement, to show what others
can rightly desire, namely, God’s glory first, and their good as
second and incidental thereto. Christianity furnishes this divine
and perfect standard; Confucianism is defective in that it has no
standard higher than human convention. While Confucianism excludes
polytheism, idolatry, and deification of vice, it is a shallow and
tantalizing system, because it does not recognize the hereditary
corruption of human nature, or furnish any remedy for moral evil
except the “doctrines of the sages.” “The heart of man,” it says,
“is naturally perfectly upright and correct.” Sin is simply “a
disease, to be cured by self-discipline; a debt, to be canceled by
meritorious acts; an ignorance, to be removed by study and
contemplation.” See Bib. Sac., 1883:292, 293; N. Englander,
1883:565; Marcus Dods, in Erasmus and other Essays, 239.

2. THE INDIAN SYSTEMS. _Brahmanism_, as expressed in the Vedas,
dates back to 1000-1500 B. C. As Caird (in Faiths of the World,
St. Giles Lectures, lecture 1) has shown, it originated in the
contemplation of the power in nature apart from the moral
Personality that works in and through nature. Indeed we may say
that all heathenism is man’s choice of a non-moral in place of a
moral God. Brahmanism is a system of pantheism, “a false or
illegitimate consecration of the finite.” All things are a
manifestation of Brahma. Hence evil is deified as well as good.
And many thousand gods are worshiped as partial representations of
the living principle which moves through all. “How many gods have
the Hindus?” asked Dr. Duff of his class. Henry Drummond thought
there were about twenty-five. “Twenty-five?” responded the
indignant professor; “twenty-five millions of millions!” While the
early Vedas present a comparatively pure nature-worship, later
Brahmanism becomes a worship of the vicious and the vile, of the
unnatural and the cruel. Juggernaut and the suttee did not belong
to original Hindu religion.

Bruce, Apologetics, 15—“Pantheism in theory always means
polytheism in practice.” The early Vedas are hopeful in spirit;
later Brahmanism is a religion of disappointment. Caste is fixed
and consecrated as a manifestation of God. Originally intended to
express, in its four divisions of priest, soldier, agriculturist,
slave, the different degrees of unworldliness and divine
indwelling, it becomes an iron fetter to prevent all aspiration
and progress. Indian religion sought to exalt receptivity, the
unity of existence, and rest from self-determination and its
struggles. Hence it ascribed to its gods the same character as
nature-forces. God was the common source of good and of evil. Its
ethics is an ethics of moral indifference. Its charity is a
charity for sin, and the temperance it desires is a temperance
that will let the intemperate alone. Mozoomdar, for example, is
ready to welcome everything in Christianity but its reproof of sin
and its demand for righteousness. Brahmanism degrades woman, but
it deifies the cow.

_Buddhism_, beginning with Buddha, 600 B. C., “recalls the mind to
its elevation above the finite,” from which Brahmanism had fallen
away. Buddha was in certain respects a reformer. He protested
against caste, and proclaimed that truth and morality are for all.
Hence Buddhism, through its possession of this one grain of truth,
appealed to the human heart, and became, next to Christianity, the
greatest missionary religion. Notice then, first, its
_universalism_. But notice also that this is a false universalism,
for it ignores individualism and leads to universal stagnation and
slavery. While Christianity is a religion of history, of will, of
optimism, Buddhism is a religion of illusion, of quietism, of
pessimism; see Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 107-109. In
characterizing Buddhism as a missionary religion, we must notice,
secondly, its element of _altruism_. But this altruism is one
which destroys the self, instead of preserving it. The future
Buddha, out of compassion for a famished tiger, permits the tiger
to devour him. “Incarnated as a hare, he jumps into the fire to
cook himself for a meal for a beggar,—having previously shaken
himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should
perish with him”; see William James, Varieties of Religious
Experience, 283. Buddha would deliver man, not by philosophy, nor
by asceticism, but by self-renunciation. All isolation and
personality are sin, the guilt of which rests, however, not on
man, but on existence in general.

While Brahmanism is pantheistic, Buddhism is atheistic in its
spirit. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:285—“The Brahmanic
Akosmism, that had explained the world as mere seeming, led to the
Buddhistic Atheism.” Finiteness and separateness are evil, and the
only way to purity and rest is by ceasing to exist. This is
essential pessimism. The highest morality is to endure that which
must be, and to escape from reality and from personal existence as
soon as possible. Hence the doctrine of _Nirvana_. Rhys Davids, in
his Hibbert Lectures, claims that early Buddhism meant by
_Nirvana_, not annihilation, but the extinction of the self-life,
and that this was attainable during man’s present mortal
existence. But the term _Nirvana_ now means, to the great mass of
those who use it, the loss of all personality and consciousness,
and absorption into the general life of the universe. Originally
the term denoted only freedom from individual desire, and those
who had entered into _Nirvana_ might again come out of it; see
Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 238. But even in its original form,
_Nirvana_ was sought only from a selfish motive. Self-renunciation
and absorption in the whole was not the enthusiasm of
benevolence,—it was the refuge of despair. It is a religion
without god or sacrifice. Instead of communion with a personal
God, Buddhism has in prospect only an extinction of personality,
as reward for untold ages of lonely self-conquest, extending
through many transmigrations. Of Buddha it has been truly said
“That all the all he had for needy man Was nothing, and his best
of being was But not to be.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 296—“He by
his own act dying all the time, In ceaseless effort utterly to
cease, Will willing not to will, desire desiring To be desire no
more, until at last The fugitive go free, emancipate But by
becoming naught.” Of Christ Bruce well says: “What a contrast this
Healer of disease and Preacher of pardon to the worst, to Buddha,
with his religion of despair!”

Buddhism is also fatalistic. It inculcates submission and
compassion—merely negative virtues. But it knows nothing of manly
freedom, or of active love—the positive virtues of Christianity.
It leads men to spare others, but not to help them. Its morality
revolves around self, not around God. It has in it no organizing
principle, for it recognizes no God, no inspiration, no soul, no
salvation, no personal immortality. Buddhism would save men only
by inducing them to flee from existence. To the Hindu, family life
involves sin. The perfect man must forsake wife and children. All
gratification of natural appetites and passions is evil. Salvation
is not from sin, but from desire, and from this men can be saved
only by escaping from life itself. Christianity buries sin, but
saves the man; Buddha would save the man by killing him.
Christianity symbolizes the convert’s entrance upon a new life by
raising him from the baptismal waters; the baptism of Buddhism
should be immersion without emersion. The fundamental idea of
Brahmanism, extinction of personality, remains the same in
Buddhism; the only difference being that the result is secured by
active atonement in the former, by passive contemplation in the
latter. Virtue, and the knowledge that everything earthly is a
vanishing spark of the original light, delivers man from existence
and from misery.

Prof. G. H. Palmer, of Harvard, in The Outlook, June 19,
1897—“Buddhism is unlike Christianity in that it abolishes misery
by abolishing desire; denies personality instead of asserting it;
has many gods, but no one God who is living and conscious; makes a
shortening of existence rather than a lengthening of it to be the
reward of righteousness. Buddhism makes no provision for family,
church, state, science, or art. It gives us a religion that is
little, when we want one that is large.” Dr. E. Benjamin Andrews:
“Schopenhauer and Spencer are merely teachers of Buddhism. They
regard the central source of all as unknowable force, instead of
regarding it as a Spirit, living and holy. This takes away all
impulse to scientific investigation. We need to start from a
Person, and not from a thing.”

For comparison of the sage of India, Sakya Muni, more commonly
called Buddha (properly “the Buddha” = the enlightened; but who,
in spite of Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia,” is represented as not
pure from carnal pleasures before he began his work), with Jesus
Christ, see Bib. Sac., July, 1882:458-498; W. C. Wilkinson, Edwin
Arnold, Poetizer and Paganizer; Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the
Light of the World. Buddhism and Christianity are compared in
Presb. Rev., July, 1883:505-548; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,
1:47-54; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 33. See also
Oldenberg, Buddha; Lillie, Popular Life of Buddha; Beal, Catena of
Buddhist Scriptures, 153—“Buddhism declares itself ignorant of any
mode of personal existence compatible with the idea of spiritual
perfection, and so far it is ignorant of God”; 157—“The earliest
idea of _Nirvana_ seems to have included in it no more than the
enjoyment of a state of rest consequent on the extinction of all
causes of sorrow.” The impossibility of satisfying the human heart
with a system of atheism is shown by the fact that the Buddha
himself has been apotheosized to furnish an object of worship.
Thus Buddhism has reverted to Brahmanism.

Monier Williams: “Mohammed has as much claim to be ‘the Light of
Asia’ as Buddha has. What light from Buddha? Not about the heart’s
depravity, or the origin of sin, or the goodness, justice,
holiness, fatherhood of God, or the remedy for sin, but only the
ridding self from suffering by ridding self from life—a doctrine
of merit, of self-trust, of pessimism, and annihilation of
personality.” Christ, himself personal, loving and holy, shows
that God is a person of holiness and love. Robert Browning: “He
that created love, shall not he love?” Only because Jesus is God,
have we a gospel for the world. The claim that Buddha is “the
Light of Asia” reminds one of the man who declared the moon to be
of greater value than the sun, because it gives light in the
darkness when it is needed, while the sun gives light in the
daytime when it is not needed.

3. THE GREEK SYSTEMS. _Pythagoras_ (584-504) based morality upon
the principle of numbers. “Moral good was identified with unity;
evil with multiplicity; virtue was harmony of the soul and its
likeness to God. The aim of life was to make it represent the
beautiful order of the Universe. The whole practical tendency of
Pythagoreanism was ascetic, and included a strict self-control and
an earnest culture.” Here already we seem to see the defect of
Greek morality in confounding the good with the beautiful, and in
making morality a mere self-development. Matheson, Messages of the
Old Religions: Greece reveals the intensity of the hour, the value
of the present life, the beauty of the world that now is. Its
religion is the religion of beautiful humanity. It anticipates the
new heaven and the new earth. Rome on the other hand stood for
union, incorporation, a universal kingdom. But its religion
deified only the Emperor, not all humanity. It was the religion,
not of love, but of power, and it identified the church with the
state.

_Socrates_ (469-400) made knowledge to be virtue. Morality
consisted in subordinating irrational desires to rational
knowledge. Although here we rise above a subjectively determined
good as the goal of moral effort, we have no proper sense of sin.
Knowledge, and not love, is the motive. If men know the right,
they will do the right. This is a great overvaluing of knowledge.
With Socrates, teaching is a sort of midwifery—not depositing
information in the mind, but drawing out the contents of our own
inner consciousness. Lewis Morris describes it as the life-work of
Socrates to “doubt our doubts away.” Socrates holds it right to
injure one’s enemies. He shows proud self-praise in his dying
address. He warns against pederasty, yet compromises with it. He
does not insist upon the same purity of family life which Homer
describes in Ulysses and Penelope. Charles Kingsley, in Alton
Locke, remarks that the spirit of the Greek tragedy was ’man
mastered by circumstance’; that of modern tragedy is “man
mastering circumstance.” But the Greek tragedians, while showing
man thus mastered, do still represent him as inwardly free, as in
the case of Prometheus, and this sense of human freedom and
responsibility appears to some extent in Socrates.

_Plato_ (430-348) held that morality is pleasure in the good, as
the truly beautiful, and that knowledge produces virtue. The good
is likeness to God,—here we have glimpses of an extra-human goal
and model. The body, like all matter, being inherently evil, is a
hindrance to the soul,—here we have a glimpse of hereditary
depravity. But Plato “reduced moral evil to the category of
natural evil.” He failed to recognize God as creator and master of
matter; failed to recognize man’s depravity as due to his own
apostasy from God; failed to found morality on the divine will
rather than on man’s own consciousness. He knew nothing of a
common humanity, and regarded virtue as only for the few. As there
was no common sin, so there was no common redemption. Plato
thought to reach God by intellect alone, when only conscience and
heart could lead to him. He believed in a freedom of the soul in a
preëxistent state where a choice was made between good and evil,
but he believed that, after that antemundane decision had been
made, the fates determined men’s acts and lives irreversibly.
Reason drives two horses, appetite and emotion, but their course
has been predetermined.

Man acts as reason prompts. All sin is ignorance. There is nothing
in this life but determinism. Martineau, Types, 13, 48, 49, 78,
88—Plato in general has no proper notion of responsibility; he
reduces moral evil to the category of natural evil. His Ideas with
one exception are not causes. Cause is mind, and mind is the Good.
The Good is the apex and crown of Ideas. The Good is the highest
Idea, and this highest Idea is a Cause. Plato has a feeble
conception of personality, whether in God or in man. Yet God is a
person in whatever sense man is a person, and man’s personality is
reflective self-consciousness. Will in God or man is not so clear.
The Right is dissolved into the Good. Plato advocated infanticide
and the killing off of the old and the helpless.

_Aristotle_ (384-322) leaves out of view even the element of
God-likeness and antemundane evil which Plato so dimly recognized,
and makes morality the fruit of mere rational self-consciousness.
He grants evil proclivities, but he refuses to call them immoral.
He advocates a certain freedom of will, and he recognizes inborn
tendencies which war against this freedom, but how these
tendencies originated he cannot say, nor how men may be delivered
from them. Not all can be moral; the majority must be restrained
by fear. He finds in God no motive, and love to God is not so much
as mentioned as the source of moral action. A proud, composed,
self-centered, and self-contained man is his ideal character. See
Nicomachean Ethics, 7:6, and 10:10; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,
1:92-126. Alexander, Theories of Will, 39-54—Aristotle held that
desire and reason are the springs of action. Yet he did not hold
that knowledge of itself would make men virtuous. He was a
determinist. Actions are free only in the sense of being devoid of
external compulsion. He viewed slavery as both rational and right.
Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 76—“While Aristotle attributed
to the State a more complete personality than it really possessed,
he did not grasp the depth and meaning of the personality of the
individual.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 289—Aristotle had
no conception of the unity of humanity. His doctrine of unity did
not extend beyond the State. “He said that ‘the whole is before
the parts,’ but he meant by ‘the whole’ only the pan-Hellenic
world, the commonwealth of Greeks; he never thought of humanity,
and the word ‘mankind’ never fell from his lips. He could not
understand the unity of humanity, because he knew nothing of
Christ, its organizing principle.” On Aristotle’s conception of
God, see James Ten Broeke, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892—God is
recognized as personal, yet he is only the Greek Reason, and not
the living, loving, providential Father of the Hebrew revelation.
Aristotle substitutes the logical for the dynamical in his dealing
with the divine causality. God is thought, not power.

_Epicurus_ (342-270) regarded happiness, the subjective feeling of
pleasure, as the highest criterion of truth and good. A prudent
calculating for prolonged pleasure is the highest wisdom. He
regards only this life. Concern for retribution and for a future
existence is folly. If there are gods, they have no concern for
men. “Epicurus, on pretense of consulting for their ease,
complimented the gods, and bowed them out of existence.” Death is
the falling apart of material atoms and the eternal cessation of
consciousness. The miseries of this life are due to imperfection
in the fortuitously constructed universe. The more numerous these
undeserved miseries, the greater our right to seek pleasure.
Alexander, Theories of the Will, 55-75—The Epicureans held that
the soul is composed of atoms, yet that the will is free. The
atoms of the soul are excepted from the law of cause and effect.
An atom may decline or deviate in the universal descent, and this
is the Epicurean idea of freedom. This indeterminism was held by
all the Greek sceptics, materialists though they were.

_Zeno_, the founder of the Stoic philosophy (340-264), regarded
virtue as the only good. Thought is to subdue nature. The free
spirit is self-legislating, self-dependent, self-sufficient.
Thinking, not feeling, is the criterion of the true and the good.
Pleasure is the consequence, not the end of moral action. There is
an irreconcilable antagonism of existence. Man cannot reform the
world, but he can make himself perfect. Hence an unbounded pride
in virtue. The sage never repents. There is not the least
recognition of the moral corruption of mankind. There is no
objective divine ideal, or revealed divine will. The Stoic
discovers moral law only within, and never suspects his own moral
perversion. Hence he shows self-control and justice, but never
humility or love. He needs no compassion or forgiveness, and he
grants none to others. Virtue is not an actively outworking
character, but a passive resistance to irrational reality. Man may
retreat into himself. The Stoic is indifferent to pleasure and
pain, not because he believes in a divine government, or in a
divine love for mankind, but as a proud defiance of the irrational
world. He has no need of God or of redemption. As the Epicurean
gives himself to enjoyment of the world, the Stoic gives himself
to contempt of the world. In all afflictions, each can say, “The
door is open.” To the Epicurean, the refuge is intoxication; to
the Stoic, the refuge is suicide: “If the house smokes, quit it.”
Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:62-161, from whom much of this account
of the Greeks systems is condensed, describes Epicureanism and
Stoicism as alike making morality subjective, although
Epicureanism regarded spirit as determined by nature, while
Stoicism regarded nature as determined by spirit.

The Stoics were materialists and pantheists. Though they speak of
a personal God, this is a figure of speech. False opinion is at
the root of all vice. Chrysippus denied what we now call the
liberty of indifference, saying that there could not be an effect
without a cause. Man is enslaved to passion. The Stoics could not
explain how a vicious man could become virtuous. The result is
apathy. Men act only according to character, and this a doctrine
of fate. The Stoic indifference or apathy in misfortune is not a
bearing of it at all, but rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is
in the actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds “the soul
of good.” The office of misfortune is disciplinary and purifying;
see Seth, Ethical Principles, 417. “The shadow of the sage’s self,
projected on vacancy, was called God, and, as the sage had long
since abandoned interest in practical life, he expected his
Divinity to do the same.”

The Stoic reverenced God just because of his unapproachable
majesty. Christianity sees in God a Father, a Redeemer, a carer
for our minute wants, a deliverer from our sin. It teaches us to
see in Christ the humanity of the divine, affinity with God, God’s
supreme interest in his handiwork. For the least of his creatures
Christ died. Kinship with God gives dignity to man. The
individuality that Stoicism lost in the whole, Christianity makes
the end of the creation. The State exists to develop and promote
it. Paul took up and infused new meaning into certain phrases of
the Stoic philosophy about the freedom and royalty of the wise
man, just as John adopted and glorified certain phrases of
Alexandrian philosophy about the Word. Stoicism was lonely and
pessimistic. The Stoics said that the best thing was not to be
born; the next best thing was to die. Because Stoicism had no God
of helpfulness and sympathy, its virtue was mere conformity to
nature, majestic egoism and self-complacency. In the Roman
_Epictetus_ (89), _Seneca_ (65), and _Marcus Aurelius_ (121-180),
the religious element comes more into the foreground, and virtue
appears once more as God-likeness; but it is possible that this
later Stoicism was influenced by Christianity. On Marcus Aurelius,
see New Englander, July, 1881:415-431; Capes, Stoicism.

4. SYSTEMS OF WESTERN ASIA. _Zoroaster_ (1000 B. C. ?), the
founder of the Parsees, was a dualist, at least so far as to
explain the existence of evil and of good by the original presence
in the author of all things of two opposing principles. Here is
evidently a limit put upon the sovereignty and holiness of God.
Man is not perfectly dependent upon him, nor is God’s will an
unconditional law for his creatures. As opposed to the Indian
systems, Zoroaster’s insistence upon the divine personality
furnished a far better basis for a vigorous and manly morality.
Virtue was to be won by hard struggle of free beings against evil.
But then, on the other hand, this evil was conceived as originally
due, not to finite beings themselves, but either to an evil deity
who warred against the good, or to an evil principle in the one
deity himself. The burden of guilt is therefore shifted from man
to his maker. Morality becomes subjective and unsettled. Not love
to God or imitation of God, but rather self-love and
self-development, furnish the motive and aim of morality. No
fatherhood or love is recognized in the deity, and other things
besides God (_e. g._, fire) are worshiped. There can be no depth
to the consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine deliverance.

It is the one merit of Parseeism that it recognizes the moral
conflict of the world; its error is that it carries this moral
conflict into the very nature of God. We can apply to Parseeism
the words of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards to the
Buddhists of Japan: “All religions are expressions of man’s sense
of dependence, but only one provides fellowship with God. All
religions speak of a higher truth, but only one speaks of that
truth as found in a loving personal God, our Father. All religions
show man’s helplessness, but only one tells of a divine Savior,
who offers to man forgiveness of sin, and salvation through his
death, and who is now a living person, working in and with all who
believe in him, to make them holy and righteous and pure.”
Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism
recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself.
Moral evil is reality; but there is no reconciliation, nor is it
shown that all things work together for good. See Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, 1:47-54; Faiths of the World (St. Giles
Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 25;
Whitney on the Avesta, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies.

_Mohammed_ (570-632 A. D.), the founder of Islam, gives us in the
Koran a system containing four dogmas of fundamental immorality,
namely, polygamy, slavery, persecution, and suppression of private
judgement. Mohammedanism is heathenism in monotheistic form. Its
good points are its conscientiousness and its relation to God. It
has prospered because it has preached the unity of God, and
because it is a book-religion. But both these it got from Judaism
and Christianity. It has appropriated the Old Testament saints and
even Jesus. But it denies the death of Christ and sees no need of
atonement. The power of sin is not recognized. The idea of sin, in
Moslems, is emptied of all positive content. Sin is simply a
falling short, accounted for by the weakness and shortsightedness
of man, inevitable in the fatalistic universe, or not remembered
in wrath by the indulgent and merciful Father. Forgiveness is
indulgence, and the conception of God is emptied of the quality of
justice. Evil belongs only to the individual, not to the race. Man
attains the favor of God by good works, based on prophetic
teaching. Morality is not a fruit of salvation, but a means. There
is no penitence or humility, but only self-righteousness; and this
self-righteousness is consistent with great sensuality, unlimited
divorce, and with absolute despotism in family, civil and
religious affairs. There is no knowledge of the fatherhood of God
or of the brotherhood of man. In all the Koran, there is no such
declaration as that “God so loved the world”_ (John 3:16)_.

The submission of Islam is submission to an arbitrary will, not to
a God of love. There is no basing of morality in love. The highest
good is the sensuous happiness of the individual. God and man are
external to one another. Mohammed is a teacher but not a priest.
Mozley, Miracles, 140, 141—“Mohammed had no faith in human nature.
There were two things which he thought men could do, and would do,
for the glory of God—transact religious _forms_, and _fight_, and
upon these two points he was severe; but within the sphere of
common practical life, where man’s great trial lies, his code
exhibits the disdainful laxity of a legislator who accomodates his
rule to the recipient, and shows his estimate of the recipient by
the accommodation which he adopts.... ‘Human nature is weak,’ said
he.” Lord Houghton: The Koran is all wisdom, all law, all
religion, for all time. Dead men bow before a dead God. “Though
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.” Wherever Mohammedanism has gone, it has either
found a desert or made one. Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Dec.
1882:866—“The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey is to
abandon progress.” Muir, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no.
14—“Mohammedanism reduces men to a dead level of social
depression, despotism, and semi-barbarism. Islam is the work of
man; Christianity of God.” See also Faiths of the World (St. Giles
Lectures, Second Series), 361-396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great
Religions, 1:448-488; 280-317; Great Religions of the World,
published by the Harpers; Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

3. The person and character of Christ.

A. The conception of Christ’s person as presenting deity and humanity
indissolubly united, and the conception of Christ’s character, with its
faultless and all-comprehending excellence, cannot be accounted for upon
any other hypothesis than that they were historical realities.

The stylobate of the Parthenon at Athens rises about three inches
in the middle of the 101 feet of the front, and four inches in the
middle of the 228 feet of the flanks. A nearly parallel line is
found in the entablature. The axes of the columns lean inward
nearly three inches in their height of 34 feet, thus giving a sort
of pyramidal character to the structure. Thus the architect
overcame the apparent sagging of horizontal lines, and at the same
time increased the apparent height of the edifice; see Murray,
Handbook of Greece, 5th ed., 1884, 1:308, 309; Ferguson, Handbook
of Architecture, 268-270. The neglect to counteract this optical
illusion has rendered the Madeleine in Paris a stiff and
ineffective copy of the Parthenon. The Galilean peasant who should
minutely describe these peculiarities of the Parthenon would
prove, not only that the edifice was a historical reality, but
that he had actually seen it. Bruce, Apologetics, 343—“In reading
the memoirs of the evangelists, you feel as one sometimes feels in
a picture-gallery. Your eye alights on the portrait of a person
whom you do not know. You look at it intently for a few moments
and then remark to a companion: ‘That must be like the
original,—it is so life-like.’ ” Theodore Parker: “It would take a
Jesus to forge a Jesus.” See Row, Bampton Lectures, 1877:178-219,
and in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 22; F. W. Farrar, Witness of
History to Christ; Barry, Boyle Lecture on Manifold Witness for
Christ.

(_a_) No source can be assigned from which the evangelists could have
derived such a conception. The Hindu avatars were only temporary unions of
deity with humanity. The Greeks had men half-deified, but no unions of God
and man. The monotheism of the Jews found the person of Christ a perpetual
stumbling-block. The Essenes were in principle more opposed to
Christianity than the Rabbinists.

Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, 279—“The coëxistence of a perfect
man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two
coëxist, the resulting conduct would not furnish the ethical
standard sought.” We must conclude that the perfect manhood of
Christ is a miracle, and the greatest of miracles. Bruce,
Apologetics, 346, 351—“When Jesus asks: ‘Why callest thou me
good?’ he means: ‘Learn first what goodness is, and call no man
good till you are sure that he deserves it.’ Jesus’ goodness was
entirely free from religious scrupulosity; it was distinguished by
humanity; it was full of modesty and lowliness.... Buddhism has
flourished 2000 years, though little is known of its founder.
Christianity might have been so perpetuated, but it is not so. I
want to be sure that the ideal has been embodied in an actual
life. Otherwise it is only poetry, and the obligation to conform
to it ceases.” For comparison of Christ’s incarnation with Hindu,
Greek, Jewish, and Essene ideas, see Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of
Christ, Introduction. On the Essenes, see Herzog, Encyclop., art,:
Essener; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, Life, Times and Work, 84-87;
Lightfoot on Colossians, 349-419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of
the Christian Faith.

(_b_) No mere human genius, and much less the genius of Jewish fishermen,
could have originated this conception. Bad men invent only such characters
as they sympathize with. But Christ’s character condemns badness. Such a
portrait could not have been drawn without supernatural aid. But such aid
would not have been given to fabrication. The conception can be explained
only by granting that Christ’s person and character were historical
realities.

Between Pilate and Titus 30,000 Jews are said to have been
crucified around the walls of Jerusalem. Many of these were young
men. What makes one of them stand out on the pages of history?
There are two answers: The character of Jesus was a perfect
character, and, He was God as well as man. Gore, Incarnation,
63—“The Christ of the gospels, if he be not true to history,
represents a combined effort of the creative imagination without
parallel in literature. But the literary characteristics of
Palestine in the first century make the hypothesis of such an
effort morally impossible.” The Apocryphal gospels show us what
mere imagination was capable of producing. That the portrait of
Christ is not puerile, inane, hysterical, selfishly assertive, and
self-contradictory, can be due only to the fact that it is the
photograph from real life.

For a remarkable exhibition of the argument from the character of
Jesus, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332.
Bushnell mentions the originality and vastness of Christ’s plan,
yet its simplicity and practical adaptation; his moral traits of
independence, compassion, meekness, wisdom, zeal, humility,
patience; the combination in him of seemingly opposite qualities.
With all his greatness, he was condescending and simple; he was
unworldly, yet not austere; he had strong feelings, yet was
self-possessed; he had indignation toward sin, yet compassion
toward the sinner; he showed devotion to his work, yet calmness
under opposition; universal philanthropy, yet susceptibility to
private attachments; the authority of a Savior and Judge, yet the
gratitude and the tenderness of a son; the most elevated devotion,
yet a life of activity and exertion. See chapter on The Moral
Miracle, in Bruce, Miraculous Element of the Gospels, 43-78.

B. The acceptance and belief in the New Testament descriptions of Jesus
Christ cannot be accounted for except upon the ground that the person and
character described had an actual existence.

(_a_) If these descriptions were false, there were witnesses still living
who had known Christ and who would have contradicted them. (_b_) There was
no motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts, but every motive to
the contrary. (_c_) The success of such falsehoods could be explained only
by supernatural aid, but God would never have thus aided falsehood. This
person and character, therefore, must have been not fictitious but real;
and if real, then Christ’s words are true, and the system of which his
person and character are a part is a revelation from God.

“The counterfeit may for a season Deceive the wide earth; But the
lie waxing great comes to labor, And truth has its birth.” Matthew
Arnold, The Better Part: “Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us
see, If we then too can be Such men as he!” When the blatant
sceptic declared: “I do not believe that such a man as Jesus
Christ ever lived,” George Warren merely replied: “I wish I were
like him!” Dwight L. Moody was called a hypocrite, but the
stalwart evangelist answered: “Well, suppose I am. How does that
make your case any better? I know some pretty mean things about
myself; but you cannot say anything against my Master.” Goethe:
“Let the culture of the spirit advance forever; let the human
spirit broaden itself as it will; yet it will never go beyond the
height and moral culture of Christianity, as it glitters and
shines in the gospels.”

Renan, Life of Jesus: “Jesus founded the absolute religion,
excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence.... The
foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him,
there is nothing left but to develop and fructify.” And a
Christian scholar has remarked: “It is an astonishing proof of the
divine guidance vouchsafed to the evangelists that no man, of
their time or since, has been able to touch the picture of Christ
without debasing it.” We may find an illustration of this in the
words of Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 207—“Jesus’ doctrine
of marriage was ascetic, his doctrine of property was communistic,
his doctrine of charity was sentimental, his doctrine of
non-resistance was such as commends itself to Tolstoi, but not to
many others of our time. With the example of Jesus, it is the same
as with his teachings. Followed unreservedly, would it not justify
those who say: ‘The hope of the race is in its extinction’; and
bring all our joys and sorrows to a sudden end?” To this we may
answer in the words of Huxley, who declares that Jesus Christ is
“the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind has yet worshiped.”
Gordon, Christ of To-Day, 179—“The question is not whether Christ
is good enough to represent the Supreme Being, but whether the
Supreme Being is good enough to have Christ for his
representative. John Stuart Mill looks upon the Christian religion
as the worship of Christ, rather than the worship of God, and in
this way he explains the beneficence of its influence.”

John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 254—“The most valuable part
of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced, by
holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model
for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and
can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than
God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of
perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the
God of the Jews or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so
great and salutary hold on the modern mind. And whatever else may
be taken away from us by rational 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 personal
preaching.... Who among his disciples, or among their proselytes,
was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of
imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels?... About
the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal
originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we
abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where
something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of
Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in
his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime
genius of whom our species can boast. When this preëminent genius
is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral
reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth,
religion 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 virtue from the abstract into
the concrete than the endeavor so to live that Christ would
approve our life. When to this we add that, to the conception of
the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ
actually was ... a man charged with a special, express and unique
commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may
well conclude that the influences of religion on the character,
which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost
against the evidences of religion, are well worth preserving, and
that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a
firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and
rectitude of the morality they sanction.” See also Ullmann,
Sinlessness of Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-157;
Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ in History; George
Dana Boardman, The Problem of Jesus.

4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a messenger from God and as
being one with God.

Only one personage in history has claimed to teach absolute truth, to be
one with God, and to attest his divine mission by works such as only God
could perform.

A. This testimony cannot be accounted for upon the hypothesis that Jesus
was an intentional deceiver: for (_a_) the perfectly consistent holiness
of his life; (_b_) the unwavering confidence with which he challenged
investigation of his claims and staked all upon the result; (_c_) the vast
improbability of a lifelong lie in the avowed interests of truth; and
(_d_) the impossibility that deception should have wrought such blessing
to the world,—all show that Jesus was no conscious impostor.

Fisher, Essays on the Supernat. Origin of Christianity,
515-538—Christ knew how vast his claims were, yet he staked all
upon them. Though others doubted, he never doubted himself. Though
persecuted unto death, he never ceased his consistent testimony.
Yet he lays claim to humility: _Mat. 11:29—_“I am meek and lowly
in heart.” How can we reconcile with humility his constant
self-assertion? We answer that Jesus’ self-assertion was
absolutely essential to his mission, for he and the truth were
one: he could not assert the truth without asserting himself, and
he could not assert himself without asserting the truth. Since he
was the truth, he needed to say so, for men’s sake and for the
truth’s sake, and he could be meek and lowly in heart in saying
so. Humility is not self-depreciation, but only the judging of
ourselves according to God’s perfect standard. “Humility” is
derived from “_humus_”. It is the coming down from airy and vain
self-exploitation to the solid ground, the hard-pan, of actual
fact.

God requires of us only so much humility as is consistent with
truth. The self-glorification of the egotist is nauseating,
because it indicates gross ignorance or misrepresentation of self.
But it is a duty to be self-asserting, just so far as we represent
the truth and righteousness of God. There is a noble
self-assertion which is perfectly consistent with humility. Job
must stand for his integrity. Paul’s humility was not of the Uriah
Heep variety. When occasion required, he could assert his manhood
and his rights, as at Philippi and at the Castle of Antonia. So
the Christian should frankly say out the truth that is in him.
Each Christian has an experience of his own, and should tell it to
others. In testifying to the truth he is only following the
example of “Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the
good confession”_ (1 Tim. 6:13)_.

B. Nor can Jesus’ testimony to himself be explained upon the hypothesis
that he was self-deceived: for this would argue (_a_) a weakness and folly
amounting to positive insanity. But his whole character and life exhibit a
calmness, dignity, equipoise, insight, self-mastery, utterly inconsistent
with such a theory. Or it would argue (_b_) a self-ignorance and
self-exaggeration which could spring only from the deepest moral
perversion. But the absolute purity of his conscience, the humility of his
spirit, the self-denying beneficence of his life, show this hypothesis to
be incredible.

Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 39—If he were man, then to
demand that all the world should bow down to him would be worthy
of scorn like that which we feel for some straw-crowned monarch of
Bedlam. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 22,
76—Christ never united with his disciples in prayer. He went up
into the mountain to pray, but not to pray _with them_: _Luke
9:18—_“as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him.” The
consciousness of preëxistence is the indispensable precondition of
the total demand which he makes in the Synoptics. Adamson, The
Mind in Christ, 81, 82—We value the testimony of Christians to
their communion with God. Much more should we value the testimony
of Christ. Only one who, first being divine, also knew that he was
divine, could reveal heavenly things with the clearness and
certainty that belong to the utterances of Jesus. In him we have
something very different from the momentary flashes of insight
which leave us in all the greater darkness.

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 5—“Self-respect is bottomed upon the
ability to become what one desires to be; and, if the ability
steadily falls short of the task, the springs of self-respect dry
up; the motives of happy and heroic action wither. Science, art,
generous civic life, and especially religion, come to man’s
rescue,”—showing him his true greatness and breadth of being in
God. The State is the individual’s larger self. Humanity, and even
the universe, are parts of him. It is the duty of man to enable
all men to be men. It is possible for men not only truthfully but
also rationally to assert themselves, even in earthly affairs.
Chatham to the Duke of Devonshire: “My Lord, I believe I can save
this country, and that no one else can.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his
thirtieth year, to the Duke of Milan: “I can carry through every
kind of work in sculpture, in clay, marble, and bronze; also in
painting I can execute everything that can be demanded, as well as
any one whosoever.”

Horace: “Exegi monumentum ære perennius.” Savage, Life beyond
Death, 209—A famous old minister said once, when a young and
zealous enthusiast tried to get him to talk, and failing, burst
out with, “Have you no religion at all?” “None _to speak of_,” was
the reply. When Jesus perceived a tendency in his disciples to
self-glorification, he urged silence; but when he saw the tendency
to introspection and inertness, he bade them proclaim what he had
done for them (_Mat. 8:4_; _Mark 5:19_). It is never right for the
Christian to proclaim himself; but, if Christ had not proclaimed
himself, the world could never have been saved. Rush Rhees. Life
of Jesus of Nazareth, 235-237—“In the teaching of Jesus, two
topics have the leading place—the Kingdom of God, and himself. He
sought to be Lord, rather than Teacher only. Yet the Kingdom is
not one of power, national and external, but one of fatherly love
and of mutual brotherhood.”

Did Jesus do anything for effect, or as a mere example? Not so.
His baptism had meaning for him as a consecration of himself to
death for the sins of the world, and his washing of the disciples’
feet was the fit beginning of the paschal supper and the symbol of
his laying aside his heavenly glory to purify us for the marriage
supper of the Lamb. Thomas à Kempis: “Thou art none the holier
because thou art praised, and none the worse because thou art
censured. What thou art, that thou art, and it avails thee naught
to be called any better than thou art in the sight of God.” Jesus’
consciousness of his absolute sinlessness and of his perfect
communion with God is the strongest of testimonies to his divine
nature and mission. See Theological Eclectic, 4:137; Liddon, Our
Lord’s Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, 253; Young,
Christ of History; Divinity of Jesus Christ, by Andover
Professors, 37-62.

If Jesus, then, cannot be charged with either mental or moral unsoundness,
his testimony must be true, and he himself must be one with God and the
revealer of God to men.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha claimed to be divine, or the organs
of divine revelation, though both were moral teachers and
reformers. Zoroaster and Pythagoras apparently believed themselves
charged with a divine mission, though their earliest biographers
wrote centuries after their death. Socrates claimed nothing for
himself which was beyond the power of others. Mohammed believed
his extraordinary states of body and soul to be due to the action
of celestial beings; he gave forth the Koran as “a warning to all
creatures,” and sent a summons to the King of Persia and the
Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other potentates, to
accept the religion of Islam; yet he mourned when he died that he
could not have opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Koran
and of his own life. For Confucius or Buddha, Zoroaster or
Pythagoras, Socrates or Mohammed to claim all power in heaven and
earth, would show insanity or moral perversion. But this is
precisely what Jesus claimed. He was either mentally or morally
unsound, or his testimony is true. See Baldensperger,
Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; E. Ballentine, Christ his own Witness.

IV. The Historical Results of the Propagation of Scripture Doctrine.

1. _The rapid progress of the gospel in the first centuries of our era
shows its divine origin._

A. That Paganism should have been in three centuries supplanted by
Christianity, is an acknowledged wonder of history.

The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity was the most
astonishing revolution of faith and worship ever known. Fifty
years after the death of Christ, there were churches in all the
principal cities of the Roman Empire. Nero (37-68) found (as
Tacitus declares) an “ingens multitudo” of Christians to
persecute. Pliny writes to Trajan (52-117) that they “pervaded not
merely the cities but the villages and country places, so that the
temples were nearly deserted.” Tertullian (160-230) writes: “We
are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your places, your
cities, your islands, your castles, your towns, your
council-houses, even your camps, your tribes, your senate, your
forum. We have left you nothing but your temples.” In the time of
the emperor Valerian (253-268), the Christians constituted half
the population of Rome. The conversion of the emperor Constantine
(272-337) brought the whole empire, only 300 years after Jesus’
death, under the acknowledged sway of the gospel. See McIlvaine
and Alexander, Evidences of Christianity.

B. The wonder is the greater when we consider the obstacles to the
progress of Christianity:

(_a_) The scepticism of the cultivated classes; (_b_) the prejudice and
hatred of the common people; and (_c_) the persecutions set on foot by
government.

(_a_) Missionaries even now find it difficult to get a hearing
among the cultivated classes of the heathen. But the gospel
appeared in the most enlightened age of antiquity—the Augustan age
of literature and historical inquiry. Tacitus called the religion
of Christ “exitiabilis superstitio”—“quos per flagitia invisos
vulgus Christianos appellabat.” Pliny: “Nihil aliud inveni quam
superstitionem pravam et immodicam.” If the gospel had been false,
its preachers would not have ventured into the centres of
civilization and refinement; or if they had, they would have been
detected. (_b)_ Consider the interweaving of heathen religions
with all the relations of life. Christians often had to meet the
furious zeal and blind rage of the mob,—as at Lystra and Ephesus.
(_c_) Rawlinson, in his Historical Evidences, claims that the
Catacombs of Rome comprised nine hundred miles of streets and
seven millions of graves within a period of four hundred years—a
far greater number than could have died a natural death—and that
vast multitudes of these must have been massacred for their faith.
The Encyclopædia Britannica, however, calls the estimate of De
Marchi, which Rawlinson appears to have taken as authority, a
great exaggeration. Instead of nine hundred miles of streets,
Northcote has three hundred fifty. The number of interments to
correspond would be less than three millions. The Catacombs began
to be deserted by the time of Jerome. The times when they were
universally used by Christians could have been hardly more than
two hundred years. They did not begin in sand-pits. There were
three sorts of tufa: (1) rocky, used for quarrying and too hard
for Christian purposes; (2) sandy, used for sand-pits, too soft to
permit construction of galleries and tombs; (3) granular, that
used by Christians. The existence of the Catacombs must have been
well known to the heathen. After Pope Damasus the exaggerated
reverence for them began. They were decorated and improved. Hence
many paintings are of later date than 400, and testify to papal
polity, not to that of early Christianity. The bottles contain,
not blood, but wine of the eucharist celebrated at the funeral.

Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 256-258, calls attention
to Matthew Arnold’s description of the needs of the heathen world,
yet his blindness to the true remedy: “On that hard pagan world
disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell. In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The
Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the
Appian Way; He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned
his hair with flowers,—No easier nor no quicker passed The
impracticable hours.” Yet with mingled pride and sadness, Mr.
Arnold fastidiously rejects more heavenly nutriment. Of Christ he
says: “Now he is dead! Far hence he lies, In the lorn Syrian town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.”
He sees that the millions “Have such need of joy, And joy whose
grounds are true, And joy that should all hearts employ As when
the past was new!” The want of the world is: “One mighty wave of
thought and joy, Lifting mankind amain.” But the poet sees no
ground of hope: “Fools! that so often here, Happiness mocked our
prayer, I think might make us fear A like event elsewhere,—Make us
not fly to dreams, But moderate desire.” He sings of the time when
Christianity was young: “Oh, had I lived in that great day, How
had its glory new Filled earth and heaven, and caught away My
ravished spirit too!” But desolation of spirit does not bring with
it any lowering of self-esteem, much less the humility which
deplores the presence and power of evil in the soul, and sighs for
deliverance. “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but
they that are sick”_ (Mat. 9:12)_. Rejecting Christ, Matthew
Arnold embodies in his verse “the sweetness, the gravity, the
strength, the beauty, and the languor of death” (Hutton, Essays,
302).

C. The wonder becomes yet greater when we consider the natural
insufficiency of the means used to secure this progress.

(_a_) The proclaimers of the gospel were in general unlearned men,
belonging to a despised nation. (_b_) The gospel which they proclaimed was
a gospel of salvation through faith in a Jew who had been put to an
ignominious death. (_c_) This gospel was one which excited natural
repugnance, by humbling men’s pride, striking at the root of their sins,
and demanding a life of labor and self-sacrifice. (_d_) The gospel,
moreover, was an exclusive one, suffering no rival and declaring itself to
be the universal and only religion.

(_a_) The early Christians were more unlikely to make converts
than modern Jews are to make proselytes, in vast numbers, in the
principal cities of Europe and America. Celsus called Christianity
“a religion of the rabble.” (_b_) The cross was the Roman
gallows—the punishment of slaves. Cicero calls it “servitutis
extremum summumque supplicium.” (_c_) There were many bad
religions: why should the mild Roman Empire have persecuted the
only good one? The answer is in part: Persecution did not
originate with the official classes; it proceeded really from the
people at large. Tacitus called Christians “haters of the human
race.” Men recognized in Christianity a foe to all their previous
motives, ideals, and aims. Altruism would break up the old
society, for every effort that centered in self or in the present
life was stigmatized by the gospel as unworthy. (_d_) Heathenism,
being without creed or principle, did not care to propagate
itself. “A man must be very weak,” said Celsus, “to imagine that
Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and Libya, can ever unite
under the same system of religion.” So the Roman government would
allow no religion which did not participate in the worship of the
State. “Keep yourselves from idols,” “We worship no other God,”
was the Christian’s answer. Gibbon, Hist. Decline and Fall, 1:
chap. 15, mentions as secondary causes: (1) the zeal of the Jews;
(2) the doctrine of immortality; (3) miraculous powers; (4)
virtues of early Christians; (5) privilege of participation in
church government. But these causes were only secondary, and all
would have been insufficient without an invincible persuasion of
the truth of Christianity. For answer to Gibbon, see Perrone,
Prelectiones Theologicæ, 1:133.

Persecution destroys falsehood by leading its advocates to
investigate the grounds of their belief; but it strengthens and
multiplies truth by leading its advocates to see more clearly the
foundations of their faith. There have been many conscientious
persecutors: _John 16:2—_“They shall put you out of the
synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall
think that he offereth service unto God.” The Decretal of Pope
Urban II reads: “For we do not count them to be homicides, to whom
it may have happened, through their burning zeal against the
excommunicated, to put any of them to death.” St. Louis, King of
France, urged his officers “not to argue with the infidel, but to
subdue unbelievers by thrusting the sword into them as far as it
will go.” Of the use of the rack in England on a certain occasion,
it was said that it was used with all the tenderness which the
nature of the instrument would allow. This reminds us of Isaak
Walton’s instruction as to the use of the frog: “Put the hook
through his mouth and out at his gills; and, in so doing, use him
as though you loved him.”

Robert Browning, in his Easter Day, 275-288, gives us what
purports to be A Martyr’s Epitaph, inscribed upon a wall of the
Catacombs, which furnishes a valuable contrast to the sceptical
and pessimistic strain of Matthew Arnold: “I was born sickly, poor
and mean, A slave: no misery could screen The holders of the pearl
of price from Cæsar’s envy: therefore twice I fought with beasts,
and three times saw My children suffer by his law; At length my
own release was earned: I was some time in being burned, But at
the close a Hand came through The fire above my head, and drew My
soul to Christ, whom now I see. Sergius, a brother, writes for me
This testimony on the wall—For me, I have forgot it all.”

The progress of a religion so unprepossessing and uncompromising to
outward acceptance and dominion, within the space of three hundred years,
cannot be explained without supposing that divine power attended its
promulgation, and therefore that the gospel is a revelation from God.

Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:527—“In the Kremlin Cathedral,
whenever the Metropolitan advanced from the altar to give his
blessing, there was always thrown under his feet a carpet
embroidered with the eagle of old Pagan Rome, to indicate that the
Christian Church and Empire of Constantinople had succeeded and
triumphed over it.” On this whole section, see F. W. Farrar,
Witness of History to Christ, 91; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy
Scripture, 139.

2. _The beneficent influence of the Scripture doctrines and precepts,
wherever they have had sway, shows their divine origin._ Notice:

A. Their influence on civilization in general, securing a recognition of
principles which heathenism ignored, such as Garbett mentions: (_a_) the
importance of the individual; (_b_) the law of mutual love; (_c_) the
sacredness of human life; (_d_) the doctrine of internal holiness; (_e_)
the sanctity of home; (_f_) monogamy, and the religious equality of the
sexes; (_g_) identification of belief and practice.

The continued corruption of heathen lands shows that this change is not
due to any laws of merely natural progress. The confessions of ancient
writers show that it is not due to philosophy. Its only explanation is
that the gospel is the power of God.

Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 177-186; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History
to Christ, chap. on Christianity and the Individual; Brace, Gesta
Christi, preface, vi—“Practices and principles implanted,
stimulated or supported by Christianity, such as regard for the
personality of the weakest and poorest; respect for woman; duty of
each member of the fortunate classes to raise up the unfortunate;
humanity to the child, the prisoner, the stranger, the needy, and
even to the brute; unceasing opposition to all forms of cruelty,
oppression and slavery; the duty of personal purity, and the
sacredness of marriage; the necessity of temperance; obligation of
a more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater
coöperation between employers and employed; the right of every
human being to have the utmost opportunity of developing his
faculties, and of all persons to enjoy equal political and social
privileges; the principle that the injury of one nation is the
injury of all, and the expediency and duty of unrestricted trade
and intercourse between all countries; and finally, a profound
opposition to war, a determination to limit its evils when
existing, and to prevent its arising by means of international
arbitration.”

Max Müller: “The concept of humanity is the gift of Christ.”
Guizot, History of Civilization, 1: Introd., tells us that in
ancient times the individual existed for the sake of the State; in
modern times the State exists for the sake of the individual. “The
individual is a discovery of Christ.” On the relations between
Christianity and Political Economy, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy
and Religion, pages 443-460; on the cause of the changed view with
regard to the relation of the individual to the State, see page
207—“What has wrought the change? Nothing but the death of the Son
of God. When it was seen that the smallest child and the lowest
slave had a soul of such worth that Christ left his throne and
gave up his life to save it, the world’s estimate of values
changed, and modern history began.” Lucian, the Greek satirist and
humorist, 160 A. D., said of the Christians: “Their first
legislator [Jesus] has put it into their heads that they are all
brothers.”

It is this spirit of common brotherhood which has led in most
countries to the abolition of cannibalism, infanticide,
widow-burning, and slavery. Prince Bismarck: “For social
well-being I ask nothing more than Christianity without
phrases”—which means the religion of the deed rather than of the
creed. Yet it is only faith in the historic revelation of God in
Christ which has made Christian deeds possible. Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 232-278—Aristotle, if he could look over
society to-day, would think modern man a new species, in his going
out in sympathy to distant peoples. This cannot be the result of
natural selection, for self-sacrifice is not profitable to the
individual. Altruistic emotions owe their existence to God.
Worship of God has flowed back upon man’s emotions and has made
them more sympathetic. Self-consciousness and sympathy, coming
into conflict with brute emotions, originate the sense of sin.
Then begins the war of the natural and the spiritual. Love of
nature and absorption in others is the true _Nirvana_. Not
physical science, but the humanities, are most needed in
education.

H. E. Hersey, Introd. to Browning’s Christmas Eve, 19— “Sidney
Lanier tells us that the last twenty centuries have spent their
best power upon the development of personality. Literature,
education, government, and religion, have learned to recognize the
individual as the unit of force. Browning goes a step further. He
declares that so powerful is a complete personality that its very
touch gives life and courage and potency. He turns to history for
the inspiration of enduring virtue and the stimulus for sustained
effort, and he finds both in Jesus Christ.” J. P. Cooke,
Credentials of Science, 43—The change from the ancient philosopher
to the modern investigator is the change from self-assertion to
self-devotion, and the great revolution can be traced to the
influence of Christianity and to the spirit of humility exhibited
and inculcated by Christ. Lewes, Hist. Philos., 1:408—Greek
morality never embraced any conception of humanity; no Greek ever
attained to the sublimity of such a point of view.

Kidd, Social Evolution, 165, 287—It is not intellect that has
pushed forward the world of modern times: it is the altruistic
feeling that originated in the cross and sacrifice of Christ. The
French Revolution was made possible by the fact that humanitarian
ideas had undermined the upper classes themselves, and effective
resistance was impossible. Socialism would abolish the struggle
for existence on the part of individuals. What security would be
left for social progress? Removing all restrictions upon
population ensures progressive deterioration. A non-socialist
community would outstrip a socialist community where all the main
wants of life were secure. The real tendency of society is to
bring all the people into _rivalry_, not only on a footing of
political equality, but on conditions of equal social
opportunities. The State in future will interfere and control, in
order to preserve or secure free competition, rather than to
suspend it. The goal is not socialism or State management, but
competition in which all shall have equal advantages. The
evolution of human society is not primarily intellectual but
religious. The winning races are the religious races. The Greeks
had more intellect, but we have more civilization and progress.
The Athenians were as far above us as we are above the negro race.
Gladstone said that we are intellectually weaker than the men of
the middle ages. When the intellectual development of any section
of the race has for the time being outrun its ethical development,
natural selection has apparently weeded it out, like any other
unsuitable product. Evolution is developing _reverence_, with its
allied qualities, mental energy, resolution, enterprise, prolonged
and concentrated application, simple minded and single minded
devotion to duty. Only religion can overpower selfishness and
individualism and ensure social progress.

B. Their influence upon individual character and happiness, wherever they
have been tested in practice. This influence is seen (_a_) in the moral
transformations they have wrought—as in the case of Paul the apostle, and
of persons in every Christian community; (_b_) in the self-denying labors
for human welfare to which they have led—as in the case of Wilberforce and
Judson; (_c_) in the hopes they have inspired in times of sorrow and
death.

These beneficent fruits cannot have their source in merely natural causes,
apart from the truth and divinity of the Scriptures; for in that case the
contrary beliefs would be accompanied by the same blessings. But since we
find these blessings only in connection with Christian teaching, we may
justly consider this as their cause. This teaching, then, must be true,
and the Scriptures must be a divine revelation. Else God has made a lie to
be the greatest blessing to the race.

The first Moravian missionaries to the West Indies walked six
hundred miles to take ship, worked their passage, and then sold
themselves as slaves, in order to get the privilege of preaching
to the negroes.... The father of John G. Paton was a
stocking-weaver. The whole family, with the exception of the very
small children, worked from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m., with one hour for
dinner at noon and a half hour each for breakfast and supper. Yet
family prayer was regularly held twice a day. In these
breathing-spells for daily meals John G. Paton took part of his
time to study the Latin Grammar, that he might prepare himself for
missionary work. When told by an uncle that, if he went to the New
Hebrides, the cannibals would eat him, he replied: “You yourself
will soon be dead and buried, and I had as lief be eaten by
cannibals as by worms.” The Aneityumese raised arrow-root for
fifteen years and sold it to pay the £1200 required for printing
the Bible in their own language. Universal church-attendance and
Bible-study make those South Sea Islands the most heavenly place
on earth on the Sabbath-day.

In 1839, twenty thousand negroes in Jamaica gathered to begin a
life of freedom. Into a coffin were put the handcuffs and shackles
of slavery, relics of the whipping-post and the scourge. As the
clock struck twelve at night, a preacher cried with the first
stroke: “The monster is dying!” and so with every stroke until the
last, when he cried: “The monster is dead!” Then all rose from
their knees and sang: “Praise God from whom all blessings
flow!”... “What do you do that for?” said the sick Chinaman whom
the medical missionary was tucking up in bed with a care which the
patient had never received since he was a baby. The missionary
took the opportunity to tell him of the love of Christ.... The
aged Australian mother, when told that her two daughters,
missionaries in China, had both of them been murdered by a heathen
mob, only replied: “This decides me; I will go to China now
myself, and try to teach those poor creatures what the love of
Jesus means.”... Dr. William Ashmore: “Let one missionary die, and
ten come to his funeral.” A shoemaker, teaching neglected boys and
girls while he worked at his cobbler’s bench, gave the impulse to
Thomas Guthrie’s life of faith.

We must judge religions not by their ideals, but by their
performances. Omar Khayyam and Mozoomdar give us beautiful
thoughts, but the former is not Persia, nor is the latter India.
“When the microscopic search of scepticism, which has hunted the
heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a
Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found
on this planet a place ten miles square where a decent man can
live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating
his children, unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is
reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood
honored, and human life held in due regard—when sceptics can find
such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of
Christ has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations
and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order
for the sceptical literati to move thither and to ventilate their
views. But so long as these very men are dependent upon the very
religion they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may
well hesitate before they rob the Christian of his hope and
humanity of its faith in that Savior who alone has given that hope
of eternal life which makes life tolerable and society possible,
and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.” On the
beneficent influence of the gospel, see Schmidt, Social Results of
Early Christianity; D. J. Hill, The Social Influence of
Christianity.

Chapter III. Inspiration Of The Scriptures.

I. Definition of Inspiration.

Inspiration is that influence of the Spirit of God upon the minds of the
Scripture writers which made their writings the record of a progressive
divine revelation, sufficient, when taken together and interpreted by the
same Spirit who inspired them, to lead every honest inquirer to Christ and
to salvation.

Notice the significance of each part of this definition: 1.
Inspiration is an influence of the Spirit of God. It is not a
merely naturalistic phenomenon or psychological vagary, but is
rather the effect of the inworking of the personal divine Spirit.
2. Yet inspiration is an influence upon the mind, and not upon the
body. God secures his end by awakening man’s rational powers, and
not by an external or mechanical communication. 3. The writings of
inspired men are the record of a revelation. They are not
themselves the revelation. 4. The revelation and the record are
both progressive. Neither one is complete at the beginning. 5. The
Scripture writings must be taken together. Each part must be
viewed in connection with what precedes and with what follows. 6.
The same Holy Spirit who made the original revelations must
interpret to us the record of them, if we are to come to the
knowledge of the truth. 7. So used and so interpreted, these
writings are sufficient, both in quantity and in quality, for
their religious purpose. 8. That purpose is, not to furnish us
with a model history or with the facts of science, but to lead us
to Christ and to salvation.

(_a_) Inspiration is therefore to be defined, not by its method, but by
its result. It is a general term including all those kinds and degrees of
the Holy Spirit’s influence which were brought to bear upon the minds of
the Scripture writers, in order to secure the putting into permanent and
written form of the truth best adapted to man’s moral and religious needs.

(_b_) Inspiration may often include revelation, or the direct
communication from God of truth to which man could not attain by his
unaided powers. It may include illumination, or the quickening of man’s
cognitive powers to understand truth already revealed. Inspiration,
however, does not necessarily and always include either revelation or
illumination. It is simply the divine influence which secures a
transmission of needed truth to the future, and, according to the nature
of the truth to be transmitted, it may be only an inspiration of
superintendence, or it may be also and at the same time an inspiration of
illumination or revelation.

(_c_) It is not denied, but affirmed, that inspiration may qualify for
oral utterance of truth, or for wise leadership and daring deeds. Men may
be inspired to render external service to God’s kingdom, as in the cases
of Bezalel and Samson; even though this service is rendered unwillingly or
unconsciously, as in the cases of Balaam and Cyrus. All human
intelligence, indeed, is due to the inbreathing of that same Spirit who
created man at the beginning. We are now concerned with inspiration,
however, only as it pertains to the authorship of Scripture.

_Gen. 2:7—_“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
a living soul”; _Ex. 31:2, 3—_“I have called by name Bezalel ...
and I have filled him with the Spirit of God ... in all manner of
workmanship”; _Judges 13:24, 25—_“called his name Samson: and the
child grew, and Jehovah blessed him. And the Spirit of Jehovah
began to move him”; _Num. 23:5—_“And Jehovah put a word in
Balaam’s mouth, and said, Return unto Balak, and thus shalt thou
speak”; _2 Chron. 36:22—_“Jehovah stirred up the spirit of Cyrus”;
_Is. 44:28—_“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd”; _45:5—_“I
will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”; _Job 32:8—_“there
is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth them
understanding.” These passages show the true meaning of 2 Tim.
3:16—“Every scripture inspired of God.” The word θεόπνευστος is to
be understood as alluding, not to the flute-player’s breathing
into his instrument, but to God’s original inbreathing of life.
The flute is passive, but man’s soul is active. The flute gives
out only what it receives, but the inspired man under the divine
influence is a conscious and free originator of thought and
expression. Although the inspiration of which we are to treat is
simply the inspiration of the Scripture writings, we can best
understand this narrower use of the term by remembering that all
real knowledge has in it a divine element, and that we are
possessed of complete consciousness only as we live, move, and
have our being in God. Since Christ, the divine Logos or Reason,
is “the light which lighteth every man”_ (John 1:9)_, a special
influence of “the spirit of Christ which was in them”_ (1 Pet.
1:11)_ rationally accounts for the fact that “men spake from God,
being moved by the Holy Spirit”_ (2 Pet. 1:21)_.

It may help our understanding of terms above employed if we adduce
instances of

(1) Inspiration without revelation, as in Luke or Acts, _Luke
1:1-3_;
(2) Inspiration including revelation, as in the Apocalypse, _Rev.
1:1, 11_;
(3) Inspiration without illumination, as in the prophets, _1 Pet.
1:11_;
(4) Inspiration including illumination, as in the case of Paul, _1
Cor. 2:12_;
(5) Revelation without inspiration, as in God’s words from Sinai,
_Ex. 20:1, 22_;
(6) Illumination without inspiration, as in modern preachers,
_Eph. 2:20_.

Other definitions are those of Park: “Inspiration is such an
influence over the writers of the Bible that all their teachings
which have a religious character are trustworthy”; of Wilkinson:
“Inspiration is help from God to keep the report of divine
revelation free from error. Help to whom? No matter to whom, so
the result is secured. The final result, viz.: the record or
report of revelation, this must be free from error. Inspiration
may affect one or all of the agents employed”; of Hovey:
“Inspiration was an influence of the Spirit of God on those powers
of men which are concerned in the reception, retention and
expression of religious truth—an influence so pervading and
powerful that the teaching of inspired men was according to the
mind of God. Their teaching did not in any instance embrace all
truth in respect to God, or man, or the way of life; but it
comprised just so much of the truth on any particular subject as
could be received in faith by the inspired teacher and made useful
to those whom he addressed. In this sense the teaching of the
original documents composing our Bible may be pronounced free from
error”; of G. B. Foster: “Revelation is the action of God in the
soul of his child, resulting in divine self-expression there:
Inspiration is the action of God in the soul of his child,
resulting in apprehension and appropriation of the divine
expression. Revelation has logical but not chronological
priority”; of Horton, Inspiration and the Bible, 10-13—“We mean by
Inspiration exactly those qualities or characteristics which are
the marks or notes of the Bible.... We call our Bible inspired; by
which we mean that by reading and studying it we find our way to
God, we find his will for us, and we find how we can conform
ourselves to his will.”

Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, 496, while nobly setting
forth the naturalness of revelation, has misconceived the relation
of inspiration to revelation by giving priority to the former:
“The idea of a written revelation may be said to be logically
involved in the notion of a living God. Speech is natural to
spirit; and if God is by nature spirit, it will be to him a matter
of nature to reveal himself. But if he speaks to man, it will be
through men; and those who hear best will be most possessed of
God. This possession is termed ‘inspiration.’ God inspires, man
reveals: revelation is the mode or form—word, character, or
institution—in which man embodies what he has received. The terms,
though not equivalent, are co-extensive, the one denoting the
process on its inner side, the other on its outer.” This
statement, although approved by Sanday, Inspiration, 124, 125,
seems to us almost precisely to reverse the right meaning of the
words. We prefer the view of Evans, Bib. Scholarship and
Inspiration, 54—“God has first revealed himself, and then has
inspired men to interpret, record and apply this revelation. In
redemption, inspiration is the formal factor, as revelation is the
material factor. The men are inspired, as Prof. Stowe said. The
thoughts are inspired, as Prof. Briggs said. The words are
inspired, as Prof. Hodge said. The warp and woof of the Bible is
πνεῦμα: ‘the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit’_ (John
6:63)_. Its fringes run off, as was inevitable, into the secular,
the material, the psychic.” Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:351—“If the
true revelation of God is in Christ, the Bible is not properly a
revelation, but the history of a revelation. This is not only a
fact but a necessity, for a person cannot be revealed in a book,
but must find revelation, if at all, in a person. The centre and
core of the Bible must therefore be the gospels, as the story of
Jesus.”

Some, like Priestley, have held that the gospels are authentic but
not inspired. We therefore add to the proof of the genuineness and
credibility of Scripture, the proof of its inspiration. Chadwick,
Old and New Unitarianism, 11—“Priestley’s belief in supernatural
revelation was intense. He had an absolute distrust of reason as
qualified to furnish an adequate knowledge of religious things,
and at the same time a perfect confidence in reason as qualified
to prove that negative and to determine the contents of the
revelation.” We might claim the historical truth of the gospels,
even if we did not call them inspired. Gore, in Lux Mundi,
341—“Christianity brings with it a doctrine of the inspiration of
the Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it.” Warfield and
Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“While the inspiration of the Scriptures is
true, and being true is fundamental to the adequate interpretation
of Scripture, it nevertheless is not, in the first instance, a
principle fundamental to the truth of the Christian religion.”

On the idea of Revelation, see Ladd, in Journ. Christ. Philos.,
Jan. 1883:156-178; on Inspiration, _ibid._, Apr. 1883:225-248. See
Henderson on Inspiration (2nd ed.), 58, 205, 249, 303, 310. For
other works on the general subject of Inspiration, see Lee,
Bannerman, Jamieson, Macnaught; Garbett, God’s Word Written; Aids
to Faith, essay on Inspiration. Also, Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
1:205; Westcott, Introd. to Study of the Gospels, 27-65; Bib.
Sac., 1:97; 4:154; 12:217; 15:29, 314; 25:192-198; Dr. Barrows, in
Bib. Sac., 1867:593; 1872:428; Farrar, Science in Theology, 208;
Hodge and Warfield, in Presb. Rev., Apr. 1881:225-261; Manly, The
Bible Doctrine of Inspiration; Watts, Inspiration; Mead,
Supernatural Revelation, 350; Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136; Hastings,
Bible Dict., 1:296-299; Sanday, Bampton Lectures on Inspiration.

II. Proof of Inspiration.

1. Since we have shown that God has made a revelation of himself to man,
we may reasonably presume that he will not trust this revelation wholly to
human tradition and misrepresentation, but will also provide a record of
it essentially trustworthy and sufficient; in other words, that the same
Spirit who originally communicated the truth will preside over its
publication, so far as is needed to accomplish its religious purpose.

Since all natural intelligence, as we have seen, presupposes God’s
indwelling, and since in Scripture the all-prevailing atmosphere,
with its constant pressure and effort to enter every cranny and
corner of the world, is used as an illustration of the impulse of
God’s omnipotent Spirit to vivify and energize every human soul
(_Gen. 2:7_; _Job 32:8_), we may infer that, but for sin, all men
would be morally and spiritually inspired (_Num. 11:29—_“Would
that all Jehovah’s people were prophets, that Jehovah would put
his Spirit upon them!” _Is. 59:2—_“your iniquities have separated
between you and your God”). We have also seen that God’s method of
communicating his truth in matters of religion is presumably
analogous to his method of communicating secular truth, such as
that of astronomy or history. There is an original delivery to a
single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may
through them be given to mankind. Sanday, Inspiration, 140—“There
is a ‘purpose of God according to selection’_ (Rom. 9:11)_; there
is an ‘election’ or ‘selection of grace’; and the object of that
selection was Israel and those who take their name from Israel’s
Messiah. If a tower is built in ascending tiers, those who stand
upon the lower tiers are yet raised above the ground, and some may
be raised higher than others, but the full and unimpeded view is
reserved for those who mount upward to the top. And that is the
place destined for us if we will take it.”

If we follow the analogy of God’s working in other communications
of knowledge, we shall reasonably presume that he will preserve
the record of his revelations in written and accessible documents,
handed down from those to whom these revelations were first
communicated, and we may expect that these documents will be kept
sufficiently correct and trustworthy to accomplish their religious
purpose, namely, that of furnishing to the honest inquirer a guide
to Christ and to salvation. The physician commits his
prescriptions to writing; the Clerk of Congress records its
proceedings; the State Department of our government instructs our
foreign ambassadors, not orally, but by dispatches. There is yet
greater need that revelation should be recorded, since it is to be
transmitted to distant ages; it contains long discourses; it
embraces mysterious doctrines. Jesus did not write himself; for he
was the subject, not the mere channel, of revelation. His
unconcern about the apostles’ immediately committing to writing
what they saw and heard is inexplicable, if he did not expect that
inspiration would assist them.

We come to the discussion of Inspiration with a presumption quite
unlike that of Kuenen and Wellhausen, who write in the interest of
almost avowed naturalism. Kuenen, in the opening sentences of his
Religion of Israel, does indeed assert the rule of God in the
world. But Sanday, Inspiration, 117, says well that “Kuenen keeps
this idea very much in the background. He expended a whole volume
of 593 large octavo pages (Prophets and Prophecy in Israel,
London, 1877) in proving that the prophets were _not_ moved to
speak by God, but that their utterances were all their own.” The
following extract, says Sanday, indicates the position which Dr.
Kuenen really held: “We do not allow ourselves to be deprived of
God’s presence in history. In the fortunes and development of
nations, and not least clearly in those of Israel, we see Him, the
holy and all-wise Instructor of his human children. But the old
_contrasts_ must be altogether set aside. So long as we derive a
separate part of Israel’s religious life directly from God, and
allow the supernatural or immediate revelation to intervene in
even one single point, so long also our view of the whole
continues to be incorrect, and we see ourselves here and there
necessitated to do violence to the well-authenticated contents of
the historical documents. It is the supposition of a natural
development alone which accounts for all the phenomena” (Kuenen,
Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, 585).

2. Jesus, who has been proved to be not only a credible witness, but a
messenger from God, vouches for the inspiration of the Old Testament, by
quoting it with the formula: “It is written”; by declaring that “one jot
or one tittle” of it “shall in no wise pass away,” and that “the Scripture
cannot be broken.”

Jesus quotes from four out of the five books of Moses, and from
the Psalms, Isaiah, Malachi, and Zechariah, with the formula, “it
is written”; see _Mat. 4:4, 6, 7_; _11:10_; _Mark 14:27_; _Luke
4:4-12_. This formula among the Jews indicated that the quotation
was from a sacred book and was divinely inspired. Jesus certainly
regarded the Old Testament with as much reverence as the Jews of
his day. He declared that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise
pass away from the law”_ (Mat. 5:18)_. He said that “the scripture
cannot be broken”_ (John 10:35)_ = “the normative and judicial
authority of the Scripture cannot be set aside; notice here [in
the singular, ἡ γραφή] the idea of the unity of Scripture”
(Meyer). And yet our Lord’s use of O. T. Scripture was wholly free
from the superstitious literalism which prevailed among the Jews
of his day. The phrases “word of God”_ (John 10:35; Mark 7:13)_,
“wisdom of God”_ (Luke 11:49)_ and “oracles of God”_ (Rom. 3:2)_
probably designate the original revelations of God and not the
record of these in Scripture; _cf._ _1 Sam. 9:27_; _1 Chron.
17:3_; _Is. 40:8_; _Mat. 13:19_; _Luke 3:2_; _Acts 8:25_. Jesus
refuses assent to the O. T. law respecting the Sabbath (_Mark
2:27_ _sq._), external defilements (_Mark 7:15_), divorce (_Mark
10:2_ _sq._). He “came not to destroy but to fulfil”_ (Mat.
5:17)_; yet he fulfilled the law by bringing out its inner spirit
in his perfect life, rather than by formal and minute obedience to
its precepts; see Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:5-35.

The apostles quote the O. T. as the utterance of God (_Eph.
4:8_—διὸ λέγει, _sc._ θεός). Paul’s insistence upon the form of
even a single word, as in _Gal. 3:16_, and his use of the O. T.
for purposes of allegory, as in _Gal 4:21-31_, show that in his
view the O. T. text was sacred. Philo, Josephus and the Talmud, in
their interpretations of the O. T., fall continually into a
“narrow and unhappy literalism.” “The N. T. does not indeed escape
Rabbinical methods, but even where these are most prominent they
seem to affect the form far more than the substance. And through
the temporary and local form the writer constantly penetrates to
the very heart of the O. T. teaching;” see Sanday, Bampton
Lectures on Inspiration, 87; Henderson, Inspiration, 254.

3. Jesus commissioned his apostles as teachers and gave them promises of a
supernatural aid of the Holy Spirit in their teaching, like the promises
made to the Old Testament prophets.

_Mat. 28:19, 20—_“Go ye ... teaching ... and lo, I am with you.”
Compare promises to Moses (_Ex. 3:12_), Jeremiah (_Jer. 1:5-8_),
Ezekiel (_Ezek. 2_ and _3_). See also _Is. 44:3_ and _Joel
2:28—_“I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed”; _Mat. 10:7—_“as ye
go, preach”; _19—_“be not anxious how or what ye shall speak”;
_John 14:26—_“the Holy Spirit ... shall teach you all things”;
_15:26, 27—_“the Spirit of truth ... shall bear witness of me: and
ye also bear witness” = the Spirit shall witness in and through
you; _16:13—_“he shall guide you into all the truth” = (1)
limitation—all _the_ truth of Christ, _i. e._, not of philosophy
or science, but of religion; (2) comprehension—_all_ the truth
within this limited range, _i. e._, sufficiency of Scripture as
rule of faith and practice (Hovey); _17:8—_“the words which thou
gavest me I have given unto them”; _Acts 1:4—_“he charged them ...
to wait for the promise of the Father”; _John 20:22—_“he breathed
on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” Here
was both promise and communication of the personal Holy Spirit.
Compare _Mat. 10:19, 20—_“it shall be given you in that hour what
ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of
your Father that speaketh in you.” See Henderson, Inspiration,
247, 248.

Jesus’ testimony here is the testimony of God. In _Deut. 18:18_,
it is said that God will put his words into the mouth of the great
Prophet. In _John 12:49, 50_, Jesus says: “I spake not from
myself, but the Father that sent me, he hath given me a
commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I
know that his commandment is life eternal; the things therefore
which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto me, so I speak.”
_John 17:7, 8—_“all things whatsoever thou hast given me are from
thee: for the words which thou gavest me I have given unto them.”
_John 8:40—_“a man that hath told you the truth, which I heard
from God.”

4. The apostles claim to have received this promised Spirit, and under his
influence to speak with divine authority, putting their writings upon a
level with the Old Testament Scriptures. We have not only direct
statements that both the matter and the form of their teaching were
supervised by the Holy Spirit, but we have indirect evidence that this was
the case in the tone of authority which pervades their addresses and
epistles.

_Statements_:—_1 Cor. 2:10, 13—_“unto us God revealed them through
the Spirit.... Which things also we speak, not in words which
man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth”; _11:23—_“I
received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you”; _12:8,
28_—_the λόγος σοφίας was apparently a gift peculiar to the
apostles_; _14:37, 38—_“the things which I write unto you ... they
are the commandment of the Lord”; _Gal. 1:12—_“neither did I
receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me
through revelation of Jesus Christ”; _1 Thess. 4:2, 8—_“ye know
what charge we gave you through the Lord Jesus.... Therefore he
that rejecteth, rejecteth not man, but God, who giveth his Holy
Spirit unto you.” The following passages put the teaching of the
apostles on the same level with O. T. Scripture: _1 Pet. 1:11,
12—_“Spirit of Christ which was in them” [O. T. prophets];—[N. T.
preachers] “preached the gospel unto you by the Holy Spirit”; _2
Pet. 1:21_—O. T. prophets “spake from God, being moved by the Holy
Spirit”; _3:2—_“remember the words which were spoken before by the
holy prophets” [O. T.], “and the commandment of the Lord and
Savior through your apostles” [N. T.]; 16—“wrest [Paul’s
Epistles], _as they do also the_ _other scriptures_, unto their
own destruction.” _Cf._ _Ex. 4:14-16_; _7:1_.

_Implications_:—_2 Tim. 3:16—_“Every scripture inspired of God is
also profitable”—a clear implication of inspiration, though not a
direct statement of it = _there is a divinely inspired Scripture_.
In _1 Cor. 5:3-5_, Paul, commanding the Corinthian church with
regard to the incestuous person, was arrogant if not inspired.
There are more imperatives in the Epistles than in any other
writings of the same extent. Notice the continual asseveration of
authority, as in _Gal. 1:1, 2_, and the declaration that disbelief
of the record is sin, as in _1 John 5:10, 11_. _Jude 3—_“the faith
which was once for all (ἅπαξ) delivered unto the saints.” See
Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:122; Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 34,
234; Conant, Genesis, Introd., xiii, note; Charteris, New
Testament Scriptures: They claim truth, unity, authority.

The passages quoted above show that inspired men distinguished
inspiration from their own unaided thinking. These inspired men
claim that their inspiration is the same with that of the
prophets. _Rev. 22:6—_“the Lord, the God of the spirits of the
prophets, sent his angel to show unto his servants the things
which must shortly come to pass” = inspiration gave them
supernatural knowledge of the future. As inspiration in the O. T.
was the work of the pre-incarnate Christ, so inspiration in the N.
T. is the work of the ascended and glorified Christ by his Holy
Spirit. On the Relative Authority of the Gospels, see Gerhardt, in
Am. Journ. Theol., Apl. 1899:275-294, who shows that not the words
of Jesus in the gospels are the final revelation, but rather the
teaching of the risen and glorified Christ in the Acts and the
Epistles. The Epistles are the posthumous works of Christ.
Pattison, Making of the Sermon, 23—“The apostles, believing
themselves to be inspired teachers, often preached without texts;
and the fact that their successors did not follow their example
shows that for themselves they made no such claim. Inspiration
ceased, and henceforth authority was found in the use of the words
of the now complete Scriptures.”

5. The apostolic writers of the New Testament, unlike professedly inspired
heathen sages and poets, gave attestation by miracles or prophecy that
they were inspired by God, and there is reason to believe that the
productions of those who were not apostles, such as Mark, Luke, Hebrews,
James, and Jude, were recommended to the churches as inspired, by
apostolic sanction and authority.

The twelve wrought miracles (_Mat. 10:1_). Paul’s “signs of an
apostle”_ (2 Cor. 13:12)_ = miracles. Internal evidence confirms
the tradition that Mark was the “interpreter of Peter,” and that
Luke’s gospel and the Acts had the sanction of Paul. Since the
purpose of the Spirit’s bestowment was to qualify those who were
to be the teachers and founders of the new religion, it is only
fair to assume that Christ’s promise of the Spirit was valid not
simply to the twelve but to all who stood in their places, and to
these not simply as speakers, but, since in this respect they had
a still greater need of divine guidance, to them as writers also.

The epistle to the Hebrews, with the letters of James and Jude,
appeared in the lifetime of some of the twelve, and passed
unchallenged; and the fact that they all, with the possible
exception of 2 Peter, were very early accepted by the churches
founded and watched over by the apostles, is sufficient evidence
that the apostles regarded them as inspired productions. As
evidences that the writers regarded their writings as of universal
authority, see _1 Cor. 1:2—_“unto the church of God which is at
Corinth ... with all that call upon the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ in every place,” etc.; _7:17—_“so ordain I in all the
churches”; _Col. 4:16—_“And when this epistle hath been read among
you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans”;
_2 Pet. 3:15, 16—_“our beloved brother Paul also, according to the
wisdom given to him, wrote unto you.” See Bartlett, in Princeton
Rev., Jan. 1880:23-57; Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:204, 205.

Johnson, Systematic Theology, 40—“Miraculous gifts were bestowed
at Pentecost on many besides apostles. Prophecy was not an
uncommon gift during the apostolic period.” There is no antecedent
improbability that inspiration should extend to others than to the
principal leaders of the church, and since we have express
instances of such inspiration in oral utterances (_Acts 11:28_;
_21:9, 10_) it seems natural that there should have been instances
of inspiration in written utterances also. In some cases this
appears to have been only an inspiration of superintendence.
Clement of Alexandria says only that Peter neither forbade nor
encouraged Mark in his plan of writing the gospel. Irenæus tells
us that Mark’s gospel was written after the death of Peter. Papias
says that Mark wrote down what he remembered to have heard from
Peter. Luke does not seem to have been aware of any miraculous aid
in his writing, and his methods appear to have been those of the
ordinary historian.

6. The chief proof of inspiration, however, must always be found in the
internal characteristics of the Scriptures themselves, as these are
disclosed to the sincere inquirer by the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the
Holy Spirit combines with the teaching of the Bible to convince the
earnest reader that this teaching is as a whole and in all essentials
beyond the power of man to communicate, and that it must therefore have
been put into permanent and written form by special inspiration of God.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 105—“The testimony of the
Spirit is an argument from identity of effects—the doctrines of
experience and the doctrines of the Bible—to identity of cause....
God-wrought experience proves a God-wrought Bible.... This covers
the Bible as a whole, if not the whole of the Bible. It is true so
far as I can test it. It is to be believed still further if there
is no other evidence.” Lyman Abbott, in his Theology of an
Evolutionist, 105, calls the Bible “a record of man’s laboratory
work in the spiritual realm, a history of the dawning of the
consciousness of God and of the divine life in the soul of man.”
This seems to us unduly subjective. We prefer to say that the
Bible is also God’s witness to us of his presence and working in
human hearts and in human history—a witness which proves its
divine origin by awakening in us experiences similar to those
which it describes, and which are beyond the power of man to
originate.

G. P. Fisher, in Mag. of Christ. Lit., Dec. 1892:239—“Is the Bible
infallible? Not in the sense that all its statements extending
even to minutiæ in matters of history and science are strictly
accurate. Not in the sense that every doctrinal and ethical
statement in all these books is incapable of amendment. The whole
must sit in judgment on the parts. Revelation is progressive.
There is a human factor as well as a divine. The treasure is in
earthen vessels. But the Bible is infallible in the sense that
whoever surrenders himself in a docile spirit to its teaching will
fall into no hurtful error in matters of faith and charity. Best
of all, he will find in it the secret of a new, holy and blessed
life, ‘hidden with Christ in God’_ (Col. 3:3)_. The Scriptures are
the witness to Christ.... Through the Scriptures he is truly and
adequately made known to us.” Denney, Death of Christ, 314—“The
unity of the Bible and its inspiration are correlative terms. If
we can discern a real unity in it—and I believe we can when we see
that it converges upon and culminates in a divine love bearing the
sin of the world—then that unity and its inspiration are one and
the same thing. And it is not only inspired as a whole, it is the
only book that is inspired. It is the only book in the world to
which God sets his seal in our hearts when we read in search of an
answer to the question, How shall a sinful man be righteous with
God?... The conclusion of our study of Inspiration should be the
conviction that the Bible gives us a body of doctrine—a ‘faith
which was once for all delivered unto the saints’_ (Jude 3)_.”

III. Theories of Inspiration.

1. The Intuition-theory.

This holds that inspiration is but a higher development of that natural
insight into truth which all men possess to some degree; a mode of
intelligence in matters of morals and religion which gives rise to sacred
books, as a corresponding mode of intelligence in matters of secular truth
gives rise to great works of philosophy or art. This mode of intelligence
is regarded as the product of man’s own powers, either without special
divine influence or with only the inworking of an impersonal God.

This theory naturally connects itself with Pelagian and
rationalistic views of man’s independence of God, or with
pantheistic conceptions of man as being himself the highest
manifestation of an all-pervading but unconscious intelligence.
Morell and F. W. Newman in England, and Theodore Parker in
America, are representatives of this theory. See Morell, Philos.
of Religion, 127-179—“Inspiration is only a higher potency of what
every man possesses in some degree.” See also Francis W. Newman
(brother of John Henry Newman), Phases of Faith (= phases of
unbelief); Theodore Parker, Discourses of Religion, and
Experiences as a Minister: “God is infinite; therefore he is
immanent in nature, yet transcending it; immanent in spirit, yet
transcending that. He must fill each point of spirit, as of space;
matter must unconsciously obey; man, conscious and free, has power
to a certain extent to disobey, but obeying, the immanent God acts
in man as much as in nature”—quoted in Chadwick, Theodore Parker,
271. Hence Parker’s view of Inspiration: If the conditions are
fulfilled, inspiration comes in proportion to man’s gifts and to
his use of those gifts. Chadwick himself, in his Old and New
Unitarianism, 68, says that “the Scriptures are inspired just so
far as they are inspiring, and no more.”

W. C. Gannett, Life of Ezra Stiles Gannett, 196—“Parker’s
spiritualism affirmed, as the grand truth of religion, the
immanence of an infinitely perfect God in matter and mind, and his
activity in both spheres.” Martineau, Study of Religion,
2:178-180—“Theodore Parker treats the regular results of the human
faculties as an immediate working of God, and regards the
Principia of Newton as inspired.... What then becomes of the human
personality? He calls God not only omnipresent, but omniactive. Is
then Shakespeare only by courtesy author of Macbeth?... If this
were more than rhetorical, it would be unconditional pantheism.”
Both nature and man are other names for God. Martineau is willing
to grant that our intuitions and ideals are expressions of the
Deity in us, but our personal reasoning and striving, he thinks,
cannot be attributed to God. The word νοῦς has no plural:
intellect, in whatever subject manifested, being all one, just as
a truth is one and the same, in however many persons’
consciousness it may present itself; see Martineau, Seat of
Authority, 403. Palmer, Studies in Theological Definition, 27—“We
can draw no sharp distinction between the human mind discovering
truth, and the divine mind imparting revelation.” Kuenen belongs
to this school.

With regard to this theory we remark:

(_a_) Man has, indeed, a certain natural insight into truth, and we grant
that inspiration uses this, so far as it will go, and makes it an
instrument in discovering and recording facts of nature or history.

In the investigation, for example, of purely historical matters,
such as Luke records, merely natural insight may at times have
been sufficient. When this was the case, Luke may have been left
to the exercise of his own faculties, inspiration only inciting
and supervising the work. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 413—“God
could not reveal himself _to_ man, unless he first revealed
himself _in_ man. If it should be written in letters on the sky:
‘God is good,’—the words would have no meaning, unless goodness
had been made known already in human volitions. Revelation is not
by an occasional stroke, but by a continuous process. It is not
superimposed, but inherent.... Genius is inspired; for the mind
which perceives truth must be responsive to the Mind that made
things the vehicles of thought.” Sanday, Bampton Lectures on
Inspiration: “In claiming for the Bible inspiration, we do not
exclude the possibility of other lower or more partial degrees of
inspiration in other literatures. The Spirit of God has doubtless
touched other hearts and other minds ... in such a way as to give
insight into truth, besides those which could claim descent from
Abraham.” Philo thought the LXX translators, the Greek
philosophers, and at times even himself, to be inspired. Plato he
regards as “most sacred” (ἱερωτατος), but all good men are in
various degrees inspired. Yet Philo never quotes as authoritative
any but the Canonical Books. He attributes to them an authority
unique in its kind.

(_b_) In all matters of morals and religion, however, man’s insight into
truth is vitiated by wrong affections, and, unless a supernatural wisdom
can guide him, he is certain to err himself, and to lead others into
error.

_1 Cor. 2:14—_“Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot
know them, because they are spiritually judged”; _10—_“But unto us
God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all
things, yea, the deep things of God.” See quotation from
Coleridge, in Shairp, Culture and Religion, 114—“Water cannot rise
higher than its source; neither can human reasoning”; Emerson,
Prose Works, 1:474; 2:468—“’Tis curious we only believe as deep as
we live”; Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, 183, 184. For this reason
we hold to a communication of religious truth, at least at times,
more direct and objective than is granted by George Adam Smith,
Com. on Isaiah, 1:372—“To Isaiah inspiration was nothing more nor
less than the possession of certain strong moral and religious
convictions, which he felt he owed to the communication of the
Spirit of God, and according to which he interpreted, and even
dared to foretell, the history of his people and of the world. Our
study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible itself,
that view of inspiration and prediction so long held in the
church.” If this is meant as a denial of any communication of
truth other than the internal and subjective, we set over against
it. _Num. 12:6-8—_“if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord
will make myself known unto him in a vision, I will speak with him
in a dream. My servant Moses is not so; he is faithful in all my
house: with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and
not in dark speeches; and the form of Jehovah shall he behold.”

(_c_) The theory in question, holding as it does that natural insight is
the only source of religious truth, involves a self-contradiction;—if the
theory be true, then one man is inspired to utter what a second is
inspired to pronounce false. The Vedas, the Koran and the Bible cannot be
inspired to contradict each other.

The Vedas permit thieving, and the Koran teaches salvation by
works; these cannot be inspired and the Bible also. Paul cannot be
inspired to write his epistles, and Swedenborg also inspired to
reject them. The Bible does not admit that pagan teachings have
the same divine endorsement with its own. Among the Spartans to
steal was praiseworthy; only to be caught stealing was criminal.
On the religious consciousness with regard to the personality of
God, the divine goodness, the future life, the utility of prayer,
in all of which Miss Cobbe, Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker disagree with
each other, see Bruce, Apologetics, 143, 144. With Matheson we may
grant that the leading idea of inspiration is “the growth of the
divine through the capacities of the human,” while yet we deny
that inspiration confines itself to this subjective enlightenment
of the human faculties, and also we exclude from the divine
working all those perverse and erroneous utterances which are the
results of human sin.

(_d_) It makes moral and religious truth to be a purely subjective thing—a
matter of private opinion—having no objective reality independently of
men’s opinions regarding it.

On this system truth is what men “trow”; things are what men
“think”—words representing only the subjective. “Better the Greek
ἀλήθεια = ‘the unconcealed’ (objective truth)”—Harris, Philos.
Basis of Theism, 182. If there be no absolute truth, Lessing’s
“search for truth” is the only thing left to us. But who will
search, if there is no truth to be found? Even a wise cat will not
eternally chase its own tail. The exercise within certain limits
is doubtless useful, but the cat gives it up so soon as it becomes
convinced that the tail cannot be caught. Sir Richard Burton
became a Roman Catholic, a Brahmin, and a Mohammedan,
successively, apparently holding with Hamlet that “there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This same
scepticism as to the existence of objective truth appears in the
sayings: “Your religion is good for you, and mine for me”; “One
man is born an Augustinian, and another a Pelagian.” See Dix,
Pantheism, Introd., 12. Richter: “It is not the goal, but the
course, that makes us happy.”

(_e_) It logically involves the denial of a personal God who is truth and
reveals truth, and so makes man to be the highest intelligence in the
universe. This is to explain inspiration by denying its existence; since,
if there be no personal God, inspiration is but a figure of speech for a
purely natural fact.

The _animus_ of this theory is denial of the supernatural. Like
the denial of miracles, it can be maintained only upon grounds of
atheism or pantheism. The view in question, as Hutton in his
Essays remarks, would permit us to say that the word of the Lord
came to Gibbon, amid the ruins of the Coliseum, saying: “Go, write
the history of the Decline and Fall!” But, replies Hutton: Such a
view is pantheistic. Inspiration is the voice of a living friend,
in distinction from the voice of a dead friend, _i. e._, the
influence of his memory. The inward impulse of genius,
Shakespeare’s for example, is not properly denominated
inspiration. See Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:428-474; Rogers,
Eclipse of Faith, 73 _sq._ and 283 _sq._; Henderson, Inspiration
(2nd ed.), 443-469, 481-490. The view of Martineau, Seat of
Authority, 302, is substantially this. See criticism of Martineau,
by Rainy, in Critical Rev., 1:5-20.

2. The Illumination Theory.

This regards inspiration as merely an intensifying and elevating of the
religious perceptions of the Christian, the same in kind, though greater
in degree, with the illumination of every believer by the Holy Spirit. It
holds, not that the Bible is, but that it contains, the word of God, and
that not the writings, but only the writers, were inspired. The
illumination given by the Holy Spirit, however, puts the inspired writer
only in full possession of his normal powers, but does not communicate
objective truth beyond his ability to discover or understand.

This theory naturally connects itself with Arminian views of mere
coöperation with God. It differs from the Intuition-theory by
containing several distinctively Christian elements: (1) the
influence of a personal God; (2) an extraordinary work of the Holy
Spirit; (3) the Christological character of the Scriptures,
putting into form a revelation of which Christ is the centre
(_Rev. 19:10_). But while it grants that the Scripture writers
were “moved by the Holy Spirit” (φερόμενοι—_2 Pet. 1:21_), it
ignores the complementary fact that the Scripture itself is
“inspired of God” (θεόπνευστος—_2 Tim. 3:16_). Luther’s view
resembles this; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 236, 237.
Schleiermacher, with the more orthodox Neander, Tholuck and
Cremer, holds it; see Essays by Tholuck, in Herzog, Encyclopädie,
and in Noyes, Theological Essays; Cremer, Lexicon N.T.,
θεόπνευστος, and in Herzog and Hauck, Realencyc., 9:183-203. In
France, Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 90, remarks: “Prophetic
inspiration is piety raised to the second power”—it differs from
the piety of common men only in intensity and energy. See also
Godet, in Revue Chrétienne, Jan. 1878.

In England Coleridge propounded this view in his Confessions of an
Inquiring Spirit (Works, 5:669)—“Whatever _finds me_ bears witness
that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit; in the Bible there is
more that _finds me_ than I have experienced in all other books
put together.” [Shall we then call Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest”
inspired, while the Books of Chronicles are not?] See also F. W.
Robertson, Sermon I; Life and Letters, letter 53, vol. 1:270;
2:143-150—“The _other_ way, some twenty or thirty men in the
world’s history have had special communication, miraculous and
from God; in _this_ way, all may have it, and by devout and
earnest cultivation of the mind and heart may have it illimitably
increased.” Frederick W. H. Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible
and Theology, 10-20, emphasizes the idea that the Scriptures are,
in their earlier parts, not merely inadequate, but partially
untrue, and subsequently superseded by fuller revelations. The
leading thought is that of _accommodation_; the record of
revelation is not necessarily infallible. Allen, Religious
Progress, 44, quotes Bishop Thirlwall: “If that Spirit by which
every man spoke of old is a living and present Spirit, its later
lessons may well transcend its earlier”;—Pascal’s “colossal man”
is the race; the first men represented only infancy; _we_ are “the
ancients”, and we are wiser than our fathers. See also Farrar,
Critical History of Free Thought, 473, note 50; Martineau, Studies
in Christianity: “One Gospel in Many Dialects.”

Of American writers who favor this view, see J. F. Clarke,
Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 74; Curtis, Human Element in
Inspiration; Whiton, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:63-72; Ladd, in Andover
Review, July, 1885, in What is the Bible? and in Doctrine of
Sacred Scripture, 1:759—“a large proportion of its writings
inspired”; 2:178, 275, 497—“that fundamental misconception which
identifies the Bible and the word of God”; 2:488—“Inspiration, as
the subjective condition of Biblical revelation and the predicate
of the word of God, is _specifically_ the same illumining,
quickening, elevating and purifying work of the Holy Spirit as
that which goes on in the persons of the entire believing
community.” Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive
prophecy, and regards _Isaiah 53_, not as directly and solely, but
only as typically, Messianic. Clarke, Christian Theology,
35-44—“Inspiration is exaltation, quickening of ability,
stimulation of spiritual power; it is uplifting and enlargement of
capacity for perception, comprehension and utterance; and all
under the influence of a thought, a truth, or an ideal that has
taken possession of the soul.... Inspiration to write was not
different in kind from the common influence of God upon his
people.... Inequality in the Scriptures is plain.... Even if we
were convinced that some book would better have been omitted from
the Canon, our confidence in the Scriptures would not thereby be
shaken. The Canon did not make Scripture, but Scripture made the
Canon. The inspiration of the Bible does not prove its excellence,
but its excellence proves its inspiration. The Spirit brought the
Scriptures to help Christ’s work, but not to take his place.
Scripture says with Paul: ‘Not that we have lordship over your
faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast’_
(2 Cor. 1:24)_.”

E. G. Robinson: “The office of the Spirit in inspiration is not
different from that which he performed for Christians at the time
the gospels were written.... When the prophets say: ‘Thus saith
the Lord,’ they mean simply that they have divine authority for
what they utter.” Calvin E. Stowe, History of Books of Bible,
19—“It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired. It is not
the thoughts of the Bible that were inspired. It was the men who
wrote the Bible who were inspired.” Thayer, Changed Attitude
toward the Bible, 63—“It was not before the polemic spirit became
rife in the controversies which followed the Reformation that the
fundamental distinction between the word of God and the record of
that word became obliterated, and the pestilent tenet gained
currency that the Bible is absolutely free from every error of
every sort.” Principal Cave, in Homiletical Review, Feb. 1892,
admitting errors but none serious in the Bible, proposes a
mediating statement for the present controversy, namely, that
Revelation implies inerrancy, but that Inspiration does not.
Whatever God reveals must be true, but many have become inspired
without being rendered infallible. See also Mead, Supernatural
Revelation, 291 _sq._

With regard to this theory we remark:

(_a_) There is unquestionably an illumination of the mind of every
believer by the Holy Spirit, and we grant that there may have been
instances in which the influence of the Spirit, in inspiration, amounted
only to illumination.

Certain applications and interpretations of Old Testament
Scripture, as for example, John the Baptist’s application to Jesus
of Isaiah’s prophecy (_John 1:29—_“Behold, the Lamb of God, that
taketh away [marg. “beareth”] the sin of the world”), and Peter’s
interpretation of David’s words (_Acts 2:27—_“thou wilt not leave
my soul unto Hades, Neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see
corruption”), may have required only the illuminating influence of
the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which we may say that the
Scriptures are inspired only to those who are themselves inspired.
The Holy Spirit must show us Christ before we recognize the work
of the Spirit in Scripture. The doctrines of atonement and of
justification perhaps did not need to be newly revealed to the N.
T. writers; illumination as to earlier revelations may have
sufficed. But that Christ existed before his incarnation, and that
there are personal distinctions in the Godhead, probably required
revelation. Edison says that “inspiration is simply perspiration.”
Genius has been defined as “unlimited power to take pains.” But it
is more—the power to do spontaneously and without effort what the
ordinary man does by the hardest. Every great genius recognizes
that this power is due to the inflowing into him of a Spirit
greater than his own—the Spirit of divine wisdom and energy. The
Scripture writers attribute their understanding of divine things
to the Holy Spirit; see next paragraph. On genius, as due to
“subliminal uprush,” see F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality,
1:70-120.

(_b_) But we deny that this was the constant method of inspiration, or
that such an influence can account for the revelation of new truth to the
prophets and apostles. The illumination of the Holy Spirit gives no new
truth, but only a vivid apprehension of the truth already revealed. Any
original communication of truth must have required a work of the Spirit
different, not in degree, but in kind.

The Scriptures clearly distinguish between revelation, or the
communication of new truth, and illumination, or the quickening of
man’s cognitive powers to perceive truth already revealed. No
increase in the power of the eye or the telescope will do more
than to bring into clear view what is already within its range.
Illumination will not lift the veil that hides what is beyond.
Revelation, on the other hand, is an “unveiling”—the raising of a
curtain, or the bringing within our range of what was hidden
before. Such a special operation of God is described in _2 Sam.
23:2, 3—_“The Spirit of Jehovah spake by me, And his word was upon
my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel spake to
me”; _Mat. 10:20—_“For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of
your Father that speaketh in you”; _1 Cor. 2:9-13—_“Things which
eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the
heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love
him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the
Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who
among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man,
which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the
Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but
the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that
were freely given to us of God.”

Clairvoyance and second sight, of which along with many cases of
imposition and exaggeration there seems to be a small residuum of
proved fact, show that there may be extraordinary operations of
our natural powers. But, as in the case of miracle, the
inspiration of Scripture necessitated an exaltation of these
natural powers such as only the special influence of the Holy
Spirit can explain. That the product is inexplicable as due to
mere illumination seems plain when we remember that revelation
sometimes _excluded_ illumination as to the meaning of that which
was communicated, for the prophets are represented in _1 Pet.
1:11_ as “searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of
Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified
beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should
follow them.” Since no degree of illumination can account for the
prediction of “things that are to come” (_John 16:13_), this
theory tends to the denial of any immediate revelation in prophecy
so-called, and the denial easily extends to any immediate
revelation of doctrine.

(_c_) Mere illumination could not secure the Scripture writers from
frequent and grievous error. The spiritual perception of the Christian is
always rendered to some extent imperfect and deceptive by remaining
depravity. The subjective element so predominates in this theory, that no
certainty remains even with regard to the trustworthiness of the
Scriptures as a whole.

While we admit imperfections of detail in matters not essential to
the moral and religious teaching of Scripture, we claim that the
Bible furnishes a sufficient guide to Christ and to salvation. The
theory we are considering, however, by making the measure of
holiness to be the measure of inspiration, renders even the
collective testimony of the Scripture writers an uncertain guide
to truth. We point out therefore that inspiration is not
absolutely limited by the moral condition of those who are
inspired. Knowledge, in the Christian, may go beyond conduct.
Balaam and Caiaphas were not holy men, yet they were inspired
(_Num. 23:5; John 11:49-52_). The promise of Christ assured at
least the essential trustworthiness of his witnesses (_Mat. 10:7,
19, 20; John 14:26; 15:26, 27; 16:13; 17:8_). This theory that
inspiration is a wholly subjective communication of truth leads to
the practical rejection of important parts of Scripture, in fact
to the rejection of all Scripture that professes to convey truth
beyond the power of man to discover or to understand. Notice the
progress from Thomas Arnold (Sermons, 2:185) to Matthew Arnold
(Literature and Dogma, 134, 137). Notice also Swedenborg’s
rejection of nearly one half the Bible (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra,
Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon,
and the whole of the N. T. except the Gospels and the Apocalypse),
connected with the claim of divine authority for his new
revelation. “His interlocutors all Swedenborgize” (R. W. Emerson).
On Swedenborg, see Hours with the Mystics, 2:230; Moehler,
Symbolism, 436-466; New Englander, Jan. 1874:195; Baptist Review,
1883:143-157; Pond, Swedenborgianism; Ireland, The Blot on the
Brain, 1-129.

(_d_) The theory is logically indefensible, as intimating that
illumination with regard to truth can be imparted without imparting truth
itself, whereas God must first furnish objective truth to be perceived
before he can illuminate the mind to perceive the meaning of that truth.

The theory is analogous to the views that preservation is a
continued creation; knowledge is recognition; regeneration is
increase of light. In order to preservation, something must first
be created which can be preserved; in order to recognition,
something must be known which can be recognized or known again; in
order to make increase of light of any use, there must first be
the power to see. In like manner, inspiration cannot be mere
illumination, because the external necessarily precedes the
internal, the objective precedes the subjective, the truth
revealed precedes the apprehension of that truth. In the case of
all truth that surpasses the normal powers of man to perceive or
evolve, there must be special communication from God; revelation
must go before inspiration; inspiration alone is not revelation.
It matters not whether this communication of truth be from without
or from within. As in creation, God can work from within, yet the
new result is not explicable as mere reproduction of the past. The
eye can see only as it receives and uses the external light
furnished by the sun, even though it be equally true that without
the eye the light of the sun would be nothing worth.

Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 17-19, says that to Schleiermacher
revelation is the original appearance of a proper religious life,
which life is derived neither from external communication nor from
invention and reflection, but from a divine impartation, which
impartation can be regarded, not merely as an instructive
influence upon man as an intellectual being, but as an endowment
determining his whole personal existence—an endowment analogous to
the higher conditions of poetic and heroic exaltation. Pfleiderer
himself would give the name “revelation” to “every original
experience in which man becomes aware of, and is seized by,
supersensible truth, truth which does not come from external
impartation nor from purposed reflection, but from the unconscious
and undivided transcendental ground of the soul, and so is
received as an impartation from God through the medium of the
soul’s human activity.” Kaftan, Dogmatik, 51 _sq._—“We must put
the conception of revelation in place of inspiration. Scripture is
the record of divine revelation. We do not propose a new doctrine
or inspiration, in place of the old. We need only revelation, and,
here and there, providence. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is
given, not to inspiration, but to revelation—the truths that touch
the human spirit and have been historically revealed.”

Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 182—Edwards held that spiritual life in
the soul is given by God only to his favorites and dear children,
while inspiration may be thrown out, as it were, to dogs and
swine—a Balaam, Saul, and Judas. The greatest privilege of
apostles and prophets was, not their inspiration, but their
holiness. Better to have grace in the heart, than to be the mother
of Christ (_Luke 11:27, 28_). Maltbie D. Babcock, in S. S. Times,
1901:590—“The man who mourns because infallibility cannot be had
in a church, or a guide, or a set of standards, does not know when
he is well off. How could God develop our minds, our power of
moral judgment, if there were no ‘spirit to be tried’ (_1 John
4:1_), no necessity for discrimination, no discipline of search
and challenge and choice? To give the right answer to a problem is
to put him on the side of infallibility so far as that answer is
concerned, but it is to do him an ineffable wrong touching his
real education. The blessing of life’s schooling is not in knowing
the right answer in advance, but in developing power through
struggle.”

Why did John Henry Newman surrender to the Church of Rome? Because
he assumed that an external authority is absolutely essential to
religion, and, when such an assumption is followed, Rome is the
only logical terminus. “Dogma was,” he says, “the fundamental
principle of my religion.” Modern ritualism is a return to this
mediæval notion. “Dogmatic Christianity,” says Harnack, “is
Catholic. It needs an inerrant Bible, and an infallible church to
interpret that Bible. The dogmatic Protestant is of the same camp
with the sacramental and infallible Catholic.” Lyman Abbott: “The
new Reformation denies the infallibility of the Bible, as the
Protestant Reformation denied the infallibility of the Church.
There is no infallible authority. Infallible authority is
undesirable.... God has given us something far better,—life....
The Bible is the record of the gradual manifestation of God to man
in human experience, in moral laws and their applications, and in
the life of Him who was God manifest in the flesh.”

Leighton Williams: “There is no inspiration apart from experience.
Baptists are not sacramental, nor creedal, but experimental
Christians”—not Romanists, nor Protestants, but believers in an
inner light. “Life, as it develops, awakens into
self-consciousness. That self-consciousness becomes the most
reliable witness as to the nature of the life of which it is the
development. Within the limits of its own sphere, its authority is
supreme. Prophecy is the utterance of the soul in moments of deep
religious experience. The inspiration of Scripture writers is not
a peculiar thing,—it was given that the same inspiration might be
perfected in those who read their writings.” Christ is the only
ultimate authority, and he reveals himself in three ways, through
Scripture, the Reason, and the Church. Only Life saves, and the
Way leads through the Truth to the Life. Baptists stand nearer to
the Episcopal system of life than to the Presbyterian system of
creed. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 136—“The mistake is in looking to the
Father above the world, rather than to the Son and the Spirit
within the world, as the immediate source of revelation....
Revelation is the unfolding of the life and thought of God within
the world. One should not be troubled by finding errors in the
Scriptures, any more than by finding imperfections in any physical
work of God, as in the human eye.”

3. The Dictation-theory.

This theory holds that inspiration consisted in such a possession of the
minds and bodies of the Scripture writers by the Holy Spirit, that they
became passive instruments or amanuenses—pens, not penmen, of God.

This theory naturally connects itself with that view of miracles
which regards them as suspensions or violations of natural law.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:624 (transl. 2:186-189), calls it a
“docetic view of inspiration. It holds to the abolition of second
causes, and to the perfect passivity of the human instrument;
denies any inspiration of persons, and maintains inspiration of
writings only. This exaggeration of the divine element led to the
hypothesis of a multiform divine sense in Scripture, and, in
assigning the spiritual meaning, a rationalizing spirit led the
way.” Representatives of this view are Quenstedt, Theol. Didact.,
1:76—“The Holy Ghost inspired his amanuenses with those
expressions which they would have employed, had they been left to
themselves”; Hooker, Works, 2:383—“They neither spake nor wrote
any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the
Spirit put it into their mouths”; Gaussen, Theopneusty, 61—“The
Bible is not a book which God charged men already enlightened to
make under his protection; it is a book which God dictated to
them”; Cunningham, Theol. Lectures, 349—“The verbal inspiration of
the Scriptures [which he advocates] implies in general that the
words of Scripture were suggested or dictated by the Holy Spirit,
as well as the substance of the matter, and this, not only in some
portion of the Scriptures, but through the whole.” This reminds us
of the old theory that God created fossils in the rocks, as they
would be had ancient seas existed.

Sanday, Bamp. Lect. on Inspiration, 74, quotes Philo as saying: “A
prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as
interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utterances, and
as long as he is under inspiration he is in ignorance, his reason
departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of the soul,
when the divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and strikes
at the mechanism of the voice, sounding through it to the clear
declaration of that which he prophesieth”; in _Gen. 15:12—_“About
the setting of the sun a trance came upon Abram”—the sun is the
light of human reason which sets and gives place to the Spirit of
God. Sanday, 78, says also: “Josephus holds that even historical
narratives, such as those at the beginning of the Pentateuch which
were not written down by contemporary prophets, were obtained by
direct inspiration from God. The Jews from their birth regard
their Scripture as ‘the decrees of God,’ which they strictly
observe, and for which if need be they are ready to die.” The
Rabbis said that “Moses did not write one word out of his own
knowledge.”

The Reformers held to a much freer view than this. Luther said:
“What does not carry Christ with it, is not apostolic, even though
St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. If our adversaries fall back on
the Scripture against Christ, we fall back on Christ against the
Scripture.” Luther refused canonical authority to books not
actually written by apostles or composed, like Mark and Luke,
under their direction. So he rejected from the rank of canonical
authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. Even
Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter, excluded the
book of Revelation from the Scripture on which he wrote
Commentaries, and also thus ignored the second and third epistles
of John; see Prof. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3,
1898:803, 804. The dictation-theory is post-Reformation. H. P.
Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 85—“After the Council of
Trent, the Roman Catholic polemic became sharper. It became the
endeavor of that party to show the necessity of tradition and the
untrustworthiness of Scripture alone. This led the Protestants to
defend the Bible more tenaciously than before.” The Swiss Formula
of Consensus in 1675 not only called the Scriptures “the very word
of God,” but declared the Hebrew vowel-points to be inspired, and
some theologians traced them back to Adam. John Owen held to the
inspiration of the vowel-points; see Horton, Inspiration and
Bible, 8. Of the age which produced the Protestant dogmatic
theology, Charles Beard, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, says:
“I know no epoch of Christianity to which I could more confidently
point in illustration of the fact that where there is most
theology, there is often least religion.”

Of this view we may remark:

(_a_) We grant that there are instances when God’s communications were
uttered in an audible voice and took a definite form of words, and that
this was sometimes accompanied with the command to commit the words to
writing.

For examples, see _Ex. 3:4—_“God called unto him out of the midst
of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses”; _20:22—_“Ye yourselves have
seen that I have talked with you from heaven”; _cf._ _Heb.
12:19—_“the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated
that no word more should be spoken unto them”; _Numbers 7:89—_“And
when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with him, then
he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the mercy-seat
that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two
cherubim: and he spake unto him”; _8:1—_“And Jehovah spake unto
Moses, saying,” etc.; _Dan. 4:31—_“While the word was in the
king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king
Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from
thee”; _Acts 9:5—_“And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I
am Jesus whom thou persecutest”; _Rev. 19:9—_“And he saith unto
me, Write, Blessed are they that are bidden to the marriage supper
of the Lamb”; _21:5—_“And he that sitteth on the throne said,
Behold, I make all things new”; _cf._ _1:10, 11—_“and I heard
behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet saying, What thou seest,
write in a book and send it to the seven churches.” So the voice
from heaven at the baptism, and at the transfiguration, of Jesus
(_Mat. 3:17_, and _17:5_; see Broadus, Amer. Com., on these
passages).

(_b_) The theory in question, however, rests upon a partial induction of
Scripture facts,—unwarrantably assuming that such occasional instances of
direct dictation reveal the invariable method of God’s communications of
truth to the writers of the Bible.

Scripture nowhere declares that this immediate communication of
the words was universal. On _1 Cor. 2:13—οὐκ ἐν διδακτοίς
ανθρωπίνης σοφίας, λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διδακτοîς πνεύματος_, the text
usually cited as proof of invariable dictation—Meyer says: “There
is no dictation here; διδακτοîς excludes everything mechanical.”
Henderson, Inspiration (2nd ed.), 333, 349—“As human wisdom did
not dictate word for word, so the Spirit did not.” Paul claims for
Scripture simply a general style of plainness which is due to the
influence of the Spirit. Manly: “Dictation to an amanuensis is not
_teaching_.” Our Revised Version properly translates the remainder
of the verse, _1 Cor. 2:13—_“combining spiritual things with
spiritual words.”

(_c_) It cannot account for the manifestly human element in the
Scriptures. There are peculiarities of style which distinguish the
productions of each writer from those of every other, and there are
variations in accounts of the same transaction which are inconsistent with
the theory of a solely divine authorship.

Notice Paul’s anacoloutha and his bursts of grief and indignation
(_Rom. 5:12 __sq._, _2 Cor. 11:1_ _sq._), and his ignorance of the
precise number whom he had baptized (_1 Cor. 1:16_). One beggar or
two (_Mat. 20:30_; _cf._ _Luke 18:35_); “about five and twenty or
thirty furlongs”_ (John 6:19)_; “shed for many” (_Mat. 26:28_ has
περί, _Mark 14:24_ and _Luke 22:20_ have ὑπέρ). Dictation of words
which were immediately to be lost by imperfect transcription?
Clarke, Christian Theology, 33-37—“We are under no obligation to
maintain the complete inerrancy of the Scriptures. In them we have
the freedom of life, rather than extraordinary precision of
statement or accuracy of detail. We have become Christians in
spite of differences between the evangelists. The Scriptures are
various, progressive, free. There is no authority in Scripture for
applying the word ’inspired’ to our present Bible as a whole, and
theology is not bound to employ this word in defining the
Scriptures. Christianity is founded in history, and will stand
whether the Scriptures are inspired or not. If special inspiration
were wholly disproved, Christ would still be the Savior of the
world. But the divine element in the Scriptures will never be
disproved.”

(_d_) It is inconsistent with a wise economy of means, to suppose that the
Scripture writers should have had dictated to them what they knew already,
or what they could inform themselves of by the use of their natural
powers.

Why employ eye-witnesses at all? Why not dictate the gospels to
Gentiles living a thousand years before? God respects the
instruments he has called into being, and he uses them according
to their constitutional gifts. George Eliot represents
Stradivarius as saying:—“If my hand slacked, I should rob
God—since he is fullest good—Leaving a blank instead of violins.
God cannot make Antonio Stradivari’s violins, Without Antonio.”
_Mark 11:3—_“The Lord hath need of him,” may apply to man as well
as beast.

(_e_) It contradicts what we know of the law of God’s working in the soul.
The higher and nobler God’s communications, the more fully is man in
possession and use of his own faculties. We cannot suppose that this
highest work of man under the influence of the Spirit was purely
mechanical.

Joseph receives communication by vision (_Mat. 1:20_); Mary, by
words of an angel spoken in her waking moments (_Luke 1:28_). The
more advanced the recipient, the more conscious the communication.
These four theories might almost be called the Pelagian, the
Arminian, the Docetic, and the Dynamical. Sabatier, Philos.
Religion, 41, 42, 87—“In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Father
says at the baptism to Jesus: ‘My Son, in all the prophets I was
waiting for thee, that thou mightest come, and that I might rest
in thee. For thou art my Rest.’ Inspiration becomes more and more
internal, until in Christ it is continuous and complete. Upon the
opposite Docetic view, the most perfect inspiration should have
been that of Balaam’s ass.” Semler represents the Pelagian or
Ebionitic view, as Quenstedt represents this Docetic view. Semler
localizes and temporalizes the contents of Scripture. Yet, though
he carried this to the extreme of excluding any divine authorship,
he did good service in leading the way to the historical study of
the Bible.

4. The Dynamical Theory.

The true view holds, in opposition to the first of these theories, that
inspiration is not simply a natural but also a supernatural fact, and that
it is the immediate work of a personal God in the soul of man.

It holds, in opposition to the second, that inspiration belongs, not only
to the men who wrote the Scriptures, but to the Scriptures which they
wrote, so that these Scriptures, when taken together, constitute a
trustworthy and sufficient record of divine revelation.

It holds, in opposition to the third theory, that the Scriptures contain a
human as well as a divine element, so that while they present a body of
divinely revealed truth, this truth is shaped in human moulds and adapted
to ordinary human intelligence.

In short, inspiration is characteristically neither natural, partial, nor
mechanical, but supernatural, plenary, and dynamical. Further explanations
will be grouped under the head of The Union of the Divine and Human
Elements in Inspiration, in the section which immediately follows.

If the small circle be taken as symbol of the human element in
inspiration, and the large circle as symbol of the divine, then
the Intuition-theory would be represented by the small circle
alone; the Dictation-theory by the large circle alone; the
Illumination-theory by the small circle external to the large, and
touching it at only a single point; the Dynamical-theory by two
concentric circles, the small included in the large. Even when
inspiration is but the exaltation and intensification of man’s
natural powers, it must be considered the work of God as well as
of man. God can work from within as well as from without. As
creation and regeneration are works of the immanent rather than of
the transcendent God, so inspiration is in general a work within
man’s soul, rather than a communication to him from without.
Prophecy may be natural to perfect humanity. Revelation is an
unveiling, and the Röntgen rays enable us to see through a veil.
But the insight of the Scripture writers into truth so far beyond
their mental and moral powers is inexplicable except by a
supernatural influence upon their minds; in other words, except as
they were lifted up into the divine Reason and endowed with the
wisdom of God.

Although we propose this Dynamical-theory as one which best
explains the Scripture facts, we do not regard this or any other
theory as of essential importance. No theory of inspiration is
necessary to Christian faith. Revelation precedes inspiration.
There was religion before the Old Testament, and an oral gospel
before the New Testament. God might reveal without recording;
might permit record without inspiration; might inspire without
vouching for anything more than religious teaching and for the
history, only so far as was necessary to that religious teaching.
Whatever theory of inspiration we frame, should be the result of a
strict induction of the Scripture facts, and not an a priori
scheme to which Scripture must be conformed. The fault of many
past discussions of the subject is the assumption that God must
adopt some particular method of inspiration, or secure an absolute
perfection of detail in matters not essential to the religious
teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the best theory of inspiration is
to have no theory.

Warfield and Hodge, Inspiration, 8—“Very many religious and
historical truths must be established before we come to the
question of inspiration, as for instance the being and moral
government of God, the fallen condition of man, the fact of a
redemptive scheme, the general historical truth of the Scriptures,
and the validity and authority of the revelation of God’s will
which they contain, i. e., the general truth of Christianity and
of its doctrines. Hence it follows that while the inspiration of
the Scriptures is true, and being true is a principle fundamental
to the adequate interpretation of Scripture, it nevertheless is
not, in the first instance, a principle fundamental to the truth
of the Christian religion.” Warfield, in Presb. and Ref. Rev.,
April, 1893:208—“We do not found the whole Christian system on the
doctrine of inspiration.... Were there no such thing as
inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential
doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us”—in the gospels and in
the living church. F. L. Patton, Inspiration, 22—“I must take
exception to the disposition of some to stake the fortunes of
Christianity on the doctrine of inspiration. Not that I yield to
any one in profound conviction of the truth and importance of the
doctrine. But it is proper for us to bear in mind the immense
argumentative advantage which Christianity has, aside altogether
from the inspiration of the documents on which it rests.” So argue
also Sanday, Oracles of God, and Dale, The Living Christ.

IV. The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration.

1. The Scriptures are the production equally of God and of man, and are
therefore never to be regarded as merely human or merely divine.

The mystery of inspiration consists in neither of these terms separately,
but in the union of the two. Of this, however, there are analogies in the
interpenetration of human powers by the divine efficiency in regeneration
and sanctification, and in the union of the divine and human natures in
the person of Jesus Christ.

According to “Dalton’s law,” each gas is as a vacuum to every
other: “Gases are mutually passive, and pass into each other as
into vacua.” Each interpenetrates the other. But this does not
furnish a perfect illustration of our subject. The atom of oxygen
and the atom of nitrogen, in common air, remain side by side but
they do not unite. In inspiration the human and the divine
elements do unite. The Lutheran maxim, “Mens humana capax divinæ,”
is one of the most important principles of a true theology. “The
Lutherans think of humanity as a thing made by God for himself and
to receive himself. The Reformed think of the Deity as ever
preserving himself from any confusion with the creature. They fear
pantheism and idolatry” (Bp. of Salisbury, quoted in Swayne, Our
Lord’s Knowledge, xx).

Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 66—“That initial mystery, the relation
in our consciousness between the individual and the universal
element, between the finite and the infinite, between God and
man,—how can we comprehend their coëxistence and their union, and
yet how can we doubt it? Where is the thoughtful man to-day who
has not broken the thin crust of his daily life, and caught a
glimpse of those profound and obscure waters on which floats our
consciousness? Who has not felt within himself a veiled presence,
and a force much greater than his own? What worker in a lofty
cause has not perceived within his own personal activity, and
saluted with a feeling of veneration, the mysterious activity of a
universal and eternal Power? ‘In Deo vivimus, movemur, et
sumus.’... This mystery cannot be dissipated, for without it
religion itself would no longer exist.” Quackenbos, in Harper’s
Magazine, July, 1900:264, says that “hypnotic suggestion is but
inspiration.” The analogy of human influence thus communicated may
at least help us to some understanding of the divine.

2. This union of the divine and human agencies in inspiration is not to be
conceived of as one of external impartation and reception.

On the other hand, those whom God raised up and providentially qualified
to do this work, spoke and wrote the words of God, when inspired, not as
from without, but as from within, and that not passively, but in the most
conscious possession and the most exalted exercise of their own powers of
intellect, emotion, and will.

The Holy Spirit does not dwell in man as water in a vessel. We may
rather illustrate the experience of the Scripture writers by the
experience of the preacher who under the influence of God’s Spirit
is carried beyond himself, and is conscious of a clearer
apprehension of truth and of a greater ability to utter it than
belong to his unaided nature, yet knows himself to be no passive
vehicle of a divine communication, but to be as never before in
possession and exercise of his own powers. The inspiration of the
Scripture writers, however, goes far beyond the illumination
granted to the preacher, in that it qualifies them to put the
truth, without error, into permanent and written form. This
inspiration, moreover, is more than providential preparation. Like
miracles, inspiration may use man’s natural powers, but man’s
natural powers do not explain it. Moses, David, Paul, and John
were providentially endowed and educated for their work of writing
Scripture, but this endowment and education were not inspiration
itself, but only the preparation for it.

Beyschlag: “With John, remembrance and exposition had become
inseparable.” E. G. Robinson; “Novelists do not _create_
characters,—they reproduce with modifications material presented
to their memories. So the apostles reproduced their impressions of
Christ.” Hutton, Essays, 2:231—“The Psalmists vacillate between
the first person and the third, when they deliver the purposes of
God. As they warm with their spiritual inspiration, they lose
themselves in the person of Him who inspires them, and then they
are again recalled to themselves.” Stanley, Life and Letters,
1:380—“Revelation is not resolved into a mere human process
because we are able to distinguish the natural agencies through
which it was communicated”; 2:102—“You seem to me to transfer too
much to these ancient prophets and writers and chiefs our modern
notions of _divine origin_.... Our notion, or rather, the modern
Puritanical notion of divine origin, is of a preternatural force
or voice, putting aside secondary agencies, and separated from
those agencies by an impassable gulf. The ancient, Oriental,
Biblical notion was of a supreme Will acting through those
agencies, or rather, being inseparable from them. _Our_ notions of
inspiration and divine communications insist on absolute
perfection of fact, morals, doctrine. The Biblical notion was that
inspiration was compatible with weakness, infirmity,
contradiction.” Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 182—“In inspiration the
thoughts, feelings, purposes are organized into another One than
the self in which they were themselves born. That other One is _in
themselves_. They enter into communication with Him. Yet this may
be supernatural, even though natural psychological means are used.
Inspiration which is external is not inspiration at all.” This
last sentence, however, seems to us a needless exaggeration of the
true principle. Though God originally inspires from within, he may
also communicate truth from without.

3. Inspiration, therefore, did not remove, but rather pressed into its own
service, all the personal peculiarities of the writers, together with
their defects of culture and literary style.

Every imperfection not inconsistent with truth in a human composition may
exist in inspired Scripture. The Bible is God’s word, in the sense that it
presents to us divine truth in human forms, and is a revelation not for a
select class but for the common mind. Rightly understood, this very
humanity of the Bible is a proof of its divinity.

Locke: “When God made the prophet, he did not unmake the man.”
Prof. Day: “The bush in which God appeared to Moses remained a
bush, while yet burning with the brightness of God and uttering
forth the majesty of the mind of God.” The paragraphs of the Koran
are called _ayat_, or “sign,” from their supposed supernatural
elegance. But elegant literary productions do not touch the heart.
The Bible is not merely the word of God; it is also the word made
flesh. The Holy Spirit hides himself, that he may show forth
Christ (_John 3:8_); he is known only by his effects—a pattern for
preachers, who are ministers of the Spirit (_2 Cor. 3:6_). See
Conant on Genesis, 65.

The Moslem declares that every word of the Koran came by the
agency of Gabriel from the seventh heaven, and that its very
pronunciation is inspired. Better the doctrine of Martineau, Seat
of Authority, 289—“Though the pattern be divine, the web that
bears it must still be human.” Jackson, James Martineau,
255—“Paul’s metaphor of the ‘treasure in earthen vessels’_ (2 Cor.
4:7)_ you cannot allow to give you guidance; you want, not the
treasure only, but the casket too, to come from above, and be of
the crystal of the sky. You want the record to be divine, not only
in its spirit, but also in its letter.” Charles Hodge, Syst.
Theol., 1:157—“When God ordains praise out of the mouths of babes,
they must speak as babes, or the whole power and beauty of the
tribute will be lost.”

Evans, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 16, 25—“The πνεῦμα of a
dead wind is never changed, as the Rabbis of old thought, into the
πνεῦμα of a living spirit. The raven that fed Elijah was nothing
more than a bird. Nor does man, when supernaturally influenced,
cease to be a man. An inspired man is not God, nor a divinely
manipulated automaton”; “In Scripture there may be as much
imperfection as, in the parts of any organism, would be consistent
with the perfect adaptation of that organism to its destined end.
Scripture then, taken together, is a statement of moral and
religious truth sufficient for men’s salvation, or an infallible
and sufficient rule of _faith and practice_.” J. S. Wrightnour:
“Inspire means to breathe in, as a flute-player breathes into his
instrument. As different flutes may have their own shapes,
peculiarities, and what might seem like defects, so here; yet all
are breathed into by one Spirit. The same Spirit who inspired them
selected those instruments which were best for his purpose, as the
Savior selected his apostles. In these writings therefore is given
us, in the precise way that is best for us, the spiritual
instruction and food that we need. Food for the body is not always
given in the most concentrated form, but in the form that is best
adapted for digestion. So God gives gold, not in coin ready
stamped, but in the quartz of the mine whence it has to be dug and
smelted.” Remains of Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his
Friends, 274—“I see that the Bible fits in to every fold of the
human heart. I am a man, and I believe it is God’s book, because
it is man’s book.”

4. In inspiration God may use all right and normal methods of literary
composition.

As we recognize in literature the proper function of history, poetry, and
fiction; of prophecy, parable, and drama; of personification and proverb;
of allegory and dogmatic instruction; and even of myth and legend; we
cannot deny the possibility that God may use any one of these methods of
communicating truth, leaving it to us to determine in any single case
which of these methods he has adopted.

In inspiration, as in regeneration and sanctification, God works
“in divers manners”_ (Heb. 1:1)_. The Scriptures, like the books
of secular literature, must be interpreted in the light of their
purpose. Poetry must not be treated as prose, and parable must not
be made to “go on all fours,” when it was meant to walk erect and
to tell one simple story. Drama is not history, nor is
personification to be regarded as biography. There is a rhetorical
overstatement which is intended only as a vivid emphasizing of
important truth. Allegory is a popular mode of illustration. Even
myth and legend may convey great lessons not otherwise
apprehensible to infantile or untrained minds. A literary sense is
needed in our judgments of Scripture, and much hostile criticism
is lacking in this literary sense.

Denney, Studies in Theology, 218—“There is a stage in which the
whole contents of the mind, as yet incapable of science or
history, may be called mythological. And what criticism shows us,
in its treatment of the early chapters of Genesis, is that God
does not disdain to speak to the mind, nor through it, even when
it is at this lowly stage. Even the myth, in which the beginnings
of human life, lying beyond human research, are represented to
itself by the child-mind of the race, may be made the medium of
revelation.... But that does not make the first chapter of Genesis
science, nor the third chapter history. And what is of authority
in these chapters is not the quasi-scientific or quasi-historical
form, but the message, which through them comes to the heart, of
God’s creative wisdom and power.” Gore, in Lux Mundi, 356—“The
various sorts of mental or literary activity develop in their
different lines out of an earlier condition in which they lie
fused and undifferentiated. This we can vaguely call the mythical
stage of mental evolution. A myth is not a falsehood; it is a
product of mental activity, as instructive and rich as any later
product, but its characteristic is that it is not yet
distinguished into history and poetry and philosophy.” So Grote
calls the Greek myths the whole intellectual stock of the age to
which they belonged—the common root of all the history, poetry,
philosophy, theology, which afterwards diverged and proceeded from
it. So the early part of Genesis may be of the nature of myth in
which we cannot distinguish the historical germ, though we do not
deny that it exists. Robert Browning’s Clive and Andrea del Sarto
are essentially correct representations of historical characters,
though the details in each poem are imaginary.

5. The inspiring Spirit has given the Scriptures to the world by a process
of gradual evolution.

As in communicating the truths of natural science, God has communicated
the truths of religion by successive steps, germinally at first, more
fully as men have been able to comprehend them. The education of the race
is analogous to the education of the child. First came pictures,
object-lessons, external rites, predictions; then the key to these in
Christ, and then didactic exposition in the Epistles.

There have been “divers portions,” as well as “divers manners”_
(Heb. 1:1)_. The early prophecies like that of _Gen. 3:15_—the
seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head—were but faint
glimmerings of the dawn. Men had to be raised up who were capable
of receiving and transmitting the divine communications. Moses,
David, Isaiah mark successive advances in recipiency and
transparency to the heavenly light. Inspiration has employed men
of various degrees of ability, culture and religious insight. As
all the truths of the calculus lie germinally in the simplest
mathematical axiom, so all the truths of salvation may be wrapped
up in the statement that God is holiness and love. But not every
scholar can evolve the calculus from the axiom. The teacher may
dictate propositions which the pupil does not understand: he may
demonstrate in such a way that the pupil participates in the
process; or, best of all, he may incite the pupil to work out the
demonstration for himself. God seems to have used all these
methods. But while there are instances of dictation and
illumination, and inspiration sometimes includes these, the
general method seems to have been such a divine quickening of
man’s powers that he discovers and expresses the truth for
himself.

A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 339—“Inspiration is that,
seen from its divine side, which we call discovery when seen from
the human side.... Every addition to knowledge, whether in the
individual or the community, whether scientific, ethical or
theological, is due to a coöperation between the human soul which
assimilates and the divine power which inspires. Neither acts, or
could act, in independent isolation. For ‘unassisted reason’ is a
fiction, and pure receptivity it is impossible to conceive. Even
the emptiest vessel must limit the quantity and determine the
configuration of any liquid with which it may be filled....
Inspiration is limited to no age, to no country, to no people.”
The early Semites had it, and the great Oriental reformers. There
can be no gathering of grapes from thorns, or of figs from
thistles. Whatever of true or of good is found in human history
has come from God. On the Progressiveness of Revelation, see Orr,
Problem of the O. T., 431-478.

6. Inspiration did not guarantee inerrancy in things not essential to the
main purpose of Scripture.

Inspiration went no further than to secure a trustworthy transmission by
the sacred writers of the truth they were commissioned to deliver. It was
not omniscience. It was a bestowal of various kinds and degrees of
knowledge and aid, according to need; sometimes suggesting new truth,
sometimes presiding over the collection of preëxisting material and
guarding from essential error in the final elaboration. As inspiration was
not omniscience, so it was not complete sanctification. It involved
neither personal infallibility, nor entire freedom from sin.

God can use imperfect means. As the imperfection of the eye does
not disprove its divine authorship, and as God reveals himself in
nature and history in spite of their shortcomings, so inspiration
can accomplish its purpose through both writers and writings in
some respects imperfect. God is, in the Bible as he was in Hebrew
history, leading his people onward to Christ, but only by a
progressive unfolding of the truth. The Scripture writers were not
perfect men. Paul at Antioch resisted Peter, “because he stood
condemned”_ (Gal 2:11)_. But Peter differed from Paul, not in
public utterances, nor in written words, but in following his own
teachings (_cf._ _Acts 15:6-11_); _versus_ Norman Fox, in Bap.
Rev., 1885:469-482. Personal defects do not invalidate an
ambassador, though they may hinder the reception of his message.
So with the apostles’ ignorance of the time of Christ’s second
coming. It was only gradually that they came to understand
Christian doctrines; they did not teach the truth all at once;
their final utterances supplemented and completed the earlier; and
all together furnished only that measure of knowledge which God
saw needful for the moral and religious teaching of mankind. Many
things are yet unrevealed, and many things which inspired men
uttered, they did not, when they uttered them, fully understand.

Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 53, 54—“The word is divine-human in the
sense that it has for its contents divine truth in human,
historical, and individually conditioned form. The Holy Scripture
contains the word of God in a way plain, and entirely sufficient
to beget saving faith.” Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 87—“Inspiration
is not a miraculous and therefore incredible thing, but normal and
in accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and
finite spirit, a divine inflowing of _mental_ light precisely
analogous to that _moral_ influence which divines call grace. As
every devout and obedient soul may expect to share in divine
grace, so the devout and obedient souls of all the ages have
shared, as Parker taught, in divine inspiration. And, as the
reception of grace even in large measure does not render us
_impeccable_, so neither does the reception of inspiration render
us _infallible_.” We may concede to Miss Cobbe that inspiration
consists with imperfection, while yet we grant to the Scripture
writers an authority higher than our own.

7. Inspiration did not always, or even generally, involve a direct
communication to the Scripture writers of the words they wrote.

Thought is possible without words, and in the order of nature precedes
words. The Scripture writers appear to have been so influenced by the Holy
Spirit that they perceived and felt even the new truths they were to
publish, as discoveries of their own minds, and were left to the action of
their own minds in the expression of these truths, with the single
exception that they were supernaturally held back from the selection of
wrong words, and when needful were provided with right ones. Inspiration
is therefore not verbal, while yet we claim that no form of words which
taken in its connections would teach essential error has been admitted
into Scripture.

Before expression there must be something to be expressed. Thought
is possible without language. The concept may exist without words.
See experiences of deaf-mutes, in Princeton Rev., Jan.
1881:104-128. The prompter interrupts only when the speaker’s
memory fails. The writing-master guides the pupil’s hand only when
it would otherwise go wrong. The father suffers the child to walk
alone, except when it is in danger of stumbling. If knowledge be
rendered certain, it is as good as direct revelation. But whenever
the mere communication of ideas or the direction to proper
material would not suffice to secure a correct utterance, the
sacred writers were guided in the very selection of their words.
Minute criticism proves more and more conclusively the
suitableness of the verbal dress to the thoughts expressed; all
Biblical exegesis is based, indeed, upon the assumption that
divine wisdom has made the outward form a trustworthy vehicle of
the inward substance of revelation. See Henderson, Inspiration
(2nd ed.), 102, 114; Bib. Sac, 1872:428, 640; William James,
Psychology, 1:266 _sq._

Watts, New Apologetic, 40, 111, holds to a verbal inspiration:
“The bottles are not the wine, but if the bottles perish the wine
is sure to be spilled”; the inspiring Spirit certainly gave
language to Peter and others at Pentecost, for the apostles spoke
with other tongues; holy men of old not only thought, but “spake
from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”_ (2 Pet. 1:21)_. So
Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 171—“Why the minute study of the
_words_ of Scripture, carried on by all expositors, their search
after the precise shade of verbal significance, their attention to
the minutest details of language, and to all the delicate coloring
of mood and tense and accent?” Liberal scholars, Dr. Gordon
thinks, thus affirm the very doctrine which they deny. Rothe,
Dogmatics, 238, speaks of “a language of the Holy Ghost.”
Oetinger: “It is the style of the heavenly court.” But Broadus, an
almost equally conservative scholar, in his Com. on _Mat. 3:17_,
says that the difference between “This is my beloved Son,” and
_Luke 3:22—_“Thou art my beloved Son,” should make us cautious in
theorizing about verbal inspiration, and he intimates that in some
cases that hypothesis is unwarranted. The theory of verbal
inspiration is refuted by the two facts: 1. that the N. T.
quotations from the O. T., in 99 cases, differ both from the
Hebrew and from the LXX; 2. that Jesus’ own words are reported
with variations by the different evangelists; see Marcus Dods, The
Bible, its Origin and Nature, chapter on Inspiration.

Helen Keller told Phillips Brooks that she had always known that
there was a God, but she had not known his name. Dr. Z. F.
Westervelt, of the Deaf Mute Institute, had under his charge four
children of different mothers. All of these children were dumb,
though there was no defect of hearing and the organs of speech
were perfect. But their mothers had never loved them and had never
talked to them in the loving way that provoked imitation. The
children heard scolding and harshness, but this did not attract.
So the older members of the church in private and in the meetings
for prayer should teach the younger to talk. But harsh and
contentious talk will not accomplish the result,—it must be the
talk of Christian love. William D. Whitney, in his review of Max
Müller’s Science of Language, 26-31, combats the view of Müller
that thought and language are identical. Major Bliss Taylor’s
reply to Santa Anna: “General Taylor never surrenders!” was a
substantially correct, though a diplomatic and euphemistic,
version of the General’s actual profane words. Each Scripture
writer uttered old truth in the new forms with which his own
experience had clothed it. David reached his greatness by leaving
off the mere repetition of Moses, and by speaking out of his own
heart. Paul reached his greatness by giving up the mere teaching
of what he had been taught, and by telling what God’s plan of
mercy was to all. Augustine: “Scriptura est sensus
Scripturæ”—“Scripture _is_ what Scripture _means_.” Among the
theological writers who admit the errancy of Scripture writers as
to some matters unessential to their moral and spiritual teaching,
are Luther, Calvin, Cocceius, Tholuck, Neander, Lange, Stier, Van
Oosterzee, John Howe, Richard Baxter, Conybeare, Alford, Mead.

8. Yet, notwithstanding the ever-present human element, the all-pervading
inspiration of the Scriptures constitutes these various writings an
organic whole.

Since the Bible is in all its parts the work of God, each part is to be
judged, not by itself alone, but in its connection with every other part.
The Scriptures are not to be interpreted as so many merely human
productions by different authors, but as also the work of one divine mind.
Seemingly trivial things are to be explained from their connection with
the whole. One history is to be built up from the several accounts of the
life of Christ. One doctrine must supplement another. The Old Testament is
part of a progressive system, whose culmination and key are to be found in
the New. The central subject and thought which binds all parts of the
Bible together, and in the light of which they are to be interpreted, is
the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The Bible says: “There is no God”_ (Ps. 14:1)_; but then, this is
to be taken with the context: “The fool hath said in his heart.”
Satan’s “it is written,”_ (Mat. 4:6)_ is supplemented by Christ’s
“It is written again”_ (Mat. 4:7)_. Trivialities are like the hair
and nails of the body—they have their place as parts of a complete
and organic whole; see Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:40. The verse which
mentions Paul’s cloak at Troas (2 Tim. 4:13) is (1) a sign of
genuineness—a forger would not invent it; (2) an evidence of
temporal need endured for the gospel; (3) an indication of the
limits of inspiration,—even Paul must have books and parchments.
_Col. 2:21—_“Handle not, nor taste, nor touch”—is to be
interpreted by the context in _verse 20—_“why ... do ye subject
yourselves to ordinances?” and by _verse 22—_“after the precepts
and doctrines of men.” Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:164—“The difference
between John’s gospel and the book of Chronicles is like that
between man’s brain and the hair of his head; nevertheless the
life of the body is as truly in the hair as in the brain.” Like
railway coupons, Scripture texts are “Not good if detached.”

Crooker, The New Bible and its New Uses, 137-144, utterly denies
the unity of the Bible. Prof. A. B. Davidson of Edinburgh says
that “A theology of the O. T. is really an impossibility, because
the O. T. is not a homogeneous whole.” These denials proceed from
an insufficient recognition of the principle of evolution in O. T.
history and doctrine. Doctrines in early Scripture are like rivers
at their source; they are not yet fully expanded; many affluents
are yet to come. See Bp. Bull’s Sermon, in Works, xv:183; and
Bruce, Apologetics, 323—“The literature of the early stages of
revelation must share the defects of the revelation which it
records and interprets.... The final revelation enables us to see
the defects of the earlier.... We should find Christ in the O. T.
as we find the butterfly in the caterpillar, and man the crown of
the universe in the fiery cloud.” Crane, Religion of To-morrow,
224—Every part is to be modified by every other part. No verse is
true _out of_ the Book, but the whole Book taken together is true.
Gore, in Lux Mundi, 350—“To recognize the inspiration of the
Scriptures is to put ourselves to school in every part of them.”
Robert Browning, Ring and Book, 175 (Pope, 228)—“Truth nowhere
lies, yet everywhere, in these; Not absolutely in a portion, yet
Evolvable from the whole; evolved at last Painfully, held
tenaciously by me.” On the Organic Unity of the O. T., see Orr,
Problem of the O. T., 27-51.

9. When the unity of the Scripture is fully recognized, the Bible, in
spite of imperfections in matters non-essential to its religious purpose,
furnishes a safe and sufficient guide to truth and to salvation.

The recognition of the Holy Spirit’s agency makes it rational and natural
to believe in the organic unity of Scripture. When the earlier parts are
taken in connection with the later, and when each part is interpreted by
the whole, most of the difficulties connected with inspiration disappear.
Taken together, with Christ as its culmination and explanation, the Bible
furnishes the Christian rule of faith and practice.

The Bible answers two questions: What has God done to save me? and
What must I do to be saved? The propositions of Euclid are not
invalidated by the fact that he believed the earth to be flat. The
ethics of Plato would not be disproved by his mistakes with regard
to the solar system. So religious authority is independent of
merely secular knowledge.—Sir Joshua Reynolds was a great painter,
and a great teacher of his art. His lectures on painting laid down
principles which have been accepted as authority for generations.
But Joshua Reynolds illustrates his subject from history and
science. It was a day when both history and science were young. In
some unimportant matters of this sort, which do not in the least
affect his conclusions, Sir Joshua Reynolds makes an occasional
slip; his statements are inaccurate. Does he, therefore, cease to
be an authority in matters of his art?—The Duke of Wellington said
once that no human being knew at what time of day the battle of
Waterloo began. One historian gets his story from one combatant,
and he puts the hour at eleven in the morning. Another historian
gets his information from another combatant, and he puts it at
noon. Shall we say that this discrepancy argues error in the whole
account, and that we have no longer any certainty that the battle
of Waterloo was ever fought at all?

Such slight imperfections are to be freely admitted, while at the
same time we insist that the Bible, taken as a whole, is
incomparably superior to all other books, and is “able to make
thee wise unto salvation”_ (2 Tim. 3:15)_. Hooker, Eccl. Polity:
“Whatsoever is spoken of God or things pertaining to God otherwise
than truth is, though it seem an honor, it is an injury. And as
incredible praises given unto men do often abate and impair the
credit of their deserved commendation, so we must likewise take
great heed lest, in attributing to Scripture more than it can
have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which
it hath more abundantly to be less reverently esteemed.” Baxter,
Works, 21:349—“Those men who think that these human imperfections
of the writers do extend further, and may appear in some passages
of chronologies or history which are no part of the rule of faith
and life, do not hereby destroy the Christian cause. For God might
enable his apostles to an infallible recording and preaching of
the gospel, even all things necessary to salvation, though he had
not made them infallible in every by-passage and circumstance, any
more than they were indefectible in life.”

The Bible, says Beet, “contains possible errors in small details
or allusions, but it gives us with absolute certainty the great
facts of Christianity, and upon these great facts, and upon these
only, our faith is based.” Evans, Bib. Scholarship and
Inspiration, 15, 18, 65—“Teach that the shell is part of the
kernel and men who find that they cannot keep the shell will throw
away shell and kernel together.... This overstatement of
inspiration made Renan, Bradlaugh and Ingersoll sceptics.... If in
creation God can work out a perfect result through imperfection
why cannot he do the like in inspiration? If in Christ God can
appear in human weakness and ignorance, why not in the _written_
word?”

We therefore take exception to the view of Watts, New Apologetic,
71—“Let the theory of historical errors and scientific errors be
adopted, and Christianity must share the fate of Hinduism. If its
inspired writers err when they tell us of earthly things, none
will believe when they tell of heavenly things.” Watts adduces
instances of Spinoza’s giving up the form while claiming to hold
the substance, and in this way reducing revelation to a phenomenon
of naturalistic pantheism. We reply that no _a priori_ theory of
perfection in divine inspiration must blind us to the evidence of
actual imperfection in Scripture. As in creation and in Christ, so
in Scripture, God humbles himself to adopt human and imperfect
methods of self-revelation. See Jonathan Edwards, Diary: “I
observe that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries,
because they are beside the way to which they have been so long
used. _Resolved_, if ever I live to years, that I will be
impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and
receive them if rational, however long soever I have been used to
another way of thinking.”

Bowne, The Immanence of God, 109, 110—“Those who would find the
source of certainty and the seat of authority in the Scriptures
alone, or in the church alone, or reason and conscience alone,
rather than in the complex and indivisible coworking of all these
factors, should be reminded of the history of religious thought.
The stiffest doctrine of Scripture inerrancy has not prevented
warring interpretations; and those who would place the seat of
authority in reason and conscience are forced to admit that
outside illumination may do much for both. In some sense the
religion of the spirit is a very important fact, but when it sets
up in opposition to the religion of a book, the light that is in
it is apt to turn to darkness.”

10. While inspiration constitutes Scripture an authority more trustworthy
than are individual reason or the creeds of the church, the only ultimate
authority is Christ himself.

Christ has not so constructed Scripture as to dispense with his personal
presence and teaching by his Spirit. The Scripture is the imperfect mirror
of Christ. It is defective, yet it reflects him and leads to him.
Authority resides not in it, but in him, and his Spirit enables the
individual Christian and the collective church progressively to
distinguish the essential from the non-essential, and so to perceive the
truth as it is in Jesus. In thus judging Scripture and interpreting
Scripture, we are not rationalists, but are rather believers in him who
promised to be with us alway even unto the end of the world and to lead us
by his Spirit into all the truth.

James speaks of the law as a mirror (_James 1:23-25—_“like unto a
man beholding his natural face in a mirror ... looketh into the
perfect law”); the law convicts of sin because it reflects Christ.
Paul speaks of the gospel as a mirror (_2 Cor. 3:18—_“we all,
beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord”); the gospel
transforms us because it reflects Christ. Yet both law and gospel
are imperfect; they are like mirrors of polished metal, whose
surface is often dim, and whose images are obscure; (_1 Cor.
13:12—_“For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to
face”); even inspired men know only in part, and prophesy only in
part. Scripture itself is the conception and utterance of a child,
to be done away when that which is perfect is come, and we see
Christ as he is.

Authority is the right to impose beliefs or to command obedience.
The only ultimate authority is God, for he is truth, justice and
love. But he can impose beliefs and command obedience only as he
is known. Authority belongs therefore only to God revealed, and
because Christ is God revealed he can say: “All authority hath
been given unto me in heaven and on earth”_ (Mat. 28:18)_. The
final authority in religion is Jesus Christ. Every one of his
revelations of God is authoritative. Both nature and human nature
are such revelations. He exercises his authority through delegated
and subordinate authorities, such as parents and civil government.
These rightfully claim obedience so long as they hold to their own
respective spheres and recognize their relation of dependence upon
him. “The powers that be are ordained of God”_ (Rom. 13:1)_, even
though they are imperfect manifestations of his wisdom and
righteousness. The decisions of the Supreme Court are
authoritative even though the judges are fallible and come short
of establishing absolute justice. Authority is not infallibility,
in the government either of the family or of the state.

The church of the middle ages was regarded as possessed of
absolute authority. But the Protestant Reformation showed how vain
were these pretensions. The church is an authority only as it
recognizes and expresses the supreme authority of Christ. The
Reformers felt the need of some external authority in place of the
church. They substituted the Scripture. The phrase “the word of
God,” which designates the truth orally uttered or affecting the
minds of men, came to signify only a book. Supreme authority was
ascribed to it. It often usurped the place of Christ. While we
vindicate the proper authority of Scripture, we would show that
its authority is not immediate and absolute, but mediate and
relative, through human and imperfect records, and needing a
supplementary and divine teaching to interpret them. The authority
of Scripture is not apart from Christ or above Christ, but only in
subordination to him and to his Spirit. He who inspired Scripture
must enable us to interpret Scripture. This is not a doctrine of
rationalism, for it holds to man’s absolute dependence upon the
enlightening Spirit of Christ. It is not a doctrine of mysticism,
for it holds that Christ teaches us only by opening to us the
meaning of his past revelations. We do not expect any new worlds
in our astronomy, nor do we expect any new Scriptures in our
theology. But we do expect that the same Christ who gave the
Scriptures will give us new insight into their meaning and will
enable us to make new applications of their teachings.

The right and duty of private judgment with regard to Scripture
belong to no ecclesiastical caste, but are inalienable liberties
of the whole church of Christ and of each individual member of
that church. And yet this judgment is, from another point of view,
no private judgment. It is not the judgment of arbitrariness or
caprice. It does not make the Christian consciousness supreme, if
we mean by this term the consciousness of Christians apart from
the indwelling Christ. When once we come to Christ, he joins us to
himself, he seats us with him upon his throne, he imparts to us
his Spirit, he bids us use our reason in his service. In judging
Scripture, we make not ourselves but Christ supreme, and recognize
him as the only ultimate and infallible authority in matters of
religion. We can believe that the total revelation of Christ in
Scripture is an authority superior to individual reason or to any
single affirmation of the church, while yet we believe that this
very authority of Scripture has its limitation, and that Christ
himself must teach us what this total revelation is. So the
judgment which Scripture encourages us to pass upon its own
limitations only induces a final and more implicit reliance upon
the living and personal Son of God. He has never intended that
Scripture should be a substitute for his own presence, and it is
only his Spirit that is promised to lead us into all the truth.

On the authority of Scripture, see A. H. Strong, Christ in
Creation, 113-136—“The source of all authority is not Scripture,
but Christ.... Nowhere are we told that the Scripture of itself is
able to convince the sinner or to bring him to God. It is a
glittering sword, but it is ‘the sword of the Spirit’_ (Eph.
6:17)_; and unless the Spirit use it, it will never pierce the
heart. It is a heavy hammer, but only the Spirit can wield it so
that it breaks in pieces the flinty rock. It is the type locked in
the form, but the paper will never receive an impression until the
Spirit shall apply the power. No mere instrument shall have the
glory that belongs to God. Every soul shall feel its entire
dependence upon him. Only the Holy Spirit can turn the outer word
into an inner word. And the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ.
Christ comes into direct contact with the soul. He himself gives
his witness to the truth. He bears testimony to Scripture, even
more than Scripture bears testimony to him.”

11. The preceding discussion enables us at least to lay down three
cardinal principles and to answer three common questions with regard to
inspiration.

Principles: (_a_) The human mind can be inhabited and energized by God
while yet attaining and retaining its own highest intelligence and
freedom. (_b_) The Scriptures being the work of the one God, as well as of
the men in whom God moved and dwelt, constitute an articulated and organic
unity. (_c_) The unity and authority of Scripture as a whole are entirely
consistent with its gradual evolution and with great imperfection in its
non-essential parts.

Questions: (_a_) Is any part of Scripture uninspired? Answer: Every part
of Scripture is inspired in its connection and relation with every other
part. (_b_) Are there degrees of inspiration? Answer: There are degrees of
value, but not of inspiration. Each part in its connection with the rest
is made completely true, and completeness has no degrees. (_c_) How may we
know what parts are of most value and what is the teaching of the whole?
Answer: The same Spirit of Christ who inspired the Bible is promised to
take of the things of Christ, and, by showing them to us, to lead us
progressively into all the truth.

Notice the value of the Old Testament, revealing as it does the
natural attributes of God, as a basis and background for the
revelation of mercy in the New Testament. Revelation was in many
parts _(πολυμερῶς—Heb. 1:1)_ as well as in many ways. “Each
individual oracle, taken by itself, was partial and incomplete”
(Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jewish Ch., 21). But the person and the
words of Christ sum up and complete the revelation, so that, taken
together and in their connection with him, the various parts of
Scripture constitute an infallible and sufficient rule of faith
and practice. See Browne, Inspiration of the N. T.; Bernard,
Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of
the O. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of Doctrine. See A. H.
Strong, on Method of Inspiration, in Philosophy and Religion,
148-155.

The divine influence upon the minds of post-biblical writers,
leading to the composition of such allegories as Pilgrim’s
Progress, and such dramas as Macbeth, is to be denominated
illumination rather than inspiration, for the reasons that these
writings contain error as well as truth in matters of religion and
morals; that they add nothing essential to what the Scriptures
give us; and that, even in their expression of truth previously
made known, they are not worthy of a place in the sacred canon. W.
H. P. Faunce: “How far is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress true to
present Christian experience? It is untrue: 1. In its despair of
this world. The Pilgrim has to leave this world in order to be
saved. Modern experience longs to do God’s will _here_, and to
save others instead of forsaking them. 2. In its agony over sin
and frightful conflict. Bunyan illustrates modern experience
better by Christiana and her children who go through the Valley
and the Shadow of Death in the daytime, and without conflict with
Apollyon. 3. In the constant uncertainty of the issue of the
Pilgrim’s fight. Christian enters Doubting Castle and meets Giant
Despair, even after he has won most of his victories. In modern
experience, ‘at evening time there shall be light’_—(Zech. 14:7)_.
4. In the constant conviction of an absent Christ. Bunyan’s Christ
is never met this side of the Celestial City. The Cross at which
the burden dropped is the symbol of a sacrificial act, but it is
not the Savior himself. Modern experience has Christ living in us
and with us alway, and not simply a Christ whom we hope to see at
the end of the journey.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theol., 2:18—“Paul declares his own prophecy and
inspiration to be essentially imperfect (_1 Cor. 13:9, 10, 12; cf.
1 Cor. 12:10; 1 Thess. 5:19-21_). This admission justifies a
Christian criticism even of his views. He can pronounce an
anathema on those who preach ‘a different gospel’_ (Gal. 1:8, 9)_,
for what belongs to simple faith, the facts of salvation, are
absolutely certain. But where prophetic thought and speech go
beyond these facts of salvation, wood and straw may be mingled
with the gold, silver and precious stones built upon the one
foundation. So he distinguishes his own modest γνώμη from the
ἐπιταγὴ κυρίον (1 Cor. 7:25, 40).” Clarke, Christian Theology,
44—“The authority of Scripture is not one that binds, but one that
sets free. Paul is writing of Scripture when he says: ‘Not that we
have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in
faith ye stand fast’_ (2 Cor. 1:24)_.”

Cremer, in Herzog, Realencyc., 183-203—“The church doctrine is
_that_ the Scriptures are inspired, but it has never been
determined by the church _how_ they are inspired.” Butler,
Analogy, part II, chap. III—“The only question concerning the
truth of Christianity is, whether it be a real revelation, not
whether it be attended with every circumstance which we should
have looked for; and concerning the authority of Scripture,
whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a book of
such sort, and so promulgated, as weak men are apt to fancy a book
containing a divine revelation should. And therefore, neither
obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy of style, nor various readings,
nor early disputes about the authors of particular parts, nor any
other things of the like kind, though they had been much more
considerable than they are, could overthrow the authority of the
Scripture; unless the prophets, apostles, or our Lord had promised
that the book containing the divine revelation should be secure
from these things.” W. Robertson Smith: “If am asked why I receive
the Scriptures as the word of God and as the only perfect rule of
faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant
church: ‘Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming
love of God; because in the Bible alone I find God drawing nigh to
men in Jesus Christ, and declaring his will for our salvation. And
the record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit in my
heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God himself is
able to speak such words to my soul.’ ” The gospel of Jesus Christ
is the ἅπαξ λεγόμενον of the Almighty. See Marcus Dods, The Bible,
its Origin and Nature; Bowne, The Immanence of God, 66-115.

V. Objections to the Doctrine of Inspiration.

In connection with a divine-human work like the Bible, insoluble
difficulties may be expected to present themselves. So long, however, as
its inspiration is sustained by competent and sufficient evidence, these
difficulties cannot justly prevent our full acceptance of the doctrine,
any more than disorder and mystery in nature warrant us in setting aside
the proofs of its divine authorship. These difficulties are lessened with
time; some have already disappeared; many may be due to ignorance, and may
be removed hereafter; those which are permanent may be intended to
stimulate inquiry and to discipline faith.

It is noticeable that the common objections to inspiration are urged, not
so much against the religious teaching of the Scriptures, as against
certain errors in secular matters which are supposed to be interwoven with
it. But if these are proved to be errors indeed, it will not necessarily
overthrow the doctrine of inspiration; it will only compel us to give a
larger place to the human element in the composition of the Scriptures,
and to regard them more exclusively as a text-book of religion. As a rule
of religious faith and practice, they will still be the infallible word of
God. The Bible is to be judged as a book whose one aim is man’s rescue
from sin and reconciliation to God, and in these respects it will still be
found a record of substantial truth. This will appear more fully as we
examine the objections one by one.

“The Scriptures are given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but
how to go to heaven.” Their aim is certainly not to teach science
or history, except so far as science or history is essential to
their moral and religious purpose. Certain of their doctrines,
like the virgin-birth of Christ and his bodily resurrection, are
historical facts, and certain facts, like that of creation, are
also doctrines. With regard to these great facts, we claim that
inspiration has given us accounts that are essentially
trustworthy, whatever may be their imperfections in detail. To
undermine the scientific trustworthiness of the Indian Vedas is to
undermine the religion which they teach. But this only because
their scientific doctrine is an essential part of their religious
teaching. In the Bible, religion is not dependent upon physical
science. The Scriptures aim only to declare the creatorship and
lordship of the personal God. The method of his working may be
described pictorially without affecting this substantial truth.
The Indian cosmogonies, on the other hand, polytheistic or
pantheistic as they are, teach essential untruth, by describing
the origin of things as due to a series of senseless
transformations without basis of will or wisdom.

So long as the difficulties of Scripture are difficulties of form
rather than substance, of its incidental features rather than its
main doctrine, we may say of its obscurities as Isocrates said of
the work of Heraclitus: “What I understand of it is so excellent
that I can draw conclusions from it concerning what I do not
understand.” “If Bengel finds things in the Bible too hard for his
critical faculty, he finds nothing too hard for his believing
faculty.” With John Smyth, who died at Amsterdam in 1612, we may
say: “I profess I have changed, and shall be ready still to
change, for the better”; and with John Robinson, in his farewell
address to the Pilgrim Fathers: “I am verily persuaded that the
Lord hath more truth yet to break forth from his holy word.” See
Luthardt, Saving Truths, 205; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 205 _sq._;
Bap. Rev., April, 1881: art. by O. P. Eaches; Cardinal Newman, in
19th Century, Feb. 1884.

1. Errors in matters of Science.

Upon this objection we remark:

(_a_) We do not admit the existence of scientific error in the Scripture.
What is charged as such is simply truth presented in popular and
impressive forms.

The common mind receives a more correct idea of unfamiliar facts when
these are narrated in phenomenal language and in summary form than when
they are described in the abstract terms and in the exact detail of
science.

The Scripture writers unconsciously observe Herbert Spencer’s
principle of style: Economy of the reader’s or hearer’s
attention,—the more energy is expended upon the form the less
there remains to grapple with the substance (Essays, 1-47). Wendt,
Teaching of Jesus, 1:130, brings out the principle of Jesus’
style: “The greatest clearness in the smallest compass.” Hence
Scripture uses the phrases of common life rather than scientific
terminology. Thus the language of appearance is probably used in
_Gen. 7:19—_“all the high mountains that were under the whole
heaven were covered”—such would be the appearance, even if the
deluge were local instead of universal; in _Josh. 10:12, 13—_“and
the sun stood still”—such would be the appearance, even if the
sun’s rays were merely refracted so as preternaturally to lengthen
the day; in _Ps. 93:1—_“The world also is established, that it
cannot be moved”—such is the appearance, even though the earth
turns on its axis and moves round the sun. In narrative, to
substitute for “sunset” some scientific description would divert
attention from the main subject. Would it be preferable, in the O.
T., if we should read: “When the revolution of the earth upon its
axis caused the rays of the solar luminary to impinge horizontally
upon the retina, _Isaac went out to meditate_” (_Gen. 24:63_)? “Le
secret d’ennuyer est de tout dire.” Charles Dickens, in his
American Notes, 72, describes a prairie sunset: “The decline of
day here was very gorgeous, tinging the firmament deeply with red
and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above us” (quoted by
Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 97). Did Dickens therefore
believe the firmament to be a piece of solid masonry?

Canon Driver rejects the Bible story of creation because the
distinctions made by modern science cannot be found in the
primitive Hebrew. He thinks the fluid state of the earth’s
substance should have been called “surging chaos,” instead of
“waters”_ (Gen. 1:2)_. “An admirable phrase for modern and
cultivated minds,” replies Mr. Gladstone, “but a phrase that would
have left the pupils of the Mosaic writer in exactly the condition
out of which it was his purpose to bring them, namely, a state of
utter ignorance and darkness, with possibly a little ripple of
bewilderment to boot”; see Sunday School Times, April 26, 1890.
The fallacy of holding that Scripture gives in detail all the
facts connected with a historical narrative has led to many
curious arguments. The Gregorian Calendar which makes the year
begin in January was opposed by representing that Eve was tempted
at the outset by an apple, which was possible only in case the
year began in September; see Thayer, Change of Attitude towards
the Bible, 46.

(_b_) It is not necessary to a proper view of inspiration to suppose that
the human authors of Scripture had in mind the proper scientific
interpretation of the natural events they recorded.

It is enough that this was in the mind of the inspiring Spirit. Through
the comparatively narrow conceptions and inadequate language of the
Scripture writers, the Spirit of inspiration may have secured the
expression of the truth in such germinal form as to be intelligible to the
times in which it was first published, and yet capable of indefinite
expansion as science should advance. In the miniature picture of creation
in the first chapter of Genesis, and in its power of adjusting itself to
every advance of scientific investigation, we have a strong proof of
inspiration.

The word “day” in _Genesis 1_ is an instance of this general mode
of expression. It would be absurd to teach early races, that deal
only in small numbers, about the myriads of years of creation. The
child’s object-lesson, with its graphic summary, conveys to his
mind more of truth than elaborate and exact statement would
convey. Conant (_Genesis 2:10_) says of the description of Eden
and its rivers: “Of course the author’s object is not a minute
topographical description, but a general and impressive conception
as a whole.” Yet the progress of science only shows that these
accounts are not less but more true than was supposed by those who
first received them. Neither the Hindu Shasters nor any heathen
cosmogony can bear such comparison with the results of science.
Why change our interpretations of Scripture so often? Answer: We
do not assume to be original teachers of science, but only to
interpret Scripture with the new lights we have. See Dana, Manual
of Geology, 741-746; Guyot, in Bib. Sac., 1855:324; Dawson, Story
of Earth and Man, 32.

This conception of early Scripture teaching as elementary and
suited to the childhood of the race would make it possible, if the
facts so required, to interpret the early chapters of Genesis as
mythical or legendary. God might condescend to “Kindergarten
formulas.” Goethe said that “We should deal with children as God
deals with us: we are happiest under the influence of innocent
delusions.” Longfellow: “How beautiful is youth! how bright it
gleams, With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of
beginnings, story without end, Each maid a heroine, and each man a
friend!” We might hold with Goethe and with Longfellow, if we only
excluded from God’s teaching all essential error. The narratives
of Scripture might be addressed to the imagination, and so might
take mythical or legendary form, while yet they conveyed
substantial truth that could in no other way be so well
apprehended by early man; see Robert Browning’s poem,
“Development,” in Asolando. The Koran, on the other hand, leaves
no room for imagination, but fixes the number of the stars and
declares the firmament to be solid. Henry Drummond: “Evolution has
given us a new Bible.... The Bible is not a book which has been
made,—it has grown.”

Bagehot tells us that “One of the most remarkable of Father
Newman’s Oxford sermons explains how science teaches that the
earth goes round the sun, and how Scripture teaches that the sun
goes round the earth; and it ends by advising the discreet
believer to accept both.” This is mental bookkeeping by double
entry; see Mackintosh, in Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1899:41.
Lenormant, in Contemp. Rev., Nov. 1879—“While the tradition of the
deluge holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of
all branches of the Aryan race, the monuments and original texts
of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not
afforded any, even distant, allusion to this cataclysm.” Lenormant
here wrongly assumed that the language of Scripture is scientific
language. If it is the language of appearance, then the deluge may
be a local and not a universal catastrophe. G. F. Wright, Ice Age
in North America, suggests that the numerous traditions of the
deluge may have had their origin in the enormous floods of the
receding glacier. In South-western Queensland, the standard gauge
at the Meteorological Office registered 10-¾, 20, 35-¾, 10-¾
inches of rainfall, in all 77-¼ inches, in four successive days.

(_c_) It may be safely said that science has not yet shown any fairly
interpreted passage of Scripture to be untrue.

With regard to the antiquity of the race, we may say that owing to the
differences of reading between the Septuagint and the Hebrew there is room
for doubt whether either of the received chronologies has the sanction of
inspiration. Although science has made probable the existence of man upon
the earth at a period preceding the dates assigned in these chronologies,
no statement of inspired Scripture is thereby proved false.

Usher’s scheme of chronology, on the basis of the Hebrew, puts the
creation 4004 years before Christ. Hales’s, on the basis of the
Septuagint, puts it 5411 B. C. The Fathers followed the LXX. But
the genealogies before and after the flood may present us only
with the names of “leading and representative men.” Some of these
names seem to stand, not for individuals, but for tribes, _e. g._:
_Gen. 10:16_—where Canaan is said to have begotten the Jebusite
and the Amorite; 29—Joktan begot Ophir and Havilah. In _Gen.
10:6_, we read that Mizraim belonged to the sons of Ham. But
Mizraim is a dual, coined to designate the two parts, Upper and
Lower Egypt. Hence a son of Ham could not bear the name of
Mizraim. _Gen. 10:13_ reads: “And Mizraim begat Ludim.” But Ludim
is a plural form. The word signifies a whole nation, and “begat”
is not employed in a literal sense. So in _verses 15, 16: _“Canaan
begat ... the Jebusite,” a tribe; the ancestors of which would
have been called Jebus. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, are
names, not of tribes or nations, but of individuals; see Prof.
Edward König, of Bonn, in S. S. Times, Dec. 14, 1901. E. G.
Robinson: “We may pretty safely go back to the time of Abraham,
but no further.” Bib. Sac., 1899:403—“The lists in Genesis may
relate to families and not to individuals.”

G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lect. II—“When in
David’s time it is said that ‘Shebuel, the son of Gershom, the son
of Moses, was ruler over the treasures’_ (1 Chron. 23:16; 26:24)_,
Gershom was the immediate son of Moses, but Shebuel was separated
by many generations from Gershom. So when Seth is said to have
begotten Enosh when he was 105 years old (_Gen. 5:6_), it is,
according to Hebrew usage, capable of meaning that Enosh was
descended from the branch of Seth’s line which set off at the
105th year, with any number of intermediate links omitted.” The
appearance of completeness in the text may be due to alteration of
the text in the course of centuries; see Bib. Com., 1:30. In the
phrase “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”_ (Mat.
1:1)_ thirty-eight to forty generations are omitted. It may be so
in some of the Old Testament genealogies. There is room for a
hundred thousand years, if necessary (Conant). W. H. Green, in
Bib. Sac., April, 1890:303, and in Independent, June 18, 1891—“The
Scriptures furnish us with no data for a chronological computation
prior to the life of Abraham. The Mosaic records do not fix, and
were not intended to fix, the precise date of the Flood or of the
Creation.... They give a series of specimen lives, with
appropriate numbers attached, to show by selected examples what
was the original term of human life. To make them a complete and
continuous record, and to deduce from them the antiquity of the
race, is to put them to a use they were never intended to serve.”

Comparison with secular history also shows that no such length of
time as 100,000 years for man’s existence upon earth seems
necessary. Rawlinson, in Jour. Christ. Philosophy, 1883:339-364,
dates the beginning of the Chaldean monarchy at 2400 B. C.
Lenormant puts the entrance of the Sanskritic Indians into
Hindustan at 2500 B. C. The earliest Vedas are between 1200 and
1000 B. C. (Max Müller). Call of Abraham, probably 1945 B. C.
Chinese history possibly began as early as 2356 B. C. (Legge). The
old Empire in Egypt possibly began as early as 2650 B. C.
Rawlinson puts the flood at 3600 B. C., and adds 2000 years
between the deluge and the creation, making the age of the world
1886 + 3600 + 2000 = 7486. S. R. Pattison, in Present Day Tracts,
3: no. 13, concludes that “a term of about 8000 years is warranted
by deductions from history, geology, and Scripture.” See also Duke
of Argyll, Primeval Man, 76-128; Cowles on Genesis, 49-80; Dawson,
Fossil Men, 246; Hicks, in Bap. Rev., July, 1884 (15000 years);
Zöckler, Urgeschichte der Erde und des Menschen, 137-163. On the
critical side, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses, 80-102.

Evidence of a geological nature seems to be accumulating, which
tends to prove man’s advent upon earth at least ten thousand years
ago. An arrowhead of tempered copper and a number of human bones
were found in the Rocky Point mines, near Gilman, Colorado, 460
feet beneath the surface of the earth, embedded in a vein of
silver-bearing ore. More than a hundred dollars worth of ore clung
to the bones when they were removed from the mine. On the age of
the earth and the antiquity of man, see G. F. Wright, Man and the
Glacial Epoch, lectures IV and X, and in McClure’s Magazine, June,
1901, and Bib. Sac., 1903:31—“Charles Darwin first talked about
300 million years as a mere trifle of geologic time. His son
George limits it to 50 or 100 million; Croll and Young to 60 or 70
million; Wallace to 28 million; Lord Kelvin to 24 million;
Thompson and Newcomb to only 10 million.” Sir Archibald Geikie, at
the British Association at Dover in 1899, said that 100 million
years sufficed for that small portion of the earth’s history which
is registered in the stratified rocks of the crust.

Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 122, considers vegetable life to
have existed on the planet for at least 100 million years. Warren
Upham, in Pop. Science Monthly, Dec. 1893:153—“How old is the
earth? 100 million years.” D. G. Brinton, in Forum, Dec. 1893:454,
puts the minimum limit of man’s existence on earth at 50,000
years. G. F. Wright does not doubt that man’s presence on this
continent was preglacial, say eleven or twelve thousand years ago.
He asserts that there has been a subsidence of Central Asia and
Southern Russia since man’s advent, and that Arctic seals are
still found in Lake Baikal in Siberia. While he grants that
Egyptian civilization may go back to 5000 B. C., he holds that no
more than 6000 or 7000 years before this are needed as preparation
for history. Le Conte, Elements of Geology, 613—“Men saw the great
glaciers of the second glacial epoch, but there is no reliable
evidence of their existence before the first glacial epoch.
Deltas, implements, lake shores, waterfalls, indicate only 7000 to
10,000 years.” Recent calculations of Prof. Prestwich, the most
eminent living geologist of Great Britain, tend to bring the close
of the glacial epoch down to within 10,000 or 15,000 years.

(_d_) Even if error in matters of science were found in Scripture, it
would not disprove inspiration, since inspiration concerns itself with
science only so far as correct scientific views are necessary to morals
and religion.

Great harm results from identifying Christian doctrine with
specific theories of the universe. The Roman church held that the
revolution of the sun around the earth was taught in Scripture,
and that Christian faith required the condemnation of Galileo;
John Wesley thought Christianity to be inseparable from a belief
in witchcraft; opposers of the higher criticism regard the Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch as “articulus stantis vel cadentis
ecclesiæ.” We mistake greatly when we link inspiration with
scientific doctrine. The purpose of Scripture is not to teach
science, but to teach religion, and, with the exception of God’s
creatorship and preserving agency in the universe, no scientific
truth is essential to the system of Christian doctrine.
Inspiration might leave the Scripture writers in possession of the
scientific ideas of their time, while yet they were empowered
correctly to declare both ethical and religious truth. A right
spirit indeed gains some insight into the meaning of nature, and
so the Scripture writers seem to be preserved from incorporating
into their productions much of the scientific error of their day.
But entire freedom from such error must not be regarded as a
necessary accompaniment of inspiration.

2. Errors in matters of History.

To this objection we reply:

(_a_) What are charged as such are often mere mistakes in transcription,
and have no force as arguments against inspiration, unless it can first be
shown that inspired documents are by the very fact of their inspiration
exempt from the operation of those laws which affect the transmission of
other ancient documents.

We have no right to expect that the inspiration of the original
writer will be followed by a miracle in the case of every copyist.
Why believe in infallible copyists, more than in infallible
printers? God educates us to care for his word, and for its
correct transmission. Reverence has kept the Scriptures more free
from various readings than are other ancient manuscripts. None of
the existing variations endanger any important article of faith.
Yet some mistakes in transcription there probably are. In _1
Chron. 22:14_, instead of 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000
talents of silver (= $3,750,000,000), Josephus divides the sum by
ten. Dr. Howard Osgood: “A French writer, Revillout, has accounted
for the differing numbers in Kings and Chronicles, just as he
accounts for the same differences in Egyptian and Assyrian later
accounts, by the change in the value of money and debasement of
issues. He shows the change all over Western Asia.” _Per contra_,
see Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 45.

In _2 Chron. 13:3, 17_, where the numbers of men in the armies of
little Palestine are stated as 400,000 and 800,000, and 500,000
are said to have been slain in a single battle, “some ancient
copies of the Vulgate and Latin translations of Josephus have
40,000, 80,000, and 50,000”; see Annotated Paragraph Bible, _in
loco_. In _2 Chron. 17:14-19_, Jehoshaphat’s army aggregates
1,160,000, besides the garrisons of his fortresses. It is possible
that by errors in transcription these numbers have been multiplied
by ten. Another explanation however, and perhaps a more probable
one, is given under (_d_) below. Similarly, compare _1 Sam. 6:19_,
where 50,070 are slain, with the 70 of Josephus; _2 Sam.
8:4—_“1,700 horsemen,” with _1 Chron. 18:4—_“7,000 horsemen”;
_Esther 9:16_—75,000 slain by the Jews, with LXX—15,000. In _Mat.
27:9_, we have “Jeremiah” for “Zechariah”—this Calvin allows to be
a mistake; and, if a mistake, then one made by the first copyist,
for it appears in all the uncials, all the manuscripts and all the
versions except the Syriac Peshito where it is omitted, evidently
on the authority of the individual transcriber and translator. In
_Acts 7:16—_“the tomb that Abraham bought”—Hackett regards
“Abraham” as a clerical error for “Jacob” (compare _Gen. 33:18,
19_). See Bible Com., 3:165, 249, 251, 317.

(_b_) Other so-called errors are to be explained as a permissible use of
round numbers, which cannot be denied to the sacred writers except upon
the principle that mathematical accuracy was more important than the
general impression to be secured by the narrative.

In _Numbers 25:9_, we read that there fell in the plague 24,000;
_1 Cor. 10:8_ says 23,000. The actual number was possibly
somewhere between the two. Upon a similar principle, we do not
scruple to celebrate the Landing of the Pilgrims on December 22nd
and the birth of Christ on December 25th. We speak of the battle
of Bunker Hill, although at Bunker Hill no battle was really
fought. In _Ex. 12:40, 41_, the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt
is declared to be 430 years. Yet Paul, in _Gal. 3:17_, says that
the giving of the law through Moses was 430 years after the call
of Abraham, whereas the call of Abraham took place 215 years
before Jacob and his sons went down into Egypt, and Paul should
have said 645 years instead of 430. Franz Delitzsch: “The Hebrew
Bible counts four centuries of Egyptian sojourn (_Gen. 15:13-16_),
more accurately, 430 years (_Ex. 12:40_); but according to the LXX
(_Ex. 12:40_) this number comprehends the sojourn in Canaan and
Egypt, so that 215 years come to the pilgrimage in Canaan, and 215
to the servitude in Egypt. This kind of calculation is not
exclusively Hellenistic; it is also found in the oldest
Palestinian Midrash. Paul stands on this side in _Gal. 3:17_,
making, not the immigration into Egypt, but the covenant with
Abraham the _terminus a quo_ of the 430 years which end in the
Exodus from Egypt and in the legislation”; see also Hovey, Com. on
_Gal. 3:17_. It was not Paul’s purpose to write chronology,—so he
may follow the LXX, and call the time between the promise to
Abraham and the giving of the law to Moses 430 years, rather than
the actual 600. If he had given the larger number, it might have
led to perplexity and discussion about a matter which had nothing
to do with the vital question in hand. Inspiration may have
employed current though inaccurate statements as to matters of
history, because they were the best available means of impressing
upon men’s minds truth of a more important sort. In _Gen. 15:13_
the 430 years is called in round numbers 400 years, and so in
_Acts 7:6_.

(_c_) Diversities of statement in accounts of the same event, so long as
they touch no substantial truth, may be due to the meagreness of the
narrative, and might be fully explained if some single fact, now
unrecorded, were only known. To explain these apparent discrepancies would
not only be beside the purpose of the record, but would destroy one
valuable evidence of the independence of the several writers or witnesses.

On the Stokes trial, the judge spoke of two apparently conflicting
testimonies as neither of them necessarily false. On the
difference between Matthew and Luke as to the scene of the Sermon
on the Mount (_Mat. 5:1_; _cf._ _Luke 6:17_) see Stanley, Sinai
and Palestine, 360. As to one blind man or two (_Mat. 20:30_;
_cf._ _Luke 18:35_) see Bliss, Com. on Luke, 275, and Gardiner, in
Bib. Sac., July, 1879:513, 514; Jesus may have healed the blind
men during a day’s excursion from Jericho, and it might be
described as “when they went out,” or “as they drew nigh to
Jericho.” Prof. M. B. Riddle: “_Luke 18:35_ describes the general
movement towards Jerusalem and not the precise detail preceding
the miracle; _Mat. 20:30_ intimates that the miracle occurred
during an excursion from the city,—Luke afterwards telling of the
final departure”; Calvin holds to two meetings; Godet to two
cities; if Jesus healed two blind men, he certainly healed one,
and Luke did not need to mention more than one, even if he knew of
both; see Broadus on _Mat. 20:30_. In _Mat. 8:28_, where Matthew
has two demoniacs at Gadara and Luke has only one at Gerasa,
Broadus supposes that the village of Gerasa belonged to the
territory of the city of Gadara, a few miles to the Southeast of
the lake, and he quotes the case of Lafayette: “In the year 1824
Lafayette visited the United States and was welcomed with honors
and pageants. Some historians will mention only Lafayette, but
others will relate the same visit as made and the same honors as
enjoyed by two persons, namely, Lafayette and his son. Will not
both be right?” On Christ’s last Passover, see Robinson, Harmony,
212; E. H. Sears, Fourth Gospel, Appendix A; Edersheim, Life and
Times of the Messiah, 2:507. Augustine: “Locutiones variæ, sed non
contrariæ: dlversæ, sed non adversæ.”

Bartlett, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1880:46, 47, gives the following
modern illustrations: Winslow’s Journal (of Plymouth Plantation)
speaks of a ship sent out “by Master Thomas Weston.” But Bradford
in his far briefer narrative of the matter, mentions it as sent
“by Mr. Weston and another.” John Adams, in his letters, tells the
story of the daughter of Otis about her father’s destruction of
his own manuscripts. At one time he makes her say: “In one of his
unhappy moments he committed them all to the flames”; yet, in the
second letter, she is made to say that “he was several days in
doing it.” One newspaper says: President Hayes attended the
Bennington centennial; another newspaper says: the President and
Mrs. Hayes; a third: the President and his Cabinet; a fourth: the
President, Mrs. Hayes and a majority of his Cabinet. Archibald
Forbes, in his account of Napoleon III at Sedan, points out an
agreement of narratives as to the salient points, combined with
“the hopeless and bewildering discrepancies as to details,” even
as these are reported by eye-witnesses, including himself,
Bismarck, and General Sheridan who was on the ground, as well as
others.

Thayer, Change of Attitude, 52, speaks of Luke’s “plump
anachronism in the matter of Theudas”—_Acts 5:36—_“For before
those days rose up Theudas.” Josephus, Antiquities, 20:5:1,
mentions an insurrectionary Theudas, but the date and other
incidents do not agree with those of Luke. Josephus however may
have mistaken the date as easily as Luke, or he may refer to
another man of the same name. The inscription on the Cross is
given in _Mark 15:26_, as “The King of the Jews”; in _Luke 23:38_,
as “This is the King of the Jews”; in _Mat. 27:37_, as “This is
Jesus the King of the Jews”; and in _John 19:19_, as “Jesus of
Nazareth the King of the Jews.” The entire superscription, in
Hebrew, Greek and Latin, may have contained every word given by
the several evangelists combined, and may have read “This is Jesus
of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” and each separate report may
be entirely correct so far as it goes. See, on the general
subject, Haley, Alleged Discrepancies; Fisher, Beginnings of
Christianity, 406-412.

(_d_) While historical and archæological discovery in many important
particulars goes to sustain the general correctness of the Scripture
narratives, and no statement essential to the moral and religious teaching
of Scripture has been invalidated, inspiration is still consistent with
much imperfection in historical detail and its narratives “do not seem to
be exempted from possibilities of error.”

The words last quoted are those of Sanday. In his Bampton Lectures
on Inspiration, 400, he remarks that “Inspiration belongs to the
historical books rather as conveying a religious lesson, than as
histories; rather as interpreting, than as narrating plain matter
of fact. The crucial issue is that in these last respects they do
not seem to be exempted from possibilities of error.” R. V.
Foster, Systematic Theology, (Cumberland Presbyterian): The
Scripture writers “were not inspired to do otherwise than to take
these statements as they found them.” Inerrancy is not freedom
from misstatements, but from error defined as “that which misleads
in any serious or important sense.” When we compare the accounts
of _1_ and _2 Chronicles_ with those of _1_ and _2 Kings_ we find
in the former an exaggeration of numbers, a suppression of
material unfavorable to the writer’s purpose, and an emphasis upon
that which is favorable, that contrasts strongly with the method
of the latter. These characteristics are so continuous that the
theory of mistakes in transcription does not seem sufficient to
account for the facts. The author’s aim was to draw out the
religious lessons of the story, and historical details are to him
of comparative unimportance.

H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 108—“Inspiration
did not correct the Chronicler’s historical point of view, more
than it corrected his scientific point of view, which no doubt
made the earth the centre of the solar system. It therefore left
him open to receive documents, and to use them, which idealized
the history of the past, and described David and Solomon according
to the ideas of later times and the priestly class. David’s sins
are omitted, and numbers are multiplied, to give greater dignity
to the earlier kingdom.” As Tennyson’s Idylls of the King give a
nobler picture of King Arthur, and a more definite aspect to his
history, than actual records justify, yet the picture teaches
great moral and religious lessons, so the Chronicler seems to have
manipulated his material in the interest of religion. Matters of
arithmetic were minor matters. “Majoribus intentus est.”

E. G. Robinson: “The numbers of the Bible are characteristic of a
semi-barbarous age. The writers took care to guess enough. The
tendency of such an age is always to exaggerate.” Two Formosan
savages divide five pieces between them by taking two apiece and
throwing one away. The lowest tribes can count only with the
fingers of their hands; when they use their toes as well, it marks
an advance in civilization. To the modern child a hundred is just
as great a number as a million. So the early Scriptures seem to
use numbers with a childlike ignorance as to their meaning.
Hundreds of thousands can be substituted for tens of thousands,
and the substitution seems only a proper tribute to the dignity of
the subject. Gore, in Lux Mundi, 353—“This was not conscious
perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading
back into past records of a ritual development which was really
later. Inspiration excludes conscious deception, but it appears to
be quite consistent with this sort of idealizing; always supposing
that the result read back into the earlier history does represent
the real purpose of God and only anticipates the realization.”

There are some who contend that these historical imperfections are
due to transcription and that they did not belong to the original
documents. Watts, New Apologetic, 71, 111, when asked what is
gained by contending for infallible original autographs if they
have been since corrupted, replies: “Just what we gain by
contending for the original perfection of human nature, though man
has since corrupted it. We must believe God’s own testimony about
his own work. God may permit others to do what, as a holy
righteous God, he cannot do himself.” When the objector declares
it a matter of little consequence whether a pair of trousers were
or were not originally perfect, so long as they are badly rent
just now, Watts replies: “The tailor who made them would probably
prefer to have it understood that the trousers did not leave his
shop in their present forlorn condition. God drops no stitches and
sends out no imperfect work.” Watts however seems dominated by an
_a priori_ theory of inspiration, which blinds him to the actual
facts of the Bible.

Evans, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 40—“Does the _present_
error destroy the inspiration of the Bible as we have it? No. Then
why should the _original_ error destroy the inspiration of the
Bible, as it was first given? There are spots on yonder sun; do
they stop its being the sun? Why, the sun is all the more a sun
for the spots. So the Bible.” Inspiration seems to have permitted
the gathering of such material as was at hand, very much as a
modern editor might construct his account of an army movement from
the reports of a number of observers; or as a modern historian
might combine the records of a past age with all their
imperfections of detail. In the case of the Scripture writers,
however, we maintain that inspiration has permitted no sacrifice
of moral and religious truth in the completed Scripture, but has
woven its historical material together into an organic whole which
teaches all the facts essential to the knowledge of Christ and of
salvation.

When we come to examine in detail what purport to be historical
narratives, we must be neither credulous nor sceptical, but simply
candid and open-minded. With regard for example to the great age
of the Old Testament patriarchs, we are no more warranted in
rejecting the Scripture accounts upon the ground that life in
later times is so much shorter, than we are to reject the
testimony of botanists as to trees of the Sequoia family between
four and five hundred feet high, or the testimony of geologists as
to Saurians a hundred feet long, upon the ground that the trees
and reptiles with which we are acquainted are so much smaller.
Every species at its introduction seems to exhibit the maximum of
size and vitality. Weismann, Heredity, 6, 30—“Whales live some
hundreds of years; elephants two hundred—their gestation taking
two years. Giants prove that the plan upon which man is
constructed can also be carried out on a scale far larger than the
normal one.” E. Ray Lankester, Adv. of Science, 205-237,
286—agrees with Weismann in his general theory. Sir George
Cornewall Lewis long denied centenarism, but at last had to admit
it.

Charles Dudley Warner, in Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1895, gives
instances of men 137, 140, and 192 years old. The German Haller
asserts that “the ultimate limit of human life does not exceed two
centuries: to fix the exact number of years is exceedingly
difficult.” J. Norman Lockyer, in Nature, regards the years of the
patriarchs as lunar years. In Egypt, the sun being used, the unit
of time was a year; but in Chaldea, the unit of time was a month,
for the reason that the standard of time was the moon. Divide the
numbers by twelve, and the lives of the patriarchs come out very
much the same length with lives at the present day. We may ask,
however, how this theory would work in shortening the lives
between Noah and Moses. On the genealogies in Matthew and Luke,
see Lord Harvey, Genealogies of our Lord, and his art, in Smith’s
Bible Dictionary; _per contra_, see Andrews, Life of Christ, 55
_sq._ On Quirinius and the enrollment for taxation (_Luke 2:2_),
see Pres. Woolsey, in New Englander, 1869. On the general subject,
see Rawlinson, Historical Evidences, and essay in Modern
Scepticism, published by Christian Evidence Society, 1:265;
Crooker, New Bible and New Uses, 102-126.

3. Errors in Morality.

(_a_) What are charged as such are sometimes evil acts and words of good
men—words and acts not sanctioned by God. These are narrated by the
inspired writers as simple matter of history, and subsequent results, or
the story itself, is left to point the moral of the tale.

Instances of this sort are Noah’s drunkenness (_Gen. 9:20-27_);
Lot’s incest (_Gen. 19:30-38_); Jacob’s falsehood (_Gen.
27:19-24_); David’s adultery (_2 Sam. 11:1-4_); Peter’s denial
(_Mat. 26:69-75_). See Lee, Inspiration, 265, note. Esther’s
vindictiveness is not commended, nor are the characters of the
Book of Esther said to have acted in obedience to a divine
command. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 241—“In law and psalm and
prophecy we behold the influence of Jehovah working as leaven
among a primitive and barbarous people. Contemplating the Old
Scriptures in this light, they become luminous with divinity, and
we are furnished with the principle by which to discriminate
between the divine and the human in the book. Particularly in
David do we see a rugged, half-civilized, kingly man, full of
gross errors, fleshly and impetuous, yet permeated with a divine
Spirit that lifts him, struggling, weeping, and warring, up to
some of the loftiest conceptions of Deity which the mind of man
has conceived. As an angelic being, David is a caricature; as a
man of God, as an example of God moving upon and raising up a most
human man, he is a splendid example. The proof that the church is
of God, is not its impeccability, but its progress.”

(_b_) Where evil acts appear at first sight to be sanctioned, it is
frequently some right intent or accompanying virtue, rather than the act
itself, upon which commendation is bestowed.

As Rehab’s faith, not her duplicity (_Josh. 2:1-24_; _cf._ _Heb.
11:31_ and _James 2:25_); Jael’s patriotism, not her treachery
(_Judges 4:17-22_; _cf._ _5:24_). Or did they cast in their lot
with Israel and use the common stratagems of war (see next
paragraph)? Herder: “The limitations of the pupil are also
limitations of the teacher.” While Dean Stanley praises Solomon
for tolerating idolatry, James Martineau, Study, 2:137, remarks:
“It would be a ridiculous pedantry to apply the Protestant pleas
of private judgment to such communities as ancient Egypt and
Assyria.... It is the survival of coercion, after conscience has
been born to supersede it, that shocks and revolts us in
persecution.”

(_c_) Certain commands and deeds are sanctioned as relatively
just—expressions of justice such as the age could comprehend, and are to
be judged as parts of a progressively unfolding system of morality whose
key and culmination we have in Jesus Christ.

_Ex. 20:25—_“I gave them statutes that were not good”—as Moses’
permission of divorce and retaliation (_Deut. 24:1_; _cf._ _Mat.
5:31, 32; 19:7-9_; _Ex. 21:24_; _cf._ _Mat. 5:38, 39_). Compare
Elijah’s calling down fire from heaven (_2 K. 1:10-12_) with
Jesus’ refusal to do the same, and his intimation that the spirit
of Elijah was not the spirit of Christ (_Luke 9:52-56_); _cf._
Mattheson, Moments on the Mount, 253-255, on _Mat. 17:8—_“Jesus
only”: “The strength of Elias paled before him. To shed the blood
of enemies requires less strength than to shed one’s own blood,
and to conquer by fire is easier than to conquer by love.” Hovey:
“In divine revelation, it is first starlight, then dawn, finally
day.” George Washington once gave directions for the
transportation to the West Indies and the sale there of a
refractory negro who had given him trouble. This was not at
variance with the best morality of his time, but it would not suit
the improved ethical standards of today. The use of force rather
than moral suasion is sometimes needed by children and by
barbarians. We may illustrate by the Sunday School scholar’s
unruliness which was cured by his classmates during the week.
“What did you say to him?” asked the teacher. “We didn’t say
nothing; we just punched his head for him.” This was Old Testament
righteousness. The appeal in the O. T. to the hope of earthly
rewards was suitable to a stage of development not yet instructed
as to heaven and hell by the coming and work of Christ; compare
_Ex. 20:12_ with _Mat. 5:10; 25:46_. The Old Testament aimed to
fix in the mind of a selected people the idea of the unity and
holiness of God; in order to exterminate idolatry, much other
teaching was postponed. See Peabody, Religion of Nature, 45;
Mozley, Ruling Ideas of Early Ages; Green, in Presb. Quar., April,
1877:221-252; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 328-368; Brit.
and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:1-32; Martineau, Study, 2:137.

When therefore we find in the inspired song of Deborah, the
prophetess (_Judges 5:30_), an allusion to the common spoils of
war—“a damsel, two damsels to every man” or in _Prov. 31:6,
7—_“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine
unto the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty,
and remember his misery no more”—we do not need to maintain that
these passages furnish standards for our modern conduct. Dr.
Fisher calls the latter “the worst advice to a person in
affliction, or dispirited by the loss of property.” They mark past
stages in God’s providential leading of mankind. A higher stage
indeed is already intimated in _Prov. 31:4—_“it is not for kings
to drink wine, Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink?” We
see that God could use very imperfect instruments and could
inspire very imperfect men. Many things were permitted for men’s
“hardness of heart”_ (Mat. 19:8)_. The Sermon on the Mount is a
great advance on the law of Moses (_Mat. 5:21—_“Ye have heard that
it was said to them of old time”; _cf._ 22—“But I say unto you”).

Robert G. Ingersoll would have lost his stock in trade if
Christians had generally recognized that revelation is gradual,
and is completed only in Christ. This gradualness of revelation is
conceded in the common phrase: “the new dispensation.” Abraham
Lincoln showed his wisdom by never going far ahead of the common
sense of the people. God similarly adapted his legislation to the
capacities of each successive age. The command to Abraham to
sacrifice his son (_Gen. 22:1-19_) was a proper test of Abraham’s
faith in a day when human sacrifice violated no common ethical
standard because the Hebrew, like the Roman, “patria potestas” did
not regard the child as having a separate individuality, but
included the child in the parent and made the child equally
responsible for the parent’s sin. But that very command was given
_only_ as a test of faith, and with the intent to make the
intended obedience the occasion of revealing God’s provision of a
substitute and so of doing away with human sacrifice for all
future time. We may well imitate the gradualness of divine
revelation in our treatment of dancing and of the liquor traffic.

(_d_) God’s righteous sovereignty affords the key to other events. He has
the right to do what he will with his own, and to punish the transgressor
when and where he will; and he may justly make men the foretellers or
executors of his purposes.

Foretellers, as in the imprecatory Psalms (_137:9_; _cf._ _Is.
13:16-18_ and _Jer. 50:16, 29_); executors, as in the destruction
of the Canaanites (_Deut. 7:2, 16_). In the former case the Psalm
was not the ebullition of personal anger, but the expression of
judicial indignation against the enemies of God. We must
distinguish the substance from the form. The substance was the
denunciation of God’s righteous judgments; the form was taken from
the ordinary customs of war in the Psalmist’s time. See Park, in
Bib. Sac., 1862:165; Cowles, Com. on Ps. 137; Perowne on Psalms,
Introd., 61; Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1897:490-505; _cf._ _2 Tim.
4:14—_“the Lord will render to him according to his works”—a
prophecy, not a curse, ἀποδώσει, not ἀποδώη, as in A. V. In the
latter case, an exterminating war was only the benevolent surgery
that amputated the putrid limb, and so saved the religious life of
the Hebrew nation and of the after-world. See Dr. Thomas Arnold,
Essay on the Right Interpretation of Scripture; Fisher, Beginnings
of Christianity, 11-24.

Another interpretation of these events has been proposed, which
would make them illustrations of the principle indicated in (_c_)
above: E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 45—“It was not the
imprecations of the Psalm that were inspired of God, but his
purposes and ideas of which these were by the times the necessary
vehicle; just as the adultery of David was not by divine command,
though through it the purpose of God as to Christ’s descent was
accomplished.” John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Cure of Souls,
143—“When the massacre of the Canaanites and certain proceedings
of David are flung in the face of Christians, it is no longer
necessary to fall back on evasions or special pleading. It can now
be frankly admitted that, from our standpoint in this year of
grace, such deeds were atrocious, and that they never could have
been according to the mind of God, but that they must be judged by
their date, and considered the defects of elementary moral
processes. The Bible is vindicated, because it is, on the whole, a
steady ascent, and because it culminates in Christ.”

Lyman Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 56—“Abraham mistook the
voice of conscience, calling on him to consecrate his only son to
God, and interpreted it as a command to slay his son as a burnt
offering. Israel misinterpreted his righteous indignation at the
cruel and lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion as a divine
summons to destroy the worship by putting the worshipers to death;
a people undeveloped in moral judgment could not distinguish
between formal regulations respecting camp-life and eternal
principles of righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself, but embodied them in the same code, and seemed to
regard them as of equal authority.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul,
281—“If so be such man, so placed ... did in some part That
utterance make his own, profaning it, To be his vehicle for sense
not meant By the august supreme inspiring Will”—_i. e._, putting
some of his own sinful anger into God’s calm predictions of
judgment. Compare the stern last words of “Zechariah, the son of
Jehoiada, the priest” when stoned to death in the temple court:
“Jehovah look upon it and require it”_ (2 Chron. 24:20-22)_, with
the last words of Jesus: “Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do”_ (Luke 23:34)_ and of Stephen: “Lord, lay not this
sin to their charge”_ (Acts 7:60)_.

(_e_) Other apparent immoralities are due to unwarranted interpretations.
Symbol is sometimes taken for literal fact; the language of irony is
understood as sober affirmation; the glow and freedom of Oriental
description are judged by the unimpassioned style of Western literature;
appeal to lower motives is taken to exclude, instead of preparing for, the
higher.

In _Hosea 1:2, 3_, the command to the prophet to marry a harlot
was probably received and executed in vision, and was intended
only as symbolic: compare _Jer. 25:15-18—_“Take this cup ... and
cause all the nations ... to drink.” Literal obedience would have
made the prophet contemptible to those whom he would instruct, and
would require so long a time as to weaken, if not destroy, the
designed effect; see Ann. Par. Bible, _in loco_. In _2 K. 6:19_,
Elisha’s deception, so called, was probably only ironical and
benevolent; the enemy dared not resist, because they were
completely in his power. In the _Song of Solomon_, we have, as
Jewish writers have always held, a highly-wrought dramatic
description of the union between Jehovah and his people, which we
must judge by Eastern and not by Western literary standards.

Francis W. Newman, in his Phases of Faith, accused even the New
Testament of presenting low motives for human obedience. It is
true that all right motives are appealed to, and some of these
motives are of a higher sort than are others. Hope of heaven and
fear of hell are not the highest motives, but they may be employed
as preliminary incitements to action, even though only love for
God and for holiness will ensure salvation. Such motives are urged
both by Christ and by his apostles: _Mat. 6:20—_“lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven”; _10:28—_“fear him who is able to
destroy both soul and body in hell”; _Jude 23—_“some save with
fear, snatching them out of the fire.” In this respect the N. T.
does not differ from the O. T. George Adam Smith has pointed out
that the royalists got their texts, “the powers that be”_ (Rom.
13:1)_ and “the king as supreme”_ (1 Pet. 2:13)_, from the N. T.,
while the O. T. furnished texts for the defenders of liberty.
While the O. T. deals with _national_ life, and the discharge of
social and political functions, the N. T. deals in the main with
_individuals_ and with their relations to God. On the whole
subject, see Hessey, Moral Difficulties of the Bible; Jellett,
Moral Difficulties of the O. T.; Faith and Free Thought (Lect. by
Christ. Ev. Soc.), 2:173; Rogers, Eclipse of Faith; Butler,
Analogy, part ii, chap. iii; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 465-483.

4. Errors of Reasoning.

(_a_) What are charged as such are generally to be explained as valid
argument expressed in highly condensed form. The appearance of error may
be due to the suppression of one or more links in the reasoning.

In _Mat. 22:32_, Christ’s argument for the resurrection, drawn
from the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is
perfectly and obviously valid, the moment we put in the suppressed
premise that the living relation to God which is here implied
cannot properly be conceived as something merely spiritual, but
necessarily requires a new and restored life of the body. If God
is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall
rise from the dead. See more full exposition, under Eschatology.
Some of the Scripture arguments are enthymemes, and an enthymeme,
according to Arbuthnot and Pope, is “a syllogism in which the
major is married to the minnor, and the marriage is kept secret.”

(_b_) Where we cannot see the propriety of the conclusions drawn from
given premises, there is greater reason to attribute our failure to
ignorance of divine logic on our part, than to accommodation or _ad
hominem_ arguments on the part of the Scripture writers.

By divine logic we mean simply a logic whose elements and
processes are correct, though not understood by us. In _Heb. 7:9,
10_ (Levi’s paying tithes in Abraham), there is probably a
recognition of the organic unity of the family, which in miniature
illustrates the organic unity of the race. In _Gal. 3:20—_“a
mediator is not a mediator of one; but God is one”—the law, with
its two contracting parties, is contrasted with the promise, which
proceeds from the sole fiat of God and is therefore unchangeable.
Paul’s argument here rests on Christ’s divinity as its
foundation—otherwise Christ would have been a mediator in the same
sense in which Moses was a mediator (see Lightfoot, _in loco_). In
_Gal. 4:21-31_, Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and Sarah and
Isaac on the other, illustrate the exclusion of the bondmen of the
law from the privileges of the spiritual seed of Abraham.
Abraham’s two wives, and the two classes of people in the two
sons, represent the two covenants (so Calvin). In _John 10:34—_“I
said, Ye are gods,” the implication is that Judaism was not a
system of mere monotheism, but of theism tending to theanthropism,
a real union of God and man (Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_).
Godet well remarks that he who doubts Paul’s logic will do well
first to suspect his own.

(_c_) The adoption of Jewish methods of reasoning, where it could be
proved, would not indicate error on the part of the Scripture writers, but
rather an inspired sanction of the method as applied to that particular
case.

In _Gal. 3:16—_“He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of
one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” Here it is intimated that
the very form of the expression in _Gen. 22:18_, which denotes
unity, was selected by the Holy Spirit as significant of that one
person, Christ, who was the true seed of Abraham and in whom all
nations were to be blessed. Argument from the form of a single
word is in this case correct, although the Rabbins often made more
of single words than the Holy Spirit ever intended. Watts, New
Apologetic, 69—“F. W. Farrar asserts that the plural of the Hebrew
or Greek terms for ‘seed’ is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers
as a designation of human offspring. But see Sophocles, Œdipus at
Colonus, 599, 600—γῆς ἔμῆς ἀπηλάθην πρὸς τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ σπερμάτων—‘I
was driven away from my own country by my own offspring.’ ” In _1
Cor. 10:1-6—_“and the rock was Christ”—the Rabbinic tradition that
the smitten rock followed the Israelites in their wanderings is
declared to be only the absurd literalizing of a spiritual
fact—the continual presence of Christ, as preëxistent Logos, with
his ancient people. _Per contra_, see Row, Rev. and Mod. Theories,
98-128.

(_d_) If it should appear however upon further investigation that
Rabbinical methods have been wrongly employed by the apostles in their
argumentation, we might still distinguish between the truth they are
seeking to convey and the arguments by which they support it. Inspiration
may conceivably make known the truth, yet leave the expression of the
truth to human dialectic as well as to human rhetoric.

Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., 137, 138—“In the
utter absence of all evidence to the contrary, we ought to suppose
that the allegories of the N. T. are like the allegories of
literature in general, merely luminous embodiments of the
truth.... If these allegories are not presented by their writers
as evidences, they are none the less precious, since they
illuminate the truth otherwise evinced, and thus render it at once
clear to the apprehension and attractive to the taste.” If however
the purpose of the writers was to use these allegories for proof,
we may still see shining through the rifts of their traditional
logic the truth which they were striving to set forth. Inspiration
may have put them in possession of this truth without altering
their ordinary scholastic methods of demonstration and expression.
Horton, Inspiration, 108—“Discrepancies and illogical reasonings
were but inequalities or cracks in the mirrors, which did not
materially distort or hide the Person” whose glory they sought to
reflect. Luther went even further than this when he said that a
certain argument in the epistle was “good enough for the
Galatians.”

5. Errors in quoting or interpreting the Old Testament.

(_a_) What are charged as such are commonly interpretations of the meaning
of the original Scripture by the same Spirit who first inspired it.

In _Eph. 5:14, _“arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon
thee” is an inspired interpretation of _Is. 60:1—_“Arise, shine;
for thy light is come.” _Ps. 68:18—_“Thou hast received gifts
among men”—is quoted in _Eph. 4:8_ as “gave gifts to men.” The
words in Hebrew are probably a concise expression for “thou hast
taken spoil which thou mayest distribute as gifts to men.” _Eph.
4:8_ agrees exactly with the sense, though not with the words, of
the Psalm. In _Heb. 11:21, _“Jacob ... worshiped, leaning upon the
top of his staff” (LXX); _Gen. 47:31_ has “bowed himself upon the
bed’s head.” The meaning is the same, for the staff of the chief
and the spear of the warrior were set at the bed’s head. Jacob,
too feeble to rise, prayed in his bed. Here Calvin says that “the
apostle does not hesitate to accommodate to his own purpose what
was commonly received,—they were not so scrupulous” as to details.
Even Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 177, speaks of “a reshaping
of his own words by the Author of them.” We prefer, with Calvin,
to see in these quotations evidence that the sacred writers were
insistent upon the substance of the truth rather than upon the
form, the spirit rather than the letter.

(_b_) Where an apparently false translation is quoted from the Septuagint,
the sanction of inspiration is given to it, as expressing a part at least
of the fulness of meaning contained in the divine original—a fulness of
meaning which two varying translations do not in some cases exhaust.

_Ps. 4:4_—Heb.: “Tremble, and sin not” (= no longer); LXX: “Be ye
angry, and sin not.”_ Eph. 4:26_ quotes the LXX. The words may
originally have been addressed to David’s comrades, exhorting them
to keep their anger within bounds. Both translations together are
needed to bring out the meaning of the original. _Ps.
40:6-8—_“Mine ears hast thou opened” is translated in _Heb.
10:5-7—_“a body didst thou prepare for me.” Here the Epistle
quotes from the LXX. But the Hebrew means literally: “Mine ears
hast thou bored”—an allusion to the custom of pinning a slave to
the doorpost of his master by an awl driven through his ear, in
token of his complete subjection. The sense of the verse is
therefore given in the Epistle: “Thou hast made me thine in body
and soul—lo, I come to do thy will.” A. C. Kendrick: “David, just
entering upon his kingdom after persecution, is a type of Christ
entering on his earthly mission. Hence David’s words are put into
the mouth of Christ. For ‘ears,’ the organs with which we hear and
obey and which David conceived to be hollowed out for him by God,
the author of the Hebrews substitutes the word ‘body,’ as the
_general_ instrument of doing God’s will” (Com. on _Heb. 10:5-7_).

(_c_) The freedom of these inspired interpretations, however, does not
warrant us in like freedom of interpretation in the case of other passages
whose meaning has not been authoritatively made known.

We have no reason to believe that the scarlet thread of Rahab
(_Josh. 2:18_) was a designed prefiguration of the blood of
Christ, nor that the three measures of meal in which the woman hid
her leaven (_Mat. 13:33_) symbolized Shem, Ham and Japheth, the
three divisions of the human race. C. H. M., in his notes on the
tabernacle in Exodus, tells us that “the loops of blue = heavenly
grace; the taches of gold = the divine energy of Christ; the rams’
skins dyed red = Christ’s consecration and devotedness; the
badgers’ skins = his holy vigilance against temptation”! The
tabernacle was indeed a type of Christ (_John 1:14_—ἐσκήνωσεν.
_2:19, 21—_“in three days I will raise it up ... but he spake of
the temple of his body”); yet it does not follow that every detail
of the structure was significant. So each parable teaches some one
main lesson,—the particulars may be mere drapery; and while we may
use the parables for illustration, we should never ascribe divine
authority to our private impressions of their meaning.

_Mat. 25:1-13_—the parable of the five wise and the five foolish
virgins—has been made to teach that the number of the saved
precisely equals the number of the lost. Augustine defended
persecution from the words in _Luke 14:23—_“constrain them to come
in.” The Inquisition was justified by _Mat. 13:30—_“bind them in
bundles to burn them.” Innocent III denied the Scriptures to the
laity, quoting _Heb. 12:20—_“If even a beast touch the mountain,
it shall be stoned.” A Plymouth Brother held that he would be safe
on an evangelizing journey because he read in _John 19:36—_“A bone
of him shall not be broken.” _Mat. 17:8—_“they saw no one, save
Jesus only”—has been held to mean that we should trust only Jesus.
The Epistle of Barnabas discovered in Abraham’s 318 servants a
prediction of the crucified Jesus, and others have seen in
Abraham’s three days’ journey to Mount Moriah the three stages in
the development of the soul. Clement of Alexandria finds the four
natural elements in the four colors of the Jewish Tabernacle. All
this is to make a parable “run on all fours.” While we call a hero
a lion, we do not need to find in the man something to correspond
to the lion’s mane and claws. See Toy, Quotations in the N. T.;
Franklin Johnson, Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T.; Crooker,
The New Bible and its New Uses, 126-136.

(_d_) While we do not grant that the New Testament writers in any proper
sense misquoted or misinterpreted the Old Testament, we do not regard
absolute correctness in these respects as essential to their inspiration.
The inspiring Spirit may have communicated truth, and may have secured in
the Scriptures as a whole a record of that truth sufficient for men’s
moral and religious needs, without imparting perfect gifts of scholarship
or exegesis.

In answer to Toy, Quotations in the N. T., who takes a generally
unfavorable view of the correctness of the N. T. writers, Johnson,
Quotations of the N. T. from the O. T., maintains their
correctness. On pages x, xi, of his Introduction, Johnson remarks:
“I think it just to regard the writers of the Bible as the
creators of a great literature, and to judge and interpret them by
the laws of literature. They have produced all the chief forms of
literature, as history, biography, anecdote, proverb, oratory,
allegory, poetry, fiction. They have needed therefore all the
resources of human speech, its sobriety and scientific precision
on one page, its rainbow hues of fancy and imagination on another,
its fires of passion on yet another. They could not have moved and
guided men in the best manner had they denied themselves the
utmost force and freedom of language; had they refused to employ
its wide range of expressions, whether exact or poetic; had they
not borrowed without stint its many forms of reason, of terror, of
rapture, of hope, of joy, of peace. So also, they have needed the
usual freedom of literary allusion and citation, in order to
commend the gospel to the judgment, the tastes, and the feelings
of their readers.”

6. Errors in Prophecy.

(_a_) What are charged as such may frequently be explained by remembering
that much of prophecy is yet unfulfilled.

It is sometimes taken for granted that the book of Revelation, for
example, refers entirely to events already past. Moses Stuart, in
his Commentary, and Warren’s Parousia, represent this preterist
interpretation. Thus judged, however, many of the predictions of
the book might seem to have failed.

(_b_) The personal surmises of the prophets as to the meaning of the
prophecies they recorded may have been incorrect, while yet the prophecies
themselves are inspired.

In _1 Pet. 1:10, 11_, the apostle declares that the prophets
searched “what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ
which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow them.” So
Paul, although he does not announce it as certain, seems to have
had some hope that he might live to witness Christ’s second
coming. See _2 Cor. 5:4—_“not for that we would be unclothed, but
that we would be clothed upon” (ἐπενδύσασθαι—put on the spiritual
body, as over the present one, without the intervention of death);
_1 Thess. 4:15, 17—_“we that are alive, that are left unto the
coming of the Lord.” So _Mat. 2:15_ quotes from _Hosea 11:1—_“Out
of Egypt did I call my son,” and applies the prophecy to Christ,
although Hosea was doubtless thinking only of the exodus of the
people of Israel.

(_c_) The prophet’s earlier utterances are not to be severed from the
later utterances which elucidate them, nor from the whole revelation of
which they form a part. It is unjust to forbid the prophet to explain his
own meaning.

_2 Thessalonians_ was written expressly to correct wrong
inferences as to the apostle’s teaching drawn from his peculiar
mode of speaking in the first epistle. In _2 Thess. 2:2-5_ he
removes the impression “that the day of the Lord is now present”
or “just at hand”; declares that “it will not be, except the
falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed”; reminds
the Thessalonians: “when I was yet with you, I told you these
things.” Yet still, in _verse 1_, he speaks of “the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him.”

These passages, taken together, show: (1) that the two epistles
are one in their teaching; (2) that in neither epistle is there
any prediction of the immediate coming of the Lord; (3) that in
the second epistle great events are foretold as intervening before
that coming; (4) that while Paul never taught that Christ would
come during his own lifetime, he hoped at least during the earlier
part of his life that it might be so—a hope that seems to have
been dissipated in his later years. (See _2 Tim. 4:6—_“I am
already being offered, and the time of my departure is come.”) We
must remember, however, that there was a “coming of the Lord” in
the destruction of Jerusalem within three or four years of Paul’s
death. Henry Van Dyke: “The point of Paul’s teaching in _1_ and _2
Thess._ is not that Christ is coming to-morrow, but that he is
surely coming.” The absence of perspective in prophecy may explain
Paul’s not at first defining the precise time of the end, and so
leaving it to be misunderstood.

The second Epistle to the Thessalonians, therefore, only makes
more plain the meaning of the first, and adds new items of
prediction. It is important to recognize in Paul’s epistles a
progress in prophecy, in doctrine, in church polity. The full
statement of the truth was gradually drawn out, under the
influence of the Spirit, upon occasion of successive outward
demands and inward experiences. Much is to be learned by studying
the chronological order of Paul’s epistles, as well as of the
other N. T. books. For evidence of similar progress in the
epistles of Peter, compare _1 Pet. 4:7_ with _2 Pet. 3:4_ _sq._

(_d_) The character of prophecy as a rough general sketch of the future,
in highly figurative language, and without historical perspective, renders
it peculiarly probable that what at first sight seem to be errors are due
to a misinterpretation on our part, which confounds the drapery with the
substance, or applies its language to events to which it had no reference.

_James 5:9_ and _Phil. 4:5_ are instances of that large prophetic
speech which regards the distant future as near at hand, because
so certain to the faith and hope of the church. Sanday,
Inspiration, 376-378—“No doubt the Christians of the Apostolic age
did live in immediate expectation of the Second Coming, and that
expectation culminated at the crisis in which the Apocalypse was
written. In the Apocalypse, as in every predictive prophecy, there
is a double element, one part derived from the circumstances of
the present and another pointing forwards to the future.... All
these things, in an exact and literal sense have fallen through
with the postponement of that great event in which they centre.
From the first they were but meant as the imaginative pictorial
and symbolical clothing of that event. What measure of real
fulfilment the Apocalypse may yet be destined to receive we cannot
tell. But in predictive prophecy, even when most closely verified,
the essence lies less in the prediction than in the eternal laws
of moral and religious truth which the fact predicted reveals or
exemplifies.” Thus we recognize both the divinity and the freedom
of prophecy, and reject the rationalistic theory which would
relate the fall of the Beaconsfield government in Matthew’s way:
“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Cromwell, saying:
‘Get you gone, and make room for honest men!’ ” See the more full
statement of the nature of prophecy, on pages 132-141. Also
Bernard, Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.

7. Certain books unworthy of a place in inspired Scripture.

(_a_) This charge may be shown, in each single case, to rest upon a
misapprehension of the aim and method of the book, and its connection with
the remainder of the Bible, together with a narrowness of nature or of
doctrinal view, which prevents the critic from appreciating the wants of
the peculiar class of men to which the book is especially serviceable.

Luther called _James_ “a right strawy epistle.” His constant
pondering of the doctrine of justification by faith alone made it
difficult for him to grasp the complementary truth that we are
justified only by such faith as brings forth good works, or to
perceive the essential agreement of James and Paul. Prof. R. E.
Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 3,1898:803, 804—“Luther refused
canonical authority to books not actually written by apostles or
composed (as Mark and Luke) under their direction. So he rejected
from the rank of canonical authority Hebrews, James, Jude, 2
Peter, Revelation. Even Calvin doubted the Petrine authorship of 2
Peter, excluded the book of Revelation from the Scripture on which
he wrote Commentaries, and also thus ignored 2 and 3 John.” G. P.
Fisher in S. S. Times, Aug. 29, 1891—“Luther, in his preface to
the N. T. (Edition of 1522), gives a list of what he considers as
the principal books of the N. T. These are John’s Gospel and First
Epistle, Paul’s Epistles, especially Romans and Galatians, and
Peter’s First Epistle. Then he adds that ‘St. James’ Epistle is a
right strawy Epistle _compared with them_’—‘_ein recht strohern
Epistel gegen sie,_’ thus characterizing it not absolutely but
only relatively.” Zwingle even said of the Apocalypse: “It is not
a Biblical book.” So Thomas Arnold, with his exaggerated love for
historical accuracy and definite outline, found the Oriental
imagery and sweeping visions of the book of Revelation so bizarre
and distasteful that he doubted their divine authority.

(_b_) The testimony of church history and general Christian experience to
the profitableness and divinity of the disputed books is of greater weight
than the personal impressions of the few who criticize them.

Instance the testimonies of the ages of persecution to the worth
of the prophecies, which assure God’s people that his cause shall
surely triumph. Denney, Studies in Theology, 226—“It is at least
as likely that the individual should be insensible to the divine
message in a book, as that the church should have judged it to
contain such a message if it did not do so.” Milton, Areopagitica:
“The Bible brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against
Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.” Bruce,
Apologetics, 329—“O. T. religion was querulous, vindictive,
philolevitical, hostile toward foreigners, morbidly
self-conscious, and tending to self-righteousness. Ecclesiastes
shows us how we ought _not_ to feel. To go about crying _Vanitas!_
is to miss the lesson it was meant to teach, namely, that the Old
Covenant was vanity—proved to be vanity by allowing a son of the
Covenant to get into so despairing a mood.” Chadwick says that
Ecclesiastes got into the Canon only after it had received an
orthodox postscript.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:193—“Slavish fear and
self-righteous reckoning with God are the unlovely features of
this Jewish religion of law to which the ethical idealism of the
prophets had degenerated, and these traits strike us most visibly
in Pharsiaism.... It was this side of the O. T. religion to which
Christianity took a critical and destroying attitude, while it
revealed a new and higher knowledge of God. For, says Paul, ‘ye
received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye
received the spirit of adoption’_ (Rom. 8:15)_. In unity with God
man does not lose his soul but preserves it. God not only commands
but gives.” Ian Maclaren (John Watson), Cure of Souls, 144—“When
the book of Ecclesiastes is referred to the days of the third
century B. C., then its note is caught, and any man who has been
wronged and embittered by political tyranny and social corruption
has his bitter cry included in the book of God.”

(_c_) Such testimony can be adduced in favor of the value of each one of
the books to which exception is taken, such as Esther, Job, Song of
Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, James, Revelation.

Esther is the book, next to the Pentateuch, held in highest
reverence by the Jews. “Job was the discoverer of infinity, and
the first to see the bearing of infinity on righteousness. It was
the return of religion to nature. Job heard the voice beyond the
Sinai-voice” (Shadow-Cross, 89). Inge, Christian Mysticism, 43—“As
to the Song of Solomon, its influence upon Christian Mysticism has
been simply deplorable. A graceful romance in honor of true love
has been distorted into a precedent and sanction for giving way to
hysterical emotions in which sexual imagery has been freely used
to symbolize the relation between the soul and its Lord.” Chadwick
says that the Song of Solomon got into the Canon only after it had
received an allegorical interpretation. Gladden, Seven Puzzling
Bible Books, 165, thinks it impossible that “the addition of one
more inmate to the harem of that royal rake, King Solomon, should
have been made the type of the spiritual affection between Christ
and his church. Instead of this, the book is a glorification of
pure love. The Shulamite, transported to the court of Solomon,
remains faithful to her shepherd lover, and is restored to him.”

Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“The Song of Solomon, literally
interpreted as a story of true love, proof against the
blandishments of the royal harem, is rightfully in the Canon as a
buttress to the true religion; for whatever made for purity in the
relations of the sexes made for the worship of Jehovah—Baal
worship and impurity being closely associated.” Rutherford,
McCheyne, and Spurgeon have taken more texts from the Song of
Solomon than from any other portion of Scripture of like extent.
Charles G. Finney, Autobiography, 378—“At this time it seemed as
if my soul was wedded to Christ in a sense which I never had any
thought or conception of before. The language of the Song of
Solomon was as natural to me as my breath. I thought I could
understand well the state he was in when he wrote that Song, and
concluded then, as I have ever thought since, that that Song was
written by him after he had been reclaimed from his great
backsliding. I not only had all the fulness of my first love, but
a vast accession to it. Indeed, the Lord lifted me up so much
above anything that I had experienced before, and taught me so
much of the meaning of the Bible, of Christ’s relations and power
and willingness, that I found myself saying to him: I had not
known or conceived that any such thing was true.” On Jonah, see R.
W. Dale, in Expositor, July, 1892, advocating the non-historical
and allegorical character of the book. Bib. Sac.,
10:737-764—“Jonah represents the nation of Israel as emerging
through a miracle from the exile, in order to carry out its
mission to the world at large. It teaches that God is the God of
the whole earth; that the Ninevites as well as the Israelites are
dear to him; that his threatenings of penalty are conditional.”

8. Portions of the Scripture books written by others than the persons to
whom they are ascribed.

The objection rests upon a misunderstanding of the nature and object of
inspiration. It may be removed by considering that

(_a_) In the case of books made up from preëxisting documents, inspiration
simply preserved the compilers of them from selecting inadequate or
improper material. The fact of such compilation does not impugn their
value as records of a divine revelation, since these books supplement each
other’s deficiencies and together are sufficient for man’s religious
needs.

Luke distinctly informs us that he secured the materials for his
gospel from the reports of others who were eye-witnesses of the
events he recorded (_Luke 1:1-4_). The book of Genesis bears marks
of having incorporated documents of earlier times. The account of
creation which begins with _Gen. 2:4_ is evidently written by a
different hand from that which penned _1:1-31_ and _2:1-3_.
Instances of the same sort may be found in the books of
Chronicles. In like manner, Marshall’s Life of Washington
incorporates documents by other writers. By thus incorporating
them, Marshall vouches for their truth. See Bible Com., 1:2, 22.

Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theology, 1:243—“Luther ascribes to faith
critical authority with reference to the Canon. He denies the
canonicity of James, without regarding it as spurious. So of
Hebrews and Revelation, though later, in 1545, he passed a more
favorable judgment upon the latter. He even says of a proof
adduced by Paul in Galatians that it is too weak to hold. He
allows that in external matters not only Stephen but even the
sacred authors contain inaccuracies. The authority of the O. T.
does not seem to him invalidated by the admission that several of
its writings have passed through revising hands. What would it
matter, he asks, if Moses did not write the Pentateuch? The
prophets studied Moses and one another. If they built in much
wood, hay and stubble along with the rest, still the foundation
abides; the fire of the great day shall consume the former; for in
this manner do we treat the writings of Augustine and others.
Kings is far more to be believed than Chronicles. Ecclesiastes is
forged and cannot come from Solomon. Esther is not canonical. The
church may have erred in adopting a book into the Canon. Faith
first requires proof. Hence he ejects the Apocryphal books of the
O. T. from the Canon. So some parts of the N. T. receive only a
secondary, deuterocanonical position. There is a difference
between the word of God and the holy Scriptures, not merely in
reference to the form, but also in reference to the subject
matter.”

H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 94—“The Editor of
the Minor Prophets united in one roll the prophetic fragments
which were in circulation in his time. Finding a fragment without
an author’s name he inserted it in the series. It would not have
been distinguished from the work of the author immediately
preceding. So _Zech. 9:1-4_ came to go under the name of
Zechariah, and _Is. 40-66_ under the name of Isaiah. Reuss called
these ‘anatomical studies.’ ” On the authorship of the book of
Daniel, see W. C. Wilkinson, in Homiletical Review, March,
1902:208, and Oct. 1902:305; on Paul, see Hom. Rev., June,
1902:501; on 110th Psalm, Hom. Rev., April, 1902:309.

(_b_) In the case of additions to Scripture books by later writers, it is
reasonable to suppose that the additions, as well as the originals, were
made by inspiration, and no essential truth is sacrificed by allowing the
whole to go under the name of the chief author.

_Mark 16:9-20_ appears to have been added by a later hand (see
English Revised Version). The Eng. Rev. Vers. also brackets or
segregates a part of _verse 3_ and the whole of _verse 4_ in _John
5_ (the moving of the water by the angel), and the whole passage
_John 7:53-8:11_ (the woman taken in adultery). Westcott and Hort
regard the latter passage as an interpolation, probably “Western”
in its origin (so also _Mark 16:9-20_). Others regard it as
authentic, though not written by John. The closing chapter of
Deuteronomy was apparently added after Moses’ death—perhaps by
Joshua. If criticism should prove other portions of the Pentateuch
to have been composed after Moses’ time, the inspiration of the
Pentateuch would not be invalidated, so long as Moses was its
chief author or even the original source and founder of its
legislation (_John 5:46—_“he wrote of me”). Gore, in Lux Mundi,
355—“Deuteronomy may be a republication of the law, in the spirit
and power of Moses, and put dramatically into his mouth.”

At a spot near the Pool of Siloam, Manasseh is said to have
ordered that Isaiah should be sawn asunder with a wooden saw. The
prophet is again sawn asunder by the recent criticism. But his
prophecy opens (_Is. 1:1_) with the statement that it was composed
during a period which covered the reigns of four kings—Uzziah,
Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah—nearly forty years. In so long a time
the style of a writer greatly changes. _Chapters 40-66_ may have
been written in Isaiah’s later age, after he had retired from
public life. Compare the change in the style of Zechariah, John
and Paul, with that in Thomas Carlyle and George William Curtis.
On Isaiah, see Smyth, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ; Bib.
Sac., Apr. 1881:230-253; also July, 1881; Stanley, Jewish Ch.,
2:646, 647; Nägelsbach, Int. to Lange’s Isaiah.

For the view that there were two Isaiahs, see George Adam Smith,
Com. on Isaiah, 2:1-25: Isaiah flourished B. C. 740-700. The last
27 chapters deal with the captivity (598-538) and with Cyrus
(550), whom they name. The book is not one continuous prophecy,
but a number of separate orations. Some of these claim to be
Isaiah’s own, and have titles, such as “The vision of Isaiah the
son of Amos”_ (1:1)_; “The word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw”_
(2:1)_. But such titles describe only the individual prophecies
they head. Other portions of the book, on other subjects and in
different styles, have no titles at all. Chapters _40-66_ do not
claim to be his. There are nine citations in the N. T. from the
disputed chapters, but none by our Lord. None of these citations
were given in answer to the question: Did Isaiah write chapters
_44-66_? Isaiah’s name is mentioned only for the sake of
reference. Chapters _44-66_ set forth the exile and captivity as
already having taken place. Israel is addressed as ready for
deliverance. Cyrus is named as deliverer. There is no grammar of
the future like Jeremiah’s. Cyrus is pointed out as proof that
_former_ prophecies of deliverance are at last coming to pass. He
is not presented as a prediction, but as a proof that prediction
is being fulfilled. The prophet could not have referred the
heathen to Cyrus as proof that prophecy had been fulfilled, had he
not been visible to them in all his weight of war. Babylon has
still to fall before the exiles can go free. But chapters _40-66_
speak of the coming of Cyrus as past, and of the fall of Babylon
as yet to come. Why not use the prophetic perfect of both, if both
were yet future? Local color, language and thought are all
consistent with exilic authorship. All suits the exile, but all is
foreign to the subjects and methods of Isaiah, for example, the
use of the terms _righteous_ and _righteousness_. Calvin admits
exilic authorship (on _Is. 55:3_). The passage _56:9-57_, however,
is an exception and is preëxilic. _40-48_ are certainly by one
hand, and may be dated 555-538. 2nd Isaiah is not a unity, but
consists of a number of pieces written before, during, and after
the exile, to comfort the people of God.

(_c_) It is unjust to deny to inspired Scripture the right exercised by
all historians of introducing certain documents and sayings as simply
historical, while their complete truthfulness is neither vouched for nor
denied.

An instance in point is the letter of Claudius Lysias in _Acts
23:26-30_—a letter which represents his conduct in a more
favorable light than the facts would justify—for he had not
learned that Paul was a Roman when he rescued him in the temple
(_Acts 21:31-33; 22:26-29_). An incorrect statement may be
correctly reported. A set of pamphlets printed in the time of the
French Revolution might be made an appendix to some history of
France without implying that the historian vouched for their
truth. The sacred historians may similarly have been inspired to
use only the material within their reach, leaving their readers by
comparison with other Scriptures to judge of its truthfulness and
value. This seems to have been the method adopted by the compiler
of _1_ and _2 Chronicles_. The moral and religious lessons of the
history are patent, even though there is inaccuracy in reporting
some of the facts. So the assertions of the authors of the Psalms
cannot be taken for absolute truth. The authors were not sinless
models for the Christian,—only Christ is that. But the Psalms
present us with a record of the actual experience of believers in
the past. It has its human weakness, but we can profit by it, even
though it expresses itself at times in imprecations. _Jeremiah
20:7—_“O lord, thou hast deceived me”—may possibly be thus
explained.

9. Sceptical or fictitious Narratives.

(_a_) Descriptions of human experience may be embraced in Scripture, not
as models for imitation, but as illustrations of the doubts, struggles,
and needs of the soul. In these cases inspiration may vouch, not for the
correctness of the views expressed by those who thus describe their mental
history, but only for the correspondence of the description with actual
fact, and for its usefulness as indirectly teaching important moral
lessons.

The book of Ecclesiastes, for example, is the record of the mental
struggles of a soul seeking satisfaction without God. If written
by Solomon during the time of his religious declension, or near
the close of it, it would constitute a most valuable commentary
upon the inspired history. Yet it might be equally valuable,
though composed by some later writer under divine direction and
inspiration. H. P. Smith, Bib. Scholarship and Inspiration, 97—“To
suppose Solomon the author of Ecclesiastes is like supposing
Spenser to have written In Memoriam.” Luther, Keil, Delitzsch,
Ginsburg, Hengstenberg all declare it to be a production of later
times (330 B. C.). The book shows experience of misgovernment. An
earlier writer cannot write in the style of a later one, though
the later can imitate the earlier. The early Latin and Greek
Fathers quoted the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon as by Solomon; see
Plumptre, Introd. to Ecclesiastes, in Cambridge Bible. Gore, in
Lux Mundi, 355—“Ecclesiastes, though like the book of Wisdom
purporting to be by Solomon, may be by another author.... ‘A pious
fraud’ cannot be inspired; an idealizing personification, as a
normal type of literature, can be inspired.” Yet Bernhard Schäfer,
Das Buch Koheleth, ably maintains the Solomonic authorship.

(_b_) Moral truth may be put by Scripture writers into parabolic or
dramatic form, and the sayings of Satan and of perverse men may form parts
of such a production. In such cases, inspiration may vouch, not for the
historical truth, much less for the moral truth of each separate
statement, but only for the correspondence of the whole with ideal fact;
in other words, inspiration may guarantee that the story is true to
nature, and is valuable as conveying divine instruction.

It is not necessary to suppose that the poetical speeches of Job’s
friends were actually delivered in the words that have come down
to us. Though Job never had had a historical existence, the book
would still be of the utmost value, and would convey to us a vast
amount of true teaching with regard to the dealings of God and the
problem of evil. Fact is local; truth is universal. Some novels
contain more truth than can be found in some histories. Other
books of Scripture, however, assure us that Job was an actual
historical character (_Ez. 14:14_; _James 5:11_). Nor is it
necessary to suppose that our Lord, in telling the parable of the
Prodigal Son (_Luke 15:11-32_) or that of the Unjust Steward
(_16:1-8_), had in mind actual persons of whom each parable was an
exact description.

Fiction is not an unworthy vehicle of spiritual truth. Parable,
and even fable, may convey valuable lessons. In _Judges 9:14, 15_,
the trees, the vine, the bramble, all talk. If truth can be
transmitted in myth and legend, surely God may make use of these
methods of communicating it, and even though _Gen. 1-3_ were
mythical it might still be inspired. Aristotle said that poetry is
truer than history. The latter only tells us that certain things
happened. Poetry presents to us the permanent passions,
aspirations and deeds of men which are behind all history and
which make it what it is; see Dewey, Psychology, 197. Though Job
were a drama and Jonah an apologue, both might be inspired. David
Copperfield, the Apology of Socrates, Fra Lippo Lippi, were not
the authors of the productions which bear their names, but
Dickens, Plato and Browning, rather. Impersonation is a proper
method in literature. The speeches of Herodotus and Thucydides
might be analogues to those in Deuteronomy and in the Acts, and
yet these last might be inspired.

The book of Job could not have been written in patriarchal times.
Walled cities, kings, courts, lawsuits, prisons, stocks, mining
enterprises, are found in it. Judges are bribed by the rich to
decide against the poor. All this belongs to the latter years of
the Jewish Kingdom. Is then the book of Job all a lie? No more
than Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the parable of the Good
Samaritan are all a lie. The book of Job is a dramatic poem. Like
Macbeth or the Ring and the Book, it is founded in fact. H. P.
Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 101—“The value of the
book of Job lies in the spectacle of a human soul in its direst
affliction working through its doubts, and at last humbly
confessing its weakness and sinfulness in the presence of its
Maker. The inerrancy is not in Job’s words or in those of his
friends, but in the truth of the picture presented. If Jehovah’s
words at the end of the book are true, then the first thirty-five
chapters are not infallible teaching.”

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 355, suggests in a similar manner that the
books of Jonah and of Daniel may be dramatic compositions worked
up upon a basis of history. George Adam Smith, in the Expositors’
Bible, tells us that Jonah flourished 780 B. C., in the reign of
Jeroboam II. Nineveh fell in 606. The book implies that it was
written after this (_3:3_—“Nineveh _was_ an exceeding great
city”). The book does not claim to be written by Jonah, by an
eye-witness, or by a contemporary. The language has Aramaic forms.
The date is probably 300 B. C. There is an absence of precise
data, such as the sin of Nineveh, the journey of the prophet
thither, the place where he was cast out on land, the name of the
Assyrian king. The book illustrates God’s mission of prophecy to
the Gentiles, his care for them, their susceptibility to his word.
Israel flies from duty, but is delivered to carry salvation to the
heathen. Jeremiah had represented Israel as swallowed up and cast
out (_Jer. 51:34, 44 __sq.__—_“Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon
hath devoured me ... he hath, like a monster, swallowed me up, he
hath filled his maw with my delicacies; he hath cast me out.... I
will bring forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed
up.”) Some tradition of Jonah’s proclaiming doom to Nineveh may
have furnished the basis of the apologue. Our Lord uses the story
as a mere illustration, like the homiletic use of Shakespeare’s
dramas. “As Macbeth did,” “As Hamlet said,” do not commit us to
the historical reality of Macbeth or of Hamlet. Jesus may say as
to questions of criticism: “Man, who made me a judge or a divider
over you?”_ _“I came not to judge the world, but to save the
world”_ (Luke 12:14; John 12:47)_. He had no thought of
confirming, or of not confirming, the historic character of the
story. It is hard to conceive the compilation of a psalm by a man
in Jonah’s position. It is not the prayer of one inside the fish,
but of one already saved. More than forty years ago President
Woolsey of Yale conceded that the book of Jonah was probably an
apologue.

(_c_) In none of these cases ought the difficulty of distinguishing man’s
words from God’s words, or ideal truth from actual truth, to prevent our
acceptance of the fact of inspiration; for in this very variety of the
Bible, combined with the stimulus it gives to inquiry and the general
plainness of its lessons, we have the very characteristics we should
expect in a book whose authorship was divine.

The Scripture is a stream in which “the lamb may wade and the
elephant may swim.” There is need both of literary sense and of
spiritual insight to interpret it. This sense and this insight can
be given only by the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, who
inspired the various writings to witness of him in various ways,
and who is present in the world to take of the things of Christ
and show them to us (_Mat. 28:20_; _John 16:13, 14_). In a
subordinate sense the Holy Spirit inspires us to recognize
inspiration in the Bible. In the sense here suggested we may
assent to the words of Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst at the
inauguration of William Adams Brown as Professor of Systematic
Theology in the Union Theological Seminary, November 1,
1898—“Unfortunately we have condemned the word ‘inspiration’ to a
particular and isolated field of divine operation, and it is a
trespass upon current usage to employ it in the full urgency of
its Scriptural intent in connection with work like your own or
mine. But the word voices a reality that lies so close to the
heart of the entire Christian matter that we can ill afford to
relegate it to any single or technical function. Just as much
to-day as back at the first beginnings of Christianity, those who
would _declare_ the truths of God must be inspired to _behold_ the
truths of God.... The only irresistible persuasiveness is that
which is born of vision, and it is _not_ vision to be able merely
to describe what some seer has seen, though it were Moses or Paul
that was the seer.”

10. Acknowledgment of the non-inspiration of Scripture teachers and their
writings.

This charge rests mainly upon the misinterpretation of two particular
passages:

(_a_) Acts 23:5 (“I wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest”) may
be explained either as the language of indignant irony: “I would not
recognize such a man as high priest”; or, more naturally, an actual
confession of personal ignorance and fallibility, which does not affect
the inspiration of any of Paul’s final teachings or writings.

Of a more reprehensible sort was Peter’s dissimulation at Antioch,
or practical disavowal of his convictions by separating or
withdrawing himself from the Gentile Christians (_Gal. 2:11-13_).
Here was no public teaching, but the influence of private example.
But neither in this case, nor in that mentioned above, did God
suffer the error to be a final one. Through the agency of Paul,
the Holy Spirit set the matter right.

(_b_) 1 Cor. 7:12, 10 (“I, not the Lord”; “not I, but the Lord”). Here the
contrast is not between the apostle inspired and the apostle uninspired,
but between the apostle’s words and an actual saying of our Lord, as in
Mat. 5:32; 19:3-10; Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18 (Stanley on Corinthians). The
expressions may be paraphrased:—“With regard to this matter no express
command was given by Christ before his ascension. As one inspired by
Christ, however, I give you my command.”

Meyer on _1 Cor. 7:10_—“Paul distinguishes, therefore, here and in
verses 12, 25, not between _his own_ and _inspired_ commands, but
between those which proceeded from his own (God-inspired)
subjectivity and those which Christ himself supplied by his
objective word.” “Paul knew from the living voice of tradition
what commands Christ had given concerning divorce.” Or if it
should be maintained that Paul here disclaims inspiration,—a
supposition contradicted by the following δοκῶ—“I think that I
also have the Spirit of God”_ (verse 40)_,—it only proves a single
exception to his inspiration, and since it is expressly mentioned,
and mentioned only once, it implies the inspiration of all the
rest of his writings. We might illustrate Paul’s method, if this
were the case, by the course of the New York Herald when it was
first published. Other journals had stood by their own mistakes
and had never been willing to acknowledge error. The Herald gained
the confidence of the public by correcting every mistake of its
reporters. The result was that, when there was no confession of
error, the paper was regarded as absolutely trustworthy. So Paul’s
one acknowledgment of non-inspiration might imply that in all
other cases his words had divine authority. On Authority in
Religion, see Wilfred Ward, in Hibbert Journal, July,
1903:677-692.

PART IV. THE NATURE, DECREES, AND WORKS OF GOD.

Chapter I. The Attributes Of God.

In contemplating the words and acts of God, as in contemplating the words
and acts of individual men, we are compelled to assign uniform and
permanent effects to uniform and permanent causes. Holy acts and words, we
argue, must have their source in a principle of holiness; truthful acts
and words, in a settled proclivity to truth; benevolent acts and words, in
a benevolent disposition.

Moreover, these permanent and uniform sources of expression and action to
which we have applied the terms principle, proclivity, disposition, since
they exist harmoniously in the same person, must themselves inhere, and
find their unity, in an underlying spiritual substance or reality of which
they are the inseparable characteristics and partial manifestations.

Thus we are led naturally from the works to the attributes, and from the
attributes to the essence, of God.

For all practical purposes we may use the words essence,
substance, being, nature, as synonymous with each other. So, too,
we may speak of attribute, quality, characteristic, principle,
proclivity, disposition, as practically one. As, in cognizing
matter, we pass from its effects in sensation to the qualities
which produce the sensations, and then to the material substance
to which the qualities belong; and as, in cognizing mind, we pass
from its phenomena in thought and action to the faculties and
dispositions which give rise to these phenomena, and then to the
mental substance to which these faculties and dispositions belong;
so, in cognizing God, we pass from his words and acts to his
qualities or attributes, and then to the substance or essence to
which these qualities or attributes belong.

The teacher in a Young Ladies’ Seminary described substance as a
cushion, into which the attributes as pins are stuck. But pins and
cushion alike are substance,—neither one is quality. The opposite
error is illustrated from the experience of Abraham Lincoln on the
Ohio River. “What is this transcendentalism that we hear so much
about?” asked Mr. Lincoln. The answer came: “You see those
swallows digging holes in yonder bank? Well, take away the bank
from around those holes, and what is left is transcendentalism.”
Substance is often represented as being thus transcendental. If
such representations were correct, metaphysics would indeed be
“that, of which those who listen understand nothing, and which he
who speaks does not himself understand,” and the metaphysician
would be the fox who ran into the hole and then pulled in the hole
after him. Substance and attributes are correlates,—neither one is
possible without the other. There is no quality that does not
qualify something; and there is no thing, either material or
spiritual, that can be known or can exist without qualities to
differentiate it from other things. In applying the categories of
substance and attribute to God, we indulge in no merely curious
speculation, but rather yield to the necessities of rational
thought and show how we must think of God if we think at all. See
Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:240; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:172-188.

I. Definition of the term Attributes.

The attributes of God are those distinguishing characteristics of the
divine nature which are inseparable from the idea of God and which
constitute the basis and ground for his various manifestations to his
creatures.

We call them attributes, because we are compelled to attribute them to God
as fundamental qualities or powers of his being, in order to give rational
account of certain constant facts in God’s self-revelations.

II. Relation of the divine Attributes to the divine Essence.

1. _The attributes have an objective existence._ They are not mere names
for human conceptions of God—conceptions which have their only ground in
the imperfection of the finite mind. They are qualities objectively
distinguishable from the divine essence and from each other.

The nominalistic notion that God is a being of absolute simplicity, and
that in his nature there is no internal distinction of qualities or
powers, tends directly to pantheism; denies all reality of the divine
perfections; or, if these in any sense still exist, precludes all
knowledge of them on the part of finite beings. To say that knowledge and
power, eternity and holiness, are identical with the essence of God and
with each other, is to deny that we know God at all.

The Scripture declarations of the possibility of knowing God, together
with the manifestation of the distinct attributes of his nature, are
conclusive against this false notion of the divine simplicity.

Aristotle says well that there is no such thing as a science of
the unique, of that which has no analogies or relations. Knowing
is distinguishing; what we cannot distinguish from other things we
cannot know. Yet a false tendency to regard God as a being of
absolute simplicity has come down from mediæval scholasticism, has
infected much of the post-reformation theology, and is found even
so recently as in Schleiermacher, Rothe, Olshausen, and Ritschl.
E. G. Robinson defines the attributes as “our methods of
conceiving of God.” But this definition is influenced by the
Kantian doctrine of relativity and implies that we cannot know
God’s essence, that is, the thing-in-itself, God’s real being.
Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 141—“This notion of the divine
simplicity reduces God to a rigid and lifeless stare.... The One
is manifold without being many.”

The divine simplicity is the starting-point of Philo: God is a
being absolutely bare of quality. All quality in finite beings has
limitation, and no limitation can be predicated of God who is
eternal, unchangeable, simple substance, free, self-sufficient,
better than the good and the beautiful. To predicate any quality
of God would reduce him to the sphere of finite existence. Of him
we can only say _that_ he is, not _what_ he is; see art. by
Schürer, in Encyc. Brit., 18:761.

Illustrations of this tendency are found in Scotus Erigena: “Deus
nescit se quid est, quia non est quid”; and in Occam: The divine
attributes are distinguished neither substantially nor logically
from each other or from the divine essence; the only distinction
is that of names; so Gerhard and Quenstedt. Charnock, the Puritan
writer, identifies both knowledge and will with the simple essence
of God. Schleiermacher makes all the attributes to be
modifications of power or causality; in his system God and world =
the “natura naturans” and “natura naturata” of Spinoza. There is
no distinction of attributes and no succession of acts in God, and
therefore no real personality or even spiritual being; see
Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 110. Schleiermacher said: “My
God is the Universe.” God is causative force. Eternity,
omniscience and holiness are simply aspects of causality. Rothe,
on the other hand, makes omniscience to be the all-comprehending
principle of the divine nature; and Olshausen, on _John 1:1_, in a
similar manner attempts to prove that the Word of God must have
objective and substantial being, by assuming that knowing =
willing; whence it would seem to follow that, since God wills all
that he knows, he must will moral evil. Bushnell and others
identify righteousness in God with benevolence, and therefore
cannot see that any atonement needs to be made to God. Ritschl
also holds that love is the fundamental divine attribute, and that
omnipotence and even personality are simply modifications of love;
see Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of Doctrine, 8. Herbert
Spencer only carries the principle further when he concludes God
to be simple unknowable force.

But to call God everything is the same as to call him nothing.
With Dorner, we say that “definition is no limitation.” As we rise
in the scale of creation from the mere jelly-sac to man, the
homogeneous becomes the heterogeneous, there is differentiation of
functions, complexity increases. We infer that God, the highest of
all, instead of being simple force, is infinitely complex, that he
has an infinite variety of attributes and powers. Tennyson, Palace
of Art (lines omitted in the later editions): “All nature widens
upward: evermore The simpler essence lower lies: More complex is
more perfect, owning more Discourse, more widely wise.”

_Jer. 10:10_—God is “the living God”; _John 5:26_—he “hath life in
himself”—unsearchable riches of positive attributes; _John
17:23—_“thou lovedst me”—manifoldness in unity. This complexity in
God is the ground of blessedness for him and of progress for us:
_1 Tim. 1:11—_“the blessed God”; _Jer. 9:23, 24—_“let him glory in
this, that he knoweth me.” The complex nature of God permits anger
at the sinner and compassion for him at the same moment: _Ps.
7:11—_“a God that hath indignation every day”; _John 3:16—_“God so
loved the world”; _Ps. 85:10, 11—_“mercy and truth are met
together.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:116 _sq._; Schweizer,
Glaubenslehre, 1:229-235; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
1:43, 50; Martensen, Dogmatics, 91—“If God were the simple One, τὸ
ἁπλῶς ἕν, the mystic abyss in which every form of determination
were extinguished, there would be nothing in the Unity to be
known.” Hence “nominalism is incompatible with the idea of
revelation. We teach, with realism, that the attributes of God are
objective determinations in his revelation and as such are rooted
in his inmost essence.”

2. _The attributes inhere in the divine essence._ They are not separate
existences. They are attributes of God.

While we oppose the nominalistic view which holds them to be mere names
with which, by the necessity of our thinking, we clothe the one simple
divine essence, we need equally to avoid the opposite realistic extreme of
making them separate parts of a composite God.

We cannot conceive of attributes except as belonging to an underlying
essence which furnishes their ground of unity. In representing God as a
compound of attributes, realism endangers the living unity of the Godhead.

Notice the analogous necessity of attributing the properties of matter to
an underlying substance, and the phenomena of thought to an underlying
spiritual essence; else matter is reduced to mere force, and mind, to mere
sensation,—in short, all things are swallowed up in a vast idealism. The
purely realistic explanation of the attributes tends to low and
polytheistic conceptions of God. The mythology of Greece was the result of
personifying the divine attributes. The _nomina_ were turned into
_numina_, as Max Müller says; see Taylor, Nature on the Basis of Realism,
293. Instance also Christmas Evans’s sermon describing a Council in the
Godhead, in which the attributes of Justice, Mercy, Wisdom, and Power
argue with one another. Robert Hall called Christmas Evans “the one-eyed
orator of Anglesey,” but added that his one eye could “light an army
through a wilderness”; see Joseph Cross, Life and Sermons of Christmas
Evans, 112-116; David Rhys Stephen, Memoirs of Christmas Evans, 168-176.
We must remember that “Realism may so exalt the attributes that no
personal subject is left to constitute the ground of unity. Looking upon
Personality as anthropomorphism, it falls into a worse personification,
that of omnipotence, holiness, benevolence, which are mere blind thoughts,
unless there is one who is the Omnipotent, the Holy, the Good.” See
Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 70.

3. _The attributes belong to the divine essence as such._ They are to be
distinguished from those other powers or relations which do not appertain
to the divine essence universally.

The personal distinctions (_proprietates_) in the nature of the one God
are not to be denominated attributes; for each of these personal
distinctions belongs not to the divine essence as such and universally,
but only to the particular person of the Trinity who bears its name, while
on the contrary all of the attributes belong to each of the persons.

The relations which God sustains to the world (_predicata_), moreover,
such as creation, preservation, government, are not to be denominated
attributes; for these are accidental, not necessary or inseparable from
the idea of God. God would be God, if he had never created.

To make creation eternal and necessary is to dethrone God and to
enthrone a fatalistic development. It follows that the nature of
the attributes is to be illustrated, not alone or chiefly from
wisdom and holiness in man, which are not inseparable from man’s
nature, but rather from intellect and will in man, without which
he would cease to be man altogether. Only that is an attribute, of
which it can be safely said that he who possesses it would, if
deprived of it, cease to be God. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:335—“The
attribute is the whole essence acting in a certain way. The centre
of unity is not in any one attribute, but in the essence.... The
difference between the divine attribute and the divine person is,
that the person is a mode of the _existence_ of the essence, while
the attribute is a mode either of the _relation_, or of the
_operation_, of the essence.”

4. _The attributes manifest the divine essence._ The essence is revealed
only through the attributes. Apart from its attributes it is unknown and
unknowable.

But though we can know God only as he reveals to us his attributes, we do,
notwithstanding, in knowing these attributes, know the being to whom these
attributes belong. That this knowledge is partial does not prevent its
corresponding, so far as it goes, to objective reality in the nature of
God.

All God’s revelations are, therefore, revelations of himself in and
through his attributes. Our aim must be to determine from God’s works and
words what qualities, dispositions, determinations, powers of his
otherwise unseen and unsearchable essence he has actually made known to
us; or in other words, what are the revealed attributes of God.

_John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten
Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; _1
Tim. 6:16—_“whom no man hath seen, nor can see”; _Mat.
5:8—_“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”;
_11:27—_“neither doth any man know the Father, save the Son, and
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” C. A. Strong:
“Kant, not content with knowing the reality _in_ the phenomena,
was trying to know the reality _apart from_ the phenomena; he was
seeking to know, without fulfilling the conditions of knowledge;
in short, he wished to know without knowing.” So Agnosticism
perversely regards God as concealed by his own manifestation. On
the contrary, in knowing the phenomena we know the object itself.
J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 6—“In language, as in
nature, there are no verbs without subjects, but we are always
hunting for the noun that has no adjective, and the verb that has
no subject, and the subject that has no verb. Consciousness is
necessarily a consciousness of self. Idealism and monism would
like to see all verbs solid with their subjects, and to write ‘I
do’ or ‘I feel’ in the mazes of a monogram, but consciousness
refuses, and before it says ‘Do’ or ‘Feel’ it finishes saying
‘I.’ ” J. G. Holland’s Katrina, to her lover: “God is not
worshiped in his attributes. I do not love your attributes, but
you. Your attributes all meet me otherwhere, Blended in other
personalities, Nor do I love nor do I worship them, Nor those who
bear them. E’en the spotted pard Will dare a danger which will
make you pale; But shall his courage steal my heart from you? You
cheat your conscience, for you know That I may like your
attributes. Yet love not you.”

III. Methods of determining the divine Attributes.

We have seen that the existence of God is a first truth. It is presupposed
in all human thinking, and is more or less consciously recognized by all
men. This intuitive knowledge of God we have seen to be corroborated and
explicated by arguments drawn from nature and from mind. Reason leads us
to a causative and personal Intelligence upon whom we depend. This Being
of indefinite greatness we clothe, by a necessity of our thinking, with
all the attributes of perfection. The two great methods of determining
what these attributes are, are the Rational and the Biblical.

1. _The Rational method._ This is threefold:—(_a_) the _via negationis_,
or the way of negation, which consists in denying to God all imperfections
observed in created beings; (_b_) the _via eminentiæ_, or the way of
climax, which consists in attributing to God in infinite degree all the
perfections found in creatures; and (_c_) the _via causalitatis_, or the
way of causality, which consists in predicating of God those attributes
which are required in him to explain the world of nature and of mind.

This rational method explains God’s nature from that of his creation,
whereas the creation itself can be fully explained only from the nature of
God. Though the method is valuable, it has insuperable limitations, and
its place is a subordinate one. While we use it continually to confirm and
supplement results otherwise obtained, our chief means of determining the
divine attributes must be

2. _The Biblical method._ This is simply the inductive method, applied to
the facts with regard to God revealed in the Scriptures. Now that we have
proved the Scriptures to be a revelation from God, inspired in every part,
we may properly look to them as decisive authority with regard to God’s
attributes.

The rational method of determining the attributes of God is
sometimes said to have been originated by Dionysius the
Areopagite, reputed to have been a judge at Athens at the time of
Paul and to have died A. D. 95. It is more probably eclectic,
combining the results attained by many theologians, and applying
the intuitions of perfection and causality which lie at the basis
of all religious thinking. It is evident from our previous study
of the arguments for God’s existence, that from nature we cannot
learn either the Trinity or the mercy of God, and that these
deficiencies in our rational conclusions with respect to God must
be supplied, if at all, by revelation. Spurgeon, Autobiography,
166—“The old saying is ’Go from Nature up to Nature’s God.’ But it
is hard work going up hill. The best thing is to go from Nature’s
God down to Nature; and, if you once get to Nature’s God and
believe him and love him, it is surprising how easy it is to hear
music in the waves, and songs in the wild whisperings of the
winds, and to see God everywhere.” See also Kahnis, Dogmatik,
3:181.

IV. Classification of the Attributes.

The attributes may be divided into two great classes: Absolute or
Immanent, and Relative or Transitive.

By Absolute or Immanent Attributes, we mean attributes which respect the
inner being of God, which are involved in God’s relations to himself, and
which belong to his nature independently of his connection with the
universe.

By Relative or Transitive Attributes, we mean attributes which respect the
outward revelation of God’s being, which are involved in God’s relations
to the creation, and which are exercised in consequence of the existence
of the universe and its dependence upon him.

Under the head of Absolute or Immanent Attributes, we make a three-fold
division into Spirituality, with the attributes therein involved, namely,
Life and Personality; Infinity, with the attributes therein involved,
namely, Self-existence, Immutability, and Unity; and Perfection, with the
attributes therein involved, namely, Truth, Love, and Holiness.

Under the head of Relative or Transitive Attributes, we make a three-fold
division, according to the order of their revelation, into Attributes
having relation to Time and Space, as Eternity and Immensity; Attributes
having relation to Creation, as Omnipresence, Omniscience, and
Omnipotence; and Attributes having relation to Moral Beings, as Veracity
and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth; Mercy and Goodness, or Transitive
Love; and Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness.

This classification may be better understood from the following schedule:

1. Absolute or Immanent Attributes:
A. Spirituality, involving (a) Life, (b) Personality.
B. Infinity, involving (a) Self-existence, (b) Immutability, (c)
Unity.
C. Perfection, involving (a) Truth, (b) Love, (c) Holiness.

2. Relative or Transitive Attributes:
A. Related to Time and Space—(a) Eternity, (b) Immensity.
B. Related to Creation—(a) Omnipresence, (b) Omniscience, (c)
Omnipotence.
C. Related to Moral Beings—(a) Veracity, (b) Mercy, (c) Justice.

It will be observed, upon examination of the preceding schedule,
that our classification presents God first as Spirit, then as the
infinite Spirit, and finally as the perfect Spirit. This accords
with our definition of the term God (see page 52). It also
corresponds with the order in which the attributes commonly
present themselves to the human mind. Our first thought of God is
that of mere Spirit, mysterious and undefined, over against our
own spirits. Our next thought is that of God’s greatness; the
quantitative element suggests itself; his natural attributes rise
before us; we recognize him as the infinite One. Finally comes the
qualitative element; our moral natures recognize a moral God; over
against our error, selfishness and impurity, we perceive his
absolute perfection.

It should also be observed that this moral perfection, as it is an
immanent attribute, involves relation of God to himself. Truth,
love and holiness, as they respectively imply an exercise in God
of intellect, affection and will, may be conceived of as God’s
self-knowing, God’s self-loving, and God’s self-willing. The
significance of this will appear more fully in the discussion of
the separate attributes.

Notice the distinction between absolute and relative, between
immanent and transitive, attributes. Absolute = existing in no
necessary relation to things outside of God. Relative = existing
in such relation. Immanent = “remaining within, limited to, God’s
own nature in their activity and effect, inherent and indwelling,
internal and subjective—opposed to emanent or transitive.”
Transitive = having an object outside of God himself. We speak of
transitive verbs, and we mean verbs that are followed by an
object. God’s transitive attributes are so called, because they
respect and affect things and beings outside of God.

The aim of this classification into Absolute and Relative
Attributes is to make plain the divine self-sufficiency. Creation
is not a necessity, for there is a πλήρωμα in God (_Col. 1:19_),
even before he makes the world or becomes incarnate. And πλήρωμα
is not “the filling material,” nor “the vessel filled,” but “that
which is complete in itself,” or, in other words, “plenitude,”
“fulness,” “totality,” “abundance.” The whole universe is but a
drop of dew upon the fringe of God’s garment, or a breath exhaled
from his mouth. He could create a universe a hundred times as
great. Nature is but the symbol of God. The tides of life that ebb
and flow on the far shores of the universe are only faint
expressions of his life. The Immanent Attributes show us how
completely matters of grace are Creation and Redemption, and how
unspeakable is the condescension of him who took our humanity and
humbled himself to the death of the Cross. _Ps. 8:3, 4—_“When I
consider thy heavens ... what is man that thou art mindful of
him?” _113:5, 6—_“Who is like unto Jehovah our God, that hath his
seat on high, that humbleth himself?” _Phil. 2:6, 7—_“Who,
existing in the form of God, ... emptied himself, taking the form
of a servant.”

Ladd, Theory of Reality, 69—“I know _that_ I am, because, as the
basis of all discriminations as to _what_ I am, and as the core of
all such self-knowledge, I immediately know myself as _will_” So
as to the non-ego, “that things actually are is a factor in my
knowledge of them which springs from the root of an experience
with myself as a _will_, at once active and inhibited, as an agent
and yet opposed by another.” The ego and the non-ego as well are
fundamentally and essentially _will_. “Matter must be, _per se_,
Force. But this is ... to be a Will” (439). We know nothing of the
atom apart from its force (442). Ladd quotes from G. E. Bailey:
“The life-principle, varying only in degree, is omnipresent. There
is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence,
and this thrills through every atom of the whole Cosmos” (446).
“Science has only made the Substrate of material things more and
more completely self-like” (449). Spirit is the true and essential
Being of what is called Nature (472). “The ultimate Being of the
world is a self-conscious Mind and Will, which is the Ground of
all objects made known in human experience” (550).

On classification of attributes, see Luthardt, Compendium, 71;
Rothe, Dogmatik, 71; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:162; Thomasius, Christi
Person und Werk, 1:47, 52, 136. On the general subject, see
Charnock, Attributes; Bruce, Eigenschaftslehre.

V. Absolute or Immanent Attributes.

First division.—Spirituality, and attributes therein involved.

In calling spirituality an attribute of God, we mean, not that we are
justified in applying to the divine nature the adjective “spiritual,” but
that the substantive “Spirit” describes that nature (John 4:24, marg.—“God
is spirit”; Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him”; 1 Tim.
1:17—“incorruptible, invisible”; Col. 1:15—“the invisible God”). This
implies, negatively, that (_a_) God is not matter. Spirit is not a refined
form of matter but an immaterial substance, invisible, uncompounded,
indestructible. (_b_) God is not dependent upon matter. It cannot be shown
that the human mind, in any other state than the present, is dependent for
consciousness upon its connection with a physical organism. Much less is
it true that God is dependent upon the material universe as his sensorium.
God is not only spirit, but he is pure spirit. He is not only not matter,
but he has no necessary connection with matter (Luke 24:39—“A spirit hath
not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”).

John gives us the three characteristic attributes of God when he
says that God is “spirit,”_ _“light,”_ _“love”_ (John 4:24; 1 John
1:5; 4:8)_,—not _a_ spirit, _a_ light, _a_ love. Le Conte, in
Royce’s Conception of God, 45—“God is spirit, for spirit is
essential Life and essential Energy, and essential Love, and
essential Thought; in a word, essential Person.” Biedermann,
Dogmatik, 631—“Das Wesen des Geistes als des reinen Gegensatzes
zur Materie, ist das _reine Sein_, das _in sich ist_, aber _nicht
da ist_.” Martineau, Study, 2:366—“The subjective Ego is always
_here_, as opposed to all else, which is variously _there_....
Without local relations, therefore, the soul is inaccessible.”
But, Martineau continues, “if matter be but centres of force, all
the soul needs may be centres from which to act.” Romanes, Mind
and Motion, 34—“Because within the limits of human experience mind
is only known as associated with brain, it does not follow that
mind cannot exist in any other mode.” La Place swept the heavens
with his telescope, but could not find anywhere a God. “He might
just as well,” says President Sawyer, “have swept his kitchen with
a broom.” Since God is not a material being, he cannot be
apprehended by any physical means.

Those passages of Scripture which seem to ascribe to God the possession of
bodily parts and organs, as eyes and hands, are to be regarded as
anthropomorphic and symbolic. “When God is spoken of as appearing to the
patriarchs and walking with them, the passages are to be explained as
referring to God’s temporary manifestations of himself in human
form—manifestations which prefigured the final tabernacling of the Son of
God in human flesh. Side by side with these anthropomorphic expressions
and manifestations, moreover, are specific declarations which repress any
materializing conceptions of God; as, for example, that heaven is his
throne and the earth his footstool (Is. 66:1), and that the heaven of
heavens cannot contain him (1 K. 8:27).”

_Ex. 33:18-20_ declares that man cannot see God and live; _1 Cor.
2:7-16_ intimates that without the teaching of God’s Spirit we
cannot know God; all this teaches that God is above sensuous
perception, in other words, that he is not a material being. The
second command of the decalogue does not condemn sculpture and
painting, but only the making of images of _God_. It forbids our
conceiving God after the likeness of a _thing_, but it does not
forbid our conceiving God after the likeness of our inward _self_,
_i. e._, as _personal_. This again shows that God is a spiritual
being. Imagination can be used in religion, and great help can be
derived from it. Yet we do not know God by
imagination,—imagination only helps us vividly to realize the
presence of the God whom we already know. We may almost say that
some men have not imagination enough to be religious. But
imagination must not lose its wings. In its representations of
God, it must not be confined to a picture, or a form, or a place.
Humanity tends too much to rest in the material and the sensuous,
and we must avoid all representations of God which would identify
the Being who is worshiped with the helps used in order to realize
his presence; _John 4:24—_“they that worship him must worship in
spirit and truth.”

An Egyptian Hymn to the Nile, dating from the 19th dynasty (14th
century B. C.), contains these words: “His abode is not known; no
shrine is found with painted figures; there is no building that
can contain him” (Cheyne, Isaiah, 2:120). The repudiation of
images among the ancient Persians (Herod. 1:131), as among the
Japanese Shintos, indicates the remains of a primitive spiritual
religion. The representation of Jehovah with body or form degrades
him to the level of heathen gods. Pictures of the Almighty over
the chancels of Romanist cathedrals confine the mind and degrade
the conception of the worshiper. We may use imagination in prayer,
picturing God as a benignant form holding out arms of mercy, but
we should regard such pictures only as scaffolding for the
building of our edifice of worship, while we recognize, with the
Scripture, that the reality worshiped is immaterial and spiritual.
Otherwise our idea of God is brought down to the low level of
man’s material being. Even man’s spiritual nature may be
misrepresented by physical images, as when mediæval artists
pictured death, by painting a doll-like figure leaving the body at
the mouth of the person dying.

The longing for a tangible, incarnate God meets its satisfaction
in Jesus Christ. Yet even pictures of Christ soon lose their
power. Luther said: “If I have a picture of Christ in my heart,
why not one upon canvas?” We answer: Because the picture in the
heart is capable of change and improvement, as we ourselves change
and improve; the picture upon canvas is fixed, and holds to old
conceptions which we should outgrow. Thomas Carlyle: “Men never
think of painting the face of Christ, till they lose the
impression of him upon their hearts.” Swedenborg, in modern times,
represents the view that God exists in the shape of a man—an
anthropomorphism of which the making of idols is only a grosser
and more barbarous form; see H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 9,
10. This is also the doctrine of Mormonism; see Spencer, Catechism
of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons teach that God is a man; that he
has numerous wives by whom he peoples space with an infinite
number of spirits. Christ was a favorite son by a favorite wife,
but birth as man was the only way he could come into the enjoyment
of real life. These spirits are all the sons of God, but they can
realize and enjoy their sonship only through birth. They are about
every one of us pleading to be born. Hence, polygamy.

We come now to consider the positive import of the term Spirit. The
spirituality of God involves the two attributes of Life and Personality.

1. Life.

The Scriptures represent God as the living God.

_Jer. 10:10—_“He is the living God”; _1 Thess. 1:9—_“turned unto God from
idols, to serve a living and true God”; _John 5:26-_“hath life in
himself”; _cf._ _14:6—_“I am ... the life,” and _Heb. 7:16—_“the power of
an endless life”; _Rev. 11:11—_“the Spirit of life.”

Life is a simple idea, and is incapable of real definition. We know it,
however, in ourselves, and we can perceive the insufficiency or
inconsistency of certain current definitions of it. We cannot regard life
in God as

(_a_) Mere _process_, without a subject; for we cannot conceive of a
divine life without a God to live it.

_Versus_ Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 1:10—“Life and mind are
processes; neither is a substance; neither is a force; ... the
name given to the whole group of phenomena becomes the
personification of the phenomena, and the product is supposed to
have been the producer.” Here we have a product without any
producer—a series of phenomena without any substance of which they
are manifestations. In a similar manner we read in Dewey,
Psychology, 247—“Self is an _activity_. It is not something which
acts; it is activity.... It is constituted by activities....
Through its activity the soul is.” Here it does not appear how
there can be activity, without any subject or being that is
active. The inconsistency of this view is manifest when Dewey goes
on to say: “The activity may further or develop the self,” and
when he speaks of “the organic activity of the self.” So Dr.
Burdon Sanderson: “Life is a state of ceaseless change,—a state of
change with permanence; living matter ever changes while it is
ever the same.” “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But
this permanent thing in the midst of change is the subject, the
self, the being, that _has_ life.

Nor can we regard life as

(_b_) Mere _correspondence_ with outward condition and environment; for
this would render impossible a life of God before the existence of the
universe.

_Versus_ Herbert Spencer, Biology, 1:59-71—“Life is the definite
combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and
successive, in correspondence with external coëxistences and
sequences.” Here we have, at best, a definition of physical and
finite life; and even this is insufficient, because the definition
recognizes no original source of activity within, but only a power
of reaction in response to stimulus from without. We might as well
say that the boiling tea-kettle is alive (Mark Hopkins). We find
this defect also in Robert Browning’s lines in The Ring and the
Book (The Pope, 1307): “O Thou—as represented here to me In such
conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my
atom-width!—Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass Wherein are
gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of
sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our known Unknown,
our God revealed to man?” Life is something more than a passive
receptivity.

(_c_) Life is rather _mental energy_, or energy of intellect, affection,
and will. God is the living God, as having in his own being a source of
being and activity, both for himself and others.

Life means energy, activity, movement. Aristotle: “Life is energy
of mind.” Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5:602—“Life is love and
immortality, The Being one, and one the element.... Life, I
repeat, is energy of love Divine or human.” Prof. C. L. Herrick,
on Critics of Ethical Monism, in Denison Quarterly, Dec.
1896:248—“Force is energy under resistance, or self-limited
energy, for all parts of the universe are derived from the energy.
Energy manifesting itself under self-conditioning or differential
forms is force. The change of pure energy into force is creation.”
Prof. Herrick quotes from S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetæ: “Space is
the name for God; it is the most perfect image of soul—pure soul
being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is
resisted, limitation begins—and limitation is the first
constituent of body; the more omnipresent it is in a given space,
the more that space is body or matter; and thus all body
presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action.”
Schelling: “Life is the tendency to individualism.”

If spirit in man implies life, spirit in God implies endless and
inexhaustible life. The total life of the universe is only a faint
image of that moving energy which we call the life of God. Dewey,
Psychology, 253—“The sense of being alive is much more vivid in
childhood than afterwards. Leigh Hunt says that, when he was a
child, the sight of certain palings painted red gave him keener
pleasure than any experience of manhood.” Matthew Arnold: “Bliss
was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.”
The child’s delight in country scenes, and our intensified
perceptions in brain fever, show us by contrast how shallow and
turbid is the stream of our ordinary life. Tennyson, Two Voices:
“’Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for
which we pant; More life, and fuller, that we want.” That life the
needy human spirit finds only in the infinite God. Instead of
Tyndall’s: “Matter has in it the promise and potency of every form
of life,” we accept Sir William Crookes’s dictum: “Life has in it
the promise and potency of every form of matter.” See A. H.
Strong, on The Living God, in Philos. and Religion, 180-187.

2. Personality.

The Scriptures represent God as a personal being. By personality we mean
the power of self-consciousness and of self-determination. By way of
further explanation we remark:

(_a_) Self-consciousness is more than consciousness. This last the brute
may be supposed to possess, since the brute is not an automaton. Man is
distinguished from the brute by his power to objectify self. Man is not
only conscious of his own acts and states, but by abstraction and
reflection he recognizes the self which is the subject of these acts and
states. (_b_) Self-determination is more than determination. The brute
shows determination, but his determination is the result of influences
from without; there is no inner spontaneity. Man, by virtue of his
free-will, determines his action from within. He determines self in view
of motives, but his determination is not caused by motives; he himself is
the cause.

God, as personal, is in the highest degree self-conscious and
self-determining. The rise in our own minds of the idea of God, as
personal, depends largely upon our recognition of personality in
ourselves. Those who deny spirit in man place a bar in the way of the
recognition of this attribute of God.

_Ex. 3:14—_“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said,
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me
unto you.” God is not the everlasting “IT IS,” or “I WAS,” but the
everlasting “I AM” (Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 128); “I
AM” implies both personality and presence. _1 Cor. 2:11—_“the
things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”; _Eph.
1:9—_“good pleasure which he purposed”; _11—_“the counsel of his
will.” Definitions of personality are the following:
Boethius—“Persona est animæ rationalis individua substantia”
(quoted in Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415). F. W. Robertson, Genesis
3—“Personality = self-consciousness, will, character.” Porter,
Human Intellect, 626—“Distinct subsistence, either actually or
latently self-conscious and self-determining.” Harris, Philos.
Basis of Theism: Person = “being, conscious of self, subsisting in
individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason,
rational sensibility, and free-will.” See Harris, 98, 99,
quotation from Mansel—“The freedom of the will is so far from
being, as it is generally considered, a controvertible question in
philosophy, that it is the fundamental postulate without which all
action and all speculation, philosophy in all its branches and
human consciousness itself, would be impossible.”

One of the most astounding announcements in all literature is that
of Matthew Arnold, in his “Literature and Dogma,” that the Hebrew
Scriptures recognize in God only “the power, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness” = the God of pantheism. The “I AM” of
_Ex. 3:14_ could hardly have been so misunderstood, if Matthew
Arnold had not lost the sense of his own personality and
responsibility. From free-will in man we rise to freedom in
God—“That living Will that shall endure, When all that seems shall
suffer shock.” Observe that personality needs to be accompanied by
life—the power of self-consciousness and self-determination needs
to be accompanied by activity—in order to make up our total idea
of God as Spirit. Only this personality of God gives proper
meaning to his punishments or to his forgiveness. See Bib. Sac.,
April, 1884:217-233; Eichhorn, die Persönlichkeit Gottes.

Illingworth, Divine and Human Personality, 1:25, shows that the
sense of personality has had a gradual growth; that its
pre-Christian recognition was imperfect; that its final definition
has been due to Christianity. In 29-53, he notes the
characteristics of personality as reason, love, will. The brute
_perceives_; only the man _apperceives_, _i. e._, recognizes his
perception as belonging to himself. In the German story,
Dreiäuglein, the three-eyed child, had besides her natural pair of
eyes one other to see what the pair did, and besides her natural
will had an additional will to set the first to going right. On
consciousness and self-consciousness, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:179-189—“In consciousness the object is another substance than
the subject; but in self-consciousness the object is the same
substance as the subject.” Tennyson, in his Palace of Art, speaks
of “the abysmal depths of personality.” We do not fully know
ourselves, nor yet our relation to God. But the divine
consciousness embraces the whole divine content of being: “the
Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God”_ (1 Cor.
2:10)_.

We are not fully masters of ourselves. Our self-determination is
as limited as is our self-consciousness. But the divine will is
absolutely without hindrance; God’s activity is constant, intense,
infinite; _Job 23:13—_“What his soul desireth, even that he
doeth”; _John 5:17—_“My Father worketh even until now, and I
work.” Self-knowledge and self-mastery are the dignity of man;
they are also the dignity of God; Tennyson: “Self-reverence,
self-knowledge, self-control, These three lead life to sovereign
power.” Robert Browning, The Last Ride Together: “What act proved
all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen?”
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 6, 161, 216-255—“Perhaps the
root of personality is capacity for affection.”... Our personality
is incomplete; we reason truly only with God helping; our love in
higher Love endures; we will rightly, only as God works in us to
will and to do; to make us truly ourselves we need an infinite
Personality to supplement and energize our own; we are complete
only in Christ (_Col. 2:9, 10—_“In him dwelleth all the fulness of
the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”)

Webb, on the Idea of Personality as applied to God, in Jour.
Theol. Studies, 2:50—“Self knows itself and what is not itself as
two, just because both alike are embraced within the unity of its
experience, stand out against this background, the apprehension of
which is the very essence of that rationality or personality which
distinguishes us from the lower animals. We find that background,
God, present in us, or rather, we find ourselves present in it.
But if I find myself present in it, then it, as more complete, is
simply more personal than I. Our not-self is outside of us, so
that we are finite and lonely, but God’s not-self is within him,
so that there is a mutual inwardness of love and insight of which
the most perfect communion among men is only a faint symbol. We
are ’hermit-spirits,’ as Keble says, and we come to union with
others only by realizing our union with God. Personality is not
impenetrable in man, for ‘in him we live, and move, and have our
being’_ (Acts 17:28)_, and ‘that which hath been made is life in
him’_ (John 1:3, 4)_.” Palmer, Theologic Definition, 39—“That
which has its cause without itself is a thing, while that which
has its cause within itself is a person.”

Second Division.—Infinity, and attributes therein involved.

By infinity we mean, not that the divine nature has no known limits or
bounds, but that it has no limits or bounds. That which has simply no
known limits is the indefinite. The infinity of God implies that he is in
no way limited by the universe or confined to the universe; he is
transcendent as well as immanent. Transcendence, however, must not be
conceived as freedom from merely spatial restrictions, but rather as
unlimited resource, of which God’s glory is the expression.

_Ps. 145:3—_“his greatness is unsearchable”; _Job 11:7-9—_“high as
heaven ... deeper than Sheol”; _Is. 66:1—_“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool”; _1 K. 8:27—_“Heaven and the heaven
of heavens cannot contain thee”; _Rom. 11:33—_“how unsearchable
are his judgments, and his ways past finding out.” There can be no
infinite number, since to any assignable number a unit can be
added, which shows that this number was not infinite before. There
can be no infinite universe, because an infinite universe is
conceivable only as an infinite number of worlds or of minds. God
himself is the only real Infinite, and the universe is but the
finite expression or symbol of his greatness.

We therefore object to the statement of Lotze, Microcosm,
1:446—“The complete system, grasped in its totality, offers an
expression of the whole nature of the One.... The Cause makes
actual existence its complete manifestation.” In a similar way
Schurman, Belief in God, 26, 173-178, grants infinity, but denies
transcendence: “The infinite Spirit may include the finite, as the
idea of a single organism embraces within a single life a
plurality of members and functions.... The world is the expression
of an ever active and inexhaustible will. That the external
manifestation is as boundless as the life it expresses, science
makes exceedingly probable. In any event, we have not the
slightest reason to contrast the finitude of the world with the
infinity of God.... If the natural order is eternal and infinite,
as there seems no reason to doubt, it will be difficult to find a
meaning for ‘beyond’ or ‘before.’ Of this illimitable,
ever-existing universe, God is the Inner ground or substance.
There is no evidence, neither does any religious need require us
to believe, that the divine Being manifest in the universe has any
actual or possible existence elsewhere, in some transcendent
sphere.... The divine will can express itself only as it does,
because no other expression would reveal what it is. Of such a
will, the universe is the eternal expression.”

In explanation of the term infinity, we may notice:

(_a_) That infinity can belong to but one Being, and therefore cannot be
shared with the universe. Infinity is not a negative but a positive idea.
It does not take its rise from an impotence of thought, but is an
intuitive conviction which constitutes the basis of all other knowledge.

See Porter, Human Intellect, 651, 652, and this Compendium, pages
59-62. _Versus_ Mansel, Proleg. Logica, chap. 1—“Such negative
notions ... imply at once an attempt to think, and a failure in
that attempt.” On the contrary, the conception of the Infinite is
perfectly distinguishable from that of the finite, and is both
necessary and logically prior to that of the finite. This is not
true of our idea of the universe, of which all we know is finite
and dependent. We therefore regard such utterances as those of
Lotze and Schurman above, and those of Chamberlin and Caird below,
as pantheistic in tendency, although the belief of these writers
in divine and human personality saves them from falling into other
errors of pantheism.

Prof. T. C. Chamberlin, of the University of Chicago: “It is not
sufficient to the modern scientific thought to think of a Ruler
outside of the universe, nor of a universe with the Ruler outside.
A supreme Being who does not embrace all the activities and
possibilities and potencies of the universe seems something less
than the supremest Being, and a universe with a Ruler outside
seems something less than a universe. And therefore the thought is
growing on the minds of scientific thinkers that the supreme Being
is the universal Being, embracing and comprehending all things.”
Caird, Evolution of Religion, 2:62—“Religion, if it would continue
to exist, must combine the monotheistic idea with that which it
has often regarded as its greatest enemy, the spirit of
pantheism.” We grant in reply that religion must appropriate the
element of truth in pantheism, namely, that God is the only
substance, ground and principle of being, but we regard it as
fatal to religion to side with pantheism in its denials of God’s
transcendence and of God’s personality.

(_b_) That the infinity of God does not involve his identity with “the
all,” or the sum of existence, nor prevent the coëxistence of derived and
finite beings to which he bears relation. Infinity implies simply that God
exists in no necessary relation to finite things or beings, and that
whatever limitation of the divine nature results from their existence is,
on the part of God, a self-limitation.

_Ps. 113:5, 6—_“that humbleth himself to behold the things that
are in heaven and in the earth.” It is involved in God’s infinity
that there should be no barriers to his self-limitation in
creation and redemption (see page 9, F.). Jacob Boehme said: “God
is infinite, for God is all.” But this is to make God all
imperfection, as well as all perfection. Harris, Philos. Basis
Theism: “The relation of the absolute to the finite is not the
mathematical relation of a total to its parts, but it is a
dynamical and rational relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:189-191—“The infinite is not the total; ‘the all’ is a
pseudo-infinite, and to assert that it is greater than the simple
infinite is the same error that is committed in mathematics when
it is asserted that an infinite number plus a vast finite number
is greater than the simple infinite.” Fullerton, Conception of the
Infinite, 90—“The Infinite, though it involves unlimited
possibility of quantity, is not itself a quantitative but rather a
qualitative conception.” Hovey, Studies of Ethics and Religion,
39-47—“Any number of finite beings, minds, loves, wills, cannot
reveal fully an infinite Being, Mind, Love, Will. God must be
transcendent as well as immanent in the universe, or he is neither
infinite nor an object of supreme worship.”

Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“Great as the universe is, God is
not limited to it, wholly absorbed by what he is doing in it, and
capable of doing nothing more. God in the universe is not like the
life of the tree in the tree, which does all that it is capable of
in making the tree what it is. God in the universe is rather like
the spirit of a man in his body, which is greater than his body,
able to direct his body, and capable of activities in which his
body has no share. God is a free spirit, personal, self-directing,
unexhausted by his present activities.” The Persian poet said
truly: “The world is a bud from his bower of beauty; the sun is a
spark from the light of his wisdom; the sky is a bubble on the sea
of his power.” Faber: “For greatness which is infinite makes room
For all things in its lap to lie. We should be crushed by a
magnificence Short of infinity. We share in what is infinite; ’tis
ours, For we and it alike are Thine. What I enjoy, great God, by
right of Thee, Is more than doubly mine.”

(_c_) That the infinity of God is to be conceived of as intensive, rather
than as extensive. We do not attribute to God infinite extension, but
rather infinite energy of spiritual life. That which acts up to the
measure of its power is simply natural and physical force. Man rises above
nature by virtue of his reserves of power. But in God the reserve is
infinite. There is a transcendent element in him, which no self-revelation
exhausts, whether creation or redemption, whether law or promise.

Transcendence is not mere outsideness,—it is rather boundless
supply within. God is not infinite by virtue of existing “extra
flammantia mœnia mundi” (Lucretius) or of filling a space outside
of space,—he is rather infinite by being the pure and perfect Mind
that passes beyond all phenomena and constitutes the ground of
them. The former conception of infinity is simply supra-cosmic,
the latter alone is properly transcendent; see Hatch, Hibbert
Lectures, 244. “God is the living God, and has not yet spoken his
last word on any subject” (G. W. Northrup). God’s life “operates
unspent.” There is “ever more to follow.” The legend stamped with
the Pillars of Hercules upon the old coins of Spain was _Ne plus
ultra_—“Nothing beyond,” but when Columbus discovered America the
legend was fitly changed to _Plus ultra_—“More beyond.” So the
motto of the University of Rochester is _Meliora_—“Better things.”

Since God’s infinite resources are pledged to aid us, we may, as
Emerson bids us, “hitch our wagon to a star,” and believe in
progress. Tennyson, Locksley Hall: “Men, my brothers, men the
workers, ever reaping something new. That which they have done but
earnest of the things that they shall do.” Millet’s L’Angelus is a
witness to man’s need of God’s transcendence. Millet’s aim was to
paint, not _air_ but _prayer_. We need a God who is not confined
to nature. As Moses at the beginning of his ministry cried, “Show
me, I pray thee, thy glory”_ (Ex. 33:18)_, so we need marked
experiences at the beginning of the Christian life, in order that
we may be living witnesses to the supernatural. And our Lord
promises such manifestations of himself: _John 14:21—_“I will love
him, and will manifest myself unto him.”

_Ps. 71:15—_“My mouth shall tell of thy righteousness, And of thy
salvation all the day; For I know not the numbers thereof” = it is
infinite. _Ps. 89:2—_“Mercy shall be built up forever” = ever
growing manifestations and cycles of fulfilment—first literal,
then spiritual. _Ps. 113:4-6—_“Jehovah is high above all nations,
And his glory above the heavens. Who is like unto Jehovah our God,
That hath his seat on high, That humbleth himself [stoopeth down]
to behold The things that are in heaven and in the earth?” _Mal.
2:15—_“did he not make one, although he had the residue of the
Spirit?” = he might have created many wives for Adam, though he
did actually create but one. In this “residue of the Spirit,” says
Caldwell, Cities of our Faith, 370, “there yet lies latent—as
winds lie calm in the air of a summer noon, as heat immense lies
cold and hidden in the mountains of coal—the blessing and the life
of nations, the infinite enlargement of Zion.”

_Is. 52:10—_“Jehovah hath made bare his holy arm” = nature does
not exhaust or entomb God; nature is the mantle in which he
commonly reveals himself; but he is not fettered by the robe he
wears—he can thrust it aside, and make bare his arm in
providential interpositions for earthly deliverance, and in mighty
movements of history for the salvation of the sinner and for the
setting up of his own kingdom. See also _John 1:16—_“of his
fulness we all received, and grace for grace” = “Each blessing
appropriated became the foundation of a greater blessing. To have
realized and used one measure of grace was to have gained a larger
measure in exchange for it χάριν ἀντὶ χάριτος”; so Westcott, in
Bib. Com., _in loco_. Christ can ever say to the believer, as he
said to Nathanael _(John 1:50): _“thou shalt see greater things
than these.”

Because God is infinite, he can love each believer as much as if
that single soul were the only one for whom he had to care. Both
in providence and in redemption the whole heart of God is busy
with plans for the interest and happiness of the single Christian.
Threatenings do not half reveal God, nor his promises half express
the “eternal weight of glory”_ (2 Cor. 4:17)_. Dante, Paradiso,
19:40-63—God “Could not upon the universe so write The impress of
his power, but that his word Must still be left in distance
infinite.” To “limit the Holy One of Israel”_ (Ps. 78:41_—marg.)
is falsehood as well as sin.

This attribute of infinity, or of transcendence, qualifies all the
other attributes, and so is the foundation for the representations
of majesty and glory as belonging to God (see _Ex. 33:18_; _Ps.
19:1_; _Is. 6:3_; _Mat. 6:13_; _Acts 7:2_; _Rom. 1:23_; _9:23_;
_Heb. 1:3_; _1 Pet. 4:14_; _Rev. 21:23_). Glory is not itself a
divine attribute; it is rather a result—an objective result—of the
exercise of the divine attributes. This glory exists irrespective
of the revelation and recognition of it in the creation (_John
17:5_). Only God can worthily perceive and reverence his own
glory. He does all for his own glory. All religion is founded on
the glory of God. All worship is the result of this immanent
quality of the divine nature. Kedney, Christian Doctrine,
1:360-373, 2:354, apparently conceives of the divine glory as an
eternal material environment of God, from which the universe is
fashioned. This seems to contradict both the spirituality and the
infinity of God. God’s infinity implies absolute completeness
apart from anything external to himself. We proceed therefore to
consider the attributes involved in infinity.

Of the attributes involved in Infinity, we mention:

1. Self-existence.

By self-existence we mean

(_a_) That God is “_causa sui_,” having the ground of his existence in
himself. Every being must have the ground of its existence either in or
out of itself. We have the ground of our existence outside of us. God is
not thus dependent. He is _a se_; hence we speak of the aseity of God.

God’s self-existence is implied in the name “Jehovah”_ (Ex. 6:3)_
and in the declaration “I AM THAT I AM” (_Ex. 3:14_), both of
which signify that it is God’s nature to be. Self-existence is
certainly incomprehensible to us, yet a self-existent person is no
greater mystery than a self-existent thing, such as Herbert
Spencer supposes the universe to be; indeed it is not so great a
mystery, for it is easier to derive matter from mind than to
derive mind from matter. See Porter, Human Intellect, 661. Joh.
Angelus Silesius: “Gott ist das was Er ist; Ich was Ich durch Ihn
bin; Doch kennst du Einen wohl, So kennst du mich und Ihn.”
Martineau, Types, 1:302—“A _cause_ may be eternal, but nothing
that is _caused_ can be so.” He protests against the phrase
“_causa sui_.” So Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:338, objects to the
phrase “God is his own cause,” because God is the uncaused Being.
But when we speak of God as “_causa sui_,” we do not attribute to
him beginning of existence. The phrase means rather that the
ground of his existence is not outside of himself, but that he
himself is the living spring of all energy and of all being.

But lest this should be misconstrued, we add

(_b_) That God exists by the necessity of his own being. It is his nature
to be. Hence the existence of God is not a contingent but a necessary
existence. It is grounded, not in his volitions, but in his nature.

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:126, 130, 170, seems to hold
that God is primarily will, so that the essence of God is his act:
“God’s essence does not precede his freedom”; “if the essence of
God were for him something given, something already present, the
question ‘from whence it was given?’ could not be evaded; God’s
essence must in this case have its origin in something apart from
him, and thus the true conception of God would be entirely swept
away.” But this implies that truth, reason, love, holiness,
equally with God’s essence, are all products of will. If God’s
essence, moreover, were his act, it would be in the power of God
to annihilate himself. Act presupposes essence; else there is no
God to act. The will by which God exists, and in virtue of which
he is _causa sui_, is therefore not will in the sense of volition,
but will in the sense of the whole movement of his active being.
With Müller’s view Thomasius and Delitzsch are agreed. For
refutation of it, see Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:63.

God’s essence is not his act, not only because this would imply
that he could destroy himself, but also because before willing
there must be being. Those who hold God’s essence to be simple
activity are impelled to this view by the fear of postulating some
dead thing in God which precedes all exercise of faculty. So
Miller, Evolution of Love, 43—“Perfect action, conscious and
volitional, is the highest generalization, the ultimate unit, the
unconditioned nature, of infinite Being”; _i. e._, God’s nature is
subjective action, while external nature is his objective action.
A better statement, however, is that of Bowne, Philos. of Theism,
170—“While there is a necessity in the soul, it becomes
controlling only through freedom; and we may say that everyone
must constitute himself a rational soul.... This is absolutely
true of God.”

2. Immutability.

By this we mean that the nature, attributes, and will of God are exempt
from all change. Reason teaches us that no change is possible in God,
whether of increase or decrease, progress or deterioration, contraction or
development. All change must be to better or to worse. But God is absolute
perfection, and no change to better is possible. Change to worse would be
equally inconsistent with perfection. No cause for such change exists,
either outside of God or in God himself.

_Psalm 102:27—_“thou art the same”; _Mal. 3:6—_“I, Jehovah, change
not”; _James 1:17—_“with whom can be no variation, neither shadow
that is cast by turning.” Spenser, Faerie Queen, Cantos of
Mutability, 8:2—“Then ’gin I think on that which nature sayde, Of
that same time when no more change shall be, But steadfast rest of
all things, firmly stayed Upon the pillours of eternity; For all
that moveth doth in change delight, But henceforth all shall rest
eternally With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight; Oh thou great
Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath’s sight!” Bowne, Philos. of
Theism, 146, defines immutability as “the constancy and continuity
of the divine nature which exists through all the divine acts as
their law and source.”

The passages of Scripture which seem at first sight to ascribe change to
God are to be explained in one of three ways:

(_a_) As illustrations of the varied methods in which God manifests his
immutable truth and wisdom in creation.

Mathematical principles receive new application with each
successive stage of creation. The law of cohesion gives place to
chemical law, and chemistry yields to vital forces, but through
all these changes there is a divine truth and wisdom which is
unchanging, and which reduces all to rational order. John Caird,
Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:140—“Immutability is not
stereotyped sameness, but impossibility of deviation by one hair’s
breadth from the course which is best. A man of great force of
character is continually finding new occasions for the
manifestation and application of moral principle. In God infinite
consistency is united with infinite flexibility. There is no
iron-bound impassibility, but rather an infinite originality in
him.”

(_b_) As anthropomorphic representations of the revelation of God’s
unchanging attributes in the changing circumstances and varying moral
conditions of creatures.

_Gen. 6:6—_“it repented Jehovah that he had made man”—is to be
interpreted in the light of _Num. 23:19—_“God is not a man, that
he should lie: neither the son of man, that he should repent.” So
_cf._ _1 Sam. 15:11_ with _15:29_. God’s unchanging holiness
requires him to treat the wicked differently from the righteous.
When the righteous become wicked, his treatment of them must
change. The sun is not fickle or partial because it melts the wax
but hardens the clay,—the change is not in the sun but in the
objects it shines upon. The change in God’s treatment of men is
described anthropomorphically, as if it were a change in God
himself,—other passages in close conjunction with the first being
given to correct any possible misapprehension. Threats not
fulfilled, as in _Jonah 3:4, 10_, are to be explained by their
conditional nature. Hence God’s immutability itself renders it
certain that his love will adapt itself to every varying mood and
condition of his children, so as to guide their steps, sympathize
with their sorrows, answer their prayers. God responds to us more
quickly than the mother’s face to the changing moods of her babe.
Godet, in The Atonement, 338—“God is of all beings the most
delicately and infinitely sensitive.”

God’s immutability is not that of the stone, that has no internal
experience, but rather that of the column of mercury, that rises
and falls with every change in the temperature of the surrounding
atmosphere. When a man bicycling against the wind turns about and
goes with the wind instead of going against it, the wind seems to
change, though it is blowing just as it was before. The sinner
struggles against the wind of prevenient grace until he seems to
strike against a stone wall. Regeneration is God’s conquest of our
wills by his power, and conversion is our beginning to turn round
and to work with God rather than against God. Now we move without
effort, because we have God at our back; _Phil. 2:12, 13—_“work
out your own salvation ... for it is God who worketh in you.” God
has not changed, but we have changed; _John 3:8—_“The wind bloweth
where it will ... so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
Jacob’s first wrestling with the Angel was the picture of his
lifelong self-will, opposing God; his subsequent wrestling in
prayer was the picture of a consecrated will, working with God
(_Gen. 32:24-28_). We seem to conquer God, but he really conquers
us. He seems to change, but it is we who change after all.

(_c_) As describing executions, in time, of purposes eternally existing in
the mind of God. Immutability must not be confounded with immobility. This
would deny all those imperative volitions of God by which he enters into
history. The Scriptures assure us that creation, miracles, incarnation,
regeneration, are immediate acts of God. Immutability is consistent with
constant activity and perfect freedom.

The abolition of the Mosaic dispensation indicates no change in
God’s plan; it is rather the execution of his plan. Christ’s
coming and work were no sudden makeshift, to remedy unforeseen
defects in the Old Testament scheme: Christ came rather in “the
fulness of the time”_ (Gal. 4:4)_, to fulfill the “counsel” of God
(_Acts 2:23_). _Gen. 8:1—_“God remembered Noah” = interposed by
special act for Noah’s deliverance, showed that he remembered
Noah. While we change, God does not. There is no fickleness or
inconstancy in him. Where we once found him, there we may find him
still, as Jacob did at Bethel (_Gen. 35:1, 6, 9_). Immutability is
a consolation to the faithful, but a terror to God’s enemies
(_Mal. 3:6—_“I, Jehovah, change not; therefore ye, O sons of
Jacob, are not consumed”; _Ps. 7:11—_“a God that hath indignation
every day”). It is consistent with constant activity in nature and
in grace (_John 5:17—_“My Father worketh even until now, and I
work”; _Job 23:13, 14—_“he is in one mind, and who can turn
him?... For he performeth that which is appointed for me: and many
such things are with him”). If God’s immutability were immobility,
we could not worship him, any more than the ancient Greeks were
able to worship Fate. Arthur Hugh Clough: “It fortifies my soul to
know, That, though I perish, Truth is so: That, howsoe’er I stray
and range, Whate’er I do, Thou dost not change. I steadier step
when I recall That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.” On this
attribute see Charnock, Attributes, 1:310-362; Dorner, Gesammelte
Schriften, 188-377; translated in Bib. Sac., 1879:28-59, 209-223.

3. Unity.

By this we mean (_a_) that the divine nature is undivided and indivisible
(_unus_); and (_b_) that there is but one infinite and perfect Spirit
(_unicus_).

_Deut. 6:4—_“Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah”; _Is.
44:6—_“besides me there is no God”; _John 5:44—_“the only God”;
_17:3—_“the only true God”; _1 Cor. 8:4—_“no God but one”; _1 Tim.
1:17—_“the only God”; _6:15—_“the blessed and only Potentate”;
_Eph. 4:5, 6—_“one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and
Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all.” When
we read in Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 25—“The unity of God is not
numerical, denying the existence of a second; it is integral,
denying the possibility of division,” we reply that the unity of
God is both,—it includes both the numerical and the integral
elements.

Humboldt, in his Cosmos, has pointed out that the unity and
creative agency of the heavenly Father have given unity to the
order of nature, and so have furnished the impulse to modern
physical science. Our faith in a “universe” rests historically
upon the demonstration of God’s unity which has been given by the
incarnation and death of Christ. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That God
who ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one
far off divine event To which the whole creation moves.” See A. H.
Strong, Christ in Creation, 184-187. Alexander McLaren: “The
heathen have many gods because they have no one that satisfies
hungry hearts or corresponds to their unconscious ideals.
Completeness is not reached by piecing together many fragments.
The wise merchantman will gladly barter a sack full of ‘goodly
pearls’ for the one of great price. Happy they who turn away from
the many to embrace the One!”

Against polytheism, tritheism, or dualism, we may urge that the notion of
two or more Gods is self-contradictory; since each limits the other and
destroys his godhood. In the nature of things, infinity and absolute
perfection are possible only to one. It is unphilosophical, moreover, to
assume the existence of two or more Gods, when one will explain all the
facts. The unity of God is, however, in no way inconsistent with the
doctrine of the Trinity; for, while this doctrine holds to the existence
of hypostatical, or personal, distinctions in the divine nature, it also
holds that this divine nature is numerically and eternally one.

Polytheism is man’s attempt to rid himself of the notion of
responsibility to one moral Lawgiver and Judge by dividing up his
manifestations, and attributing them to separate wills. So Force,
in the terminology of some modern theorizers, is only God with his
moral attributes left out. “Henotheism” (says Max Müller, Origin
and Growth of Religion, 285) “conceives of each individual god as
unlimited by the power of other gods. Each is felt, at the time,
as supreme and absolute, notwithstanding the limitations which to
our minds must arise from his power being conditioned by the power
of all the gods.”

Even polytheism cannot rest in the doctrine of many gods, as an
exclusive and all-comprehending explanation of the universe. The
Greeks believed in one supreme Fate that ruled both gods and men.
Aristotle: “God, though he is one, has many names, because he is
called according to states into which he is ever entering anew.”
The doctrine of God’s unity should teach men to give up hope of
any other God, to reveal himself to them or to save them. They are
in the hands of the one and only God, and therefore there is but
one law, one gospel, one salvation; one doctrine, one duty, one
destiny. We cannot rid ourselves of responsibility by calling
ourselves mere congeries of impressions or mere victims of
circumstance. As God is one, so the soul made in God’s image is
one also. On the origin of polytheism, see articles by Tholuck, in
Bib. Repos., 2:84, 246, 441, and Max Müller, Science of Religion,
124.

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 83—“The Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and end and sum and meaning of Being, is but One. We who
believe in a personal God do not believe in a limited God. We do
not mean one more, a bigger specimen of existences, amongst
existences. Rather, we mean that the reality of existence itself
is personal: that Power, that Law, that Life, that Thought, that
Love, are ultimately, in their very reality, identified in one
supreme, and that necessarily a personal Existence. Now such
supreme Being cannot be multiplied: it is incapable of a plural:
it cannot be a generic term. There cannot be more than one
all-inclusive, more than one ultimate, more than one God. Nor has
Christian thought, at any point, for any moment, dared or endured
the least approach to such a thought or phrase as ‘two Gods.’ If
the Father is God, and the Son God, they are both the same God
wholly, unreservedly. God is a particular, an unique, not a
general, term. Each is not only God, but is the very same
‘singularis unicus et totus Deus.’ They are not both _generically_
God, as though ‘God’ could be an attribute or predicate; but both
_identically_ God, the God, the one all-inclusive, indivisible,
God.... If the thought that wishes to be orthodox had less
tendency to become tritheistic, the thought that claims to be free
would be less Unitarian.”

Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.

By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative
excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes.
Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal
state of intellect, affection and will. So God’s activity presupposes a
principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being,
and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his
nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart
from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of
intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a
self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The
consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded
with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God
entirely sufficient to himself.

_Mat. 5:48—_“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly
Father is perfect”; _Rom. 12:2—_“perfect will of God”; _Col.
1:28—_“perfect in Christ”; _cf._ _Deut. 32:4—_“The Rock, his work
is perfect”; _Ps. 18:30—_“As for God, his way is perfect.”

1. Truth.

By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which
God’s being and God’s knowledge eternally conform to each other.

In further explanation we remark:

A. Negatively:

(_a_) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity
and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are
transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.

_Deut 32:4—_“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and
right is he”; _John 17:3—_“the only true God” (ἀληθινόν); _1 John
5:20—_“we know him that is true” (τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these
passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as
distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compare _John 6:32—_“the
true bread”; _Heb. 8:2—_“the true tabernacle”). _John 14:6—_“I am
... the truth.” As “I am ... the life” signifies, not “I am the
living one,” but rather “I am he who is life and the source of
life,” so “_I am ... the truth_” signifies, not “I am the truthful
one,” but “I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other
words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So _1 John
5:7—_“the Spirit is the truth.” _Cf._ 1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth
abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever” =
personal truth? See Godet on _John 1:18_; Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:181.

Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to
the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the
dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground,
just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the
Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God
knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities.
The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that
absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only
another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all
reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but
a _becoming_, which never _is_.” Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John,
57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in
him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and
revealed to the world, God’s nature in terms of an active force
and in relation to his rational creation.” This definition however
ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all
creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of
God’s knowledge to God’s being, which antedates the universe; see
B. (_b_) below.

(_b_) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature.
God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows,
but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive
precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.

Plato: “Truth is his (God’s) body, and light his shadow.” Hollaz
(quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that
“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine
intellect.” See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272,
279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness
[spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding
of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object
but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely
identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is
the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which
answers to the knowledge.”

Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that
about which we judge, _or_ it may mean the correspondence between
our ideas and their objects.” God’s truth is both object of his
knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The
Dramatic Action and Motive of King John: “You spell Truth with a
capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and
absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is
only a personality that can touch a personality.” So we assent to
the poet’s declaration that “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise
again,” only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of
God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object
of all knowledge; _Eph. 4:20—_“ye did not so learn Christ” = ye
knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;
_John 17:3—_“this is life eternal that they should know thee the
only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”

B. Positively:

(_a_) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or
religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent
truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.

There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say “I am the
truth,” though each of them can say “I speak the truth.” Truth is
not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht
Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.” Here is the dignity of
education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws
of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason
merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but
of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart: “Science is possible
because God is scientific.” Plato: “God geometrizes.” Bowne: “The
heavens are crystalized mathematics.” The statement that two and
two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable,
expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate
statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total
revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable
apart from One who is truth and who is thus revealed. The separate
electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the
electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric
current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose
power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of
truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one
unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work
of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer
of him who dwells “in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen,
nor can see”_ (1 Tim. 6:16)_.

Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures “by assuming the Lord Jesus
Christ _and_ the multiplication-table.” But this was tautology,
because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of
God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of
Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ’s
revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the
truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct
which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God. “Grace and
truth”_ (John 1:17)_ then means the favor of God and the
righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is
impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth,
in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it
among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply,
important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its
complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as
the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of
all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we
are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him.
Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is
turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only
ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after
truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle’s ideal man was
“a hunter after truth.” But truth can never be found disjoined
from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it. “For the loving
worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God” (Robert
Browning). Hence Christ can say: _John 18:37—_“Every one that is
of the truth heareth my voice.”

(_b_) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of
all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine
self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be
understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.

To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have
opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God’s will made truth as
well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue
that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that
Adam’s sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being
content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will,
316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result
from, God’s volitions eternally.” We reply that, to make truth and
good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as
characteristics of God’s being, is to deny that anything is true
or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and
injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or
falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth
is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There
are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not
transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is
truth. Robert Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy, 214—“Were’t not for God,
I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would
stay with Man?” God’s will does not make truth, but truth rather
makes God’s will. God’s perfect knowledge in eternity past has an
object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as
well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be
personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement
to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The
pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.” See A. H. Strong,
Christ in Creation, 102-112.

On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine,
Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such
medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the
state may lie for the public good, but private people not:
“officiosum mendacium.” It is better to say that deception is
justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast
or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society
and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is
a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human
affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would
give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may
say: “I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry
for it forever after.” On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib.
Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final
Causes, 416.

2. Love.

By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God
is eternally moved to self-communication.

_1 John 4:8—_“God is love”; _3:16—_“hereby know we love, because he laid
down his life for us”; _John 17:24—_“thou lovedst me before the foundation
of the world”; _Rom. 15:30—_“the love of the Spirit.”

In further explanation we remark:

A. Negatively:

(_a_) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and
goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be
denominated transitive love.

Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God’s regard for
the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating
attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is
living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union;
self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging
of the _ego_ in another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this
other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to
possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is
therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes
personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because
as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect
self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”
Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal
and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his
relation to the world.”

In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of
the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be
the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In _1
John 2:7, 8, _“the old commandment” of love is evermore “_a new
commandment_,” because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.
“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th’ outpouring tide of
self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness
Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its
sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But
hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by
love’s exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine,
immortal still.” Clara Elizabeth Ward: “If I could gather every
look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks
that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore,
And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see
the Savior’s face.”

(_b_) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not
include truth, nor does it include holiness.

Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that
benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he
remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd’s
work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds: “He comes to
the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues
into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving
a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually
nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain
virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself.
Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage,
constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom,
justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume
all virtues under the one virtue of love. ’The unity of the
virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied
relations with other persons’ (361). If benevolence means wishing
_happiness_ to all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good,
and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if,
on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence
is made to mean wishing the highest _welfare_ to all men, and the
highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to
the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish
that men may be virtuous.” See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and
Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.

(_c_) Nor is God’s love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective
of its moral quality.

Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines
virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God’s
love is first of all directed toward himself as having the
greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward
his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared
with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a
thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if
obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no
more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue,
we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in
love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no
moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is
proportioned to the worth of that object. “Love of being in
general” makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no
standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and
as the source of right.

G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way
he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the
way he rules us.” Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God’s
desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and
to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.” The intent to
communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and
this is the “terminus ad quem” of God’s administration. Drummond,
in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of
life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We
gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object
of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man =
nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction,
looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is
love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for
others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives
righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The
father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature,
like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.

Jacob Boehme: “Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou
dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man
in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste,
thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name
and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as
thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do
it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of
salvation.” These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they
are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the
supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy,
and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity
with his holiness.

(_d_) God’s love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from
sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.

Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an
emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (_John
11:36—_“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a
rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate
choice (_John 3:16—_“God so loved the world”; _Mat. 19:19—_“Thou
shall love thy neighbor as thyself”; _5:44—_“Love your enemies”).
Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν “properly denotes a love founded in
admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat. _diligere_, to be
kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an
inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat. _amare_.... Hence
men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.” In this word ἀγάπη, when
used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he
can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love
involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a
higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God’s
self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his
own being.

B. Positively:

(_a_) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection,
grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will,
aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the
enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its
worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at
the promotion of the other’s personal end, whether known or
conjectured; it takes up the other’s personal end and makes it
part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the
other’s sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a
common end.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is
not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject
to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion
consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that
religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the
current toward God which once flowed toward self.... Christianity
rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive,
lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their
intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they
rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In
true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God’s
love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and
we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies,
affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”

(_b_) Since God’s love is rational, it involves a subordination of the
_emotional_ element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and
holiness.

_Phil. 1:9—_“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more
in knowledge and all discernment.” True love among men illustrates God’s
love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage
to self. It seeks the other’s true good, not merely his present enjoyment
or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and
therefore it is exercised for God’s sake and in the strength which God
supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness.
So God’s love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite
sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God
“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”_ (Rom. 8:32)_,
and “Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”_ (Is. 53:6)_. Love
requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is
the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include
holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only
the best for its object, and the best is _God_. The golden rule does not
bid us give what others desire, but what they need: _Rom. 15:2—_“Let each
one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”

(_c_) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect
standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his
own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the
doctrine of the Trinity.

As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater
Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also
the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility
and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree.
But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving
but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God
is shown in his eternal giving. _James 1:5—_“God, who giveth,” or
“the giving God” (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in
his being—it is his nature to give. And not only to _give_, but to
give _himself_. This he does eternally in the self-communications
of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his
giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.

Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in
John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the
Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the
Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that
there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love
respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle
certainly means something beside that which is commonly called
self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of
an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love
the apostle is speaking of.” When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be
self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes
self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic
usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.

(_d_) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine
blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as
well as of knowledge and will, in God’s own nature, the existence of the
universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.

Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a
result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a
subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective
result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their
exercise, ensure God’s blessedness. But love is especially its
source. _Acts 20:35—_“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness,
in character. Love precedes creation and is the ground of
creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that
does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object
of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his
love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal
to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes
his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love.
He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual
consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”
Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but
that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see
that to be not love but holiness.

Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest,
richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is
perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of
evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the
highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things
are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are
manifestations of love.... Man’s reason is not, but man’s love is,
a direct emanation from the inmost being of God” (345). Browning
should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which
he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his
dicta: “He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art
Love! I build my faith on that.”

(_e_) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering,
and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the
part of God is itself the atonement.

Christ is “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of
the world”_ (Rev. 13:8);_ _1 Pet. 1:19, 20—_“precious blood, as of
a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ:
who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”
While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The
blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and
sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of
moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture
attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (_Gen.
6:6—_“it grieved him at his heart”; _Rom. 1:18—_“wrath of God”;
_Eph. 4:30—_“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful
sacrifice in the gift of Christ (_Rom. 8:32—_“spared not his own
son”; _cf._ _Gen. 22:16—_“hast not withheld thy son”) and
participation in the suffering of his people (_Is. 63:9—_“in all
their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow
and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God’s
feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps,
that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We
cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of
self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as
immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human
history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions
of sorrow.

But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother
suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer
infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember
that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees
all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled
to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with
infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness,
then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for
our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection.
Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the
inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of
his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his
great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic
writers: ‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones
is unmixed joy.’ ” Christ was “_anointed ... with the oil of
gladness above his fellows,_” and “for the joy that was set before
him endured the cross”_ (Heb. 1:9; 12:2)_. Love rejoices even in
pain, when this brings good to those beloved. “Though round its
base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on
its head.”

In George Adam Smith’s Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries
out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him: “I am
sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?” Simon,
Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the
Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however
was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a
factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were
themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate
he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had
a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the
sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and
with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this
is limitation, it is also self-limitation which Christ could have
avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We
rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it
costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident
with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ’s joy
only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow
can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.

Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l’Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do
you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent,
loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and
hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more
than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly
on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle
of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us
that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die
with them, so that their own executioners have become the next
martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as
alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in.
Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true
God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered.
He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated
in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the
Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Similarly Alexander
Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that “The suffering God is
not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament
thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at
the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with
it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life
and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road
to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”
and we can say with the _Psalmist, 68:19—_“Blessed be God, who
daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,” and
with _Isaiah 63:9—_“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and
the angel of his presence saved them.”

Borden P. Bowne, Atonement: “Something like this work of grace was
a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that
was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful
possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under
infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections
on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only
make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as
sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not
_love_ at all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and
vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon
us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he
sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher
thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his
heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming
the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only
are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and
moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the
work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be
viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a
manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love
from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the
existence of the human world at all.”

Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution
that, if the world _will_ be tragic, it _shall_ still, in Satan’s
despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of
that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary
reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God’s
sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor
the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In
you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your
reason for overcoming this grief.” Henry N. Dodge, Christus
Victor: “O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast
borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are
torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light
of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every
clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go,
Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart
and slow!”

On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of
Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317;
Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208;
Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice,
59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward
Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men,
20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford,
Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton,
Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
2:117, 118, 137-142. _Per __ contra_, see Shedd, Essays and
Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev.,
1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the
Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr,
in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.

3. Holiness.

Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his
nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In
this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly,
purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.

_Ex. 15:11—_“glorious in holiness”; _19:10-16_—the people of
Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence
of God; _Is. 6:3—_“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice
the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a
coal from the altar (_verses 5-7_); _2 Cor, 7:1—_“cleanse
ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting
holiness in the fear of God”; _1 Thess. 3:13—_“unblamable in
holiness”; _4:7—_“God called us not for uncleanness, but in
sanctification”; _Heb. 12:29—_“our God is a consuming fire”—to all
iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to
impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the
conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual
one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of
separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical
cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements
which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the
proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest
but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start,
and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of
obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or
standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and
separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the
childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the
contrast between God’s purity and human sin. The least developed
man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and
causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above.
Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil.
Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as
associated with or consecrated to the Deity.

That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and
unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full
expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in
the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that
the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man’s
existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for
its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as
man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness
of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore
to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were
probably non-moral beings,” for Schurman himself had just said: “A
God without moral character is no God at all.” Dillmann, in his O.
T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T.
religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness.
This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G.
Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is
personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing
and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one
preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the
temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.” See articles on Holiness in
O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens,
in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.

The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of
love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong,
Education and Optimism: “There was a time when the past history of
life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter.
The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the
destruction of myriads. Nature was ‘red in tooth and claw with
ravine.’ But further thought has shown that this gloomy view
results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life
was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for
the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in
the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In
every lion’s den and tiger’s lair, in every mother eagle’s feeding
of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows
forth man’s subordination of personal interests to the interests
of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient
justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one’s own life
has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others.
The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right,
righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes it
to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of
morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the
geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way
for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.” And, we may
add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own
fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of
Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

In further explanation we remark:

A. Negatively, that holiness is not

(_a_) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the
relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and
expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be
confounded with it.

Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as “summa omnisque
labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a
creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather
than of the immanent attribute. _Is. 5:16—_“Jehovah of hosts is
exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in
righteousness”—Justice is simply God’s holiness in its judicial
activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and
expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it
is also used as a term of union, as in _Lev. 11:44—_“be ye holy;
for I am holy.” When Jesus turned from the young ruler (_Mark
10:23_) he illustrated the first; _John 8:29_ illustrates the
second: “he that sent me is with me.” Lowrie, Doctrine of St.
John, 51-57—“‘God is light’_ (1 John 1:5)_ indicates the character
of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as
contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state
of perdition.”

Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness
of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the
revelation of God’s justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God
show that this reaction of God’s nature is necessary. God’s nature
is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love,
as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without
self-affirmation. Holiness not simply _demands_ in law, but
_imparts_ in the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss,
79—_versus_ Ritschl’s doctrine that holiness is God’s exaltation,
and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische
Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is
the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground
of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible
conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground
of faith in the supremacy of the good.” We would regard nature
however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would
regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What
Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever
we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity
between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in
the supremacy of God.

(_b_) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the
divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in
Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly
distinct from that of other attributes.

Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness, _i. e._, “no
particular attribute, but the general character of God as
resulting from his moral attributes.” Wardlaw calls holiness the
union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of
all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So
Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher: “Holiness =
wholeness.” Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N.
Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness
of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his
own action, and the standard for his creatures.” This implies,
according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect
goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own
action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action
is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1.
character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this
definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is
essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness
that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the
most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.

A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of
Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love,
revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the
flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is
termed holiness.” As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted
in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune
or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and
sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man
is the image of God’s. But it is clear that holiness in man is not
in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power,
his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his
rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all
perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all
perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”

(_c_) Holiness is not God’s self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for
his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in
holiness.

Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God’s
self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the
holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God’s
interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source
of holiness in man. To call holiness God’s self-love is to say
that God is holy because of what he can make by it, _i. e._, to
deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius,
Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.

We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a
proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love,
however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect,
self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an
important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as
merely God’s love for himself, is to leave out of the definition
the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the
divine nature. God’s self-respect implies that God respects
himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is
holiness God’s “moral excellence” (Hopkins), or God’s “perfect
goodness” (Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect
goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not
the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but
he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is
self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that
holiness is God’s love for himself, must still admit that this
self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the
standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.

G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that “God’s
righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.” Miller,
Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a
perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a
perfect or ideal self.” In other words, love is self-affirmation.
But we object that self-love is not _love_ at all, because there
is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form
or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to
consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian
self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather
an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the
maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the
meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed.
Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By
love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is
commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love,
and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection
or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.” Yet we shall see
that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and
utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God’s
trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral
excellence.

Ritschl’s lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for
him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in
the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end
in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own
personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he
is not merely a means toward the end of man’s salvation. But when
Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent
with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in
himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom
of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well
points out that personality means self-possession as well as
self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with
others. Ritschl does not see that God’s love is primarily directed
towards his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the
Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before
self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God
gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.

(_d_) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since
self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has
its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the
self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the
self-communicating.

That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan
Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“’Tis in God’s
infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all
creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture
teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in
infinite love to himself. God’s holiness is the infinite beauty
and excellence of his nature, and God’s excellency consists in his
love to himself.” In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue,
Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He
considers that God’s love is first of all directed toward himself
as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily
directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is
infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief
end in himself, and God’s self-love is his holiness. This
principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England
theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that
holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious
Sacrifice, who declares: “Righteousness, transferred into a word
of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word
of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is
only another conception of the law of love; the two principles,
right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.” So Park,
Discourses, 155-180.

Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93,
184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others,
self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not
selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good
in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving
himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one’s
self while in another, and while one’s self to be in another who
is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor
only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but
the willing of the right thing.” So Newman Smyth, Christian
Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he
maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love.
Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted
with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part
of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical.
Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence
of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in
another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner
and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition,
limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a
principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This
principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the
right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the
right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a
part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and
dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic
distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.

God must first maintain his own being before he can give to
another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive
in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love,
because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a
standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be
itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian
Theology, 92, that “love is the desire to impart holiness.” Love
is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good
and something higher than mere love. It is not true, _vice versa_,
that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a
means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that “holiness
is central in God, but love is central in holiness,” we should
prefer to say: “Love is central in God, but holiness is central in
love,” though in this case we should use the term love as
including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love
at all as referring to God’s regard for himself. In ordinary
usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication
to that other. To embrace in it God’s self-affirmation is to
misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end,
instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and
the regulative principle, of love.

That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the
superior of love. When we forget that “Righteousness and justice
are the foundation of his throne”_ (Ps. 97:2)_, we lose one of the
chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a
mist of error. _Rev. 4:3—_“there was a rainbow round about the
throne” = in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is
a throne of holiness and judgment. In _Mat. 6:9, 10, _“Thy kingdom
come” is not the first petition, but rather, “Hallowed be thy
name.” It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would
reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of
self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even
though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but
rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge,
Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love
controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness.
To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and
wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is
only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of
the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and
does violence to the constitution of our nature.

That God is only love has been called “the doctrine of the
papahood of God.” God is “a summer ocean of kindliness, never
agitated by storms” (Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the
best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times
moral indignation. _John 17:11—_“Holy Father” = more than love.
Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness
is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track
cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is
holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of
God’s perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy
affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were
fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be
vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a
previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he
loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under
bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right
to be. Stephen G. Barnes: “Mere good will is not the sole content
of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is
inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and
justice needs love; both are commanded in God’s law and are
perfectly revealed in God’s character.”

There may be a friction between a man’s two hands, and there may
be a conflict between a man’s conscience and his will, between his
intellect and his affection. Force is God’s energy under
resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So,
upon occasion of man’s sin, holiness and love in God become
opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin
is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness
necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal
suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the
incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from
the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny
its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is
necessary for man’s salvation. If holiness is the same as love,
how is it that the classic world, that knew of God’s holiness, did
not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham
Lincoln’s meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that
died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not
holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and
righteousness.

At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man
whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the
left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go
toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San
Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will
similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle
that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of
benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only
good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the
securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or
reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to
God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated,
since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony
of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically
ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because
punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not
work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in
itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while
holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to
God’s holiness, but never to God’s love; that God is not simply
love but light—moral light—and therefore is “a consuming fire”_
(Heb. 12:29)_ to all iniquity. Love chastens (_Heb. 12:6_), but
only holiness punishes (_Jer. 10:24—_“correct me, but in measure;
not in thine anger”; _Ez. 28:22—_“I shall have executed judgments
in her, and shall be sanctified in her”; _36:21, 22_—in judgment
“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”; _1 John
1:5—_“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;
_Rev. 15:1, 4—_“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy
righteous acts have been made manifest”; _16:5—_“righteous art
thou ... because thou didst thus judge”; _19:2—_“true and
righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great
harlot”_)._ See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi,
Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154,
155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.

B. Positively, that holiness is

(_a_) Purity of substance.—In God’s moral nature, as necessarily acting,
there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive
logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; God _is_ pure
before he _wills_ purity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a
negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include
in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is
the source and standard of the right.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity,
not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of
complacency in all moral good.” Shedd, Dogm. Theology,
1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature.
The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the
divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite
Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. He _is_ law. He
is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and
author of law for all moral beings.” We may better Shedd’s
definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of
which God’s being and God’s will eternally conform to each other.
In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy
willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion,
139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary
to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction
can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.” Bowne, Philos. of
Theism, 16—“God’s nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of
manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because
they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do not _rule_
intellect, but only express what intellect _is_.”

In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must
maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of
knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so
purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine
leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):
“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness
in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy
in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite
holiness consist in, and result from, God’s volitions eternally.”
Whedon therefore believes, not in God’s _unchangeableness_, but in
God’s _unchangingness_. He cannot say whether motives may not at
some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The
essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we
have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see
H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399.
As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to
holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of
regarding it as a characteristic of God’s being, is to deny that
anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity,
then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he
ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy,
223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than
the Wrong, while He endures.” P. S. Moxom: “Revelation is a
disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the
thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine
love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness
of relations which righteousness is.” H. B. Smith, System,
223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet
holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends
and objects.”

(_b_) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead
quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and
pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.

As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than
our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness
contains this element of will, although it is a will which
expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and
moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the
stainless blue of the summer sky. It is the most tremendous of
energies, in unsleeping movement. It is “a glassy sea”_ (Rev.
15:2)_, but “a glassy sea mingled with fire.” A. J. Gordon:
“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the
faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the
idea of holiness. They who are ‘without fault before the throne’
are they who ‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy
activity attending and expressing their holy state.” Martensen,
Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the
ethically necessary and the ethically free”; “God cannot do
otherwise than will his own essential nature.” See Thomasius,
Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see
Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.

The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling,
and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling
subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must
will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over
others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to
Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object;
then define what that object is and what active measures its
presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and
philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third
stage, the stage of action.” What is true of man is even more true
of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving
energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared
with the extent and intensity of God’s willing. The whole momentum
of God’s being is behind moral law. That law is his
self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever
defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for
this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would
have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.

Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good
because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a
good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary
and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of
these is true; he holds that there is no _a priori_ good before
the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction
is not will; the good is good for God, not _before_, but _in_, his
self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the
contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple
form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly
diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally
conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary
and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that
God’s will is the executive of God’s being is necessary to a
correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified
polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God,
serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped.
Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it
worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But
this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral
distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is
not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the
Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of
being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern
theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in
benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God’s
righteousness. _John 17:25—_“O righteous Father, the world knew
thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus’ time. See Issel,
Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in
God as “the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all
that is sinful,” and holiness in men as “the condition
corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from
sin.”

(_c_) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God’s self-willing. His own purity is
the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his
infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest
possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be
understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man’s
duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is
bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his
best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the
negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine
principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing
with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when
it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy
one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is).
In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything
that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely
good being—his being like himself.” Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed.,
151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of
God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is
wholly like itself.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the
part of goodness to protect goodness.” We shall see, when we
consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close
relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the
Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge
and love.

The object of God’s willing in eternity past can be nothing
outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see
what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the
unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in
his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness.
Not all God’s acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness.
The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation,
self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God’s holiness, is
only faintly reflected in such utterances as _Job 27:5, 6—_“Till I
die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I
hold fast, and will not let it go”; _31:37—_“I would declare unto
him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”
The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit
should teach us what is God’s essential nature, and the
requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us
what is the true standard of human duty and object of human
ambition. God’s holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation,
furnishes the guarantee that God’s love will not fail to secure
its end, and that all things will serve his purpose. _Rom.
11:36—_“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things.
To him be the glory for ever. Amen.” On the whole subject of
Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and
Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch,
art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der
Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169;
Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb.
and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T.,
and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.

VI. Relative or Transitive Attributes.

First Division.—Attributes having relation to Time and Space.

1. Eternity.

By this we mean that God’s nature (_a_) is without beginning or end; (_b_)
is free from all succession of time; and (_c_) contains in itself the
cause of time.

_Deut. 32:40—_“For I lift up my hand to heaven, And say, As I live
forever....”; _Ps. 90:2—_“Before the mountains ... from
everlasting ... thou art God”; _102:27—_“thy years shall have no
end”; _Is. 41:4—_“I Jehovah, the first, and with the last”; _1
Cor. 2:7_—πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων—“before the worlds” or “ages” = πρὸ
καταβολῆς κόσμου—“before the foundation of the world”_ (Eph.
1:4)_. _1 Tim. 1:17_—Βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων—“King of the ages” (so
also _Rev. 15:8_). _1 Tim. 6:16—_“who only hath immortality.”
_Rev. 1:8—_“the Alpha and the Omega.” Dorner: “We must not make
Kronos (time) and Uranos (space) earlier divinities before God.”
They are among the “all things” that were “made by him ”_ (John
1:3)_. Yet time and space are not _substances_; neither are they
_attributes_ (qualities of substance); they are rather _relations_
of finite existence. (Porter, Human Intellect, 568, prefers to
call time and space “_correlates_ to beings and events.”) With
finite existence they come into being; they are not mere
regulative conceptions of our minds; they exist objectively,
whether we perceive them or not. Ladd: “Time is the mental
presupposition of the duration of events and of objects. Time is
not an entity, or it would be necessary to suppose some other time
in which it endures. We think of space and time as unconditional,
because they furnish the conditions of our knowledge. The age of a
son is conditioned on the age of his father. The conditions
themselves cannot be conditioned. Space and time are mental forms,
but not only that. There is an extra-mental something in the case
of space and time, as in the case of sound.”

_Ex. 3:14—_“I am”—involves eternity. _Ps. 102:12-14—_“But thou, O
Jehovah, wilt abide forever.... Thou wilt arise, and have mercy
upon Zion; for it is time to have pity upon her.... For thy
servants ... have pity upon her dust” = because God is eternal, he
will have compassion upon Zion: he will do this, for even we, her
children, love her very dust. _Jude 25—_“glory, majesty, dominion
and power, before all time, and now, and for evermore.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:165—“God is ‘King of the æons’_ (1
Tim. 1:17)_, because he distinguishes, in his thinking, his
eternal inner essence from his changeable working in the world. He
is not merged in the process.” Edwards the younger describes
timelessness as “the immediate and invariable possession of the
whole unlimited life together and at once.” Tyler, Greek Poets,
148—“The heathen gods had only existence without end. The Greeks
seem never to have conceived of existence without beginning.” On
precognition as connected with the so-called future already
existing, and on apparent time progression as a subjective human
sensation and not inherent in the universe as it exists in an
infinite Mind, see Myers, Human Personality, 2:262 _sq._ Tennyson,
Life, 1:322—“For was and is and will be are but is: And all
creation is one act at once, The birth of light; but we that are
not all, As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, And live
perforce from thought to thought, and make The act a phantom of
succession: there Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time.”

Augustine: “Mundus non in tempore, sed cum tempore, factus est.”
There is no meaning to the question: Why did creation take place
when it did rather than earlier? or the question: What was God
doing before creation? These questions presuppose an independent
time in which God created—a time before time. On the other hand,
creation did not take place at any time, but God gave both the
world and time their existence. Royce, World and Individual,
2:111-115—“Time is the form of the will, as space is the form of
the intellect (_cf._ 124, 133). Time runs only in one direction
(unlike space), toward fulfilment of striving or expectation. In
pursuing its goals, the self lives in time. Every _now_ is also a
succession, as is illustrated in any melody. To God the universe
is ‘totum simul’, as to us any succession is one whole. 233—Death
is a change in the time-span—the minimum of time in which a
succession can appear as a completed whole. To God ‘a thousand
years’ are ‘as one day’_ (2 Pet. 3:8)_. 419—God, In his totality
as the Absolute Being, is conscious not, _in_ time, but _of_ time,
and of all that infinite time contains. In time there follow, in
their sequence, the chords of his endless symphony. For him is
this whole symphony of life at once.... You unite present, past
and future in a single consciousness whenever you hear any three
successive words, for one is past, another is present, at the same
time that a third is future. So God unites in timeless perception
the whole succession of finite events.... The single notes are not
lost in the melody. You are in God, but you are not lost in God.”
Mozart, quoted in Wm. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:255—“All
the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong
dream. But the best of all is _the hearing of it all at once_.”

Eternity is infinity in its relation to time. It implies that God’s nature
is not subject to the law of time. God is not in time. It is more correct
to say that time is in God. Although there is logical succession in God’s
thoughts, there is no chronological succession.

Time is duration measured by successions. Duration without
succession would still be duration, though it would be
immeasurable. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay 3, chap. 5—“We may
measure duration by the succession of thoughts in the mind, as we
measure length by inches or feet, but the notion or idea of
duration must be antecedent to the mensuration of it, as the
notion of length is antecedent to its being measured.” God is not
under the law of time. Solly, The Will, 254—“God looks through
time as we look through space.” Murphy, Scientific Bases,
90—“Eternity is not, as men believe, Before and after us, an
endless line. No, ’tis a circle. Infinitely great—All the
circumference with creations thronged: God at the centre dwells,
beholding all. And as we move in this eternal round, The finite
portion which alone we see Behind us, is the past; what lies
before We call the future. But to him who dwells Far at the
centre, equally remote From every point of the circumference, Both
are alike, the future and the past.” Vaughan (1655): “I saw
Eternity the other night. Like a great ring of pure and endless
light. And calm as it was bright; and round beneath it Time in
hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow
moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.”

We cannot have derived from experience our idea of eternal
duration in the past, for experience gives us only duration that
has had beginning. The idea of duration as without beginning must
therefore be given us by intuition. Case, Physical Realism, 379,
380—“Time is the continuance, or continual duration, of the
universe.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 39—Consider time as a
stream—under a spatial form: “If you take time as a relation
between units without duration, then the whole time has no
duration, and is not time at all. But if you give duration to the
whole time, then at once the units themselves are found to possess
it, and they cease to be units.” The _now_ is not time, unless it
turns past into future, and this is a process. The now then
consists of nows, and these nows are undiscoverable. The unit is
nothing but its own relation to something beyond, something not
discoverable. Time therefore is not real, but is appearance.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:185—“That which grasps and correlates
objects in space cannot itself be one of the things of space; that
which apprehends and connects events as succeeding each other in
time must itself stand above the succession or stream of events.
In being able to measure them, it cannot be flowing with them.
There could not be for self-consciousness any such thing as time,
if it were not, in one aspect of it, above time, if it did not
belong to an order which is or has in it an element which is
eternal.... As taken up into thought, succession is not
successive.” A. H. Strong, Historical Discourse, May 9, 1900—“God
is above space and time, and we are in God. We mark the passage of
time, and we write our histories. But we can do this, only because
in our highest being we do not belong to space and time, but have
in us a bit of eternity. John Caird tells us that we could not
perceive the flowing of the stream if we were ourselves a part of
the current; only as we have our feet planted on solid rock, can
we observe that the water rushes by. We belong to God; we are akin
to God; and while the world passes away and the lust thereof, he
that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” J. Estlin Carpenter
and P. H. Wicksteed, Studies in Theology, 10—“Dante speaks of God
as him in whom ‘every _where_ and every _when_ are focused in a
point’, that is, to whom every season is _now_ and every place is
_here_.”

Amiel’s Journal: “Time is the supreme illusion. It is the inner
prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode by which we
perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.... Time is the
successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive
analysis of an intuition, or of an act of the will. In itself it
is relative and negative, and it disappears within the absolute
Being.... Time and space are fragments of the Infinite for the use
of finite creatures. God permits them that he may not be alone.
They are the mode under which creatures are possible and
conceivable.... If the universe subsists, it is because the
eternal Mind loves to perceive its own content, in all its wealth
and expression, especially in its stages of preparation.... The
radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the great
show of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and great art is great
only because of its conformities with the divine order—with that
which is.”

Yet we are far from saying that time, now that it exists, has no objective
reality to God. To him, past, present, and future are “one eternal now,”
not in the sense that there is no distinction between them, but only in
the sense that he sees past and future as vividly as he sees the present.
With creation time began, and since the successions of history are
veritable successions, he who sees according to truth must recognize them.

Thomas Carlyle calls God “the Eternal Now.” Mason, Faith of the
Gospel, 30—“God is not contemptuous of time.... One day is with
the Lord as a thousand years. He values the infinitesimal in time,
even as he does in space. Hence the patience, the long-suffering,
the expectation, of God.” We are reminded of the inscription on
the sun-dial, in which it is said of the hours: “Pereunt et
imputantur”—“They pass by, and they are charged to our account.” A
certain preacher remarked on the wisdom of God which has so
arranged that the moments of time come successively and not
simultaneously, and thus prevent infinite confusion! Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:344, illustrates God’s eternity by the two ways in which
a person may see a procession: first from a doorway in the street
through which the procession is passing; and secondly, from the
top of a steeple which commands a view of the whole procession at
the same instant.

S. E. Meze, quoted in Royce, Conception of God, 40—“As if all of
us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the
waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the waters seem to
move. What has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful.
But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that it
is quiet, immovable, unruffled. Speaking technically, time is no
reality. Things _seem_ past and future, and, in a sense,
non-existent to us, but, in fact, they are just as genuinely real
as the present is.” Yet even here there is an order. You cannot
play a symphony backward and have music. This qualification at
least must be put upon the words of Berkeley; “A succession of
ideas I take to _constitute_ time, and not to be only the sensible
measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think.”

Finney, quoted in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:722—“Eternity to us means
all past, present and future duration. But to God it means only
now. Duration and space, as they respect his existence, mean
infinitely different things from what they do when they respect
our existence. God’s existence and his acts, as they respect
finite existence, have relation to time and space. But as they
respect his own existence, everything is _here_ and _now_. With
respect to all finite existences, God can say: I was, I am, I
shall be, I will do; but with respect to his own existence, all
that he can say is: I am, I do.”

Edwards the younger, Works, 1:386, 387—“There is no succession in
the divine mind; therefore no new operations take place. All the
divine acts are from eternity, nor is there any time with God. The
_effects_ of these divine acts do indeed all take place in time
and in a succession. If it should be said that on this supposition
the effects take place not till long after the acts by which they
are produced, I answer that they do so in our view, but not in the
view of God. With him there is no time; no before or after with
respect to time: nor has time any existence in the divine mind, or
in the nature of things independently of the minds and perceptions
of creatures; but it depends on the succession of those
perceptions.” We must qualify this statement of the younger
Edwards by the following from Julius Müller: “If God’s working can
have no relation to time, then all bonds of union between God and
the world are snapped asunder.”

It is an interesting question whether the human spirit is capable
of timeless existence, and whether the conception of time is
purely physical. In dreams we seem to lose sight of succession; in
extreme pain an age is compressed into a minute. Does this throw
light upon the nature of prophecy? Is the soul of the prophet rapt
into God’s timeless existence and vision? It is doubtful whether
_Rev. 10:6—_“there shall be time no longer” can be relied upon to
prove the affirmative; for the Rev. Vers. marg. and the American
Revisers translate “there shall be delay no longer.” Julius
Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:147—“All self-consciousness is a victory over
time.” So with memory; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:471. On “the
death-vision of one’s whole existence,” see Frances Kemble
Butler’s experience in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:351—“Here there is
succession and series, only so exceedingly rapid as to seem
simultaneous.” This rapidity however is so great as to show that
each man can at the last be judged in an instant. On space and
time as unlimited, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 564-566. On the
conception of eternity, see Mansel, Lectures, Essays and Reviews,
111-126, and Modern Spiritualism, 255-292; New Englander, April,
1875: art. on the Metaphysical Idea of Eternity. For practical
lessons from the Eternity of God, see Park, Discourses, 137-154;
Westcott, Some Lessons of the Rev. Vers., (Pott, N. Y., 1897),
187—with comments on αἰῶνες in _Eph. 3:21_, _Heb. 11:3_, _Rev. 4_;
_10, 11_—“the universe under the aspect of time.”

2. Immensity.

By this we mean that God’s nature (_a_) is without extension; (_b_) is
subject to no limitations of space; and (_c_) contains in itself the cause
of space.

_1 Kings 8:27—_“behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot
contain thee.” Space is a creation of God; _Rom. 8:39—_“nor height
nor depth, nor any other creature.” Zahn, Bib. Dogmatik,
149—“Scripture does not teach the immanence of God in the world,
but the immanence of the world in God.” Dante does not put God,
but Satan at the centre; and Satan, being at the centre, is
crushed with the whole weight of the universe. God is the Being
who encompasses all. All things exist in him. E. G. Robinson:
“Space is a relation; God is the author of relations and of our
modes of thought; therefore God is the author of space. Space
conditions our thought, but it does not condition God’s thought.”

Jonathan Edwards: “Place itself is mental, and within and without
are mental conceptions.... When I say the material universe exists
only in the mind, I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the
conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as
spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence
on, the conception of other minds.” H. M. Stanley, on Space and
Science, in Philosophical Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full
of things, but things are spaceful.... Space is a form of dynamic
appearance.” Bradley carries the ideality of space to an extreme,
when, in his Appearance and Reality, 35-38, he tells us: Space is
not a mere relation, for it has parts, and what can be the parts
of a relation? But space is nothing but a relation, for it is
lengths of lengths of—nothing that we can find. We can find no
terms either inside or outside. Space, to be space, must have
space outside itself. Bradley therefore concludes that space is
not reality but only appearance.

Immensity is infinity in its relation to space. God’s nature is not
subject to the law of space. God is not in space. It is more correct to
say that space is in God. Yet space has an objective reality to God. With
creation space began to be, and since God sees according to truth, he
recognizes relations of space in his creation.

Many of the remarks made in explanation of time apply equally to
space. Space is not a substance nor an attribute, but a relation.
It exists so soon as extended matter exists, and exists as its
necessary condition, whether our minds perceive it or not. Reid,
Intellectual Powers, essay 2, chap. 9—“Space is not so properly an
object of sense, as a necessary concomitant of the objects of
sight and touch.” When we see or touch body, we get the idea of
space in which the body exists, but the idea of space is not
furnished by the sense; it is an _a priori_ cognition of the
reason. Experience furnishes the occasion of its evolution, but
the mind evolves the conception by its own native energy.

Anselm, Proslogion, 19—“Nothing contains thee, but thou containest
all things.” Yet it is not precisely accurate to say that space is
in God, for this expression seems to intimate that God is a
greater space which somehow includes the less. God is rather
unspatial and is the Lord of space. The notion that space and the
divine immensity are identical leads to a materialistic conception
of God. Space is not an attribute of God, as Clarke maintained,
and no argument for the divine existence can be constructed from
this premise (see pages 85, 86). Martineau, Types, 1:138, 139,
170—“Malebranche said that God is the place of all spirits, as
space is the place of all bodies.... Descartes held that there is
no such thing as empty space. _Nothing_ cannot possibly have
extension. Wherever extension is, there must be _something_
extended. Hence the doctrine of a _plenum_, A _vacuum_ is
inconceivable.” Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 87—“According to
the ordinary view ... space _exists_, and things exist _in it_;
according to our view, only things exist, and _between them_
nothing exists, but space exists _in them_.”

Case, Physical Realism, 379, 380—“Space is the continuity, or
continuous extension, of the universe as one substance.” Ladd: “Is
space extended? Then it must be extended in some other space. That
other space is the space we are talking about. Space then is not
an entity, but a mental presupposition of the existence of
extended substance. Space and time are neither finite nor
infinite. Space has neither circumference nor centre,—its centre
would be everywhere. We cannot _imagine_ space at all. It is
simply a precondition of mind enabling us to perceive things.” In
Bib. Sac., 1890:415-444, art.: Is Space a Reality? Prof. Mead
opposes the doctrine that space is purely subjective, as taught by
Bowne; also the doctrine that space is a certain order of
relations among realities; that space is nothing apart from
things; but that things, when they exist, exist in certain
relations, and that the sum, or system, of these relations
constitutes space.

We prefer the view of Bowne, Metaphysics, 127, 137, 143, that
“Space is the form of objective experience, and is nothing in
abstraction from that experience.... It is a form of intuition,
and not a mode of existence. According to this view, things are
not in space and space-relations, but appear to be. In themselves
they are essentially non-spatial; but by their interactions with
one another, and with the mind, they give rise to the appearance
of a world of extended things in a common space. Space-predicates,
then, belong to phenomena only, and not to
things-in-themselves.... Apparent reality exists spatially; but
proper ontological reality exists spacelessly and without spatial
predicates.” For the view that space is relative, see also Cocker,
Theistic Conception of the World, 66-96; Calderwood, Philos. of
the Infinite, 331-335. _Per contra_, see Porter, Human Intellect,
662; Hazard, Letters on Causation in Willing, appendix; Bib. Sac.,
Oct. 1877:723; Gear, in Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434; Lowndes,
Philos. of Primary Beliefs, 144-161.

Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.

1. Omnipresence.

By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without
diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills
the universe in all its parts.

_Ps. 139:7 __sq.__—_“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or
whither shall I flee from thy presence?” _Jer. 23:23, 24—_“Am I a
God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I
fill heaven and earth?” _Acts 17:27, 28—_“he is not far from each
one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
Faber: “For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is
within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him
as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond
Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself
Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth
Myself God’s sanctuary.” Henri Amiel: “From every point on earth
we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.” Tennyson, The
Higher Pantheism: “Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit
with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than
hands and feet.” “As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”

The atheist wrote: “God is nowhere,” but his little daughter read
it: “God is now here,” and it converted him. The child however
sometimes asks: “If God is everywhere, how is there any room for
us?” and the only answer is that God is not a material but a
spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence
but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence
of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in
Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that
God would be with him in a distant land (_Heb. 11:8_). Jacob
learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went
(_Gen. 28:15_). Jesus taught that “neither in this mountain, nor
in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”_ (John 4:21)_. Our
Lord’s mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were
intended to teach his disciples that he was with them “always,
even unto the end of the world”_ (Mat. 28:20)_. The omnipresence
of Jesus demonstrates, _a fortiori_, the omnipresence of God.

In explanation of this attribute we may say:

(_a_) God’s omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the
Socinian representation that God’s essence is in heaven, only his power on
earth. When God is said to “dwell in the heavens,” we are to understand
the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly
things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious
self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.

_Ps. 123:1—_“O thou that sittest in the heavens”; _113:5—_“That
hath his seat on high”; _Is. 57:15—_“the high and lofty One that
inhabiteth eternity.” Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as
well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea, “at
home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.” We do not need to
go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up
(_Rom. 10:6, 7_). The best illustration is found in the presence
of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to
the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from
idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact
with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought
to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All
believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all
parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less
difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body.
An animal’s brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet,
after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the
whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were
confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to
cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or
even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the
universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of
the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite;
and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in
every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its
acts.” This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in
all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God’s
omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this
omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke,
Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able
to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place....
Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God
would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God
anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all
prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”

So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a
single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of
the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be
regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not affect
our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted
when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one
point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above
is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are
divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159,
holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of
bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt. “Pflüger
and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their
intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so
the intelligence of the spinal cord’s acts must really be due to
the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”
Professor Brewer’s rattlesnake, after several hours of
decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he
attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog’s
leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?
“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after
decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.” Hudson,
Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond,
Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not
the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively
in the brain; it is seated in the _medulla oblongata_, or in the
spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson
thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when
the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by
animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born
without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The
brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence
that points to the brain as the _principal_ seat of consciousness
points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or
elsewhere as the seat of a more or less _subordinate_
consciousness or intelligence.” Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I
do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined
to the brain.”

In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the
general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side.
Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points
of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from
a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of
the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the
eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead
of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it
is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately
closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”
William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the
brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be
any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a
consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals
this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far
as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the
cortex of the brain.” See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a
Body, 40-50.

(_b_) God’s omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of
God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal
We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of
material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no
multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts
of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in
all.

_1 Kings 8:27—_“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot
contain (circumscribe) thee.” God must be present in all his
essence and all his attributes in every place. He is “totus in
omni parte.” Alger, Poetry of the Orient: “Though God extends
beyond Creation’s rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”
From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be
present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills
and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be
united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as
if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.

A. J. Gordon: “In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its
parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the
whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as
much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”
_Mat. 13:20—_“where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.” “The parish priest of austerity
Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he
might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he
daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it
down on the people’s heads Two times one day in seven. In his age
God said, ‘Come down and die,’ And he cried out from the steeple,
‘Where art thou, Lord?’ And the Lord replied, ‘Down here among my
people.’ ”

(_c_) God’s omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the
pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is
bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by
the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his
transcendence.

God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy
the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in
all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is
the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this
pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an
essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by
God’s transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an
elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the
stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God’s personal presence with his
church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the
worship of Jehovah: “The idol seems so near, but is so far,
Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!” God’s omnipresence assures
us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart
and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers,
Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136;
Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.

The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying: “I have learned
to call nothing on earth lovely.” But this is to despise not only
the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing
in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a
present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are
nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is
God’s omnipresence in space, as evolution is God’s omnipresence in
time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent,
contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and
contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and
move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent
source of our existence.” _Rom. 10:6-8—_“Say not in thy heart, Who
shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who
shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from
the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth,
and in thy heart.” Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in
Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:
“Is God in my pocket?” “Certainly.” “No, he isn’t, for I haven’t
any pocket.” God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe,
but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.

2. Omniscience.

By this we mean God’s perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which
are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past,
present, or future.

God knows his inanimate creation: _Ps. 147:4—_“counteth the number
of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.” He has
knowledge of brute creatures: _Mat. 10:29_—sparrows—“not one of
them shall fall on the ground without your Father.” Of men and
their works: _Ps. 33:13-15—_“beholdeth all the sons of men ...
considereth all their works.” Of hearts of men and their thoughts:
_Acts 15:8—_“God, who knoweth the heart”; _Ps.
139:2—_“understandest my thought afar off.” Of our wants: _Mat.
6:8—_“knoweth what things ye have need of.” Of the least things:
_Mat. 10:30—_“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Of
the past: _Mal. 3:16—_“book of remembrance.” Of the future: _Is.
46:9, 10—_“declaring the end from the beginning.” Of men’s future
free acts: _Is. 44:28—_“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and
shall perform all my pleasure.” Of men’s future evil acts: _Acts
2:23—_“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God.” Of the ideally possible: _1 Sam.
23:12—_“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the
hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up” (_sc._
if thou remainest); _Mat. 11:23—_“if the mighty works had been
done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”
From eternity: _Acts 15:18—_“the Lord, who maketh these things
known from of old.” Incomprehensible: _Ps. 139:6—_“Such knowledge
is too wonderful for me”; _Rom. 11:33—_“O the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.” Related to wisdom:
_Ps. 104:24—_“In wisdom hast thou made them all”; _Eph.
3:10—_“manifold wisdom of God.”

_Job 7:20—_“O thou watcher of men”; _Ps. 56:8—_“Thou numberest my
wanderings” = my whole life has been one continuous exile; “Put
thou my tears into thy bottle” = the skin bottle of the
east,—there are tears enough to fill one; “Are they not in thy
book?” = no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has
gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt: “Du zählst wie oft ein Christe
wein’, Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so
klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.” _Heb. 4:13—_“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”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as
animals slaughtered in sacrifice, _or_ seized by the throat and
thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether
there was any blemish. Japanese proverb: “God has forgotten to
forget.”

(_a_) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well
as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its
eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God’s omniscience.

It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a
relative and transitive attribute, does not include God’s
self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God’s
knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his
creation. H. A. Gordon: “Light travels faster than sound. You can
see the flash of fire from the cannon’s mouth, a mile away,
considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear.
God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word,
and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”

Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one
who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary
and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an
all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own
truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the
fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”

Browning, Ferishtah’s Fancies, Plot-culture: “How will it fare
shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And
each, to make the minute’s deed, word, thought As worthy of reward
and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad
daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe
within the Ear, With black night’s help around me?”

(_b_) Since it is free from all imperfection, God’s knowledge is
immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or
imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or
built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness
or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things;
eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.

An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an
absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol,
memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge
is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly
represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as
being eye. His thoughts toward us are “more than can be numbered”_
(Ps. 40:5)_, not because there is succession in them, now a
remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a
moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is
always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497. _Gen.
16:13—_“Thou art a God that seeth.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature,
374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its
existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God,
that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science
together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of
such divine contemplation.” So God’s scrutiny of every deed of
darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of
spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would
be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.

Armstrong, God and the Soul: “God’s energy is concentrated
attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two
or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same
time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another.
God attends to all things, does all things, at once.” Marie
Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every
scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panorama
_some where_, for the beholding of _some one_.” Wireless
telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are
hid, that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed;
and hid, that shall not be known”_ (Mat. 10:26)_. The Röntgen
rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our
clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God
“the night shineth as the day”_ (Ps. 139:12)_.

Professor Mitchel’s equatorial telescope, slowly moving by
clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and
disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all
unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing
was so fearful to the prisoner in the French _cachot_ as the eye
of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence
through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole
world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to
the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the
government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But
omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The text _Gen.
16:13—_“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from
evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it
should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should
as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an
exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who
understands us, loves us, and helps us. _Ps. 139:17, 18—_“How
precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the
sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than
the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”

(_c_) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences
of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the
ideally possible as ideally possible.

God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now
present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a
different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been,
had we made different decisions in the past (_Is. 48:18—_“Oh that
thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”).
Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his
universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his
own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space,
a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of
succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is
also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events
as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and
knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things
simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not
temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite
beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at
one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and
future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal
knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an
object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action
can be foreseen involves the denial of God’s own free agency,
since God’s future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while
God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those
actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye
which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the
green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh,
if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of
life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might
I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That
Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”

(_d_) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things
from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by
natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his
knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives
which will occasion men’s acts, but he directly foreknows the acts
themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable
grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite
thought to which the divine mind is not subject.

Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of
contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he
admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the
objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number
those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain,
such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot
be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present
condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by
natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will
strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws,
cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only
in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John
Milton seems also to deny God’s foreknowledge of free acts: “So,
without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably
foreseen, They trespass.”

With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in
his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future
Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the
principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this
surrender of God’s foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of
fulfilled prophecy, like Peter’s denial and Judas’s betrayal, God
brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that
Peter’s and Judas’s wills acted irresponsibly under the law of
cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that
“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential
complement of the Methodist theology, without which its
philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical
consistency of Calvinism.” See also article by McCabe in Methodist
Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God
has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know
as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain
extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has
himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring, ‘What
will he do?’ ”

So Dugald Stewart: “Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the
power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take
place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?” Martensen
holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who
declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing
the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion,
2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no
basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows
the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not
know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To
him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.” Then,
says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as
to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is
rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight
or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze
does not deny God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, but he
regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation
of time to God, and such foreknowledge as “one of those postulates
as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.” Bowne,
Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a
knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption
of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this
difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by
suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an
eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time,
its condition.”

Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our
fundamental conviction of God’s perfection, but the constant
testimony of Scripture. In _Is. 41:21, 22_, God makes his
foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with
idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then “the Lamb that
hath been slain from the foundation of the world”_ (Rev. 13:8)_
was only a sacrifice to be offered _in case_ Adam should fall, God
not knowing whether he would or not, and _in case_ Judas should
betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed,
since the course of nature is changed by man’s will when he burns
towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even
the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against
this view.

How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say,
but then the method of God’s knowledge in many other respects is
unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God
may foreknow free acts:—

1. _Mediately_, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this
either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or
(2) certainly. This last “certainly” is to be accepted, if either;
since motives are never _causes_, but are only _occasions_, of
action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be
said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not
foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather.
Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to
motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at
the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such
cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them
gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is
therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God
may foreknow free acts:—

2. _Immediately_, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius
Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future
event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be
allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of
man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in
question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was
not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be
regarded as _intuitive_, we see that it stands in the same
immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and
thus the difficulty is removed.” Even upon this view there still
remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God’s
mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to
which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet,
in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and
by our fundamental idea of God’s perfection to maintain God’s
perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With
President Pepper we say: “Knowledge of contingency is not
necessarily contingent knowledge.” With Whedon: “It is not
calculation, but pure knowledge.” See Dorner, System of Doct.,
1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605;
Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a
valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view
that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac.,
Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.

(_e_) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with
the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because
they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.

Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than
seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events,
we may say with Whedon: “Knowledge _takes_ them, not _makes_
them.” Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination,
but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his
Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that “the knowledge of God is the cause of
things”; but he is obliged to add: “God is not the cause of all
things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by
God are not from him.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, book
3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no
less proved certain unforeknown.”

(_f_) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not
embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not
objects of knowledge.

God does not know what the result would be if two and two made
five, nor does he know “whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum
devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that
he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are
not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God
make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked
while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2
= 5?” Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the
whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills
there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round
squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and
Abracadabras?”

(_g_) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated
“wisdom.” In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses
the fittest means to accomplish them.

Wisdom is not simply “estimating all things at their proper value”
(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose.
It has been defined as “the talent of using one’s talents.” It
implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly,
choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self
and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony
of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the
reception of facts that are found in things.” Thus man’s wisdom,
obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same
thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and
holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism
pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not
enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the
nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce
well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of
nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more
than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a
lion.”

3. Omnipotence.

By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of
power, whether with or without the use of means.

_Gen. 17:1—_“I am God Almighty.” He performs natural wonders:
_Gen. 1:1-3—_“Let there be Light”; _Is. 44:24—_“stretcheth forth
the heavens alone”; _Heb. 1:3—_“upholding all things by the word
of his power.” Spiritual wonders: _2 Cor. 4:6—_“God, that said,
Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;
_Eph. 1:19—_“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who
believe”; _Eph. 3:20—_“able to do exceeding abundantly.” Power to
create new things: _Mat. 3:9—_“able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham”. _Rom. 4:17—_“giveth life to the dead, and
calleth the things that are not, as though they were.” After his
own pleasure: _Ps. 115:3—_“He hath done whatsoever he hath
pleased”; _Eph. 1:11—_“worketh all things after the counsel of his
will.” Nothing impossible: _Gen 18:14—_“Is anything too hard for
Jehovah?” _Mat. 19:26—_“with God all things are possible.” E. G.
Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is
dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible
to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his
own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is
not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a
just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the
authority of a positive revelation.”

The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy
Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire.
The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion
of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind
at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore
everything before him on the first day of creation (_Gen. 1:2_;
_John 3:8_; _Acts 2:2_). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened
to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and
there was not room enough to receive that which fell (_Mal.
3:10_). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that
shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (_Mat. 3:11_;
_2 Pet. 3:7-13_). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.

(_a_) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object
of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or
contradictory to the nature of God.

Self-contradictory things: “facere factum infectum”—the making of
a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of
praying: “May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter
than a straight line between two given points; putting two
separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things
contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to
die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God
has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all
power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be
said by man than this: “I dare do all that may become a man; Who
dares do more is none.” Even God cannot make wrong to be right,
nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the
prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and
therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold
the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of
Decrees.

Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven
itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words
applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:
“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”
Sunday-school scholar: “Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big
that he can’t lift it?” Seminary Professor: “Can God tell a lie?”
Seminary student: “With God all things are possible.”

(_b_) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part
of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under
the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not
do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is
the slave of his own omnipotence.

Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine
causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no
causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual.
This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza’s _natura
naturans_ and _natura naturata_. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used
according to God’s pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the
laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own
being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a
will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all
that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to “raise
up children unto Abraham,” but he has not done it. In God are
unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings,
new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has
expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his
omnipotence. So _Job 26:14—_“Lo, these are but the outskirts of
his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the
thunder of his power who can understand?” See Rogers, Superhuman
Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.

_1 Pet. 5:6—_“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of
God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he
may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him,
because he careth for you.” “The mighty powers held under mighty
control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is
not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint
is the true power. _Prov. 16:32—_“He that is slow to anger is
better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he
that taketh a city.” Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power
in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to
do.” When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve.
God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of
wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.

(_c_) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of
self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from
neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation
of God’s power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine
omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when
God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus
Christ.

Thomasius: “If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself
be all.” _Ps. 113: 5, 6—_“Who is like unto Jehovah our God....
That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and
in the earth?” _Phil. 2:7, 8—_“emptied himself ... humbled
himself.” See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey
showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an
offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly,
Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his
life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which
proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.” We
are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love’s
sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well
as of fear, on the part of God’s creatures. Isaac Watts: “His
every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The
voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”

Third Division.—Attributes having relation to Moral Beings.

1. Veracity and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth.

By veracity and faithfulness we mean the transitive truth of God, in its
twofold relation to his creatures in general and to his redeemed people in
particular.

_Ps. 138:2—_“I will ... give thanks unto thy name for thy
lovingkindness and for thy truth: For thou hast magnified thy word
above all thy name”; _John 3:33—_“hath set his seal to this, that
God is true”; _Rom. 3:4—_“let God be found true, but every man a
liar”; _Rom. 1:25—_“the truth of God”; _John 14:17—_“the Spirit of
truth”; _1 John 5:7—_“the Spirit is the truth”; _1 Cor. 1:9—_“God
is faithful”; _1 Thess. 5:24—_“faithful is he that calleth you”;
_1 Pet. 4:19—_“a faithful Creator”; _2 Cor. 1:20—_“how many soever
be the promises of God, in him is the yea”; _Num. 23:19—_“God is
not a man that he should lie”; _Tit. 1:2—_“God, who cannot lie,
promised”; _Heb. 6:18—_“in which it is impossible for God to lie.”

(_a_) In virtue of his veracity, all his revelations to creatures consist
with his essential being and with each other.

In God’s veracity we have the guarantee that our faculties in
their normal exercise do not deceive us; that the laws of thought
are also laws of things; that the external world, and second
causes in it, have objective existence; that the same causes will
always produce the same effects; that the threats of the moral
nature will be executed upon the unrepentant transgressor; that
man’s moral nature is made in the image of God’s; and that we may
draw just conclusions from what conscience is in us to what
holiness is in him. We may therefore expect that all past
revelations, whether in nature or in his word, will not only not
be contradicted by our future knowledge, but will rather prove to
have in them more of truth than we ever dreamed. Man’s word may
pass away, but God’s word abides forever (_Mat. 5:18—_“one jot or
one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law”; _Is.
40:8—_“the word of God shall stand forever”).

_Mat. 6:16—_“be not as the hypocrites.” In God the outer
expression and the inward reality always correspond. Assyrian
wills were written on a small tablet encased in another upon which
the same thing was written over again. Breakage, or falsification,
of the outer envelope could be corrected by reference to the
inner. So our outer life should conform to the heart within, and
the heart within to the outer life. On the duty of speaking the
truth, and the limitations of the duty, see Newman Smyth,
Christian Ethics, 386-403—“Give the truth always to those who in
the bonds of humanity have a right to the truth; conceal it, or
falsify it, only when the human right to the truth has been
forfeited, or is held in abeyance, by sickness, weakness, or some
criminal intent.”

(_b_) In virtue of his faithfulness, he fulfills all his promises to his
people, whether expressed in words or implied in the constitution he has
given them.

In God’s faithfulness we have the sure ground of confidence that
he will perform what his love has led him to promise to those who
obey the gospel. Since his promises are based, not upon what we
are or have done, but upon what Christ is and has done, our
defects and errors do not invalidate them, so long as we are truly
penitent and believing: _1 John 1:9—_“faithful and righteous to
forgive us our sins” = faithful to his promise, and righteous to
Christ. God’s faithfulness also ensures a supply for all the real
wants of our being, both here and hereafter, since these wants are
implicit promises of him who made us: _Ps. 84:11—_“No good thing
will he withhold from them that walk uprightly”; _91:4—_“His truth
is a shield and a buckler”; _Mat. 6:33—_“all these things shall be
added unto you”; _1 Cor. 2:9—_“Things which eye saw not, and ear
heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever
things God prepared for them that love him.”

Regulus goes back to Carthage to die rather than break his promise
to his enemies. George William Curtis economizes for years, and
gives up all hope of being himself a rich man, in order that he
may pay the debts of his deceased father. When General Grant sold
all the presents made to him by the crowned heads of Europe, and
paid the obligations in which his insolvent son had involved him,
he said: “Better poverty and honor, than wealth and disgrace.”
Many a business man would rather die than fail to fulfil his
promise and let his note go to protest. “Maxwelton braes are
bonnie, Where early falls the dew, And ’twas there that Annie
Laurie Gave me her promise true; Which ne’er forget will I; And
for bonnie Annie Laurie I’d lay me down and dee.” Betray the man
she loves? Not “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks
melt wi’the sun.” God’s truth will not be less than that of mortal
man. God’s veracity is the natural correlate to our faith.

2. Mercy and Goodness, or Transitive Love.

By mercy and goodness we mean the transitive love of God in its two-fold
relation to the disobedient and to the obedient portions of his creatures.

_Titus 3:4—_“his love toward man”; _Rom. 2:4—_“goodness of God”;
_Mat. 5:44, 45—_“love your enemies ... that ye may be sons of your
Father”; _John 3:16—_“God so loved the world”; _2 Pet.
1:3—_“granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and
godliness”; _Rom. 8:32—_“freely give us all things”; _John
4:10—_“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved
us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

(_a_) Mercy is that eternal principle of God’s nature which leads him to
seek the temporal good and eternal salvation of those who have opposed
themselves to his will, even at the cost of infinite self-sacrifice.

Martensen: “Viewed in relation to sin, eternal love is
compassionate grace.” God’s continued importation of natural life
is a foreshadowing, in a lower sphere, of what he desires to do
for his creatures in the higher sphere—the communication of
spiritual and eternal life through Jesus Christ. When he bids us
love our enemies, he only bids us follow his own example.
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2:2—“Wilt thou draw near the nature
of the gods? Draw near them, then, in being merciful.” Twelfth
Night, 3:4—“In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; None can be
called deformed but the unkind. Virtue is beauty.”

(_b_) Goodness is the eternal principle of God’s nature which leads him to
communicate of his own life and blessedness to those who are like him in
moral character. Goodness, therefore, is nearly identical with the love of
complacency; mercy, with the love of benevolence.

Notice, however, that transitive love is but an outward
manifestation of immanent love. The eternal and perfect object of
God’s love is in his own nature. Men become subordinate objects of
that love only as they become connected and identified with its
principal object, the image of God’s perfections in Christ. Only
in the Son do men become sons of God. To this is requisite an
acceptance of Christ on the part of man. Thus it can be said that
God imparts himself to men just so far as men are willing to
receive him. And as God gives himself to men, in all his moral
attributes, to answer for them and to renew them in character,
there is truth in the statement of Nordell (Examiner, Jan. 17,
1884) that “the maintenance of holiness is the function of divine
justice; the diffusion of holiness is the function of divine
love.” We may grant this as substantially true, while yet we deny
that love is a mere form or manifestation of holiness.
Self-impartation is different from self-affirmation. The attribute
which moves God to pour out is not identical with the attribute
which moves him to maintain. The two ideas of holiness and of love
are as distinct as the idea of integrity on the one hand and of
generosity on the other. Park: “God loves Satan, in a certain
sense, and we ought to.” Shedd: “This same love of compassion God
feels toward the non-elect; but the expression of that compassion
is forbidden for reasons which are sufficient for God, but are
entirely unknown to the creature.” The goodness of God is the
basis of _reward_, under God’s government. Faithfulness leads God
to keep his promises; goodness leads him to make them.

Edwards, Nature of Virtue, in Works, 2:263—Love of benevolence
does not presuppose beauty in its object. Love of complacence does
presuppose beauty. Virtue is not love to an object for its beauty.
The beauty of intelligent beings does not consist in love for
beauty, or virtue in love for virtue. Virtue is love for being in
general, exercised in a general good will. This is the doctrine of
Edwards. We prefer to say that virtue is love, not for being in
general, but for good being, and so for God, the holy One. The
love of compassion is perfectly compatible with hatred of evil and
with indignation against one who commits it. Love does not
necessarily imply approval, but it does imply desire that all
creatures should fulfil the purpose of their existence by being
morally conformed to the holy One; see Godet, in The Atonement,
339.

_Rom. 5:8—_“God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We ought to love our
enemies, and Satan is our worst enemy. We ought to will the good
of Satan, or cherish toward him the love of benevolence, though
not the love of complacence. This does not involve a condoning of
his sin, or an ignoring of his moral depravity, as seems implied
in the verses of Wm. C. Gannett: “The poem hangs on the berry-bush
When comes the poet’s eye; The street begins to masquerade When
Shakespeare passes by. The Christ sees white in Judas’ heart And
loves his traitor well; The God, to angel his new heaven, Explores
his deepest hell.”

3. Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness.

By justice and righteousness we mean the transitive holiness of God, in
virtue of which his treatment of his creatures conforms to the purity of
his nature,—righteousness demanding from all moral beings conformity to
the moral perfection of God, and justice visiting non-conformity to that
perfection with penal loss or suffering.

_Gen. 18:25—_“shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
_Deut. 32:4—_“All his ways are justice; A God of faithfulness and
without iniquity, Just and right is he”; _Ps. 5:5—_“Thou hatest
all workers of iniquity”; _7:9-12—_“the righteous God trieth the
hearts ... saveth the upright ... is a righteous judge, Yea, a God
that hath indignation every day”; _18:24-26—_“Jehovah recompensed
me according to my righteousness.... With the merciful, thou wilt
show thyself merciful ... with the perverse thou wilt show thyself
froward”; _Mat. 5:48—_“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect”; _Rom. 2:6—_“will render to every man
according to his works”; _1 Pet. 1:16—_“Ye shall be holy; for I am
holy.” These passages show that God loves the same persons whom he
hates. It is not true that he hates the sin, but loves the sinner;
he both hates and loves the sinner himself, hates him as he is a
living and wilful antagonist of truth and holiness, loves him as
he is a creature capable of good and ruined by his transgression.

There is no abstract sin that can be hated apart from the persons
in whom that sin is represented and embodied. Thomas Fuller found
it difficult to starve the profaneness but to feed the person of
the impudent beggar who applied to him for food. Mr. Finney
declared that he would kill the slave-catcher, but would love him
with all his heart. In our civil war Dr. Kirk said: “God knows
that we love the rebels, but God also knows that we will kill them
if they do not lay down their arms.” The complex nature of God not
only permits but necessitates this same double treatment of the
sinner, and the earthly father experiences the same conflict of
emotions when his heart yearns over the corrupt son whom he is
compelled to banish from the household. Moberly, Atonement and
Personality, 7—“It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin.”

(_a_) Since justice and righteousness are simply transitive
holiness—righteousness designating this holiness chiefly in its mandatory,
justice chiefly in its punitive, aspect,—they are not mere manifestations
of benevolence, or of God’s disposition to secure the highest happiness of
his creatures, nor are they grounded in the nature of things as something
apart from or above God.

Cremer, N. T. Lexicon: δίκαιος = “the perfect coincidence existing
between God’s nature, which is the standard for all, and his
acts.” Justice and righteousness are simply holiness exercised
toward creatures. The same holiness which exists in God in
eternity past manifests itself as justice and righteousness, so
soon as intelligent creatures come into being. Much that was said
under Holiness as an immanent attribute of God is equally
applicable here. The modern tendency to confound holiness with
love shows itself in the merging of justice and righteousness in
mere benevolence. Instances of this tendency are the following:
Ritschl, Unterricht, § 16—“The righteousness of God denotes the
manner in which God carries out his loving will in the redemption
alike of humanity as a whole and of individual men; hence his
righteousness is indistinguishable from his grace”; see also
Ritschl, Rechtf. und Versöhnung, 2:113; 3:296. Prof. George M.
Forbes: “Only right makes love moral; only love makes right
moral.” Jones, Robert Browning, 70—“Is it not beneficence that
places death at the heart of sin? Carlyle forgot this. God is not
simply a great taskmaster. The power that imposes law is not an
alien power.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 237-240—“How can
self-realization be the realization of others? Why must the true
good be always the common good? Why is the end of each the end of
all?... We need a concrete universal which will unify all
persons.”

So also, Harris, Kingdom of Christ on Earth, 39-42; God the
Creator, 287, 290, 302—“Love, as required and regulated by reason,
may be called righteousness. Love is universal good will or
benevolence, regulated in its exercise by righteousness. Love is
the choice of God and man as the objects of trust and service.
This choice involves the determination of the will to seek
universal well-being, and in this aspect it is benevolence. It
also involves the consent of the will to the reason, and the
determination to regulate all action in seeking well-being by its
truths, laws, and ideals; and in this aspect it is
righteousness.... Justice is the consent of the will to the law of
love, in its authority, its requirements, and its sanctions. God’s
wrath is the necessary reaction of this law of love in the
constitution and order of the universe against the wilful violator
of it, and Christ’s sufferings atone for sin by asserting and
maintaining the authority, universality, and inviolability of
God’s law of love in his redemption of men and his forgiveness of
their sins.... Righteousness cannot be the whole of love, for this
would shut us up to the merely formal principle of the law without
telling us what the law requires. Benevolence cannot be the whole
of love, for this would shut us up to hedonism, in the form of
utilitarianism, excluding righteousness from the character of God
and man.”

Newman Smyth also, in his Christian Ethics, 227-231, tells us that
“love, as self-affirming, is righteousness; as self-imparting, is
benevolence; as self-finding in others, is sympathy.
Righteousness, as subjective regard for our own moral being, is
holiness; as objective regard for the persons of others, is
justice. Holiness is involved in love as its essential respect to
itself; the heavenly Father is the holy Father (_John 17:11_).
Love contains in its unity a trinity of virtue. Love affirms its
own worthiness, imparts to others its good, and finds its life
again in the well-being of others. The ethical limit of
self-impartation is found in self-affirmation. Love in
self-bestowal cannot become suicidal. The benevolence of love has
its moral bounds in the holiness of love. True love in God
maintains its transcendence, and excludes pantheism.”

The above doctrine, quoted for substance from Newman Smyth, seems
to us unwarrantably to include in love what properly belongs to
holiness. It virtually denies that holiness has any independent
existence as an attribute of God. To make holiness a manifestation
of love seems to us as irrational as to say that self-affirmation
is a form of self-impartation. The concession that holiness
regulates and limits love shows that holiness cannot itself be
love, but must be an independent and superior attribute. Right
furnishes the rule and law for love, but it is not true that love
furnishes the rule and law for right. There is no such double
sovereignty as this theory would imply. The one attribute that is
independent and supreme is holiness, and love is simply the
impulse to communicate this holiness.

William Ashmore: “Dr. Clarke lays great emphasis on the character
of ‘a good God.’... But he is more than a merely _good_ God; he is
a just God, and a righteous God, and a holy God—a God who is
‘angry with the wicked,’ even while ready to forgive them, if they
are willing to repent in his way, and not in their own. He is the
God who brought in a flood upon the world of the ungodly; who
rained down fire and brimstone from heaven; and who is to come in
‘flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God’ and
obey not the gospel of his son.... Paul reasoned about both the
‘goodness’ and the ‘severity’ of God.”

(_b_) Transitive holiness, as righteousness, imposes law in conscience and
Scripture, and may be called legislative holiness. As justice, it executes
the penalties of law, and may be called distributive or judicial holiness.
In righteousness God reveals chiefly his love of holiness; in justice,
chiefly his hatred of sin.

The self-affirming purity of God demands a like purity in those
who have been made in his image. As God wills and maintains his
own moral excellence, so all creatures must will and maintain the
moral excellence of God. There can be only one centre in the solar
system,—the sun is its own centre and the centre for all the
planets also. So God’s purity is the object of his own will,—it
must be the object of all the wills of all his creatures also.
Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 282—“It is not rational or safe for the
hand to separate itself from the heart. This is a _universe_, and
God is the heart of the great system. Altruism is not the result
of society, but society is the result of altruism. It begins in
creatures far below man. The animals which know how to combine
have the greatest chance of survival. The unsociable animal dies
out. The most perfect organism is the most sociable. Right is the
debt which the part owes to the whole.” This seems to us but a
partial expression of the truth. Right is more than a debt to
others,—it is a debt to one’s self, and the self-affirming,
self-preserving, self-respecting element constitutes the limit and
standard of all outgoing activity. The sentiment of loyalty is
largely a reverence for this principle of order and stability in
government. _Ps. 145:5—_“Of the glorious majesty of thine honor,
And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate”; _97:2—_“Clouds and
darkness are round about him: Righteousness and justice are the
foundation of his throne.”

John Milton, Eikonoklastes: “Truth and justice are all one; for
truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in
our practice.... For truth is properly no more than contemplation,
and her utmost efficiency is but teaching; but justice in her very
essence is all strength and activity, and hath a sword put into
her hand to use against all violence and oppression on the earth.
She it is who accepts no person, and exempts none from the
severity of her stroke.” A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief,
326—“Even the poet has not dared to represent Jupiter torturing
Prometheus without the dim figure of Avenging Fate waiting
silently in the background.... Evolution working out a nobler and
nobler justice is proof that God is just. Here is ‘preferential
action’.” S. S. Times, June 9, 1900—“The natural man is born with
a wrong personal astronomy. Man should give up the conceit of
being the centre of all things. He should accept the Copernican
theory, and content himself with a place on the edge of things—the
place he has always really had. We all laugh at John Jasper and
his thesis that ‘the sun do move.’ The Copernican theory is
leaking down into human relations, as appears from the current
phrase: ‘There are others’.”

(_c_) Neither justice nor righteousness, therefore, is a matter of
arbitrary will. They are revelations of the inmost nature of God, the one
in the form of moral requirement, the other in the form of judicial
sanction. As God cannot but demand of his creatures that they be like him
in moral character, so he cannot but enforce the law which he imposes upon
them. Justice just as much binds God to punish as it binds the sinner to
be punished.

All arbitrariness is excluded here. God is what he is—infinite
purity. He cannot change. If creatures are to attain the end of
their being, they must be like God in moral purity. Justice is
nothing but the recognition and enforcement of this natural
necessity. Law is only the transcript of God’s nature. Justice
does not make law,—it only reveals law. Penalty is only the
reaction of God’s holiness against that which is its opposite.
Since righteousness and justice are only legislative and
retributive holiness, God can cease to demand purity and to punish
sin only when he ceases to be holy, that is, only when he ceases
to be God. “Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.”

Simon, Reconciliation, 141—“To claim the performance of duty is as
truly obligatory as it is obligatory to perform the duty which is
prescribed.” E. H. Johnson, Systematic Theology, 84—“Benevolence
intends what is well for the creature; justice insists on what is
fit. But the well-for-us and the fit-for-us precisely coincide.
The only thing that is well for us is our normal employment and
development; but to provide for this is precisely what is fitting
and therefore due to us. In the divine nature the distinction
between justice and benevolence is one of form.” We criticize this
utterance as not sufficiently taking into account the nature of
the right. The right is not merely the fit. Fitness is only
general adaptation which may have in it no ethical element,
whereas right is solely and exclusively ethical. The right
therefore regulates the fit and constitutes its standard. The
well-for-us is to be determined by the right-for-us, but not _vice
versa_. George W. Northrup: “God is not bound to bestow the same
endowments upon creatures, nor to keep all in a state of holiness
forever, nor to redeem the fallen, nor to secure the greatest
happiness of the universe. But he is bound to purpose and to do
what his absolute holiness requires. He has no attribute, no will,
no sovereignty, above this law of his being. He cannot lie, he
cannot deny himself, he cannot look upon sin with complacency, he
cannot acquit the guilty without an atonement.”

(_d_) Neither justice nor righteousness bestows rewards. This follows from
the fact that obedience is due to God, instead of being optional or a
gratuity. No creature can claim anything for his obedience. If God
rewards, he rewards in virtue of his goodness and faithfulness, not in
virtue of his justice or his righteousness. What the creature cannot
claim, however, Christ _can_ claim, and the rewards which are goodness to
the creature are righteousness to Christ. God rewards Christ’s work _for_
us and _in_ us.

Bruch, Eigenschaftslehre, 280-282, and John Austin, Province of
Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223, both deny, and rightly deny, that
justice bestows rewards. Justice simply punishes infractions of
law. In _Mat. 25:34—_“inherit the kingdom”—inheritance implies no
merit; _46_—the wicked are adjudged to eternal punishment; the
righteous, not to eternal reward, but to eternal life. _Luke
17:7-10—_“when ye shall have done all the things that are
commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done
that which it was our duty to do.” _Rom. 6:23_—punishment is the
“_wages of sin_”: but salvation is “_the gift of God_”; _2:6_—God
rewards, not _on account of_ man’s work but “_according to his
works_.” Reward is thus seen to be in Scripture a matter of grace
to the creature; only to the Christ who works for us in atonement,
and in us in regeneration and sanctification, is reward a matter
of debt (see also _John 6:27_ and _2 John 8_). Martineau, Types,
2:86, 244, 249—“Merit is toward man; virtue toward God.”

All mere service is unprofitable, because it furnishes only an
equivalent to duty, and there is no margin. Works of
supererogation are impossible, because our all is due to God. He
would have us rise into the region of friendship, realize that he
has been treating us not as Master but as Father, enter into a
relation of uncalculating love. With this proviso that rewards are
matters of grace, not of debt, we may assent to the maxim of
Solon: “A republic walks upon two feet—just punishment for the
unworthy and due reward for the worthy.” George Harris, Moral
Evolution, 139—“Love seeks righteousness, and is satisfied with
nothing other than that.” But when Harris adopts the words of the
poet: “The very wrath from pity grew, From love of men the hate of
wrong,” he seems to us virtually to deny that God hates evil for
any other reason than because of its utilitarian disadvantages,
and to imply that good has no independent existence in his nature.
Bowne, Ethics, 171—“Merit is desert of reward, or better, desert
of moral approval.” Tennyson: “For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.” Baxter: “_Desert_ is written
over the gate of hell; but over the gate of heaven only, _The Gift
of God_.”

(_e_) Justice in God, as the revelation of his holiness, is devoid of all
passion or caprice. There is in God no selfish anger. The penalties he
inflicts upon transgression are not vindictive but vindicative. They
express the revulsion of God’s nature from moral evil, the judicial
indignation of purity against impurity, the self-assertion of infinite
holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. But because its
decisions are calm, they are irreversible.

Anger, within certain limits, is a duty of man. _Ps. 97:10—_“ye
that love Jehovah, hate evil”; _Eph. 4:28—_“Be ye angry, and sin
not.” The calm indignation of the judge, who pronounces sentence
with tears, is the true image of the holy anger of God against
sin. Weber, Zorn Gottes, 28, makes wrath only the jealousy of
love. It is more truly the jealousy of holiness. Prof. W. A.
Stevens, Com. on _1 Thess. 2:10_—“_Holily_ and _righteously_ are
terms that describe the same conduct in two aspects; the former,
as conformed to God’s character in itself; the latter, as
conformed to his law; both are positive.” Lillie, on _2 Thess.
1:6_—“Judgment is ‘_a righteous thing with God_.’ Divine justice
requires it for its own satisfaction.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:175-178, 365-385; Trench, Syn. N. T., 1:180, 181.

Of Gaston de Foix, the old chronicler admirably wrote: “He loved
what ought to be loved, and hated what ought to be hated, and
never had miscreant with him.” Compare _Ps. 101:5, 6—_“Him that
hath a high look and a proud heart will I not suffer. Mine eyes
shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with
me.” Even Horace Bushnell spoke of the “wrath-principle” in God.
_1 K. 11:9—_“And Jehovah was angry with Solomon” because of his
polygamy. Jesus’ anger was no less noble than his love. The love
of the right involved hatred of the wrong. Those may hate who hate
evil for its hatefulness and for the sake of God. Hate sin in
yourself first, and then you may hate it in itself and in the
world. Be angry only in Christ and with the wrath of God. W. C.
Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 264—“But we must purge ourselves of
self-regard, Or we are sinful in abhorring sin.” Instance Judge
Harris’s pity, as he sentenced the murderer; see A. H. Strong,
Philosophy and Religion, 192, 193.

Horace’s “Ira furor brevis est”—“Anger is a temporary madness”—is
true only of selfish and sinful anger. Hence the man who is angry
is popularly called “mad.” But anger, though apt to become sinful,
is not necessarily so. Just anger is neither madness, nor is it
brief. Instance the judicial anger of the church of Corinth in
inflicting excommunication: _2 Cor. 7:11—_“what indignation, yea
what fear, yea what longing, yea what zeal, yea what avenging!”
The only revenge permissible to the Christian church is that in
which it pursues and exterminates sin. To be incapable of moral
indignation against wrong is to lack real love for the right. Dr.
Arnold of Rugby was never sure of a boy who only loved good; till
the boy also began to hate evil, Dr. Arnold did not feel that he
was safe. Herbert Spencer said that good nature with Americans
became a crime. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty: “There is one thing
worse than corruption, and that is acquiescence in corruption.”

Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 139—“Xenophon intends to say a very
commendable thing of Cyrus the Younger, when he writes of him that
no one had done more good to his friends or more harm to his
enemies.” Luther said to a monkish antagonist: “I will break in
pieces your heart of brass and pulverize your iron brains.” Shedd,
Dogmatic Theology, 1:175-178—“Human character is worthless in
proportion as abhorrence of sin is lacking in it. It is related of
Charles II that ‘he felt no gratitude for benefits, and no
resentment for wrongs; he did not love anyone, and he did not hate
anyone.’ He was indifferent toward right and wrong, and the only
feeling he had was contempt.” But see the death-bed scene of the
“merry monarch,” as portrayed in Bp. Burnet, Evelyn’s Memoirs, or
the Life of Bp. Ken. Truly “The end of mirth is heaviness”_ (Prov.
14:13)_.

Stout, Manual of Psychology, 22—“Charles Lamb tells us that his
friend George Dyer could never be brought to say anything in
condemnation of the most atrocious crimes, except that the
criminal must have been very eccentric.” Professor Seeley: “No
heart is pure that is not passionate.” D. W. Simon, Redemption of
Man, 249, 250, says that God’s resentment “is a resentment of an
essentially altruistic character.” If this means that it is
perfectly consistent with love for the sinner, we can accept the
statement; if it means that love is the only source of the
resentment, we regard the statement as a misinterpretation of
God’s justice, which is but the manifestation of his holiness and
is not a mere expression of his love. See a similar statement of
Lidgett, Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, 251—“Because God is
love, his love coëxists with his wrath against sinners, is the
very life of that wrath, and is so persistent that it uses wrath
as its instrument, while at the same time it seeks and supplies a
propitiation.” This statement ignores the fact that punishment is
never in Scripture regarded as an expression of God’s love, but
always of God’s holiness. When we say that we love God, let us
make sure that it is the true God, the God of holiness, that we
love, for only this love will make us like him.

The moral indignation of a whole universe of holy beings against
moral evil, added to the agonizing self-condemnations of awakened
conscience in all the unholy, is only a faint and small reflection
of the awful revulsion of God’s infinite justice from the impurity
and selfishness of his creatures, and of the intense, organic,
necessary, and eternal reaction of his moral being in
self-vindication and the punishment of sin; see _Jer. 44:4—_“Oh,
do not this abominable thing that I hate!” _Num. 32:23—_“be sure
your sin will find you out”; _Heb. 10:30, 31—_“For we know him
that said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense. And
again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God.” On justice as an attribute
of a moral governor, see N. W. Taylor, Moral Government,
2:253-293; Owen, Dissertation on Divine Justice, in Works,
10:483-624.

VII. Rank and Relations of the several Attributes.

The attributes have relations to each other. Like intellect, affection and
will in man, no one of them is to be conceived of as exercised separately
from the rest. Each of the attributes is qualified by all the others.
God’s love is immutable, wise, holy. Infinity belongs to God’s knowledge,
power, justice. Yet this is not to say that one attribute is of as high
rank as another. The moral attributes of truth, love, holiness, are worthy
of higher reverence from men, and they are more jealously guarded by God,
than the natural attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.
And yet even among the moral attributes one stands as supreme. Of this and
of its supremacy we now proceed to speak.

Water is not water unless composed of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen
cannot be resolved into hydrogen, nor hydrogen into oxygen. Oxygen
has its own character, though only in combination with hydrogen
does it appear in water. Will in man never acts without intellect
and sensibility, yet will, more than intellect or sensibility, is
the manifestation of the man. So when God acts, he manifests not
one attribute alone, but his total moral excellence. Yet holiness,
as an attribute of God, has rights peculiar to itself; it
determines the attitude of the affections; it more than any other
faculty constitutes God’s moral being.

Clarke, Christian Theology, 83,92—“God would not be holy if he
were not love, and could not be love if he were not holy. Love is
an element in holiness. If this were lacking, there would be no
perfect character as principle of his own action or as standard
for us. On the other hand only the perfect being can be love. God
must be free from all taint of selfishness in order to be love.
Holiness requires God to act as love, for holiness is God’s
self-consistency. Love is the desire to impart holiness. Holiness
makes God’s character the standard for his creatures; but love,
desiring to impart the best good, does the same. All work of love
is work of holiness, and all work of holiness is work of love.
Conflict of attributes is impossible, because holiness always
includes love, and love always expresses holiness. They never need
reconciliation with each other.”

The general correctness of the foregoing statement is impaired by
the vagueness of its conception of holiness. The Scriptures do not
regard holiness as including love, or make all the acts of
holiness to be acts of love. Self-affirmation does not include
self-impartation, and sin necessitates an exercise of holiness
which is not also an exercise of love. But for the Cross, and
God’s suffering for sin of which the Cross is the expression,
there would be conflict between holiness and love. The wisdom of
God is most shown, not in reconciling man and God, but in
reconciling the holy God with the loving God.

1. Holiness the fundamental attribute in God.

That holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, is evident:

(_a_) From Scripture,—in which God’s holiness is not only most constantly
and powerfully impressed upon the attention of man, but is declared to be
the chief subject of rejoicing and adoration in heaven.

It is God’s attribute of holiness that first and most prominently
presents itself to the mind of the sinner, and conscience only
follows the method of Scripture: _1 Pet. 1:16—_“Ye shall be holy;
for I am holy”; _Heb. 12:14—_“the sanctification without which no
man shall see the lord”_;_ _cf._ _Luke 5:8—_“Depart from me; for I
am a sinful man, O Lord.” Yet this constant insistence upon
holiness cannot be due simply to man’s present state of sin, for
in heaven, where there is no sin, there is the same reiteration:
_Is. 6:3—_“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”; _Rev.
4:8—_“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty.” Of no other
attribute is it said that God’s throne rests upon it: _Ps.
97:2—_“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his
throne”; _99:4, 5, 9—_“The king’s strength also loveth justice....
Exalt ye Jehovah our God.... holy is he.” We would substitute the
word holiness for the word love in the statement of Newman Smyth,
Christian Ethics, 45—“We assume that love is lord in the divine
will, not that the will of God is sovereign over his love. God’s
omnipotence, as Dorner would say, exists for his love.”

(_b_) From our own moral constitution,—in which conscience asserts its
supremacy over every other impulse and affection of our nature. As we may
be kind, but must be righteous, so God, in whose image we are made, may be
merciful, but must be holy.

See Bishop Butler’s Sermons upon Human Nature, Bohn’s ed.,
385-414, showing “the supremacy of conscience in the moral
constitution of man.” We must be just, before we are generous. So
with God, justice must be done always; mercy is optional with him.
He was not under obligation to provide a redemption for sinners:
_2 Pet. 2:4—_“God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast
them down to hell.” Salvation is a matter of grace, not of debt.
Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 277-298—“The quality of justice is
necessary exaction; but ‘the quality of mercy is not
(con)strained’ ” [_cf._ Denham: “His mirth is forced and
strained”]. God can apply the salvation, after he has wrought it
out, to whomsoever he will: _Rom. 9:18—_“he hath mercy on whom he
will.” Young, Night-Thoughts, 4:233—“A God all mercy is a God
unjust.” Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it; else
it is none.” Martineau, Study, 2:100—“No one can be just without
subordinating Pity to the sense of Right.”

We may learn of God’s holiness _a priori_. Even the heathen could
say “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” or “pereat mundus.” But, for our
knowledge of God’s mercy, we are dependent upon special
revelation. Mercy, like omnipotence, may exist in God without
being exercised. Mercy is not grace but debt, if God owes the
exercise of it either to the sinner or to himself; _versus_ G. B.
Stevens, in New Eng., 1888:421-443. “But justice is an attribute
which not only _exists_ of necessity, but must be _exercised_ of
necessity; because not to exercise it would be injustice”; see
Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:218, 219, 389, 390; 2:402, and Sermons to
Nat. Man, 366. If it be said that, by parity of reasoning, for God
not to exercise mercy is to show himself unmerciful,—we reply that
this is not true so long as higher interests require that exercise
to be withheld. I am not unmerciful when I refuse to give the poor
the money needed to pay an honest debt; nor is the Governor
unmerciful when he refuses to pardon the condemned and unrepentant
criminal. Mercy has its conditions, as we proceed to show, and it
does not cease to _be_ when these conditions do not permit it to
_be exercised_. Not so with justice: justice must always be
exercised; when it ceases to _be exercised_, it also ceases to
_be_.

The story of the prodigal shows a love that ever reaches out after
the son in the far country, but which is ever conditioned by the
father’s holiness and restrained from acting until the son has
voluntarily forsaken his riotous living. A just father may banish
a corrupt son from the household, yet may love him so tenderly
that his banishment causes exquisite pain. E. G. Robinson: “God,
Christ and the Holy Spirit have a conscience, that is, they
distinguish between right and wrong.” E. H. Johnson, Syst.
Theology, 85, 86—“Holiness is primary as respects benevolence; for
(_a_) Holiness is itself moral excellence, while the moral
excellence of benevolence can be explained. (_b_) Holiness is an
attribute of being, while benevolence is an attribute of action;
but action presupposes and is controlled by being. (_c_)
Benevolence must take counsel of holiness, since for a being to
desire aught contrary to holiness would be to wish him harm, while
that which holiness leads God to seek, benevolence finds best for
the creature. (_d_) The Mosaic dispensation elaborately
symbolized, and the Christian dispensation makes provision to
meet, the requirements of holiness as supreme; _James
3:17_—‘_First pure, then_ [by consequence] _peaceable_.’ ”

We are “_to do justly_,” as well as “to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with” our God (_Micah 6:8_). Dr. Samuel Johnson: “It is
surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society
contains.” There is a sinful mercy. A School Commissioner finds it
terrible work to listen to the pleas of incompetent teachers
begging that they may not be dismissed, and he can nerve himself
for it only by remembering the children whose education may be
affected by his refusal to do justice. Love and pity are not the
whole of Christian duty, nor are they the ruling attributes of
God.

(_c_) From the actual dealings of God,—in which holiness conditions and
limits the exercise of other attributes. Thus, for example, in Christ’s
redeeming work, though love makes the atonement, it is violated holiness
that requires it; and in the eternal punishment of the wicked, the demand
of holiness for self-vindication overbears the pleading of love for the
sufferers.

Love cannot be the fundamental attribute of God, because love
always requires a norm or standard, and this norm or standard is
found only in holiness; _Phil. 1:9—_“And this I pray, that your
love may abound yet more in knowledge and all discernment”; see A.
H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405. That which conditions all
is highest of all. Holiness shows itself higher than love, in that
it conditions love. Hence God’s mercy does not consist in
outraging his own law of holiness, but in enduring the penal
affliction by which that law of holiness is satisfied. Conscience
in man is but the reflex of holiness in God. Conscience demands
either retribution or atonement. This demand Christ meets by his
substituted suffering. His sacrifice assuages the thirst of
conscience in man, as well as the demand of holiness in God: _John
6:55—_“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”
See Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 280, 291, 292; Dogmatic
Theology, 1:377, 378—“The sovereignty and freedom of God in
respect to justice relates not to the _abolition_, nor to the
_relaxation_, but to the _substitution_, of punishment. It does
not consist in any power to violate or waive legal claims. The
exercise of the other attributes of God is regulated and
conditioned by that of justice.... Where then is the mercy of God,
in case justice is strictly satisfied by a vicarious person? There
is mercy in _permitting_ another person to do for the sinner what
the sinner is bound to do for himself; and greater mercy in
_providing_ that person; and still greater mercy in _becoming_
that person.”

Enthusiasm, like fire, must not only burn, but must be controlled.
Man invented chimneys to keep in the heat but to let out the
smoke. We need the walls of discretion and self-control to guide
the flaming of our love. The holiness of God is the regulating
principle of his nature. The ocean of his mercy is bounded by the
shores of his justice. Even if holiness be God’s self-love, in the
sense of God’s self-respect or self-preservation, still this
self-love must condition love to creatures. Only as God maintains
himself in his holiness, can he have anything of worth to give;
love indeed is nothing but the self-communication of holiness. And
if we say, with J. M. Whiton, that self-affirmation in a universe
in which God is immanent is itself a form of self-impartation,
still this form of self-impartation must condition and limit that
other form of self-impartation which we call love to creatures.
See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137-155, 346-353;
Patton, art. on Retribution and the Divine Goodness, in Princeton
Rev., Jan. 1878:8-16; Owen, Dissertation on the Divine Justice, in
Works, 10: 483-624.

(_d_) From God’s eternal purpose of salvation,—in which justice and mercy
are reconciled only through the foreseen and predetermined sacrifice of
Christ. The declaration that Christ is “the Lamb ... slain from the
foundation of the world” implies the existence of a principle in the
divine nature which requires satisfaction, before God can enter upon the
work of redemption. That principle can be none other than holiness.

Since both mercy and justice are exercised toward sinners of the
human race, the otherwise inevitable antagonism between them is
removed only by the atoning death of the God-man. Their opposing
claims do not impair the divine blessedness, because the
reconciliation exists in the eternal counsels of God. This is
intimated in _Rev. 13:8—_“the Lamb that hath been slain from the
foundation of the world.” This same reconciliation is alluded to
in _Ps. 85:10—_“Mercy and truth are met together; Righteousness
and peace have kissed each other”; and in _Rom. 3:26—_“that he
might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in
Jesus.” The atonement, then, if man was to be saved, was
necessary, not primarily on man’s account, but on God’s account.
Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 279—The sacrifice of Christ was an
“atonement _ab intra_, a self-oblation on the part of Deity
himself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal
imperatives of the divine nature which without it must find their
satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor, or else be
outraged.” Thus God’s word of redemption, as well as his word of
creation, is forever “settled in heaven”_ (Ps. 119:89)_. Its
execution on the cross was “according to the pattern” on high. The
Mosaic sacrifice prefigured the sacrifice of Christ; but the
sacrifice of Christ was but the temporal disclosure of an eternal
fact in the nature of God. See Kreibig, Versöhnung, 155, 156.

God requires satisfaction because he is holiness, but he makes
satisfaction because he is love. The Judge himself, with all his
hatred of transgression, still loves the transgressor, and comes
down from the bench to take the criminal’s place and bear his
penalty. But this is an eternal provision and an eternal
sacrifice. _Heb. 9:14—_“the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.”
Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 215, 216—“Christ’s sacrifice was
offered through the Spirit. It was not wrung from a reluctant soul
through obedience to outward law; it came from the inner heart,
from the impulse of undying love. It was a completed offering
before Calvary began; it was seen by the Father before it was seen
by the world. It was finished in the Spirit, ere it began in the
flesh, finished in the hour when Christ exclaimed: ‘not as I will,
but as thou wilt’_ (Mat. 26:39)._”

Lang, Homer, 506—“Apollo is the bringer of pestilence and the
averter of pestilence, in accordance with the well-known rule that
the two opposite attributes should be combined in the same deity.”
Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “Neither angel, man nor world,
could stand or can stand one moment in God’s sight without
beholding the same in the face of a Mediator; and therefore before
him, with whom all things are present, the Lamb of God was slain
before all worlds; without which eternal counsel of his, it was
impossible for him to have descended to any work of creation.”
Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 819—“Creation is built
on redemption lines”—which is to say that incarnation and
atonement were included in God’s original design of the world.

2. The holiness of God the ground of moral obligation.

A. Erroneous Views. The ground of moral obligation is not

(_a_) In power,—whether of civil law (Hobbes, Gassendi), or of divine will
(Occam, Descartes). We are not bound to obey either of these, except upon
the ground that they are right. This theory assumes that nothing is good
or right in itself, and that morality is mere prudence.

_Civil law_: See Hobbes, Leviathan, part i, chap. 6 and 13; part
ii, chap. 30; Gassendi, Opera, 6:120. Upon this view, might makes
right; the laws of Nero are always binding; a man may break his
promise when civil law permits; there is no obligation to obey a
father, a civil governor, or God himself, when once it is certain
that the disobedience will be hidden, or when the offender is
willing to incur the punishment. Martineau, Seat of Authority,
67—“Mere magnitude of scale carries no moral quality; nor could a
whole population of devils by unanimous ballot confer
righteousness upon their will, or make it binding upon a single
Abdiel.” Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, xvii—“Justice, good, and
truth were still Divine if, by some demon’s will, Hatred and wrong
had been proclaimed Law through the world, and right misnamed.”

_Divine will_: See Occam, lib. 2, quæs. 19 (quoted in Porter,
Moral Science, 125); Descartes (referred to in Hickok, Moral
Science, 27, 28); Martineau, Types, 148—“Descartes held that the
will of God is not the revealer but the inventor of moral
distinctions. God could have made Euclid a farrago of lies, and
Satan a model of moral perfection.” Upon this view, right and
wrong are variable quantities. Duns Scotus held that God’s will
makes not only truth but right. God can make lying to be virtuous
and purity to be wrong. If Satan were God, we should be bound to
obey him. God is essentially indifferent to right and wrong, good
and evil. We reply that behind the divine will is the divine
nature, and that in the moral perfection of that nature lies the
only ground of moral obligation. God pours forth his love and
exerts his power in accordance with some determining principle in
his own nature. That principle is not happiness. Finney, Syst.
Theology, 936, 937—“Could God’s command make it obligatory upon us
to will evil to him? If not, then his will is not the ground of
moral obligation. The thing that is most valuable, namely, the
highest good of God and of the universe must be both the end and
the ground. It is the divine reason and not the divine will that
perceives and affirms the law of conduct. The divine will
publishes, but does not originate, the rule. God’s will could not
make vice to be virtuous.”

As between power or utility on the one hand, and right on the
other hand, we must regard right as the more fundamental. We do
not, however, as will be seen further on, place the ground of
moral obligation even in right, considered as an abstract
principle; but place it rather in the moral excellence of him who
is the personal Right and therefore the source of right. Character
obliges, and the master often bows in his heart to the servant,
when this latter is the nobler man.

(_b_) Nor in utility,—whether our own happiness or advantage present or
eternal (Paley), for supreme regard for our own interest is not virtuous;
or the greatest happiness or advantage to being in general (Edwards), for
we judge conduct to be useful because it is right, not right because it is
useful. This theory would compel us to believe that in eternity past God
was holy only because of the good he got from it,—that is, there was no
such thing as holiness in itself, and no such thing as moral character in
God.

_Our own happiness_: Paley, Mor. and Pol. Philos., book i, chap.
vii—“Virtue is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will
of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This unites
(_a_) and (_b_). John Stuart Mill and Dr. N. W. Taylor held that
our own happiness is the supreme end. These writers indeed regard
the highest happiness as attained only by living for others
(Mill’s altruism), but they can assign no reason why one who knows
no other happiness than the pleasures of sense should not adopt
the maxim of Epicurus, who, according to Lucretius, taught that
“ducit quemque voluptas.” This theory renders virtue impossible;
for a virtue which is mere regard to our own interest is not
virtue but prudence. “We have a sense of right and wrong
independently of all considerations of happiness or its loss.”
James Mill held that the utility is not the criterion of the
morality but itself constitutes the morality. G. B. Foster well
replies that virtue is not mere egoistic sagacity, and the moral
act is not simply a clever business enterprise. All languages
distinguish between virtue and prudence. To say that the virtues
are great utilities is to confound the effect with the cause.
Carlyle says that a man can do without happiness. Browning, Red
Cotton Nightcap Country: “Thick heads ought to recognize The
devil, that old stager, at his trick Of general utility, who leads
Downward perhaps, but fiddles all the way.” This is the morality
of Mother Goose: “He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And
said, ‘What a good boy am I!’ ”

E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 160—“Utility
has nothing ultimate in itself, and therefore can furnish no
ground of obligation. Utility is mere fitness of one thing to
minister to something else.” To say that things are right because
they are useful, is like saying that things are beautiful because
they are pleasing. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:170, 511,
556—“The moment the appetites pass into the self-conscious state,
and become ends instead of impulses, they draw to themselves terms
of censure.... So intellectual conscientiousness, or strict
submission of the mind to evidence, has its inspiration in pure
love of truth, and would not survive an hour if entrusted to the
keeping either of providence or of social affection.... Instincts,
which provide for they know not what, are proof that _want_ is the
original impulse to action, instead of pleasure being the end.” On
the happiness theory, appeals to self-interest on behalf of
religion ought to be effective,—as a matter of fact few are moved
by them.

Dewey, Psychology, 300, 362—“Emotion turned inward eats up itself.
Live on feelings rather than on the things to which feelings
belong, and you defeat your own end, exhaust your power of
feeling, commit emotional suicide. Hence arise cynicism, the _nil
admirari_ spirit, restless searching for the latest sensation. The
only remedy is to get outside of self, to devote self to some
worthy object, not for feeling’s sake but for the sake of the
object.... We do not desire an object because it gives us
pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because it satisfies the
impulse which, in connection with the idea of the object,
constitutes the desire.... Pleasure is the accompaniment of the
activity or development of the _self_.”

Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 150—“It is right to aim at
happiness. Happiness is an end. Utilitarianism errs in making
happiness the only and the highest end. It exalts a state of
feeling into the supremely desirable thing. Intuitionalism gives
the same place to a state of will. The truth includes both. The
true end is the highest development of being, self and others, the
realization of the divine idea, God in man.” Bowne, Principles of
Ethics, 96—“The standard of appeal is not the actual happiness of
the actual man but the normal happiness of the normal man....
Happiness must have a law. But then also the law must lead to
happiness.... The true ethical aim is to realize the good. But
then the contents of this good have to be determined in accordance
with an inborn ideal of human worth and dignity.... Not all good,
but the true good, not the things which please, but the things
which should please, are to be the aim of action.”

Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 223—“The Utilitarian is really asking
about the wisest method of embodying the ideal. He belongs to that
second stage in which the moral artist considers through what
material and in what form and color he may best realize his
thought. What the ideal is, and why it is the highest, he does not
tell us. Morality begins, not in feeling, but in reason. And
reason is impersonal. It discerns the moral equality of
personalities.” Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 20—Job speaks out
his character like one of Robert Browning’s heroes. He teaches
that “there is a service of God which is not work for reward: it
is a heart-loyalty, a hunger after God’s presence, which survives
loss and chastisement; which in spite of contradictory seeming
cleaves to what is godlike as the needle seeks the pole; and which
reaches up out of the darkness and hardness of this life into the
light and love beyond.”

_Greatest good of being_: Not only Edwards, but Priestley,
Bentham, Dwight, Finney, Hopkins, Fairchild, hold this view. See
Edwards, Works, 2:261-304—“Virtue is benevolence toward being in
general”; Dwight, Theology, 3:150-162—“Utility the foundation of
Virtue”; Hopkins, Law of Love, 7-28; Fairchild, Moral Philosophy;
Finney, Syst. Theol., 42-135. This theory regards good as a mere
state of the sensibility, instead of consisting in purity of
being. It forgets that in eternity past “love for being in
general” = simply God’s self-love, or God’s regard for his own
happiness. This implies that God is holy only for a purpose; he is
bound to be unholy, if greater good would result; that is,
holiness has no independent existence in his nature. We grant that
a thing is often known to be right by the fact that it is useful;
but this is very different from saying that its usefulness makes
it right. “Utility is only the setting of the diamond, which
_marks_, but does not _make_, its value.” “If utility be a
criterion of rectitude, it is only because it is a revelation of
the divine nature.” See British Quarterly, July, 1877, on Matthew
Arnold and Bishop Butler. Bp. Butler, Nature of Virtue, in Works,
Bohn’s ed., 334—“Benevolence is the true self-love.” Love and
holiness are obligatory in themselves, and not because they
promote the general good. Cicero well said that they who
confounded the _honestum_ with the _utile_ deserved to be banished
from society. See criticism on Porter’s Moral Science, in Lutheran
Quarterly, Apr. 1885:325-331; also F. L. Patton, on Metaphysics of
Oughtness, in Presb. Rev., 1886:127-150.

Encyc. Britannica, 7:690, on Jonathan Edwards—“Being in general,
being without any qualities, is too abstract a thing to be the
primary cause of love. The feeling which Edwards refers to is not
love, but awe or reverence, and moreover necessarily a blind awe.
Properly stated therefore, true virtue, according to Edwards,
would consist in a blind awe of being in general,—only this would
be inconsistent with his definition of virtue as existing in God.
In reality, as he makes virtue merely the second object of love,
his theory becomes identical with that utilitarian theory with
which the names of Hume, Bentham and Mill are associated.” Hodge,
Essays, 275—“If obligation is due primarily to being in general,
then there is no more virtue in loving God—willing his good—than
there is in loving Satan. But love to Christ differs in its nature
from benevolence toward the devil.” Plainly virtue consists, not
in love for mere being, but in love for good being, or in other
words, in love for the holy God. Not the greatest good of being,
but the holiness of God, is the ground of moral obligation.

Dr. E. A. Park interprets the Edwardian theory as holding that
virtue is love to all beings according to their value, love of the
greater therefore more than the less, “love to particular beings
in a proportion compounded of the degree of being and the degree
of virtue or benevolence to being which they have.” Love is
choice. Happiness, says Park, is not the sole good, much less the
happiness of creatures. The _greatest_ good is holiness, though
the _last_ good aimed at is happiness. Holiness is disinterested
love—free choice of the general above the private good. But we
reply that this gives us no reason or standard for virtue. It does
not tell us what is good nor why we should choose it. Martineau,
Types, 2:70, 77, 471, 484—“Why should I promote the general
well-being? Why should I sacrifice myself for others? Only because
this is godlike. It Would never have been prudent to do right, had
it not been something infinitely more.... It is not fitness that
makes an act moral, but it is its morality that makes it fit.”

Herbert Spencer must be classed as a utilitarian. He says that
justice requires that “every man be free to do as he wills
provided he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.”
But, since this would permit injury to another by one willing to
submit to injury in return, Mr. Spencer limits the freedom to
“such actions as subserve life.” This is practically equivalent to
saying that the greatest sum of happiness is the ultimate end. On
Jonathan Edwards, see Robert Hall, Works, 1:43 sq.; Alexander,
Moral Science, 194-198; Bib. Repertory (Princeton Review), 25:22;
Bib. Sacra, 9:176, 197; 10:403, 705.

(_c_) Nor in the nature of things (Price),—whether by this we mean their
fitness (Clarke), truth (Wollaston), order (Jouffroy), relations
(Wayland), worthiness (Hickok), sympathy (Adam Smith), or abstract right
(Haven and Alexander); for this nature of things is not ultimate, but has
its ground in the nature of God. We are bound to worship the highest; if
anything exists beyond and above God, we are bound to worship that,—that
indeed is God.

See Wayland, Moral Science, 33-48; Hickok, Moral Science, 27-34;
Haven, Moral Philosophy, 27-50; Alexander, Moral Science, 159-198.
In opposition to all the forms of this theory, we urge that
nothing exists independently of or above God. “If the ground of
morals exist independently of God, either it has ultimately no
authority, or it usurps the throne of the Almighty. Any rational
being who kept the law would be perfect without God, and the moral
centre of all intelligences would be outside of God” (Talbot). God
is not a Jupiter controlled by Fate. He is subject to no law but
the law of his own nature. _Noblesse oblige_,—character
rules,—purity is the highest. And therefore to holiness all
creatures, voluntarily or involuntarily, are constrained to bow.
Hopkins, Law of Love, 77—“Right and wrong have nothing to do with
things, but only with actions; nothing to do with any nature of
things existing necessarily, but only with the nature of persons.”
Another has said: “The idea of right cannot be original, since
right means conformity to some standard or rule.” This standard or
rule is not an abstraction, but an existing being—the infinitely
perfect God.

Faber: “For right is right, since God is God; And right the day
must win; To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin.”
Tennyson: “And because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom
in the scorn of consequence.” Right is right, and I should will
the right, not because God _wills_ it, but because God _is_ it. E.
G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 178-180—“Utility
and relations simply reveal the constitution of things and so
represent God. Moral law was not made for purposes of utility, nor
do relations constitute the reason for obligation. They only show
what the nature of God is who made the universe and revealed
himself in it. In his nature is found the _reason_ for morality.”
S. S. Times, Oct. 17, 1891—“Only that is level which conforms to
the curvature of the earth’s surface. A straight line tangent to
the earth’s curve would at its ends be much further from the
earth’s centre than at its middle. Now equity means levelness. The
standard of equity is not an impersonal thing, a ’nature of
things’ outside of God. Equity or righteousness is no more to be
conceived independently of the divine centre of the moral world
than is levelness comprehensible apart from the earth’s centre.”

Since God finds the rule and limitation of his action solely in
his own being, and his love is conditioned by his holiness, we
must differ from such views as that of Moxom: “Whether we define
God’s nature as perfect holiness or perfect love is immaterial,
since his nature is manifested only through his action, that is,
through his relation to other beings. Most of our reasoning on the
divine standard of righteousness, or the ultimate ground of moral
obligation, is reasoning in a circle, since we must always go back
to God for the principle of his action; which principle we can
know only by means of his action. God, the perfectly righteous
Being, is the ideal standard of human righteousness. Righteousness
in man therefore is conformity to the nature of God. God, in
agreement with his perfect nature, always wills the perfectly good
toward man. His righteousness is an expression of his love; his
love is a manifestation of his righteousness.”

So Newman Smyth: “Righteousness is the eternal genuineness of the
divine love. It is not therefore an independent excellence, to be
contrasted with, or even put in opposition to, benevolence; it is
an essential part of love.” In reply to which we urge as before
that that which is the object of love, that which limits and
conditions love, that which furnishes the norm and reason for
love, cannot itself be love, nor hold merely equal rank with love.
A double standard is as irrational in ethics as in commerce, and
it leads in ethics to the same debasement of the higher values,
and the same unsettling of relations, as has resulted in our
currency from the attempt to make silver regulate gold at the same
time that gold regulates silver.

B. The Scriptural View.—According to the Scriptures, the ground of moral
obligation is the holiness of God, or the moral perfection of the divine
nature, conformity to which is the law of our moral being (Robinson,
Chalmers, Calderwood, Gregory, Wuttke). We show this:

(_a_) From the commands: “Ye shall be holy,” where the ground of
obligation assigned is simply and only: “for I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16); and
“Ye therefore shall be perfect,” where the standard laid down is: “as your
heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5:48). Here we have an ultimate reason
and ground for being and doing right, namely, that God is right, or, in
other words, that holiness is his nature.

(_b_) From the nature of the love in which the whole law is summed up
(Mat. 22:37—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; Rom. 13:10—“love therefore
is the fulfilment of the law”). This love is not regard for abstract right
or for the happiness of being, much less for one’s own interest, but it is
regard for God as the fountain and standard of moral excellence, or in
other words, love for God as holy. Hence this love is the principle and
source of holiness in man.

(_c_) From the example of Christ, whose life was essentially an exhibition
of supreme regard for God, and of supreme devotion to his holy will. As
Christ saw nothing good but what was in God (Mark 10:18—“none is good save
one, even God”), and did only what he saw the Father do (John 5:19; see
also 30—“I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”), so
for us, to be like God is the sum of all duty, and God’s infinite moral
excellence is the supreme reason why we should be like him.

For statements of the correct view of the ground of moral
obligation, see E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of
Morality, 138-180; Chalmers, Moral Philosophy, 412-420;
Calderwood, Moral Philosophy; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 112-122;
Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:80-107; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena,
in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274—“The ground of all moral law is
the nature of God, or the ethical nature of God in relation to the
like nature in man, or the imperativeness of the divine nature.”
Plato: “The divine will is the fountain of all efficiency; the
divine reason is the fountain, of all law; the divine nature is
the fountain of all virtue.” If it be said that God is love as
well as holiness, we ask: Love to what? And the only answer is:
Love to the right, or to holiness. To ask why right is a good, is
no more sensible than to ask why happiness is a good. There must
be something ultimate. Schiller said there are people who want to
know why ten is not twelve. We cannot study character apart from
conduct, nor conduct apart from character. But this does not
prevent us from recognizing that character is the fundamental
thing and that conduct is only the expression of it.

The moral perfection of the divine nature includes truth and love,
but since it is holiness that conditions the exercise of every
other attribute, we must conclude that holiness is the ground of
moral obligation. Infinity also unites with holiness to make it
the perfect ground, but since the determining element is holiness,
we call this, and not infinity, the ground of obligation. J. H.
Harris, Baccalaureate Sermon, Bucknell University, 1890—“As
holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, so holiness is the
supreme good of man. Aristotle perceived this when he declared the
chief good of man to be energizing according to virtue.
Christianity supplies the Holy Spirit and makes this energizing
possible.” Holiness is the goal of man’s spiritual career; see _1
Thess. 3:13—_“to the end he may establish your hearts unblamable
in holiness before our God and Father.”

Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends,
272—“Holiness and happiness are two notions of one thing....
Unless therefore the heart of a created being is at one with the
heart of God, it cannot but be miserable.” It is more true to say
that holiness and happiness are, as cause and effect, inseparably
bound together. Martineau, Types, 1:xvi; 2:70-77—“Two classes of
facts it is indispensable for us to know: what are the springs of
voluntary conduct, and what are its effects”; Study, 1:26—“Ethics
must either perfect themselves in Religion, or disintegrate
themselves into Hedonism.” William Law remarks: “Ethics are not
external but internal. The essence of a moral act does not lie in
its result, but in the motive from which it springs. And that
again is good or bad, according as it conforms to the character of
God.” For further discussion of the subject see our chapter on The
Law of God. See also Thornwell, Theology, 1:363-373; Hinton, Art
of Thinking, 47-62; Goldwin Smith, in Contemporary Review, March,
1882, and Jan. 1884; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 195-231,
esp. 223.

Chapter II. Doctrine Of The Trinity.

In the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions which
are represented to us under the figure of persons, and these three are
equal. This tripersonality of the Godhead is exclusively a truth of
revelation. It is clearly, though not formally, made known in the New
Testament, and intimations of it may be found in the Old.

The doctrine of the Trinity may be expressed in the six following
statements: 1. In Scripture there are three who are recognized as God. 2.
These three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to
conceive of them as distinct persons. 3. This tripersonality of the divine
nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal.
4. This tripersonality is not tritheism; for while there are three
persons, there is but one essence. 5. The three persons, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, are equal. 6. Inscrutable yet not self-contradictory, this
doctrine furnishes the key to all other doctrines.—These statements we
proceed now to prove and to elucidate.

Reason shows us the Unity of God; only revelation shows us the
Trinity of God, thus filling out the indefinite outlines of this
Unity and vivifying it. The term “Trinity” is not found in
Scripture, although the conception it expresses is Scriptural. The
invention of the term is ascribed to Tertullian. The Montanists
first defined the personality of the Spirit, and first formulated
the doctrine of the Trinity. The term “Trinity” is not a
metaphysical one. It is only a designation of four facts: (1) the
Father is God; (2) the Son is God; (3) the Spirit is God; (4)
there is but one God.

Park: “The doctrine of the Trinity does not on the one hand assert
that three persons are united in one person, or three beings in
one being, or three Gods in one God (tritheism); nor on the other
hand that God merely manifests himself in three different ways
(modal trinity, or trinity of manifestations); but rather that
there are three eternal distinctions in the substance of God.”
Smyth, preface to Edwards, Observations on the Trinity: “The
church doctrine of the Trinity affirms that there are in the
Godhead three distinct hypostases or subsistences—the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit—each possessing one and the same divine
nature, though in a different manner. The essential points are (1)
the unity of essence; (2) the reality of immanent or ontological
distinctions.” See Park on Edwards’s View of the Trinity, in Bib.
Sac., April, 1881:333. Princeton Essays, 1:28—“There is one God;
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are this one God; there is such a
distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit as to lay a
sufficient ground for the reciprocal use of the personal
pronouns.” Joseph Cook: “(1) The Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost are one God; (2) each has a peculiarity incommunicable to
the others; (3) neither is God without the others; (4) each, with
the others, is God.”

We regard the doctrine of the Trinity as implicitly held by the
apostles and as involved in the New Testament declarations with
regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while we concede that the
doctrine had not by the New Testament writers been formulated.
They held it, as it were in solution; only time, reflection, and
the shock of controversy and opposition, caused it to crystalize
into definite and dogmatic form. Chadwick, Old and New
Unitarianism, 59, 60, claims that the Jewish origin of
Christianity shows that the Jewish Messiah could not originally
have been conceived of as divine. If Jesus had claimed this, he
would not have been taken before Pilate,—the Jews would have
dispatched him. The doctrine of the Trinity, says Chadwick, was
not developed until the Council of Nice, 325. E. G. Robinson:
“There was no doctrine of the Trinity in the Patristic period, as
there was no doctrine of the Atonement before Anselm.” The
Outlook, Notes and Queries, March 30, 1901—“The doctrine of the
Trinity cannot be said to have taken final shape before the
appearance of the so-called Athanasian Creed in the 8th or 9th
century. The Nicene Creed, formulated in the 4th century, is
termed by Dr. Schaff, from the orthodox point of view,
‘semi-trinitarian.’ The earliest time known at which Jesus was
deified was, after the New Testament writers, in the letters of
Ignatius, at the beginning of the second century.”

Gore, Incarnation, 179—“The doctrine of the Trinity is not so much
heard, as overheard, in the statements of Scripture.” George P.
Fisher quotes some able and pious friend of his as saying: “What
meets us in the New Testament is the _disjecta membra_ of the
Trinity.” G. B. Foster: “The doctrine of the Trinity is the
Christian attempt to make intelligible the personality of God
without dependence upon the world.” Charles Kingsley said that,
whether the doctrine of the Trinity is in the Bible or no, it
ought to be there, because our spiritual nature cries out for it.
Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:250—“Though the doctrine of the
Trinity is not discoverable by human reason, it is susceptible of
a rational defense, when revealed.” On New England Trinitarianism,
see New World, June, 1896:272-295—art. by Levi L. Paine. He says
that the last phase of it is represented by Phillips Brooks, James
M. Whiton and George A. Gordon. These hold to the essential
divineness of humanity and preëminently of Christ, the unique
representative of mankind, who was, in this sense, a true
incarnation of Deity. See also, L. L. Paine, Evolution of
Trinitarianism, 141, 287.

Neander declared that the Trinity is not a fundamental doctrine of
Christianity. He was speaking however of the speculative,
metaphysical form which the doctrine has assumed in theology. But
he speaks very differently of the devotional and practical form in
which the Scriptures present it, as in the baptismal formula and
in the apostolic benediction. In regard to this he says: “We
recognize therein the essential contents of Christianity summed up
in brief.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 10, 11, 55, 91, 92—“God
transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God immanent, the Son.
This one nature belongs equally to God, to Christ, and to mankind,
and in this fact is grounded the immutableness of moral
distinctions and the possibility of moral progress.... The
immanent life of the universe is one with the transcendent Power;
the filial stream is one with its paternal Fount. To Christ
supremely belongs the name of Son, which includes all that life
that is begotten of God. In Christ the before unconscious Sonship
of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. The Father is
the Life transcendent, above all; the Son is Life immanent,
through all; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized, in all.
In Christ we have collectivism; in the Holy Spirit we have
individualism; as Bunsen says: ‘The chief power in the world is
personality.’ ”

For treatment of the whole doctrine, see Dorner, System of
Doctrine, 1:344-465; Twesten, Dogmatik, and translation in Bib.
Sac., 3:502; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:145-199; Thomasius, Christi
Person und Werk, 1:57-135; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:203-229; Shedd,
Dogm. Theol., 1:248-333, and History of Doctrine, 1:246-385;
Farrar, Science and Theology, 138; Schaff, Nicene Doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:209. For the Unitarian view,
see Norton, Statement of Reasons, and J. F. Clarke, Truths and
Errors of Orthodoxy.

I. In Scriptures there are Three who are recognized as God.

1. Proofs from the New Testament.

A. The Father is recognized as God.

The Father is recognized as God,—and that in so great a number of passages
(such as John 6:27—“him the Father, even God, hath sealed,” and 1 Pet.
1:2—“foreknowledge of God the Father”) that we need not delay to adduce
extended proof.

B. Jesus Christ is recognized as God.

(_a_) He is expressly called God.

In John 1:1—Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος—the absence of the article shows Θεός to be
the predicate (_cf._ 4:24—πνεῦμα ὁ Θεός). This predicate precedes the verb
by way of emphasis, to indicate progress in the thought = “the Logos was
not only with God, but was God” (see Meyer and Luthardt, Comm. _in loco_).
“Only ὁ λόγος can be the subject, for in the whole Introduction the
question is, not who God is, but who the Logos is” (Godet).

Westcott in Bible Commentary, _in loco_—“The predicate stands
emphatically first. It is necessarily without the article,
inasmuch as it describes the nature of the Word and does not
identify his person. It would be pure Sabellianism to say: ‘The
Word was ὁ Θεός.’ Thus in verse 1 we have set forth the Word in
his absolute eternal being, (_a_) his existence: beyond time;
(_b_) his personal existence: in active communion with God; (_c_)
his nature: God in essence.” Marcus Dods, in Expositor’s Greek
Testament, _in loco_: “The Word is distinguishable from God, yet
Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος—the word was God, of divine nature; not ‘a God,’
which to a Jewish ear would have been abominable, nor yet
identical with all that can be called God, for then the article
would have been inserted (_cf._ 1 John 3:4).”

In John 1:18, μονογενὴς θεός—“the only begotten God”—must be regarded as
the correct reading, and as a plain ascription of absolute Deity to
Christ. He is not simply the only revealer of God, but he is himself God
revealed.

_John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten
God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” In
this passage, although Tischendorf (8th ed.) has μονογενὴς ὑιός,
Westcott and Hort (with א*BC*L Pesh. Syr.) read μονογενὴς Θεός and
the Rev. Vers. puts “_the only begotten God_” in the margin,
though it retains “_the only begotten Son_” in the text. Harnack
says the reading μονογενὴς θεός is “established beyond
contradiction”; see Westcott, Bib. Com. on John, pages 32, 33.
Here then we have a new and unmistakable assertion of the deity of
Christ. Meyer says that the apostles actually call Christ God only
in _John 1:1_ and _20:28_, and that Paul never so recognizes him.
But Meyer is able to maintain his position only by calling the
doxologies to Christ, in _2 Tim. 4:18_, _Heb. 13:21_ and _2 Pet.
3:18_, post-apostolic. See Thayer, N. T. Lexicon, on Θεός, and on
μονογενής.

In John 20:28, the address of Thomas Ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου—“My Lord
and my God”—since it was unrebuked by Christ, is equivalent to an
assertion on his own part of his claim to Deity.

_John 20:28—_“Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my
God.” This address cannot be interpreted as a sudden appeal to God
in surprise and admiration, without charging the apostle with
profanity. Nor can it be considered a mere exhibition of
overwrought enthusiasm, since it was accepted by Christ. Contrast
the conduct of Paul and Barnabas when the heathen at Lystra were
bringing sacrifice to them as Jupiter and Mercury (_Acts
14:11-18_). The words of Thomas, as addressed directly to Christ
and as accepted by Christ, can be regarded only as a just
acknowledgment on the part of Thomas that Christ was his Lord and
his God. Alford, Commentary, _in loco_: “The Socinian view that
these words are merely an exclamation is refuted (1) by the fact
that no such exclamations were in use among the Jews; (2) by the
εἶπεν αὐτῷ; (3) by the impossibility of referring the ὁ κύριός μου
to another than Jesus: see _verse 13_; (4) by the N. T. usage of
expressing the vocative by the nominative with an article; (5) by
the psychological absurdity of such a supposition: that one just
convinced of the presence of him whom he dearly loved should,
instead of addressing him, break out into an irrelevant cry; (6)
by the further absurdity of supposing that, if such were the case,
the Apostle John, who of all the sacred writers most constantly
keeps in mind the object for which he is writing, should have
recorded anything so beside that object; (7) by the intimate
conjunction of πεπίστευκας.” _Cf._ _Mat. 5:34—_“Swear not ... by
the heaven”—swearing by Jehovah is not mentioned, because no Jew
did so swear. This exclamation of Thomas, the greatest doubter
among the twelve, is the natural conclusion of John’s gospel. The
thesis “the Word was God”_ (John 1:1)_ has now become part of the
life and consciousness of the apostles. _Chapter 21_ is only an
Epilogue, or Appendix, written later by John, to correct the error
that he was not to die; see Westcott, Bible Com., _in loco_. The
Deity of Christ is the subject of the apostle who best understood
his Master. Lyman Beecher: “Jesus Christ is the acting Deity of
the universe.”

In Rom. 9:5, the clause ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητός cannot be
translated “blessed be the God over all,” for ὢν is superfluous if the
clause is a doxology; “εὐλογητός precedes the name of God in a doxology,
but follows it, as here, in a description” (Hovey). The clause can
therefore justly be interpreted only as a description of the higher nature
of the Christ who had just been said, τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, or according to his
lower nature, to have had his origin from Israel (see Tholuck, Com. _in
loco_).

Sanday, Com. on _Rom. 9:5_—“The words would naturally refer to
Christ, unless ‘_God_’ is so definitely a proper name that it
would imply a contrast in itself. We have seen that this is not
so.” Hence Sanday translates: “_of whom is the Christ as
concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever_”. See
President T. Dwight, in Jour. Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:22-55; _per
contra_, Ezra Abbot, in the same journal, 1881:1-19, and Denney,
in Expositor’s Gk. Test., _in loco_.

In Titus 2:13, ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν
Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ we regard (with Ellicott) as “a direct, definite, and even
studied declaration of Christ’s divinity” = “the ... appearing of the
glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (so English Revised
Version). Ἐπιφάνεια is a term applied specially to the Son and never to
the Father, and μεγάλου is uncalled for if used of the Father, but
peculiarly appropriate if used of Christ. Upon the same principles we must
interpret the similar text 2 Pet. 1:1 (see Huther, in Meyer’s Com.: “The
close juxtaposition indicates the author’s certainty of the oneness of God
and Jesus Christ”).

_Titus 2:13—_“looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the
glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ”—so the English
Revised Version. The American Revisers however translate: “the
glory of the great God and Savior”; and Westcott and Hort bracket
the word ἡμῶν. These considerations somewhat lessen the cogency of
this passage as a proof-text, yet upon the whole the balance of
argument seems to us still to incline in favor of Ellicott’s
interpretation as given above.

In Heb. 1:8, πρὸς δὲ τὸν υἱόν; ὁ θρόνος σου, ὁ Θεὸς, εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα is
quoted as an address to Christ, and verse 10 which follows—“Thou, Lord, in
the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth”—by applying to Christ
an Old Testament ascription to Jehovah, shows that ὁ Θεός, in verse 8, is
used in the sense of absolute Godhead.

It is sometimes objected that the ascription of the name God to
Christ proves nothing as to his absolute deity, since angels and
even human judges are called gods, as representing God’s authority
and executing his will. But we reply that, while it is true that
the name is sometimes so applied, it is always with adjuncts and
in connections which leave no doubt of its figurative and
secondary meaning. When, however, the name is applied to Christ,
it is, on the contrary, with adjuncts and in connections which
leave no doubt that it signifies absolute Godhead. See _Ex.
4:16—_“thou shalt be to him as God”; _7:1—_“See, I have made thee
as God to Pharaoh”; _22:28—_“Thou shalt not revile God, [marg.,
_the judges_], nor curse a ruler of thy people”; _Ps. 82:1—_“God
standeth in the congregation of God; he judgeth among the gods”
[among the mighty]; _6—_“I said, Ye are gods, And all of you sons
of the Most High”; _7—_“Nevertheless ye shall die like men, And
fall like one of the princes.” _Cf._ _John 10:34-36—_“If he called
them gods, unto whom the word of God came” (who were God’s
commissioned and appointed representatives), how much more proper
for him who is one with the Father to call himself God.

As in _Ps. 82:7_ those who had been called gods are represented as
dying, so in _Ps. 97:7—_“Worship him, all ye gods”—they are bidden
to fall down before Jehovah. Ann. Par. Bible: “Although the
deities of the heathen have no positive existence, they are often
described in Scripture as if they had, and are represented as
bowing down before the majesty of Jehovah.” This verse is quoted
in _Heb. 1:6—_“let all the angels of God worship him”—_i. e._,
Christ. Here Christ is identified with Jehovah. The quotation is
made from the Septuagint, which has “_angels_” for “_gods_.” “Its
use here is in accordance with the spirit of the Hebrew word,
which includes all that human error might regard as objects of
worship.” Those who are figuratively and rhetorically called
“_gods_” are bidden to fall down in worship before him who is the
true God, Jesus Christ. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:314;
Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 10.

In 1 John 5:20—ἐσμεν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. οὗτος
ἐστιν ὁ ἀληθινὸς Θεός—“it would be a flat repetition, after the Father had
been twice called ὁ ἀληθινός, to say now again: ‘this is ὁ ἀληθενὸς Θεός.’
Our being in God has its basis in Christ his Son, and this also makes it
more natural that οὖτος should be referred to υἱῷ. But ought not ὁ
ἀληθενός then to be without the article (as in John 1:1—Θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος)?
No, for it is John’s purpose in 1 John 5:20 to say, not _what_ Christ is,
but _who_ he is. In declaring _what_ one is, the predicate must have no
article; in declaring _who_ one is, the predicate must have the article.
St. John here says that this Son, on whom our being in the true God rests,
is this true God himself” (see Ebrard, Com. _in loco_).

Other passages might be here adduced, as _Col. 2:9—_“in him
dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”; _Phil
2:6—_“existing in the form of God”; but we prefer to consider
these under other heads as indirectly proving Christ’s divinity.
Still other passages once relied upon as direct statements of the
doctrine must be given up for textual reasons. Such are _Acts
20:28_, where the correct reading is in all probability not
ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, but ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Κυρίου (so ACDE Tregelles
and Tischendorf; B and א, however, have τοῦ Θεοῦ. The Rev. Vers.
continues to read “_church of God_”; Amer. Revisers, however, read
“church of the Lord”—see Ezra Abbot’s investigation in Bib. Sac.,
1876: 313-352); and _1 Tim. 3:16_, where ὅς is unquestionably to
be substituted for Θεός, though even here ἐφανερώθη intimates
preëxistence.

Rev. George E. Ellis, D. D., before the Unitarian Club, Boston,
November, 1882—“Fifty years of study, thought and reading given
largely to the Bible and to the literature which peculiarly
relates to it, have brought me to this conclusion, that the
book—taken with the especial divine quality and character claimed
for it, and so extensively assigned to it, as inspired and
infallible as a whole, and in all its contents—is an Orthodox
book. It yields what is called the Orthodox creed. The vast
majority of its readers, following its letter, its obvious sense,
its natural meaning, and yielding to the impression which some of
its emphatic texts make upon them, find in it Orthodoxy. Only that
kind of ingenious, special, discriminative, and in candor I must
add, forced treatment, which it receives from us liberals can make
the book teach anything but Orthodoxy. The evangelical sects, so
called, are clearly right in maintaining that their view of
Scripture and of its doctrines draws a deep and wide division of
creed between them and ourselves. In that earnest controversy by
pamphlet warfare between Drs. Channing and Ware on the one side,
and Drs. Worcester and Woods and Professor Stuart on the other—a
controversy which wrought up the people of our community sixty
years ago more than did our recent political campaign—I am fully
convinced that the liberal contestants were worsted. Scripture
exegesis, logic and argument were clearly on the side of the
Orthodox contestants. And this was so, mainly because the liberal
party put themselves on the same plane with the Orthodox in their
way of regarding and dealing with Scripture texts in their bearing
upon the controversy. Liberalism cannot vanquish Orthodoxy, if it
yields to the latter in its own way of regarding and treating the
whole Bible. Martin Luther said that the Papists burned the Bible
because it was not on their side. Now I am not about to attack the
Bible because it is not on my side; but I am about to object as
emphatically as I can against a character and quality assigned to
the Bible, which it does not claim for itself, which cannot be
certified for it: and the origin and growth and intensity of the
fond and superstitious influences resulting in that view we can
trace distinctly to agencies accounting for, but not warranting,
the current belief. Orthodoxy cannot readjust its creeds till it
readjusts its estimate of the Scriptures. The only relief which
one who professes the Orthodox creed can find is either by forcing
his ingenuity into the proof-texts or indulging his liberty
outside of them.”

With this confession of a noted Unitarian it is interesting to
compare the opinion of the so-called Trinitarian, Dr. Lyman
Abbott, who says that the New Testament nowhere calls Christ God,
but everywhere calls him man, as in _1 Tim. 2:5—_“for there is one
God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ
Jesus.” On this passage Prof. L. L. Paine remarks in the New
World, Dec. 1894—“That Paul ever confounded Christ with God
himself, or regarded him as in any way the Supreme Divinity, is a
position invalidated not only by direct statements, but also by
the whole drift of his epistles.”

(_b_) Old Testament descriptions of God are applied to him.

This application to Christ of titles and names exclusively appropriated to
God is inexplicable, if Christ was not regarded as being himself God. The
peculiar awe with which the term “Jehovah” was set apart by a nation of
strenuous monotheists as the sacred and incommunicable name of the one
self-existent and covenant-keeping God forbids the belief that the
Scripture writers could have used it as the designation of a subordinate
and created being.

_Mat. 3:3—_“Make ye ready the way of the Lord”—is a quotation from
_Is. 40:3—_“Prepare ye ... the way of Jehovah.” _John
12:41—_“These things said Isaiah, because he saw his glory; and he
spake of him” [_i. e._, Christ]—refers to _Is. 6:1—_“In the year
that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne.” So in
_Eph. 4:7, 8—_“measure of the gift of Christ ... led captivity
captive”—is an application to Christ of what is said of Jehovah in
_Ps. 68:18_. In _1 Pet. 3:15_, moreover, we read, with all the
great uncials, several of the Fathers, and all the best versions:
“sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord”; here the apostle borrows
his language from _Is. 8:13_, where we read: “_Jehovah of hosts,
him shall ye sanctify_.” When we remember that, with the Jews,
God’s covenant-title was so sacred that for the Kethib (=
“written”) _Jehovah_ there was always substituted the Keri (=
“read”—imperative) _Adonai_, in order to avoid pronunciation of
the great Name, it seems the more remarkable that the Greek
equivalent of “Jehovah” should have been so constantly used of
Christ. _Cf._ _Rom. 10:9—_“confess ... Jesus as Lord”; _1 Cor.
12:3—_“no man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit.” We
must remember also the indignation of the Jews at Christ’s
assertion of his equality and oneness with the Father. Compare
Goethe’s, “Wer darf ihn nennen?” with Carlyle’s, “the awful
Unnameable of this Universe.” The Jews, it has been said, have
always vibrated between monotheism and moneytheism. Yet James, the
strongest of Hebrews, in his Epistle uses the word ’Lord’ freely
and alternately of God the Father and of Christ the Son. This
would have been impossible if James had not believed in the
community of essence between the Son and the Father.

It is interesting to note that 1 Maccabees does not once use the
word Θεός or κύριος, or any other direct designation of God unless
it be οὐρανός (_cf._ “swear ... by the heaven”_—Mat. 5:34_). So
the book of Esther contains no mention of the name of God, though
the apocryphal additions to Esther, which are found only in Greek,
contain the name of God in the first verse, and mention it in all
eight times. See Bissell, Apocrypha, in Lange’s Commentary;
Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 93; Max Müller on Semitic Monotheism,
in Chips from a German Workshop, 1:337.

(_c_) He possesses the attributes of God.

Among these are life, self-existence, immutability, truth, love, holiness,
eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence. All these attributes are
ascribed to Christ in connections which show that the terms are used in no
secondary sense, nor in any sense predicable of a creature.

_Life_: _John 1:4—_“In him was life”; _14:6—_“I am ... the life.”
_Self-existence_: _John 5:26—_“have life in himself”; _Heb.
7:16—_“power of an endless life.” _Immutability_: _Heb.
13:8—_“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and
forever.” _Truth_: _John 14:6—_“I am ... the truth”; _Rev.
3:7—_“he that is true.” _Love_: _1 John 3:16—_“Hereby know we
love” (τὴν ἀγάπην = the personal Love, as the personal Truth)
“_because he laid down his life for us_.” _Holiness_: _Luke
1:35—_“that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of
God”; _John 6:69—_“thou art the Holy One of God”; _Heb.
7:26—_“holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners.”

_Eternity_: _John 1:1—_“In the beginning was the Word.” Godet says
ἐν ἀρχῇ = not “in eternity,” but “in the beginning of the
creation”; the eternity of the Word being an inference from the
ἦν—the Word _was_, when the world was _created_: _cf._ _Gen.
1:1—_“In the beginning God created.” But Meyer says, ἐν ἀρχῇ here
rises above the historical conception of “_in the beginning_” in
Genesis (which includes the beginning of time itself) to the
absolute conception of anteriority to time; the creation is
something subsequent. He finds a parallel in _Prov. 8:23—ἐν ἀρχῇ
πρὸ τοῦ τὴν γῆν ποιῆσαι_. The interpretation “in the beginning of
the gospel” is entirely unexegetical; so Meyer. So _John
17:5—_“glory which I had with thee before the world was”; _Eph.
1:4—_“chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Dorner
also says that ἐν ἀρχῇ in _John 1:1_ is not “the beginning of the
world,” but designates the point back of which it is impossible to
go, _i. e._, eternity; the world is first spoken of in _verse 3.
John 8:58—_“Before Abraham was born, I am”; _cf._ _1:15_; _Col.
1:17—_“he is before all things”; _Heb. 1:11_—the heavens “_shall
perish; but thou continuest_”; _Rev. 21:6—_“I am the Alpha and the
Omega, the beginning and the end.”

_Omnipresence_: _Mat. 28:20—_“I am with you always”; _Eph.
1:23—_“the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” _Omniscience_:
_Mat. 9:4—_“Jesus knowing their thoughts”; _John 2:24, 25—_“knew
all men ... knew what was in man”; _16:30—_“knowest all things”;
_Acts 1:24—_“Thou, Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men”—a
prayer offered before the day of Pentecost and showing the
attitude of the disciples toward their Master; _1 Cor. 4:5—_“until
the Lord come, who will both bring to light the hidden things of
darkness, and make manifest the counsels of the hearts”; _Col.
2:3—_“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
hidden.” _Omnipotence_: _Mat. 27:18—_“All authority hath been
given unto me in heaven and on earth”; _Rev. 1:8—_“the Lord God,
which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 1:249-260, holds that Jesus’
preëxistence is simply the concrete form given to an ideal
conception. Jesus traces himself back, as everything else holy and
divine was traced back in the conceptions of his time, to a
heavenly original in which it preëxisted before its earthly
appearance; _e. g._: the tabernacle, in _Heb. 8:5_; Jerusalem, in
_Gal. 4:25_ and _Rev. 21:10_; the kingdom of God in _Mat. 13:24_;
much more the Messiah, in _John 6:62—_“ascending where he was
before”; _8:58—_“Before Abraham was born, I am”; _17:4, 5—_“glory
which I had with thee before the world was” _17:24—_“thou lovedst
me before the foundation of the world.” This view that Jesus
existed before creation only ideally in the divine mind, means
simply that God foreknew him and his coming. The view is refuted
by the multiplied intimations of a personal, in distinction from
an ideal, preëxistence.

Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 115—“The words ‘In the beginning’_
(John 1:1)_ suggest that the author is about to write a second
book of Genesis, an account of a new creation.” As creation
presupposes a Creator, the preëxistence of the personal Word is
assigned as the explanation of the being of the universe. The ἦν
indicates absolute existence, which is a loftier idea than that of
mere preëxistence, although it includes this. While John the
Baptist and Abraham are said to have arisen, appeared, come into
being, it is said that the Logos _was_, and that the Logos was
_God_. This implies coëternity with the Father. But, if the view
we are combating were correct, John the Baptist and Abraham
preëxisted, equally with Christ. This is certainly not the meaning
of Jesus in _John 8:58—_“Before Abraham was born, I am”; _cf._
_Col. 1:17—_“he is before all things”—“αὐτός emphasizes the
personality, while ἔστιν declares that the preëxistence is
absolute existence” (Lightfoot); _John 1:15—_“He that cometh after
me is become before me: for he was before me” = not that Jesus was
_born_ earlier than John the Baptist, for he was born six months
later, but that he _existed_ earlier. He stands before John in
rank, because he existed long before John in time; _6:62—_“the Son
of man ascending where he was before”; _16:28—_“I came out from
the Father, and am come into the world.” So _Is. 9:6, 7_, calls
Christ “_Everlasting Father_” = eternity is an attribute of the
Messiah. T. W. Chambers, in Jour. Soc. Bib. Exegesis,
1881:169-171—“Christ is the Everlasting One, ‘whose goings forth
have been from of old, even from the days of eternity’_ (Micah
5:2). _‘Of the increase of his government ... there shall be no
end,’ just because of his existence there has been no beginning.”

(d) The works of God are ascribed to him.

We do not here speak of miracles, which may be wrought by communicated
power, but of such works as the creation of the world, the upholding of
all things, the final raising of the dead, and the judging of all men.
Power to perform these works cannot be delegated, for they are
characteristic of omnipotence.

_Creation_: _John 1:3—_“All things were made through him”; _1 Cor.
8:6—_“one lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; _Col.
1:16—_“all things have been created through him, and unto him”;
_Heb, 1:10—_“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation
of the earth, And the heavens are the works of thy hands”; _3:3,
4—_“he that built all things is God” = Christ, the builder of the
house of Israel, is the God who made all things; _Rev. 3:14—_“the
beginning of the creation of God” (_cf._ Plato: “Mind is the ἀρχή
of motion”). _Upholding_: _Col. 1:17—_“in him all things consist”
(marg. “_hold together_”); _Heb. 1:3—_“upholding all things by the
word of his power.” _Raising the dead and judging the world_:
_John 5:27-29—_“authority to execute judgment ... all that are in
the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth”; _Mat.
25:31, 32—_“sit on the throne of his glory; and before him shall
be gathered all the nations.” If our argument were addressed
wholly to believers, we might also urge Christ’s work in the world
as Revealer of God and Redeemer from sin, as a proof of his deity.
[On the works of Christ, see Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 153;
_per contra_, see Examination of Liddon’s Bampton Lectures, 72.]

Statements of Christ’s creative and of his upholding activity are
combined in _John 1:3, 4—Πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ
ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὅ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν—_“All things were made
through him; and without him was not anything made. That which
hath been made was life in him” (marg.). Westcott: “It would be
difficult to find a more complete consent of ancient authorities
in favor of any reading than that which supports this
punctuation.” Westcott therefore adopts it. The passage shows that
the universe 1. exists within the bounds of Christ’s being; 2. is
not dead, but living; 3. derives its life from him; see Inge,
Christian Mysticism, 46. Creation requires the divine presence, as
well as the divine agency. God creates through Christ. All things
were made, not ὐπὸ αὐτοῦ—“by him,” but δι᾽ αὐτοῦ—“through him.”
Christian believers “Behind creation’s throbbing screen Catch
movements of the great Unseen.”

Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, iv, lvi—“That which many a
philosopher dimly conjectured, namely, that God did not produce
the world in an absolute, immediate manner, but in some way or
other, mediately, here presents itself to us with the lustre of
revelation, and exalts so much the more the claim of the Son of
God to our deep and reverential homage.” Would that such
scientific men as Tyndall and Huxley might see Christ in nature,
and, doing his will, might learn of the doctrine and be led to the
Father! The humblest Christian who sees Christ’s hand in the
physical universe and in human history knows more of the secret of
the universe than all the mere scientists put together.

_Col 1:17—_“In him all things consist,” or “hold together,” means
nothing less than that Christ is the principle of cohesion in the
universe, making it a cosmos instead of a chaos. Tyndall said that
the attraction of the sun upon the earth was as inconceivable as
if a horse should draw a cart without traces. Sir Isaac Newton:
“Gravitation must be caused by an agent acting constantly
according to certain laws.” Lightfoot: “Gravitation is an
expression of the mind of Christ.” Evolution also is a method of
his operation. The laws of nature are the habits of Christ, and
nature itself is but his steady and constant will. He binds
together man and nature in one organic whole, so that we can speak
of a “universe.” Without him there would be no intellectual bond,
no uniformity of law, no unity of truth. He is the principle of
induction, that enables us to argue from one thing to another. The
medium of interaction between things is also the medium of
intercommunication between minds. It is fitting that he who draws
and holds together the physical and intellectual, should also draw
and hold together the moral universe, drawing all men to himself
(_John 12:32_) and so to God, and reconciling all things in heaven
and earth (_Col. 1:20_). In Christ “the law appears, Drawn out in
living characters,” because he is the ground and source of all
law, both in nature and in humanity. See A. H. Strong, Christ in
Creation, 6-12.

(_e_) He receives honor and worship due only to God.

In addition to the address of Thomas, in John 20:28, which we have already
cited among the proofs that Jesus is expressly called God, and in which
divine honor is paid to him, we may refer to the prayer and worship
offered by the apostolic and post-apostolic church.

_John 5:23—_“that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the
Father”; _14:14—_“If ye shall ask me [so אB and Tisch. 8th ed.]
anything in my name, that will I do”; _Acts 7:59—_“Stephen,
calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”
(_cf._ _Luke 23:46_—Jesus’ words: “Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit”); _Rom. 10:9—_“confess with thy mouth Jesus as
Lord”; _13—_“whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall
be saved” (_cf._ _Gen. 4:26—_“Then began men to call upon the name
of Jehovah”); _1 Cor. 11:24, 25—_“this do in remembrance of me” =
worship of Christ; _Heb. 1:6—_“let all the angels of God worship
him”; _Phil. 2:10, 11—_“in the name of Jesus every knee should bow
... every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”; _Rev.
5:12-14—_“Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the
power....”; _2 Pet. 3:18—_“Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be
the glory”; _2 Tim. 4:18 and Heb. 13:21—_“to whom be the glory for
ever and ever”—these ascriptions of eternal glory to Christ imply
his deity. See also _1 Pet. 3:15—_“Sanctify in your hearts Christ
as Lord,” and _Eph. 5:21—_“subjecting yourselves one to another in
the fear of Christ.” Here is enjoined an attitude of mind towards
Christ which would be idolatrous if Christ were not God. See
Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 266, 366.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 154—“In the eucharistic
liturgy of the ‘Teaching’ we read: ‘Hosanna to the God of David’;
Ignatius styles him repeatedly God ‘begotten and unbegotten, come
in the flesh’; speaking once of ‘the blood of God’, in evident
allusion to _Acts 20:28_; the epistle to Diognetus takes up the
Pauline words and calls him the ‘architect and world-builder by
whom [God] created the heavens’, and names him God (chap. vii);
Hermas speaks of him as ‘the holy preëxistent Spirit, that created
every creature’, which style of expression is followed by Justin,
who calls him God, as also all the later great writers. In the
second epistle of Clement (130-160, Harnack), we read: ‘Brethren,
it is fitting that you should think of Jesus Christ as of God—as
the Judge of the living and the dead.’ And Ignatius describes him
as ‘begotten and unbegotten, passible and impassible, ... who was
before the eternities with the Father.’ ”

These testimonies only give evidence that the Church Fathers saw
in Scripture divine honor ascribed to Christ. They were but the
precursors of a host of later interpreters. In a lull of the awful
massacre of Armenian Christians at Sassouan, one of the Kurdish
savages was heard to ask: “Who was that ‘Lord Jesus’ that they
were calling to?” In their death agonies, the Christians, like
Stephen of old, called upon the name of the Lord. Robert Browning
quoted, in a letter to a lady in her last illness, the words of
Charles Lamb, when “in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he
and they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to appear
suddenly in flesh and blood once more—on the first suggestion,
‘And if Christ entered this room?’ changed his tone at once and
stuttered out as his manner was when moved: ‘You see—if Shakespere
entered, we should all rise; if He appeared, we must kneel.’ ” On
prayer to Jesus, see Liddon, Bampton Lectures, note F; Bernard, in
Hastings’ Bib. Dict., 4:44; Zahn, Skizzen aus dem Leben der alten
Kirche, 9, 288.

(_f_) His name is associated with that of God upon a footing of equality.

We do not here allude to 1 John 5:7 (the three heavenly witnesses), for
the latter part of this verse is unquestionably spurious; but to the
formula of baptism, to the apostolic benedictions, and to those passages
in which eternal life is said to be dependent equally upon Christ and upon
God, or in which spiritual gifts are attributed to Christ equally with the
Father.

_The formula of baptism_: _Mat. 28:19—_“baptising them into the
name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; _cf._
_Acts 2:38—_“be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus
Christ”; _Rom. 6:3—_“baptized into Christ Jesus.” “In the common
baptismal formula the Son and the Spirit are coördinated with the
Father, and εἰς ὄνομα has religious significance.” It would be
both absurd and profane to speak of baptizing into the name of the
Father and of Moses.

_The apostolic benedictions_: _1 Cor. 1:3—_“Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”; _2 Cor.
13:14—_“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” “In the
benedictions grace is something divine, and Christ has power to
impart it. But why do we find ‘God,’ instead of simply ‘the
Father,’ as in the baptismal formula? Because it is only the
Father who does not become man or have a historical existence.
Elsewhere he is specially called ‘_God the Father_,’ to
distinguish him from God the Son and God the Holy Spirit (_Gal.
1:3_; _Eph. 3:14_; _6:23_).”

_Other passages_: _John 5:23—_“that all may honor the Son, even as
they honor the Father”; _John 14:1—_“believe in God, believe also
in me”—double imperative (so Westcott, Bible Com., _in loco_);
_17:3—_“this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only
true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ”; _Mat.
11:27—_“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”; _1 Cor. 12:4-6—_“the same Spirit ... the
same Lord [Christ] ... the same God” [the Father] bestow spiritual
gifts, _e. g._, faith: _Rom. 10:17—_“belief cometh of hearing, and
hearing by the word of Christ”; peace: _Col. 3:15—_“let the peace
of Christ rule in your hearts.” _2 Thess. 2:16, 17—_“now our lord
Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father ... comfort your
hearts”—two names with a verb in the singular intimate the oneness
of the Father and the Son (Lillie). _Eph. 5:5—_“kingdom of Christ
and God”; _Col. 3:1—_“Christ ... seated on the right hand of God”
= participation in the sovereignty of the universe,—the Eastern
divan held not only the monarch but his son; _Rev. 20:6—_“priests
of God and of Christ”; _22:3—_“the throne of God and of the Lamb”;
_16—_“the root and the offspring of David” = both the Lord of
David and his son. Hackett: “As the dying Savior said to the
Father, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit’_ (Luke 23:46)_, so
the dying Stephen said to the Savior, ‘receive my spirit’_ (Acts
7:59)_.”

(_g_) Equality with God is expressly claimed.

Here we may refer to Jesus’ testimony to himself, already treated of among
the proofs of the supernatural character of the Scripture teaching (see
pages 189, 190). Equality with God is not only claimed for himself by
Jesus, but it is claimed for him by his apostles.

_John 5:18—_“called God his own Father, making himself equal with
God”; _Phil. 2:6—_“who, existing in the form of God, counted not
the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped”—counted
not his equality with God a thing to be forcibly retained. Christ
made and left upon his contemporaries the impression that he
claimed to be God. The New Testament has left, upon the great mass
of those who have read it, the impression that Jesus Christ claims
to be God. If he is not God, he is a deceiver or is self-deceived,
and, in either case, _Christus, si non Deus, non bonus_. See
Nicoll, Life of Jesus Christ, 187.

(_h_) Further proof of Christ’s deity may be found in the application to
him of the phrases: “Son of God,” “Image of God”; in the declarations of
his oneness with God; in the attribution to him of the fulness of the
Godhead.

_Mat. 26:63, 64—_“I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell
us whether thou art the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto
him, Thou hast said”—it is for this testimony that Christ dies.
_Col. 1:15—_“the image of the invisible God”; _Heb. 1:3—_“the
effulgence of his [the Father’s] glory, and the very image of his
substance”; _John 10:30—_“I and the Father are one”; _14:9—_“he
that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; _17:11, 22—_“that they
may be one, even as we are”—ἕ, not εἰς; _unum_, not _unus_; one
substance, not one person. “_Unum_ is antidote to the Arian,
_sumus_ to the Sabellian heresy.” _Col. 2:9—_“in him dwelleth all
the fulness of the Godhead bodily”; _cf._ _1:19—_“for it was the
pleasure of the Father that in him should all the fulness dwell;”
or (marg.) “_for the whole fulness of God was pleased to dwell in
him_.” _John 16:15—_“all things whatsoever the Father hath are
mine”; _17:10—_“all things that are mine are thine, and thine are
mine.”

Meyer on _John 10:30—_“I and the Father are one”—“Here the Arian
understanding of a mere ethical harmony as taught in the words
‘_are one_’ is unsatisfactory, because irrelevant to the exercise
of power. Oneness of essence, though not contained in the words
themselves, is, by the necessities of the argument, presupposed in
them.” Dalman, The Words of Jesus: “Nowhere do we find that Jesus
called himself the Son of God in such a sense as to suggest a
merely religious and ethical relation to God—a relation which
others also possessed and which they were capable of attaining or
were destined to acquire.” We may add that while in the lower
sense there are many “_sons of God_,” there is but one “_only
begotten Son_.”

(_i_) These proofs of Christ’s deity from the New Testament are
corroborated by Christian experience.

Christian experience recognizes Christ as an absolutely perfect Savior,
perfectly revealing the Godhead and worthy of unlimited worship and
adoration; that is, it practically recognizes him as Deity. But Christian
experience also recognizes that through Christ it has introduction and
reconciliation to God as one distinct from Jesus Christ, as one who was
alienated from the soul by its sin, but who is now reconciled through
Jesus’s death. In other words, while recognizing Jesus as God, we are also
compelled to recognize a distinction between the Father and the Son
through whom we come to the Father.

Although this experience cannot be regarded as an independent witness to
Jesus’ claims, since it only tests the truth already made known in the
Bible, still the irresistible impulse of every person whom Christ has
saved to lift his Redeemer to the highest place, and bow before him in the
lowliest worship, is strong evidence that only that interpretation of
Scripture can be true which recognizes Christ’s absolute Godhead. It is
the church’s consciousness of her Lord’s divinity, indeed, and not mere
speculation upon the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that has
compelled the formulation of the Scripture doctrine of the Trinity.

In the letter of Pliny to Trajan, it is said of the early
Christians “quod essent soliti carmen Christo quasi Deo dicere
invicem.” The prayers and hymns of the church show what the church
has believed Scripture to teach. Dwight Moody is said to have
received his first conviction of the truth of the gospel from
hearing the concluding words of a prayer, “For Christ’s sake,
Amen,” when awakened from physical slumber in Dr. Kirk’s church,
Boston. These words, wherever uttered, imply man’s dependence and
Christ’s deity. See New Englander, 1878:432. In _Eph. 4:32_, the
Revised Version substitutes “_in Christ_” for “for Christ’s sake.”
The exact phrase “for Christ’s sake” is not found in the N. T. in
connection with prayer, although the O. T. phrase “for my name’s
sake”_ (Ps. 25:11)_ passes into the N. T. phrase “in the name of
Jesus”_ (Phil. 2:10)_; _cf._ _Ps. 72:15—_“men shall pray for him
continually” = the words of the hymn: “For him shall endless
prayer be made, And endless blessings crown his head.” All this is
proof that the idea of prayer for Christ’s sake is in Scripture,
though the phrase is absent.

A caricature scratched on the wall of the Palatine palace in Rome,
and dating back to the third century, represents a human figure
with an ass’s head, hanging upon a cross, while a man stands
before it in the attitude of worship. Under the effigy is this
ill-spelled inscription: “Alexamenos adores his God.”

This appeal to the testimony of Christian consciousness was first
made by Schleiermacher. William E. Gladstone: “All I write, and
all I think, and all I hope, is based upon the divinity of our
Lord, the one central hope of our poor, wayward race.” E. G.
Robinson: “When you preach salvation by faith in Christ, you
preach the Trinity.” W. G. T. Shedd: “The construction of the
doctrine of the Trinity started, not from the consideration of the
three persons, but from belief in the deity of one of them.” On
the worship of Christ in the authorized services of the Anglican
church, see Stanley, Church and State, 333-335; Liddon, Divinity
of our Lord, 514.

In contemplating passages apparently inconsistent with those now cited, in
that they impute to Christ weakness and ignorance, limitation and
subjection, we are to remember, first, that our Lord was truly man, as
well as truly God, and that this ignorance and weakness may be predicated
of him as the God-man in whom deity and humanity are united; secondly,
that the divine nature itself was in some way limited and humbled during
our Savior’s earthly life, and that these passages may describe him as he
was in his estate of humiliation, rather than in his original and present
glory; and, thirdly, that there is an order of office and operation which
is consistent with essential oneness and equality, but which permits the
Father to be spoken of as first and the Son as second. These statements
will be further elucidated in the treatment of the present doctrine and in
subsequent examination of the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

There are certain things of which Christ was ignorant: _Mark
13:32—_“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the
angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” He was subject
to physical fatigue: _John 4:6—_“Jesus therefore, being wearied
with his journey, sat thus by the well.” There was a limitation
connected with Christ’s taking of human flesh: _Phil.
2:7—_“emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in
the likeness of men”; _John 14:28—_“the Father is greater than I.”
There is a subjection, as respects order of office and operation,
which is yet consistent with equality of essence and oneness with
God; _1 Cor. 15:28—_“then shall the Son also himself be subjected
to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all
in all.” This must be interpreted consistently with _John
17:5—_“glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I
had with thee before the world was,” and with _Phil. 2:6_, where
this glory is described as being “_the form of God_” and
“_equality with God_.”

Even in his humiliation, Christ was the Essential Truth, and
ignorance in him never involved error or false teaching. Ignorance
on his part might make his teaching at times incomplete,—it never
in the smallest particular made his teaching false. Yet here we
must distinguish between what he _intended_ to teach and what was
merely _incidental_ to his teaching. When he said: Moses “wrote of
me”_ (John 5:46)_ and “David in the Spirit called him Lord”_ (Mat.
22:43)_, if his purpose was to teach the authorship of the
Pentateuch and of the 110th Psalm, we should regard his words as
absolutely authoritative. But it is possible that he intended only
to _locate_ the passages referred to, and if so, his words cannot
be used to exclude critical conclusions as to their authorship.
Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 136—“If he spoke of Moses or David,
it was only to identify the passage. The authority of the earlier
dispensation did not rest upon its record being due to Moses, nor
did the appropriateness of the Psalm lie in its being uttered by
David. There is no evidence that the question of authorship ever
came before him.” Adamson rather more precariously suggests that
“there may have been a lapse of memory in Jesus’ mention of
‘Zachariah, son of Barachiah’_ (Mat. 23:35)_, since this was a
matter of no spiritual import.”

For assertions of Jesus’ knowledge, see _John 2:24, 25—_“he knew
all men ... he needed not that any one should bear witness
concerning man; for he himself knew what was in man”;
_6:64—_“Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed
not, and who it was that should betray him”; _12:33—_“this he
said, signifying by what manner of death he should die”;
_21:19—_“Now this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he
[Peter] should glorify God”; _13:1—_“knowing that his hour was
come that he should depart”; _Mat. 25:31—_“when the Son of man
shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall
he sit on the throne of his glory” = he knew that he was to act as
final judge of the human race. Other instances are mentioned by
Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49: 1. Jesus’ knowledge of Peter
(_John 1:42_); 2. his finding Philip (_1:43_); 3. his recognition
of Nathanael (_1:47-50_); 4. of the woman of Samaria (_4:17-19,
39_); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes (_Luke 5:6-9_; _John
21:6_); 6. death of Lazarus (_John 11:14_); 7. the ass’s colt
(_Mat. 21:2_); 8. of the upper room (_Mark 14:15_); 9. of Peter’s
denial (_Mat. 26:34_); 10. of the manner of his own death (_John
12:33_; _18:32_); 11. of the manner of Peter’s death (_John
21:19_); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem (_Mat. 24:2_).

On the other hand there are assertions and implications of Jesus’
ignorance: he did not know the day of the end (_Mark 13:32_),
though even here he intimates his superiority to angels;
_5:30-34—_“Who touched my garments?” though even here power had
gone forth from him to heal; _John 11:34—_“Where have ye laid
him?” though here he is about to raise Lazarus from the dead;
_Mark 11:13—_“seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came,
if haply he might find anything thereon” = he did not know that it
had no fruit, yet he had power to curse it. With these evidences
of the limitations of Jesus’ knowledge, we must assent to the
judgment of Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 33—“We must decline to
stake the authority of Jesus on a question of literary criticism”;
and of Gore, Incarnation, 195—“That the use by our Lord of such a
phrase as ‘_Moses wrote of me_’ binds us to the Mosaic authorship
of the Pentateuch as a whole, I do not think we need to yield.”
See our section on The Person of Christ; also Rush Rhees, Life of
Jesus, 243, 244. _Per contra_, see Swayne, Our Lord’s Knowledge as
Man; and Crooker, The New Bible, who very unwisely claims that
belief in a Kenosis involves the surrender of Christ’s authority
and atonement.

It is inconceivable that any mere _creature_ should say, “God is
greater than I am,” or should be spoken of as ultimately and in a
mysterious way becoming “subject to God.” In his state of
humiliation Christ was subject to the Spirit (_Acts 1:2—_“after
that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit”;
_10:38—_“God anointed him with the Holy Spirit ... for God was
with him”; _Heb.9:14—_“through the eternal Spirit offered himself
without blemish unto God”), but in his state of exaltation Christ
is Lord of the Spirit (κυρίου πνεύματος—_2 Cor. 3:18_—Meyer),
giving the Spirit and working through the Spirit. _Heb. 2:7_,
marg.—“Thou madest him for a little while lower than the angels.”
On the whole subject, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 262, 351;
Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Liddon, Our Lord’s
Divinity, 127, 207, 458; _per contra_, see Examination of Liddon,
252, 294; Professors of Andover Seminary, Divinity of Christ.

C. The Holy Spirit is recognized as God.

(_a_) He is spoken of as God; (_b_) the attributes of God are ascribed to
him, such as life, truth, love, holiness, eternity, omnipresence,
omniscience, omnipotence; (_c_) he does the works of God, such as
creation, regeneration, resurrection; (_d_) he receives honor due only to
God; (_e_) he is associated with God on a footing of equality, both in the
formula of baptism and in the apostolic benedictions.

(_a_) _Spoken of as God._ _Acts 5:3, 4—_“lie to the Holy Spirit
... not lied unto men, but unto God”; _1 Cor. 3:16—_“ye are a
temple of God ... the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”; _6:19—_“your
body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”; _12:4-6 _“same Spirit ...
same Lord ... same God, who worketh all things in all”—“The divine
Trinity is here indicated in an ascending climax, in such a way
that we pass from the Spirit who bestows the gifts to the Lord
[Christ] who is served by means of them, and finally to God, who
as the absolute first cause and possessor of all Christian powers
works the entire sum of all charismatic gifts in all who are
gifted” (Meyer in _loco_).

(_b_) _Attributes of God._ Life: _Rom. 8:2—_“Spirit of life.”
Truth: _John 16:13 _“Spirit of truth.” Love: _Rom. 15:30—_“love of
the Spirit.” Holiness: _Eph. 4:30—_“the Holy Spirit of God.”
Eternity: _Heb. 9:14—_“the eternal Spirit.” Omnipresence: _Ps.
139:7—_“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?” Omniscience: _1 Cor.
12:11—_“all these [including gifts of healings and miracles]
worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one
severally even as he will.”

(_c_) _Works of God._ Creation: _Gen. 1:2_, marg.—“Spirit of God
was brooding upon the face of the waters.” Casting out of demons:
_Mat. 12:28—_“But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons.”
Conviction of sin: _John 16:8—_“convict the world in respect of
sin.” Regeneration: _John 3:8—_“born of the Spirit”; _Tit.
3:5—_“renewing of the Holy Spirit.” Resurrection: _Rom.
8:11—_“give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit”;
_1 Cor. 15:45—_“The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”

(_d_) _Honor due to God._ _1 Cor. 3:16—_“ye are a temple of God
... the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”—he who inhabits the temple
is the object of worship there. See also the next item.

(_e_) _Associated with God._ Formula of baptism: _Mat.
28:19—_“baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.” If the baptismal formula is worship, then
we have here worship paid to the Spirit. Apostolic benedictions:
_2 Cor. 13:14—_“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of
God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” If the
apostolic benedictions are prayers, then we have here a prayer to
the Spirit. _1 Pet. 1:2—_“foreknowledge of God the Father ...
sanctification of the Spirit ... sprinkling of the blood of Jesus
Christ.”

On _Heb. 9:14_, Kendrick, Com. _in loco_, interprets: “Offers
himself by virtue of an eternal spirit which dwells within him and
imparts to his sacrifice a spiritual and an eternal efficacy. The
‘spirit’ here spoken of was not, then, the ‘Holy Spirit’; it was
not his purely divine nature; it was that blending of his divine
nature with his human personality which forms the mystery of his
being, that ‘spirit of holiness’ by virtue of which he was
declared ‘_the Son of God with power_,’ on account of his
resurrection from the dead.” Hovey adds a note to Kendrick’s
Commentary, _in loco_, as follows: “This adjective ‘_eternal_’
naturally suggests that the word ‘_Spirit_’ refers to the higher
and divine nature of Christ. His truly human nature, on its
spiritual side, was indeed eternal as to the future, but so also
is the spirit of every man. The unique and superlative value of
Christ’s self-sacrifice seems to have been due to the impulse of
the divine side of his nature.” The phrase “eternal spirit” would
then mean his divinity. To both these interpretations we prefer
that which makes the passage refer to the Holy Spirit, and we cite
in support of this view _Acts 1:2—_“he had given commandment
through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles”; _10:38—_“God anointed
him with the Holy Spirit.” On _1 Cor. 2:10_, Mason, Faith of the
Gospel, 63, remarks: “The Spirit of God finds nothing even in God
which baffles his scrutiny. His ‘search’ is not a seeking for
knowledge yet beyond him.... Nothing but God could search the
depths of God.”

As spirit is nothing less than the inmost principle of life, and the
spirit of man is man himself, so the spirit of God must be God (see 1 Cor.
2:11—Meyer). Christian experience, moreover, expressed as it is in the
prayers and hymns of the church, furnishes an argument for the deity of
the Holy Spirit similar to that for the deity of Jesus Christ. When our
eyes are opened to see Christ as a Savior, we are compelled to recognize
the work in us of a divine Spirit who has taken of the things of Christ
and has shown them to us; and this divine Spirit we necessarily
distinguish both from the Father and from the Son. Christian experience,
however, is not an original and independent witness to the deity of the
Holy Spirit: it simply shows what the church has held to be the natural
and unforced interpretation of the Scriptures, and so confirms the
Scripture argument already adduced.

The Holy Spirit is God himself personally present in the believer.
E. G. Robinson: “If ‘Spirit of God’ no more implies deity than
does ‘angel of God,’ why is not the Holy Spirit called simply the
angel or messenger, of God?” Walker, The Spirit and the
Incarnation, 337—“The Holy Spirit is God in his innermost being or
essence, the principle of life of both the Father and the Son;
that in which God, both as Father and Son, does everything, and in
which he comes to us and is in us increasingly through his
manifestations. Through the working and indwelling of this Holy
Spirit, God in his person of Son was fully incarnate in Christ.”
Gould, Am. Com. on _1 Cor. 2:11_—“For who among men knoweth the
things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even
so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”—“The
analogy must not be pushed too far, as if the Spirit of God and
God were coëxtensive terms, as the corresponding terms are,
substantially, in man. The point of the analogy is evidently
_self-knowledge_, and in both cases the contrast is between the
spirit within and anything outside.” Andrew Murray, Spirit of
Christ, 140—“We must not expect always to feel the power of the
Spirit when it works. Scripture links power and weakness in a
wonderful way, not as succeeding each other but as existing
together. ‘I was with you in weakness ... my preaching was in
power’_ (1 Cor. 2:3)_; ‘when I am weak then am I strong’_ (2 Cor.
12:10)_. The power is the power of God given to faith, and faith
grows strong in the dark.... He who would command nature must
first and most absolutely obey her.... We want to get possession
of the Power, and use it. God wants the Power to get possession of
us, and use us.”

This proof of the deity of the Holy Spirit is not invalidated by the
limitations of his work under the Old Testament dispensation. John
7:39—“for the Holy Spirit was not yet”—means simply that the Holy Spirit
could not fulfill his peculiar office as Revealer of Christ until the
atoning work of Christ should be accomplished.

_John 7:39_ is to be interpreted in the light of other Scriptures
which assert the agency of the Holy Spirit under the old
dispensation (_Ps. 51:11—_“take not thy holy Spirit from me”) and
which describe his peculiar office under the new dispensation
(_John 16:14, 15—_“he shall take of mine, and shall declare it
unto you”). Limitation in the _manner_ of the Spirit’s work in the
O. T. involved a limitation in the _extent_ and _power_ of it
also. Pentecost was the flowing forth of a tide of spiritual
influence which had hitherto been dammed up. Henceforth the Holy
Spirit was the Spirit of Jesus Christ, taking of the things of
Christ and showing them, applying his finished work to human
hearts, and rendering the hitherto localized Savior omnipresent
with his scattered followers to the end of time.

Under the conditions of his humiliation, Christ was a servant. All
authority in heaven and earth was given him only after his
resurrection. Hence he could not send the Holy Spirit until he
ascended. The mother can show off her son only when he is fully
grown. The Holy Spirit could reveal Christ only when there was a
complete Christ to reveal. The Holy Spirit could fully sanctify,
only after the example and motive of holiness were furnished in
Christ’s life and death. Archer Butler: “The divine Artist could
not fitly descend to make the copy, before the original had been
provided.”

And yet the Holy Spirit is “the eternal Spirit”_ (Heb. 9:14)_, and
he not only existed, but also wrought, in Old Testament times. _2
Pet. 1:21—_“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy
Spirit”—seems to fix the meaning of the phrase “the Holy Spirit,”
where it appears in the O. T. Before Christ “the Holy Spirit was
not yet”_ (John 7:39)_, just as before Edison electricity was not
yet. There was just as much electricity in the world before Edison
as there is now. Edison has only taught us its existence and how
to use it. Still we can say that, before Edison, electricity, as a
means of lighting, warming and transporting people, had no
existence. So until Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, as the revealer of
Christ, “_was not yet_.” Augustine calls Pentecost the _dies
natalis_, or birthday, of the Holy Spirit; and for the same reason
that we call the day when Mary brought forth her firstborn son the
birthday of Jesus Christ, though before Abraham was born, Christ
was. The Holy Spirit had been engaged in the creation, and had
inspired the prophets, but _officially_, as Mediator between men
and Christ, “_the Holy Spirit was not yet_.” He could not show the
things of Christ until the things of Christ were ready to be
shown. See Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 19-25; Prof. J. S.
Gubelmann, Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in O. T. Times. For
proofs of the deity of the Holy Spirit, see Walker, Doctrine of
the Holy Spirit; Hare, Mission of the Comforter; Parker, The
Paraclete; Cardinal Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost;
Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:341-350. Further references will be
given in connection with the proof of the Holy Spirit’s
personality.

2. Intimations of the Old Testament.

The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are
three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four
heads:

A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.

(_a_) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use
remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence;
(_b_) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (_c_) Jehovah
distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (_d_) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah;
(_e_) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (_f_) there are a
threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.

(_a_) _Gen. 20:13—_“God caused [plural] me to wander from my
father’s house”; _35:7—_“built there an altar, and called the
place El-Beth-el; _because there God was revealed_ [plural] unto
him.” (_b_) _Gen. 1:26—_“Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness”; _3:22—_“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;
_11:7—_“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;
_Is. 6:8—_“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (_c_) _Gen.
19:24—_“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone
and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”; _Hos. 1:7—_“I will have
mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah,
their God”; _cf._ _2 Tim. 1:18—_“The Lord grant unto him to find
mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides
adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (_d_) _Ps. 2:7—_“Thou art
my son; this day have I begotten thee”; _Prov. 30:4—_“Who hath
established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what
is his son’s name, if thou knowest?” (_e_) _Gen. 1:1 and 2,
marg.—_“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”; _Ps.
33:6—_“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the
host of them by the breath [spirit] of his mouth”; _Is.
48:16—_“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”; _63:7,
10—_“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”
(_f_) _Is. 6:3_—the trisagion: “_Holy, holy, holy_”; _Num.
6:24-26—_“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face
to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his
countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different
places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan,
Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of
these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while
yet the whole was called by the plural term “Baalim,” and Elijah
could say: “Call ye upon your Gods,” so “Elohim” may be the
collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different
localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish
Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always
addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural
“Elohim” is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems
to show that “Baalim” is a collective term, while “Elohim” is not.
So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of
God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,
_viz._, the “Almighty” of the Patriarchs, the “Jehovah” of the
Covenant, the “God of Hosts” of the Monarchy, the “Holy One” of
the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the “Our Lord”
of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none
of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though
they may have been predominantly used in those times.

The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable
to the Son (Ps. 45:6; _cf._ Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing
that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain
plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a
simple _pluralis majestaticus_; since it is easier to derive this common
figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common
figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to
polytheism.

_Ps. 45:6_; _cf._ _Heb. 1:8—_“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O
God, is for ever and ever.” Here it is God who calls Christ
“_God_” or “_Elohim_.” The term Elohim has here acquired the
significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal
style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of
Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. In _Gen. 41:41-44_, he says: “I
have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.” But
later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was
used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one
Pharaoh is called “my gods” or “my god,” indifferently. The word
“master” is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (_cf._ _Gen.
24:9, 51_; _39:19_; _40:1_). The plural gives utterance to the
sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The
Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)

This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often
explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in
himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to
adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a
“quantitative plural,” signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews
had many plural forms, where we should use the singular, as
“heavens” instead of “heaven,” “waters” instead of “water.” We too
speak of “news,” “wages,” and say “you” instead of “thou”; see F.
W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as
Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and
Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we
are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to
express man’s reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize
the name of God. And God’s purpose in securing this pluralization
may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man’s. The
Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may
well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the
adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to
the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.

We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy,
323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of
Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the
prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and
consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a
tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general
polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything
approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could
have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....
‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’_ (Ex. 20:3)_, the first
precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a
denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an
exclusive claim to worship and obedience.” E. G. Robinson says, in
a similar strain, that “we can explain the idolatrous tendencies
of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions
that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have
understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did
not.”

To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive
intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells
us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of
development, due to man’s sin (_Rom. 1:19-25_). We prefer the
statement of McLaren: “The plural Elohim is not a survival from a
polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the
manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the
abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine
nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities.
See Conant, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar,
306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander on _Psalm
11:7_; _29:1_; _58:11_.

B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.

(_a_) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (_b_) he is
identified with Jehovah by others; (_c_) he accepts worship due only to
God. Though the phrase “angel of Jehovah” is sometimes used in the later
Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems
in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to
designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or
human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.

(_a_) _Gen. 22:11, 16—_“the angel of Jehovah called unto him
[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ... By myself have I
sworn, saith Jehovah”; _31:11, 13—_“the angel of God said unto me
[Jacob] ... I am the God of Beth-el.” (_b_) _Gen. 16:9, 13—_“angel
of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah
that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”; _48:15, 16—_“the
God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.” (_c_)
_Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—_“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God
called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes
from off thy feet”; _Judges 13:20-22—_“angel of Jehovah
ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ...
Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”

The “_angel of the Lord_” appears to be a human messenger in
_Haggai 1:13—_“Haggai, Jehovah’s messenger”; a created angel in
_Mat. 1:20—_“an angel of the Lord [called Gabriel] appeared unto”
Joseph; in _Acts 3:26—_“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”;
and in _12:7—_“an angel of the Lord stood by him” (Peter). But
commonly, in the O.T., the “angel of Jehovah” is a theophany, a
self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between
Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances
of “_the angel of Jehovah_” seem to be preliminary manifestations
of the divine Logos, as in _Gen. 18:2, 13—_“three men stood over
against him [Abraham] ... And Jehovah said unto Abraham”; _Dan.
3:25, 28—_“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods....
Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.” The N.T. “_angel
of the Lord_” does not permit, the O.T. “_angel of the Lord_”
requires, worship (_Rev. 22:8, 9—_“See thou do it not”; _cf._ _Ex.
3:5—_“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see
Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith, Scripture
Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann,
Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181.
On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.

C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.

(_a_) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally
existing with God; (_b_) the Word of God is distinguished from
God, as executor of his will from everlasting.

(_a_) _Prov. 8:1—_“Doth not wisdom cry?” _Cf._ _Mat.
11:19—_“wisdom is justified by her works”; _Luke 7:35—_“wisdom is
justified of all her children”; _11:49—_“Therefore also said the
wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;
_Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—_“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his
way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master
workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with
the sons of men”; _cf._ _3:19—_“Jehovah by wisdom founded the
earth,” and _Heb. 1:2—_“his Son ... through whom ... he made the
worlds.” (_b_) _Ps. 107:20—_“He sendeth his word, and healeth
them”; _119:89—_“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in
heaven”; _147:15-18—_“He sendeth out his commandment.... He
sendeth out his word.”

In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is
described as “the brightness of the eternal light,” “the unspotted
mirror of God’s majesty,” and “the image of his
goodness”—reminding us of _Heb. 1:3—_“the effulgence of his glory,
and the very image of his substance.” In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom
is represented as being present with God when he made the world,
and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him
out of God’s holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1
Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:
“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth
calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works
shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As
for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and
conquereth forevermore.”

It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of
personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle
derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these
descriptions in Philo Judæus. John’s doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically
different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a
Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the
world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality
in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to
take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the
thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to
present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos
with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.

Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ,
1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best
account of Philo’s doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls
the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is
anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also
calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes
the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate
being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its
origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with
Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that
by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against
false heathen ideas of God’s multiplicity and immanence, as well
as against false Jewish ideas of God’s unity and transcendence. It
owes nothing to foreign sources.

We need not assign to John’s gospel a later origin, in order to
account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to
assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for
their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally
unknown to Philo. Philo’s Logos does not and cannot become man. So
says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd.,
xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in
John’s gospel] appears to be derived directly from the Palestinian
_Memra_, and not from the Alexandrian _Logos_.” Instead of Philo’s
doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it
was a stumbling-stone. It had no doctrine of the Messiah or of the
atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference
between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo’s Logos is
Reason, while John’s is Word; Philo’s is impersonal, while John’s
is personal; Philo’s is not incarnate, while John’s is incarnate;
Philo’s is not the Messiah, while John’s is the Messiah.”

Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he
went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the
Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In
his De Opifice Mundi he says: “The Word is nothing else but the
intelligible world.” He calls the Word the “chainband,” “pilot,”
“steersman,” of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo
must be translated ‘Reason.’ But in the Targums, or early Jewish
paraphrases of the O. T., the ‘Word’ of Jehovah (_Memra_, _Devra_)
is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine
action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself, ‘The
Word of God’ had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent
to God manifesting himself, or God in action.” George H. Gilbert,
in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John’s use of the term Logos was
suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content
of the word is Jewish.”

Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos
with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη
the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made
God a mode of matter—_natura naturata_; others made matter a mode
of God—_natura naturans_ = the world a self-evolution of God. The
Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were
expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of
God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held
Philo: ‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of
God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is
cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’ Philo’s Logos is not
only form but force—God’s creative energy—the eldest-born of the
‘I am,’ which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the
high priest’s robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen
and unseen worlds.”

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of
God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is
expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian
philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a
spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the
idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a
motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo’s belief in
transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the
redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the
errors of exclusive transcendence.” See a quotation from
Siegfried, in Schürer’s History of the Jewish People, article on
Philo: “Philo’s doctrine grew out of God’s distinction and
distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of
mediating principles, some being less than God and more than
creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf
between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity
stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that
of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God
incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating
principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”

The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William
Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the
Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of
its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The
truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and
published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled “the
Word of life”_ (1 John 1:1)._ “The Christian doctrine of the Logos
was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus
Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ
θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead” (quoted in
Marcus Dods, Expositors’ Bible, on _John 1:1_). See also Kendrick,
in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev.,
1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo;
Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual
System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach,
Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 59-71; Conant
on Proverbs, 53.

D. Descriptions of the Messiah.

(_a_) He is one with Jehovah; (_b_) yet he is in some sense distinct from
Jehovah.

(_a_) _Is. 9:6—_“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given
... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”; _Micah 5:2—_“thou Bethlehem
... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me
that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old,
from everlasting.” (_b_) _Ps. 45:6, 7—_“Thy throne, O God, is for
ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;
_Mal 3:1—_“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way
before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his
temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”
Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the
Messiah is here called “_the Lord_” or “_the Sovereign_”—a title
nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah;
that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor;
and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant,
elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.

It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of
passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ’s coming
had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to
those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show
their real meaning.

Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must
therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient
basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and
may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved
from the New Testament.

That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the
Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with
Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not
surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is
undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of
God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past,
a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to
religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn
the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the
Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and
N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity
with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak
of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the
doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of
the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of
it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter
of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are
found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen
religions as well. E. G. Robinson: “The doctrine of the Trinity
underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first
recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was
first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian
doctrine.”

II. These Three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to
conceive of them as distinct Persons.

1. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from each other.

(_a_) Christ distinguishes the Father from himself as “another”; (_b_) the
Father and the Son are distinguished as the begetter and the begotten;
(_c_) the Father and the Son are distinguished as the sender and the sent.

(_a_) _John 5:32, 37—_“It is another that beareth witness of me
... the Father that sent me, he hath borne witness of me.” (_b_)
_Ps. 2:7—_“Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee”; _John
1:14—_“the only begotten from the Father”; _18—_“the only begotten
Son”; _3:16—_“gave his only begotten Son.” (_c_) _John 10:36—_“say
ye of him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world,
Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?”; _Gal
4:4—_“when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son.”
In these passages the Father is represented as objective to the
Son, the Son to the Father, and both the Father and Son to the
Spirit.

2. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from the Spirit.

(_a_) Jesus distinguishes the Spirit from himself and from the Father;
(_b_) the Spirit proceeds from the Father; (_c_) the Spirit is sent by the
Father and by the Son.

(_a_) _John 14:16, 17—_“I will pray the Father, and he shall give
you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the
Spirit of truth”—or “_Spirit of the truth_,” = he whose work it is
to reveal and apply the truth, and especially to make manifest him
who is the truth. Jesus had been their Comforter: he now promises
them another Comforter. If he himself was a person, then the
Spirit is a person. (_b_) _John 15:26—_“the Spirit of truth which
proceedeth from the Father.” (_c_) _John 14:26—_“the Comforter,
even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name”;
_15:26—_“when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you
from the Father”; _Gal. 4:6—_“God sent forth the Spirit of his Son
into our hearts.” The Greek church holds that the Spirit proceeds
from the Father only; the Latin church, that the Spirit proceeds
both from the Father and from the Son. The true formula is: The
Spirit proceeds from the Father _through_ or _by_ (not “and”) the
Son. See Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:262, 263. Moberly,
Atonement and Personality, 195—“The _Filioque_ is a valuable
defence of the truth that the Holy Spirit is not simply the
abstract second Person of the Trinity, but rather the Spirit of
the incarnate Christ, reproducing Christ in human hearts, and
revealing in them the meaning of true manhood.”

3. The Holy Spirit is a person.

A. Designations proper to personality are given him.

(_a_) The masculine pronoun ἐκεῖνος, though πνεῦμα is neuter; (_b_) the
name παράκλητος, which cannot be translated by “comfort”, or be taken as
the name of any abstract influence. The Comforter, Instructor, Patron,
Guide, Advocate, whom this term brings before us, must be a person. This
is evident from its application to Christ in 1 John 2:1—“we have an
Advocate—παράκλητον—with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

(_a_) _John 16:14—_“He (ἐκεῖνος) shall glorify me”; in _Eph. 1:14_
also, some of the best authorities, including Tischendorf (8th
ed.), read ὄς, the masculine pronoun: “_who is an earnest of our
inheritance_.” But in _John 14:16-18_, παράκλητος is followed by
the neuters ὁ and αὐτό, because πνεῦμα had intervened. Grammatical
and not theological considerations controlled the writer. See G.
B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 189-217, especially on the
distinction between Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is
another person than Christ, in spite of Christ’s saying of the
coming of the Holy Spirit: “_I come unto you_.” (_b_) _John
16:7—_“if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you.”
The word παράκλητος, as appears from _1 John 2:1_, quoted above,
is a term of broader meaning than merely “Comforter.” The Holy
Spirit is, indeed, as has been said, “the mother-principle in the
Godhead,” and “_as one whom his mother comforteth_” so God by his
Spirit comforts his children (_Is. 66:13_). But the Holy Spirit is
also an Advocate of God’s claims in the soul, and of the soul’s
interests in prayer (_Rom. 8:26—_“maketh intercession for us”). He
comforts not only by being our advocate, but by being our
instructor, patron, and guide; and all these ideas are found
attaching to the word παράκλητος in good Greek usage. The word
indeed is a verbal adjective, signifying “called to one’s aid,”
hence a “helper”; the idea of encouragement is included in it, as
well as those of comfort and of advocacy. See Westcott, Bible
Com., on _John 14:16_; Cremer, Lexicon of N. T. Greek, _in voce_.

T. Dwight, in S. S. Times, on _John 14:16_—“The fundamental
meaning of the word παράκλητος, which is a verbal adjective, is
‘called to one’s aid,’ and thus, when used as a noun, it conveys
the idea of ‘helper.’ This more general sense probably attaches to
its use in John’s Gospel, while in the Epistle (_1 John 2:1, 2_)
it conveys the idea of Jesus acting as advocate on our behalf
before God as a Judge.” So the Latin _advocatus_ signifies one
“called to”—_i. e._, called in to aid, counsel, plead. In this
connection Jesus says: “I will not leave you orphans”_ (John
14:18)_. Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit, 228—“As the orphaned
family, in the day of the parent’s death, need some friend who
shall lighten their sense of loss by his own presence with them,
so the Holy Spirit is ‘called in’ to supply the present love and
help which the Twelve are losing in the death of Jesus.” A. A.
Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 237—“The Roman ‘client,’ the poor and
dependent man, called in his ‘patron’ to help him in all his
needs. The patron thought for, advised, directed, supported,
defended, supplied, restored, comforted his client in all his
complications. The client, though weak, with a powerful patron,
was socially and politically secure forever.”

B. His name is mentioned in immediate connection with other persons, and
in such a way as to imply his own personality.

(_a_) In connection with Christians; (_b_) in connection with Christ;
(_c_) in connection with the Father and the Son. If the Father and the Son
are persons, the Spirit must be a person also.

(_a_) _Acts 15:28—_“it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us.”
(_b_) _John 16:14—_“He shall glorify me: for he shall take of
mine, and shall declare it unto you”; _cf._ _17:4—_“I glorified
thee on the earth.” (_c_) _Mat. 28:29—_“baptizing them into the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; _2 Cor.
13:14—_“the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all”; _Jude
21—_“praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of
God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.” _1 Pet. 1:1,
2—_“elect ... according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in
sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the
blood of Jesus Christ.” Yet it is noticeable in all these passages
that there is no obtrusion of the Holy Spirit’s personality, as if
he desired to draw attention to himself. The Holy Spirit shows,
not himself, but Christ. Like John the Baptist, he is a mere
voice, and so is an example to Christian preachers, who are
themselves “made ... sufficient as ministers ... of the Spirit”_
(2 Cor. 3:6)_. His leading is therefore often unperceived; he so
joins himself to us that we infer his presence only from the new
and holy exercises of our own minds; he continues to work in us
even when his presence is ignored and his purity is outraged by
our sins.

C. He performs acts proper to personality.

That which searches, knows, speaks, testifies, reveals, convinces,
commands, strives, moves, helps, guides, creates, recreates, sanctifies,
inspires, makes intercession, orders the affairs of the church, performs
miracles, raises the dead—cannot be a mere power, influence, efflux, or
attribute of God, but must be a person.

_Gen. 1:2_, marg.—“_the Spirit of God was brooding upon the face
of the waters_”; _6:3—_“My Spirit shalt not strive with man for
ever”; _Luke 12:12—_“the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that very
hour what ye ought to say”; _John 3:8—_“born of the Spirit”—here
Bengel translates: “_the Spirit breathes where he wills, and thou
hearest his voice_”—see also Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 166;
_16:8—_“convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness,
and of judgment”; _Acts 2:4—_“the Spirit gave them utterance”;
_8:29—_“the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near”; _10:19, 20—_“the
Spirit said unto him [Peter], Behold, three men seek thee.... go
with them ... for I have sent them”; _13:2—_“the Holy Spirit said,
Separate me Barnabas and Saul”; _16:6, 7—_“forbidden of the Holy
Spirit ... Spirit of Jesus suffered them not”; _Rom. 8:11—_“give
life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit”; _26—_“the
Spirit also helpeth our infirmity ... maketh intercession for us”;
_15:19—_“in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the
Holy Spirit”; _1 Cor. 2:10, 11—_“the Spirit searcheth all
things.... things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”;
_12:8-11_—distributes spiritual gifts “to each one severally even
as he will”—here Meyer calls attention to the words “as he will,”
as proving the personality of the Spirit; _2 Pet. 1:21—_“men spake
from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; _1 Pet.
1:2—_“sanctification of the Spirit.” How can a person be given in
various measures? We answer, by being permitted to work in our
behalf with various degrees of power. Dorner: “To be power does
not belong to the impersonal.”

D. He is affected as a person by the acts of others.

That which can be resisted, grieved, vexed, blasphemed, must be a person;
for only a person can perceive insult and be offended. The blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost cannot be merely blasphemy against a power or
attribute of God, since in that case blasphemy against God would be a less
crime than blasphemy against his power. That against which the
unpardonable sin can be committed must be a person.

_Is. 63:10—_“they rebelled and grieved his holy Spirit”; _Mat.
12:31—_“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but
the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”; _Acts
5:3, 4, 9—_“lie to the Holy Ghost ... thou hast not lied unto men
but unto God.... agreed together to try the Spirit of the Lord”;
_7:51—_“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit”; _Eph. 4:30—_“grieve
not the Holy Spirit of God.” Satan cannot be “grieved.”
Selfishness can be angered, but only love can be grieved.
Blaspheming the Holy Spirit is like blaspheming one’s own mother.
The passages just quoted show the Spirit’s possession of an
emotional nature. Hence we read of “the love of the Spirit”_ (Rom.
15:30)_. The unutterable sighings of the Christian in intercessory
prayer (_Rom. 8:26, 27_) reveal the mind of the Spirit, and show
the infinite depths of feeling which are awakened in God’s heart
by the sins and needs of men. These deep desires and emotions
which are only partially communicated to us, and which only God
can understand, are conclusive proof that the Holy Spirit is a
person. They are only the overflow into us of the infinite
fountain of divine love to which the Holy Spirit unites us.

As Christ in the garden “began to be sorrowful and sore troubled”_
(Mat. 26:37)_, so the Holy Spirit is sorrowful and sore troubled
at the ignoring, despising, resisting of his work, on the part of
those whom he is trying to rescue from sin and to lead out into
the freedom and joy of the Christian life. Luthardt, in S. S.
Times, May 26, 1888—“Every sin can be forgiven—even the sin
against the Son of man—except the sin against the Holy Spirit. The
sin against the Son of man can be forgiven because he can be
misconceived. For he did not appear as that which he really was.
Essence and appearance, truth and reality, contradicted each
other.” Hence Jesus could pray: “Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do”_ (Luke 23:34)_. The office of the Holy
Spirit, however, is to show to men the nature of their conduct,
and to sin against him is to sin against light and without excuse.
See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 297-313. Salmond, in
Expositor’s Greek Testament, on _Eph. 4:30_—“What love is in us
points truly, though tremulously, to what love is in God. But in
us love, in proportion as it is true and sovereign, has both its
_wrath-side_ and its _grief-side_; and so must it be with God,
however difficult for us to think it out.”

E. He manifests himself in visible form as distinct from the Father and
the Son, yet in direct connection with personal acts performed by them.

_Mat. 3:16, 17—_“Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway
from the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he
saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him;
and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased”; _Luke 3:21, 22—_“Jesus also
having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the
Holy Spirit descended in a bodily form, as a dove, upon him, and a
voice came out of heaven, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am
well pleased.” Here are the prayer of Jesus, the approving voice
of the Father, and the Holy Spirit descending in visible form to
anoint the Son of God for his work. “I ad Jordanem, et videbis
Trinitatem.”

F. This ascription to the Spirit of a personal subsistence distinct from
that of the Father and of the Son cannot be explained as personification;
for:

(_a_) This would be to interpret sober prose by the canons of poetry. Such
sustained personification is contrary to the genius of even Hebrew poetry,
in which Wisdom itself is most naturally interpreted as designating a
personal existence. (_b_) Such an interpretation would render a multitude
of passages either tautological, meaningless, or absurd,—as can be easily
seen by substituting for the name Holy Spirit the terms which are wrongly
held to be its equivalents; such as the power, or influence, or efflux, or
attribute of God. (_c_) It is contradicted, moreover, by all those
passages in which the Holy Spirit is distinguished from his own gifts.

(_a_) The Bible is not primarily a book of poetry, although there
is poetry in it. It is more properly a book of history and law.
Even if the methods of allegory were used by the Psalmists and the
Prophets, we should not expect them largely to characterize the
Gospels and Epistles; _1 Cor. 13:4—_“Love suffereth long, and is
kind”—is a rare instance in which Paul’s style takes on the form
of poetry. Yet it is the Gospels and Epistles which most
constantly represent the Holy Spirit as a person. (_b_) _Acts
10:38—_“God anointed him [Jesus] with the Holy Spirit and with
power” = anointed him with power and with power? _Rom.
15:13—_“abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit” = in the
power of the power of God? _19—_“in the power of signs and
wonders, in the power of the Holy Spirit” = in the power of the
power of God? _1 Cor. 2:4—_“demonstration of the Spirit and of
power” = demonstration of power and of power? (_c_) _Luke
1:35—_“the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the
Most High shall overshadow thee”; _4:14—_“Jesus returned in the
power of the Spirit into Galilee”; _1 Cor. 12:4, 8, 11_—after
mention of the gifts of the Spirit, such as wisdom, knowledge,
faith, healings, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits,
tongues, interpretation of tongues, all these are traced to the
Spirit who bestows them: “_all these worketh the one and the same
Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as he will_.” Here is
not only giving, but giving discreetly, in the exercise of an
independent will such as belongs only to a person. _Rom.
8:26—_“the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us”—must be
interpreted, if the Holy Spirit is not a person distinct from the
Father, as meaning that the Holy Spirit intercedes with himself.

“The personality of the Holy Spirit was virtually rejected by the
Arians, as it has since been by Schleiermacher, and it has been
positively denied by the Socinians” (E. G. Robinson). Gould, Bib.
Theol. N. T., 83, 96—“The Twelve represent the Spirit as sent by
the Son, who has been exalted that he may send this new power out
of the heavens. Paul represents the Spirit as bringing to us the
Christ. In the Spirit Christ dwells in us. The Spirit is the
historic Jesus translated into terms of universal Spirit. Through
the Spirit we are in Christ and Christ in us. The divine Indweller
is to Paul alternately Christ and the Spirit. The Spirit is the
divine principle incarnate in Jesus and explaining his
preëxistence (_2 Cor. 3:17, 18_). Jesus was an incarnation of the
Spirit of God.”

This seeming identification of the Spirit with Christ is to be
explained upon the ground that the divine essence is common to
both and permits the Father to dwell in and to work through the
Son, and the Son to dwell in and to work through the Spirit. It
should not blind us to the equally patent Scriptural fact that
there are personal relations between Christ and the Holy Spirit,
and work done by the latter in which Christ is the object and not
the subject; _John 16:14—_“He shall glorify me: for he shall take
of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The Holy Spirit is not
some _thing_, but some _one_; not αὐτό, but Αὐτός; Christ’s _alter
ego_, or other self. We should therefore make vivid our belief in
the personality of Christ and of the Holy Spirit by addressing
each of them frequently in the prayers we offer and in such hymns
as “Jesus, lover of my soul,” and “Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly
Dove!” On the personality of the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, in
Works, 3:64-92; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:341-350.

III. This Tripersonality of the Divine Nature is not merely economic and
temporal, but is immanent and eternal.

1. Scripture proof that these distinctions of personality are eternal.

We prove this (_a_) from those passages which speak of the existence of
the Word from eternity with the Father; (_b_) from passages asserting or
implying Christ’s preëxistence; (_c_) from passages implying intercourse
between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world; (_d_)
from passages asserting the creation of the world by Christ; (_e_) from
passages asserting or implying the eternity of the Holy Spirit.

(_a_) _John 1:1, 2—_“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God”; _cf._ _Gen. 1:1—_“In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; _Phil.
2:6—_“existing in the form of God ... on an equality with God.”
(_b_) _John 8:58—_“before Abraham was born, I am”; _1:18—_“the
only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.);
_Col. 1:15-17—_“firstborn of all creation” or “before every
creature ... he is before all things.” In these passages “_am_”
and “_is_” indicate an eternal fact; the present tense expresses
permanent being. _Rev. 22:13, 14—_“I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (_c_) _John
17:5—_“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory
which I had with thee before the world was”; _24—_“Thou lovedst me
before the foundation of the world.” (_d_) _John 1:3—_“All things
were made through him”; _1 Cor. 8:6—_“one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things”; _Col. 1:16—_“all things have been
created through him and unto him”; _Heb. 1:2—_“through whom also
he made the worlds”; _10—_“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay
the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy
hands.” (_e_) _Gen. 1:2—_“the Spirit of God was brooding”—existed
therefore before creation; _Ps. 33:6—_“by the word of Jehovah were
the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath [Spirit]
of his mouth”; _Heb. 9:14—_“through the eternal Spirit.”

With these passages before us, we must dissent from the statement
of Dr. E. G. Robinson: “About the ontologic Trinity we know
absolutely nothing. The Trinity we can contemplate is simply a
revealed one, one of economic manifestations. We may _suppose_
that the ontologic underlies the economic.” Scripture compels us,
in our judgment, to go further than this, and to maintain that
there are personal relations between the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit independently of creation and of time; in other words
we maintain that Scripture reveals to us a social Trinity and an
intercourse of love apart from and before the existence of the
universe. Love before time implies distinctions of personality
before time. There are three eternal consciousnesses and three
eternal wills in the divine nature. We here state only the
fact,—the explanation of it, and its reconciliation with the
fundamental unity of God is treated in our next section. We now
proceed to show that the two varying systems which ignore this
tripersonality are unscriptural and at the same time exposed to
philosophical objection.

2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages.

A. The Sabellian.

Sabellius (of Ptolemais in Pentapolis, 250) held that Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit are mere developments or revelations to creatures, in time, of
the otherwise concealed Godhead—developments which, since creatures will
always exist, are not transitory, but which at the same time are not
eternal _a parte ante_. God as united to the creation is Father; God as
united to Jesus Christ is Son; God as united to the church is Holy Spirit.
The Trinity of Sabellius is therefore an economic and not an immanent
Trinity—a Trinity of forms or manifestations, but not a necessary and
eternal Trinity in the divine nature.

Some have interpreted Sabellius as denying that the Trinity is eternal _a
parte post_, as well as _a parte ante_, and as holding that, when the
purpose of these temporary manifestations is accomplished, the Triad is
resolved into the Monad. This view easily merges in another, which makes
the persons of the Trinity mere names for the ever shifting phases of the
divine activity.

The best statement of the Sabellian doctrine, according to the
interpretation first mentioned, is that of Schleiermacher,
translated with comments by Moses Stuart, in Biblical Repository,
6:1-16. The one unchanging God is differently reflected from the
world on account of the world’s different receptivities. Praxeas
of Rome (200) Noetus of Smyrna (230), and Beryl of Arabia (250)
advocated substantially the same views. They were called
Monarchians (μόνη ἀρχή), because they believed not in the Triad,
but only in the Monad. They were called Patripassians, because
they held that, as Christ is only God in human form, and this God
suffers, therefore the Father suffers. Knight, Colloquia
Peripatetica, xlii, suggests a connection between Sabellianism and
Emanationism. See this Compendium, on Theories which oppose
Creation.

A view similar to that of Sabellius was held by Horace Bushnell,
in his God in Christ, 113-115, 130 sq., 172-175, and Christ in
Theology, 119, 120—“Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being incidental
to the revelation of God, may be and probably are from eternity to
eternity, inasmuch as God may have revealed himself from eternity,
and certainly will reveal himself so long as there are minds to
know him. It may be, in fact, the nature of God to reveal himself,
as truly as it is of the sun to shine or of living mind to think.”
He does not deny the immanent Trinity, but simply says we know
nothing about it. Yet a Trinity of Persons in the divine essence
itself he called plain tritheism. He prefers “instrumental
Trinity” to “modal Trinity” as a designation of his doctrine. The
difference between Bushnell on the one hand, and Sabellius and
Schleiermacher on the other, seems then to be the following:
Sabellius and Schleiermacher hold that the One _becomes_ three in
the process of revelation, and the three are only _media_ or
_modes_ of revelation. Father, Son, and Spirit are mere names
applied to these modes of the divine action, there being no
internal distinctions in the divine nature. This is modalism, or a
modal Trinity. Bushnell stands by the Trinity of revelation alone,
and protests against any constructive reasonings with regard to
the immanent Trinity. Yet in his later writings he reverts to
Athanasius and speaks of God as eternally “threeing himself”; see
Fisher, Edwards on the Trinity, 73.

Lyman Abbott, in The Outlook, proposes as illustration of the
Trinity, 1. the artist working on his pictures; 2. the same man
teaching pupils how to paint; 3. the same man entertaining his
friends at home. He has not taken on these types of conduct. They
are not masks (_personæ_), nor offices, which he takes up and lays
down. There is a threefold _nature_ in him: he is artist, teacher,
friend. God is complex, and not simple. I do not know him, till I
know him in all these relations. Yet it is evident that Dr.
Abbott’s view provides no basis for love or for society within the
divine nature. The three persons are but three successive aspects
or activities of the one God. General Grant, when in office, was
but one person, even though he was a father, a President, and a
commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States.

It is evident that this theory, in whatever form it may be held, is far
from satisfying the demands of Scripture. Scripture speaks of the second
person of the Trinity as existing and acting before the birth of Jesus
Christ, and of the Holy Spirit as existing and acting before the formation
of the church. Both have a personal existence, eternal in the past as well
as in the future—which this theory expressly denies.

A revelation that is not a self-revelation of God is not honest.
Stuart: Since God is revealed as three, he must be essentially or
immanently three, back of revelation; else the revelation would
not be true. Dorner: A Trinity of revelation is a
misrepresentation, if there is not behind it a Trinity of nature.
Twesten properly arrives at the threeness by considering, not so
much what is involved in the revelation of God to us, as what is
involved in the revelation of God to himself. The unscripturalness
of the Sabellian doctrine is plain, if we remember that upon this
view the Three cannot exist at once: when the Father says “Thou
art my beloved Son”_ (Luke 3:22)_, he is simply speaking to
himself; when Christ sends the Holy Spirit, he only sends himself.
_John 1:1—_“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God”—“sets aside the false notion that the
Word become _personal_ first at the time of creation, or at the
incarnation” (Westcott, Bib. Com. _in loco_).

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 50, 51—“Sabellius claimed that the
Unity became a Trinity by expansion. Fatherhood began with the
world. God is not eternally Father, nor does he love eternally. We
have only an impersonal, unintelligible God, who has played upon
us and confused our understanding by showing himself to us under
three disguises. Before creation there is no Fatherhood, even in
germ.”

According to Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:269, Origen held that
the Godhead might be represented by three concentric circles; the
widest, embracing the whole being, is that of the Father; the
next, that of the Son, which extends to the rational creation; and
the narrowest is that of the Spirit, who rules in the holy men of
the church. King, Reconstruction of Theology, 192, 194—“To affirm
social relations in the Godhead is to assert absolute
Tritheism.... Unitarianism emphasizes the humanity of Christ, to
preserve the unity of God; the true view emphasizes the divinity
of Christ, to preserve the unity.”

L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 141, 287, says that New
England Trinitarianism is characterized by three things: 1.
Sabellian Patripassianism; Christ is all the Father there is, and
the Holy Spirit is Christ’s continued life; 2. Consubstantiality,
or community of essence, of God and man; unlike the essential
difference between the created and the uncreated which Platonic
dualism maintained, this theory turns _moral_ likeness into
_essential_ likeness; 3. Philosophical monism, matter itself being
but an evolution of Spirit.... In the next form of the scientific
doctrine of evolution, the divineness of man becomes a vital
truth, and out of it arises a Christology that removes Jesus of
Nazareth indeed out of the order of absolute Deity, but at the
same time exalts him to a place of moral eminence that is secure
and supreme.

Against this danger of regarding Christ as a merely economic and
temporary manifestation of God we can guard only by maintaining
the Scriptural doctrine of an immanent Trinity. Moberly, Atonement
and Personality, 86, 165—“We cannot incur any Sabellian peril
while we maintain—what is fatal to Sabellianism—that that which is
revealed within the divine Unity is not only a distinction of
aspects or of names, but a real reciprocity of mutual relation.
One ‘aspect’ cannot contemplate, or be loved by, another....
Sabellianism degrades the persons of Deity into aspects. But there
can be no mutual relation between aspects. The heat and the light
of flame cannot severally contemplate and be in love with one
another.” See Bushnell’s doctrine reviewed by Hodge, Essays and
Reviews, 433-473. On the whole subject, see Dorner, Hist. Doct.
Person of Christ, 2:152-169; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:259; Baur,
Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, 1:256-305; Thomasius, Christi Person
und Werk 1:83.

B. The Arian.

Arius (of Alexandria; condemned by Council of Nice, 325) held that the
Father is the only divine being absolutely without beginning; the Son and
the Holy Spirit, through whom God creates and recreates, having been
themselves created out of nothing before the world was; and Christ being
called God, because he is next in rank to God, and is endowed by God with
divine power to create.

The followers of Arius have differed as to the precise rank and claims of
Christ. While Socinus held with Arius that worship of Christ was
obligatory, the later Unitarians have perceived the impropriety of
worshiping even the highest of created beings, and have constantly tended
to a view of the Redeemer which regards him as a mere man, standing in a
peculiarly intimate relation to God.

For statement of the Arian doctrine, see J. Freeman Clarke,
Orthodoxy, Its Truths and Errors. _Per contra_, see Schäffer, in
Bib. Sac., 21:1, article on Athanasius and the Arian controversy.
The so-called Athanasian Creed, which Athanasius never wrote, is
more properly designated as the _Symbolum Quicumque_. It has also
been called, though facetiously, “the Anathemasian Creed.” Yet no
error in doctrine can be more perilous or worthy of condemnation
than the error of Arius (_1 Cor. 16:22—_“If any man loveth not the
Lord, let him be anathema”; _1 John 2:23—_“Whosoever denieth the
Son, the same hath not the Father”; _4:3—_“every spirit that
confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the
antichrist”). It regards Christ as called God only by courtesy,
much as we give to a Lieutenant Governor the title of Governor.
Before the creation of the Son, the love of God, if there could be
love, was expended on himself. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism: “The
Arian Christ is nothing but a heathen idol, invented to maintain a
heathenish Supreme in heathen isolation from the world. The nearer
the Son is pulled down towards man by the attenuation of his
Godhead, the more remote from man becomes the unshared Godhead of
the Father. You have an _Être Suprême_ who is practically
unapproachable, a mere One-and-all, destitute of personality.”

Gore, Incarnation, 90, 91, 110, shows the immense importance of
the controversy with regard to ὁμοούσιον and ὁμοιούσιον. Carlyle
once sneered that “the Christian world was torn in pieces over a
diphthong.” But Carlyle afterwards came to see that Christianity
itself was at stake, and that it would have dwindled away to a
legend, if the Arians had won. Arius appealed chiefly to logic,
not to Scripture. He claimed that a Son must be younger than his
Father. But he was asserting the principle of heathenism and
idolatry, in demanding worship for a creature. The Goths were
easily converted to Arianism. Christ was to them a hero-god, a
demigod, and the later Goths could worship Christ and heathen
idols impartially.

It is evident that the theory of Arius does not satisfy the demands of
Scripture. A created God, a God whose existence had a beginning and
therefore may come to an end, a God made of a substance which once was
not, and therefore a substance different from that of the Father, is not
God, but a finite creature. But the Scripture speaks of Christ as being in
the beginning God, with God, and equal with God.

Luther, alluding to _John 1:1_, says: “‘The Word was God’ is
against Arius; ‘the Word was with God’ is against Sabellius.” The
Racovian Catechism, Quaes. 183, 184, 211, 236, 237, 245, 246,
teaches that Christ is to be truly worshiped, and they are denied
to be Christians who refuse to adore him. Davidis was persecuted
and died in prison for refusing to worship Christ; and Socinus was
charged, though probably unjustly, with having caused his
imprisonment. Bartholomew Legate, an Essexman and an Arian, was
burned to death at Smithfield, March 13, 1613. King James I asked
him whether he did not pray to Christ. Legate’s answer was that
“indeed he had prayed to Christ in the days of his ignorance, but
not for these last seven years”; which so shocked James that “he
spurned at him with his foot.” At the stake Legate still refused
to recant, and so was burned to ashes amid a vast conflux of
people. The very next month another Arian named Whiteman was
burned at Burton-on-Trent.

It required courage, even a generation later, for John Milton, in
his Christian Doctrine, to declare himself a high Arian. In that
treatise he teaches that “the Son of God did not exist from all
eternity, is not coëval or coëssential or coëqual with the Father,
but came into existence by the will of God to be the next being to
himself, the first-born and best beloved, the Logos or Word
through whom all creation should take its beginnings.” So Milton
regards the Holy Spirit as a created being, inferior to the Son
and possibly confined to our heavens and earth. Milton’s Arianism,
however, is characteristic of his later, rather than his earlier,
writings; compare the Ode on Christ’s Nativity with Paradise Lost,
3:383-391; and see Masson’s Life of Milton, 1:39; 6:823, 824; A.
H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 260-262.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, when asked whether the Father who had created
could not also destroy the Son, said that he had not considered
the question. Ralph Waldo Emerson broke with his church and left
the ministry because he could not celebrate the Lord’s Supper,—it
implied a profounder reverence for Jesus than he could give him.
He wrote: “It seemed to me at church to-day, that the Communion
Service, as it is now and here celebrated, is a document of the
dullness of the race. How these, my good neighbors, the bending
deacons, with their cups and plates, would have straightened
themselves to sturdiness, if the proposition came before them to
honor thus a fellow-man”; see Cabot’s Memoir, 314. Yet Dr. Leonard
Bacon said of the Unitarians that “it seemed as if their exclusive
contemplation of Jesus Christ in his human character as the
example for our imitation had wrought in them an exceptional
beauty and Christlikeness of living.”

Chadwick, Old and New Unitarian Belief, 20, speaks of Arianism as
exalting Christ to a degree of inappreciable difference from God,
while Socinus looked upon him only as a miraculously endowed man,
and believed in an infallible book. The term “Unitarians,” he
claims, is derived from the “Uniti,” a society in Transylvania, in
support of mutual toleration between Calvinists, Romanists, and
Socinians. The name stuck to the advocates of the divine Unity,
because they were its most active members. B. W. Lockhart:
“Trinity guarantees God’s knowableness. Arius taught that Jesus
was neither human nor divine, but created in some grade of being
between the two, essentially unknown to man. An absentee God made
Jesus his messenger, God himself not touching the world directly
at any point, and unknown and unknowable to it. Athanasius on the
contrary asserted that God did not send a messenger in Christ, but
came himself, so that to know Christ is really to know God who is
essentially revealed in him. This gave the Church the doctrine of
God immanent, or Immanuel, God knowable and actually known by men,
because actually present.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present
Age, 14—“The world was never further from Unitarianism than it is
to-day; we may add that Unitarianism was never further from
itself.” On the doctrines of the early Socinians, see Princeton
Essays, 1:195. On the whole subject, see Blunt, Dict. of Heretical
Sects, art.: Arius; Guericke, Hist. Doctrine, 1:313, 319. See also
a further account of Arianism in the chapter of this Compendium on
the Person of Christ.

IV. This Tripersonality is not Tritheism; for, while there are three
Persons, there is but one Essence.

(_a_) The term “person” only approximately represents the truth. Although
this word, more nearly than any other single word, expresses the
conception which the Scriptures give us of the relation between the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is not itself used in this
connection in Scripture, and we employ it in a qualified sense, not in the
ordinary sense in which we apply the word “person” to Peter, Paul, and
John.

The word “person” is only the imperfect and inadequate expression
of a fact that transcends our experience and comprehension.
Bunyan: “My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold The truth, as
cabinets encase the gold.” Three Gods, limiting each other, would
deprive each other of Deity. While we show that the unity is
articulated by the persons, it is equally important to remember
that the persons are limited by the unity. With us personality
implies entire separation from all others—distinct individuality.
But in the one God there can be no such separation. The personal
distinctions in him must be such as are consistent with essential
unity. This is the merit of the statement in the _Symbolum
Quicumque_ (or Athanasian Creed, wrongly so called): “The Father
is God, the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are
not three Gods but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the
Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord; yet there are not three Lords
but one Lord. For as we are compelled by Christian truth to
acknowledge each person by himself to be God and Lord, so we are
forbidden by the same truth to say that there are three Gods or
three Lords.” See Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:270. We add
that the personality of the Godhead as a whole is separate and
distinct from all others, and in this respect is more fully
analogous to man’s personality than is the personality of the
Father or of the Son.

The church of Alexandria in the second century chanted together:
“One only is holy, the Father; One only is holy, the Son; One only
is holy, the Spirit.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 154,
167, 168—“The three persons are neither three Gods, nor three
parts of God. Rather are they God threefoldly, tri-personally....
The personal distinction in Godhead is a distinction within, and
of, Unity: not a distinction which qualifies Unity, or usurps the
place of it, or destroys it. It is not a relation of mutual
exclusiveness, but of mutual inclusiveness. No one person is or
can be without the others.... The personality of the supreme or
absolute Being cannot be without self-contained mutuality of
relations such as Will and Love. But the mutuality would not be
real, unless the subject which becomes object, and the object
which becomes subject, were on each side alike and equally
Personal.... The Unity of all-comprehending inclusiveness is a
higher mode of unity than the unity of singular
distinctiveness.... The disciples are not to have the presence of
the Spirit instead of the Son, but to have the Spirit is to have
the Son. We mean by the Personal God not a limited alternative to
unlimited abstracts, such as Law, Holiness, Love, but the
transcendent and inclusive completeness of them all. The terms
Father and Son are certainly terms which rise more immediately out
of the temporal facts of the incarnation than out of the eternal
relations of the divine Being. They are metaphors, however, which
mean far more in the spiritual than they do in the material
sphere. Spiritual hunger is more intense than physical hunger. So
sin, judgment, grace, are metaphors. But in _John 1:1-18_ ‘Son’ is
not used, but ‘Word.’ ”

(_b_) The necessary qualification is that, while three persons among men
have only a _specific_ unity of nature or essence—that is, have the same
_species_ of nature or essence,—the persons of the Godhead have a
_numerical_ unity of nature or essence—that is, have the _same_ nature or
essence. The undivided essence of the Godhead belongs equally to each of
the persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each possesses all the
substance and all the attributes of Deity. The plurality of the Godhead is
therefore not a plurality of essence, but a plurality of hypostatical, or
personal, distinctions. God is not three and one, but three in one. The
one indivisible essence has three modes of subsistence.

The Trinity is not simply a partnership, in which each member can
sign the name of the firm; for this is unity of council and
operation only, not of essence. God’s nature is not an abstract
but an organic unity. God, as living, cannot be a mere Monad.
Trinity is the organism of the Deity. The one divine Being exists
in three modes. The life of the vine makes itself known in the
life of the branches, and this union between vine and branches
Christ uses to illustrate the union between the Father and
himself. (See _John 15:10—_“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall
abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments,
and abide in his love”; _cf._ _verse 5—_“I am the vine, ye are the
branches; he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth
much fruit”; _17:22, 23—_“That they may be one, even as we are
one; I in them, and thou in me.”) So, in the organism of the body,
the arm has its own life, a different life from that of the head
or the foot, yet has this only by partaking of the life of the
whole. See Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:450-453—“The one divine
personality is so present in each of the distinctions, that these,
which singly and by themselves would not be personal, yet do
participate in the one divine personality, each in its own manner.
This one divine personality is the unity of the three modes of
subsistence which participate in itself. Neither is personal
without the others. In each, in its manner, is the whole Godhead.”

The human body is a complex rather than a simple organism, a unity
which embraces an indefinite number of subsidiary and dependent
organisms. The one life of the body manifests itself in the life
of the nervous system, the life of the circulatory system, and the
life of the digestive system. The complete destruction of either
one of these systems destroys the other two. Psychology as well as
physiology reveals to us the possibility of a three-fold life
within the bounds of a single being. In the individual man there
is sometimes a double and even a triple consciousness. Herbert
Spencer, Autobiography, 1:459; 2:204—“Most active minds have, I
presume, more or less frequent experiences of double
consciousness—one consciousness seeming to take note of what the
other is about, and to applaud or blame.” He mentions an instance
in his own experience. “May there not be possible a bi-cerebral
thinking, as there is a binocular vision?... In these cases it
seems as though there were going on, quite apart from the
consciousness which seemed to constitute myself, some process of
elaborating coherent thoughts—as though one part of myself was an
independent originator over whose sayings and doings I had no
control, and which were nevertheless in great measure consistent;
while the other part of myself was a passive spectator or
listener, quite unprepared for many of the things that the first
part said, and which were nevertheless, though unexpected, not
illogical.” This fact that there can be more than one
consciousness in the same personality among men should make us
slow to deny that there can be three consciousnesses in the one
God.

Humanity at large is also an organism, and this fact lends new
confirmation to the Pauline statement of organic interdependence.
Modern sociology is the doctrine of one life constituted by the
union of many. “Unus homo, nullus homo” is a principle of ethics
as well as of sociology. No man can have a conscience to himself.
The moral life of one results from and is interpenetrated by the
moral life of all. All men moreover live, move and have their
being in God. Within the bounds of the one universal and divine
consciousness there are multitudinous _finite_ consciousnesses.
Why then should it be thought incredible that in the nature of
this one God there should be three _infinite_ consciousnesses?
Baldwin, Psychology, 53, 54—“The integration of finite
consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find
a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses
in the unit-personality of man. In the hypnotic state, multiple
consciousnesses may be induced in the same nervous organism. In
insanity there is a secondary consciousness at war with that which
normally dominates.” Schurman, Belief in God, 26, 161—“The
infinite Spirit may include the finite, as the idea of a single
organism embraces within a single life a plurality of members and
functions.... All souls are parts or functions of the eternal life
of God, who is above all, and through all, and in all, and in whom
we live, and move, and have our being.” We would draw the
conclusion that, as in the body and soul of man, both as an
individual and as a race, there is diversity in unity, so in the
God in whose image man is made, there is diversity in unity, and a
triple consciousness and will are consistent with, and even find
their perfection in, a single essence.

By the personality of God we mean more than we mean when we speak
of the personality of the Son and the personality of the Spirit.
The personality of the Godhead is distinct and separate from all
others, and is, in this respect, like that of man. Hence Shedd,
Dogm. Theol., 1:194, says “it is preferable to speak of the
_personality_ of the essence rather than of the _person_ of the
essence; because the essence is not one person, but three
persons.... The divine essence cannot be at once three persons and
one person, if ‘person’ is employed in one signification; but it
can be at once three persons and one personal Being.” While we
speak of the one God as having a personality in which there are
three persons, we would not call this personality a
superpersonality, if this latter term is intended to intimate that
God’s personality is less than the personality of man. The
personality of the Godhead is inclusive rather than exclusive.

With this qualification we may assent to the words of D’Arcy,
Idealism and Theology, 93, 94, 218, 230, 236, 254—“The innermost
truth of things, God, must be conceived as personal; but the
ultimate Unity, which is his, must be believed to be
superpersonal. It is a unity of persons, not a personal unity. For
us personality is the ultimate form of unity. It is not so in him.
For in him all persons live and move and have their being.... God
is personal and also superpersonal. In him there is a transcendent
unity that can embrace a personal multiplicity.... There is in God
an ultimate superpersonal unity in which all persons are one—[all
human persons and the three divine persons].... Substance is more
real than quality, and subject is more real than substance. The
most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive
Universal.... What human love strives to accomplish—the overcoming
of the opposition of person to person—is perfectly attained in the
divine Unity.... The presupposition on which philosophy is driven
back—[that persons have an underlying ground of unity] is
identical with that which underlies Christian theology.” See
Pfleiderer and Lotze on personality, in this Compendium, p. 104.

(_c_) This oneness of essence explains the fact that, while Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, as respects their personality, are distinct subsistences,
there is an intercommunion of persons and an immanence of one divine
person in another which permits the peculiar work of one to be ascribed,
with a single limitation, to either of the others, and the manifestation
of one to be recognized in the manifestation of another. The limitation is
simply this, that although the Son was sent by the Father, and the Spirit
by the Father and the Son, it cannot be said _vice versa_ that the Father
is sent either by the Son, or by the Spirit. The Scripture representations
of this intercommunion prevent us from conceiving of the distinctions
called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as involving separation between them.

Dorner adds that “in one is each of the others.” This is true with
the limitation mentioned in the text above. Whatever Christ does,
God the Father can be said to do; for God acts only in and through
Christ the Revealer. Whatever the Holy Spirit does, Christ can be
said to do; for the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. The
Spirit is the omnipresent Jesus, and Bengel’s dictum is true: “Ubi
Spiritus, ibi Christus.” Passages illustrating this intercommunion
are the following: _Gen. 1:1—_“God created”; _cf._ _Heb.
1:2—_“through whom [the Son] also he made the worlds”; _John 5:17,
19—_“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.... 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”; _14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”;
_11—_“I am in the Father and the Father in me”; _18—_“I will not
leave you desolate: I come unto you” (by the Holy Spirit);
_15:26—_“when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you
from the Father, even the Spirit of truth”; _17:21—_“that they may
all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee”; _2
Cor. 5:19—_“God was in Christ reconciling”; _Titus 2:10—_“God our
Savior”; _Heb. 12:23—_“God the Judge of all”; _cf._ _John
5:22—_“neither doth the father judge any man, but he hath given
all judgment unto the Son”; _Acts 17:31—_“judge the world in
righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”

It is this intercommunion, together with the order of personality
and operation to be mentioned hereafter, which explains the
occasional use of the term “Father” for the whole Godhead; as in
_Eph. 4:6—_“one God and Father of all, who is over all through all
[in Christ], and in you all” [by the Spirit]. This intercommunion
also explains the designation of Christ as “_the Spirit_,” and of
the Spirit as “_the Spirit of Christ_,” as in _1 Cor. 15:45—_“the
last Adam became a life-giving Spirit”; _2 Cor. 3:17—_“Now the
Lord is the Spirit”; _Gal. 4:6—_“sent forth the Spirit of his
Son”; _Phil. 1:19—_“supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (see
Alford and Lange on _2 Cor. 3:17, 18_). So the Lamb, in _Rev.
5:6_, has “_seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven
Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth_” = the Holy Spirit,
with his manifold powers, is the Spirit of the omnipotent,
omniscient, and omnipresent Christ. Theologians have designated
this intercommunion by the terms περιχώρησις, _circumincessio_,
_intercommunicatio_, _circulatio_, _inexistentia_. The word οὐσία
was used to denote essence, substance, nature, being; and the
words πρόσωπον and ὑπόστασις for person, distinction, mode of
subsistence. On the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον and
ὑπόστασις see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:321, note 2. On the meaning
of the word ’person’ in connection with the Trinity, see John
Howe, Calm Discourse of the Trinity; Jonathan Edwards,
Observations on the Trinity; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:194, 267-275,
299, 300.

The Holy Spirit is Christ’s _alter ego_, or other self. When Jesus
went away, it was an exchange of his presence for his
omnipresence; an exchange of limited for unlimited power; an
exchange of companionship for indwelling. Since Christ comes to
men in the Holy Spirit, he speaks through the apostles as
authoritatively as if his own lips uttered the words. Each
believer, in having the Holy Spirit, has the whole Christ for his
own; see A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit. Gore, Incarnation,
218—“The persons of the Holy Trinity are not separable
individuals. Each involves the others; the coming of each is the
coming of the others. Thus the coming of the Spirit must have
involved the coming of the Son. But the specialty of the
Pentecostal gift appears to be the coming of the Holy Spirit out
of the uplifted and glorified _manhood_ of the incarnate Son. The
Spirit is the life-giver, but the life with which he works in the
church is the life of the _Incarnate_, the life of Jesus.”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 85—“For centuries upon
centuries, the essential unity of God had been burnt and branded
in upon the consciousness of Israel. It had to be completely
established first, as a basal element of thought, indispensable,
unalterable, before there could begin the disclosure to man of the
reality of the eternal relations within the one indivisible being
of God. And when the disclosure came, it came not as modifying,
but as further interpreting and illumining, that unity which it
absolutely presupposed.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology,
238—“There is extreme difficulty in giving any statement of a
triunity that shall not verge upon tritheism on the one hand, or
upon mere modalism on the other. It was very natural that Calvin
should be charged with Sabellianism, and John Howe with
tritheism.”

V. The Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are equal.

In explanation, notice that:

1. These titles belong to the Persons.

(_a_) The Father is not God as such; for God is not only Father, but also
Son and Holy Spirit. The term “Father” designates that hypostatical
distinction in the divine nature in virtue of which God is related to the
Son, and through the Son and the Spirit to the church and the world. As
author of the believer’s spiritual as well as natural life, God is doubly
his Father; but this relation which God sustains to creatures is not the
ground of the title. God is Father primarily in virtue of the relation
which he sustains to the eternal Son; only as we are spiritually united to
Jesus Christ do we become children of God.

(_b_) The Son is not God as such; for God is not only Son, but also Father
and Holy Spirit. “The Son” designates that distinction in virtue of which
God is related to the Father, is sent by the Father to redeem the world,
and with the Father sends the Holy Spirit.

(_c_) The Holy Spirit is not God as such; for God is not only Holy Spirit,
but also Father and Son. “The Holy Spirit” designates that distinction in
virtue of which God is related to the Father and the Son, and is sent by
them to accomplish the work of renewing the ungodly and of sanctifying the
church.

Neither of these names designates the Monad as such. Each
designates rather that personal distinction which forms the
eternal basis and ground for a particular self-revelation. In the
sense of being the Author and Provider of men’s natural life, God
is the Father of all. But even this natural sonship is mediated by
Jesus Christ; see _1 Cor. 8:6—_“one Lord, Jesus Christ through
whom are all things, and we through him.” The phrase “_Our
Father_,” however, can be used with the highest truth only by the
regenerate, who have been newly born of God by being united to
Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. See _Gal. 3:26—_“For
ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Jesus Christ”;
_4:4-6—_“God sent forth his Son ... that we might receive the
adoption of sons ... sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, Abba, Father”; _Eph. 1:5—_“foreordained as unto
adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.” God’s love for Christ is
the measure of his love for those who are one with Christ. Human
nature in Christ is lifted up into the life and communion of the
eternal Trinity. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:306-310.

Human fatherhood is a reflection of the divine, not, _vice versa_,
the divine a reflection of the human; _cf._ _Eph. 3:14, 15—_“the
Father, from whom every fatherhood πατριά in heaven and on earth
is named.” Chadwick, Unitarianism, 77-83, makes the name “Father”
only a symbol for the great Cause of organic evolution, the Author
of all being. But we may reply with Stearns, Evidence of Christian
Experience, 177—“to know God outside of the sphere of redemption
is not to know him in the deeper meaning of the term ‘Father’. It
is only through the Son that we know the Father: _Mat.
11:27—_‘Neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.’”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 38—“The Unseen can be known only by the seen
which comes forth from it. The all-generating or Paternal Life
which is hidden from us can be known only by the generated or
Filial Life in which it reveals itself. The goodness and
righteousness which inhabits eternity can be known only by the
goodness and righteousness which issues from it in the successive
births of time. God above the world is made known only by God in
the world. God transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God
immanent, the Son.” Faber: “O marvellous, O worshipful! No song or
sound is heard, But everywhere and every hour, In love, in wisdom
and in power, the Father speaks his dear eternal Word.” We may
interpret this as meaning that self-expression is a necessity of
nature to an infinite Mind. The Word is therefore eternal. Christ
is the mirror from which are flashed upon us the rays of the
hidden Luminary. So Principal Fairbairn says: “Theology must be on
its historical side Christocentric, but on its doctrinal side
Theocentric.”

Salmond, Expositor’s Greek Testament, on _Eph. 1:5_—“By ‘adoption’
Paul does not mean the bestowal of the full privileges of the
family on those who are sons by nature, but the acceptance into
the family of those who are not sons originally and by right in
the relation proper of those who are sons by birth. Hence υἱοθεσία
is never affirmed of Christ, for he alone is Son of God by nature.
So Paul regards our sonship, not as lying in the natural relation
in which men stand to God as his children, but as implying a new
relation of grace, founded on a covenant relation of God and on
the work of Christ (_Gal. 4:5_ _sq._).”

2. Qualified sense of these titles.

Like the word “person”, the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not to
be confined within the precise limitations of meaning which would be
required if they were applied to men.

(_a_) The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ’s Sonship by giving
to him in his preëxistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the
Effulgence of God.—The term “Logos” combines in itself the two ideas of
thought and word, of reason and expression. While the Logos as divine
thought or reason is one with God, the Logos as divine word or expression
is distinguishable from God. Words are the means by which personal beings
express or reveal themselves. Since Jesus Christ was “the Word” before
there were any creatures to whom revelations could be made, it would seem
to be only a necessary inference from this title that in Christ God must
be from eternity expressed or revealed to himself; in other words, that
the Logos is the principle of truth, or self-consciousness, in God.—The
term “Image” suggests the ideas of copy or counterpart. Man is the image
of God only relatively and derivatively. Christ is the Image of God
absolutely and archetypally. As the perfect representation of the Father’s
perfections, the Son would seem to be the object and principle of love in
the Godhead.—The term “Effulgence,” finally, is an allusion to the sun and
its radiance. As the effulgence of the sun manifests the sun’s nature,
which otherwise would be unrevealed, yet is inseparable from the sun and
ever one with it, so Christ reveals God, but is eternally one with God.
Here is a principle of movement, of will, which seems to connect itself
with the holiness, or self-asserting purity, of the divine nature.

Smyth, Introd. to Edwards’ Observations on the Trinity: “The
ontological relations of the persons of the Trinity are not a mere
blank to human thought.” _John 1:1—_“In the beginning was the
Word”—means more than “in the beginning was the _x_, or the zero.”
Godet indeed says that Logos = “reason” only in philosophical
writings, but never in the Scriptures. He calls this a Hegelian
notion. But both Plato and Philo had made this signification a
common one. On λόγος as = reason + speech, see Lightfoot on
Colossians, 143, 144. Meyer interprets it as “personal
subsistence, the self-revelation of the divine essence, before all
time immanent in God.” Neander, Planting and Training, 369—Logos =
“the eternal Revealer of the divine essence.” Bushnell: “Mirror of
creative imagination”; “form of God.”

Word = 1. Expression; 2. Definite expression; 3. Ordered
expression; 4. Complete expression. We make thought definite by
putting it into language. So God’s wealth of ideas is in the Word
formed into an ordered Kingdom, a true Cosmos; see Mason, Faith of
the Gospel, 76. Max Müller: “A word is simply a spoken thought
made audible as sound. Take away from a word the sound, and what
is left is simply the thought of it.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 72,
73—“The Greek saw in the word the abiding thought behind the
passing form. The Word was God and yet finite—finite only as to
form, infinite as to what the form suggests or expresses. By Word
some form must be meant, and any form is finite. The Word is the
form taken by the infinite Intelligence which transcends all
forms.” We regard this identification of the Word with the finite
manifestation of the Word as contradicted by _John 1:1_, where the
Word is represented as being with God before creation, and by
_Phil. 2:6_, where the Word is represented as existing in the form
of God before his self-limitation in human nature. Scripture
requires us to believe in an objectification of God to himself in
the person of the Word prior to any finite manifestation of God to
men. Christ existed as the Word, and the Word was with God, before
the Word was made flesh and before the world came into being; in
other words, the Logos was the eternal principle of truth or
self-consciousness in the nature of God.

Passages representing Christ as the Image of God are _Col.
1:15—_“who is the image of the invisible God”; _2 Cor.
4:4—_“Christ, who is the image of God” (εἰκών); _Heb. 1:3—_“the
very image of his substance” (χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ); here
χαρακτήρ means “impress,” “counterpart.” Christ is the perfect
image of God, as men are not. He therefore has consciousness and
will. He possesses all the attributes and powers of God. The word
“Image” suggests the perfect equality with God which the title
“Son” might at first seem to deny. The living Image of God which
is equal to himself and is the object of his infinite love can be
nothing less than personal. As the bachelor can never satisfy his
longing for companionship by lining his room with mirrors which
furnish only a lifeless reflection of himself, so God requires for
his love a personal as well as an infinite object. The Image is
not precisely the _repetition_ of the original. The stamp from the
seal is not precisely the _reproduction_ of the seal. The letters
on the seal run backwards and can be easily read only when the
impression is before us. So Christ is the only interpretation and
revelation of the hidden Godhead. As only in love do we come to
know the depths of our own being, so it is only in the Son that
“God is love”_ (1 John 4:8)_.

Christ is spoken of as the Effulgence of God in _Heb. 1:3—_“who
being the effulgence of his glory” (ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης); _cf._ _2
Cor. 4:6—_“shined in our hearts, to give the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Notice
that the radiance of the sun is as old as the sun itself, and
without it the sun would not be sun. So Christ is coëqual and
coëternal with the Father. _Ps. 84:11—_“Jehovah God is a sun.” But
we cannot see the sun except by the sunlight. Christ is the
sunlight which streams forth from the Sun and which makes the Sun
visible. If there be an eternal Sun, there must be also an eternal
Sunlight, and Christ must be eternal. Westcott on _Hebrews
1:3_—“The use of the absolute timeless term ὤν, ‘_being_’, guards
against the thought that the Lord’s sonship was by adoption, and
not by nature. ἀπαύγασμα does not express personality, and
χαρακτήρ does not express coëssentiality. The two words are
related exactly as ὁμοούσιος and μονογενής, and like those must be
combined to give the fulness of the truth. The truth expressed
thus antithetically holds good absolutely.... In Christ the
essence of God is made distinct; in Christ the revelation of God’s
character is seen.” On Edwards’s view of the Trinity, together
with his quotations from Ramsey’s Philosophical Principles, from
which he seems to have derived important suggestions, see Allen,
Jonathan Edwards, 338-376; G. P. Fisher, Edwards’s Essay on the
Trinity, 110-116.

(_b_) The names thus given to the second person of the Trinity, if they
have _any_ significance, bring him before our minds in the general aspect
of Revealer, and suggest a relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to
God’s immanent attributes of truth, love, and holiness. The prepositions
used to describe the internal relations of the second person to the first
are not prepositions of rest, but prepositions of direction and movement.
The Trinity, as the organism of Deity, secures a life-movement of the
Godhead, a process in which God evermore objectifies himself and in the
Son gives forth of his fulness. Christ represents the centrifugal action
of the deity. But there must be centripetal action also. In the Holy
Spirit the movement is completed, and the divine activity and thought
returns into itself. True religion, in reuniting us to God, reproduces in
us, in our limited measure, this eternal process of the divine mind.
Christian experience witnesses that God in himself is unknown; Christ is
the organ of external revelation; the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal
revelation—only he can give us an inward apprehension or realization of
the truth. It is “through the eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered himself
without blemish unto God,” and it is only through the Holy Spirit that the
church has access to the Father, or fallen creatures can return to God.

Here we see that God is Life, self-sufficient Life, Infinite Life,
of which the life of the universe is but a faint reflection, a
rill from the fountain, a drop from the ocean. Since Christ is the
only Revealer, the only outgoing principle in the Godhead, it is
he in whom the whole creation comes to be and holds together. He
is the Life of nature: all natural beauty and grandeur, all forces
molecular and molar, all laws of gravitation and evolution, are
the work and manifestation of the omnipresent Christ. He is the
Life of humanity: the intellectual and moral impulses of man, so
far as they are normal and uplifting, are due to Christ; he is the
principle of progress and improvement in history. He is the Life
of the church: the one and only Redeemer and spiritual Head of the
race is also its Teacher and Lord.

All objective revelation of God is the work of Christ. But all
subjective manifestation of God is the work of the Holy Spirit. As
Christ is the principle of outgoing, so the Holy Spirit is the
principle of return to God. God would take up finite creatures
into himself, would breath into them his breath, would teach them
to launch their little boats upon the infinite current of his
life. Our electric cars can go up hill at great speed so long as
they grip the cable. Faith is the grip which connects us with the
moving energy of God. “The universe is homeward bound,” because
the Holy Spirit is ever turning objective revelation into
subjective revelation, and is leading men consciously or
unconsciously to appropriate the thought and love and purpose of
Him in whom all things find their object and end; “for of him and
through him, and unto him, are all things”_ (Rom. 11:36)_,—here
there is allusion to the Father as the source, the Son as the
medium, and the Spirit as the perfecting and completing agent, in
God’s operations. But all these external processes are only signs
and finite reflections of a life-process internal to the nature of
God.

Meyer on _John 1:1—_“the Word was with God”: “πρὸς τὸν θεόν does
not = παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, but expresses the existence of the Logos in God
in respect of intercourse. The moral essence of this essential
fellowship is love, which excludes any merely modalistic
conception.” Marcus Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament, _in loco_:
“This preposition implies intercourse and therefore separate
personality.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 62—“_And the Word was toward God_” =
his face is not outwards, as if he were merely revealing, or
waiting to reveal, God to the creation. His face is turned
inwards. His whole Person is directed toward God, motion
corresponding to motion, thought to thought.... In him God stands
revealed to himself. Contrast the attitude of fallen Adam, with
his face averted from God. Godet, on _John 1:1_—“Πρὸς τὸν θεόν
intimates not only personality but movement.... The tendency of
the Logos _ad extra_ rests upon an anterior and essential relation
_ad intra_. To reveal God, one must know him; to project him
outwardly, one must have plunged into his bosom.” Compare _John
1:18—_“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”
(R. V.) where we find, not ἐν τῷ κόλπῷ, but εἰς τὸν κόλπον. As ἦν
εἰς τὴν πόλιν means “went into the city and was there,” so the use
of these prepositions indicates in the Godhead movement as well as
rest. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:193, translates πρός by
“_hingewandt zu_,” or “turned toward.” The preposition would then
imply that the Revealer, who existed in the beginning, was ever
over against God, in the life-process of the Trinity, as the
perfect objectification of himself. “Das Aussichselbstsein kraft
des Durchsichselbstsein mit dem Fürsichselbstsein
zusammenschliesst.” Dorner speaks of “das
Aussensichoderineinemandernsein; Sichgeltendmachen des
Ausgeschlossenen; Sichnichtsogesetzthaben; Stehenbleibenwollen.”

There is in all human intelligence a threefoldness which points
toward a trinitarian life in God. We can distinguish a _Wissen_, a
_Bewusstsein_, a _Selbstbewusstein_. In complete
self-consciousness there are the three elements: 1. We are
ourselves; 2. We form a picture of ourselves; 3. We recognize this
picture as the picture of ourselves. The little child speaks of
himself in the third person: “Baby did it.” The objective comes
before the subject; “me” comes first, and “I” is a later
development; “himself” still holds its place, rather than
“heself.” But this duality belongs only to undeveloped
intelligence; it is characteristic of the animal creation; we
revert to it in our dreams; the insane are permanent victims of
it; and since sin is moral insanity, the sinner has no hope until,
like the prodigal, he “comes to himself”_ (Luke 15:17)_. The
insane person is _mente alienatus_, and we call physicians for the
insane by the name of _alienists_. Mere duality gives us only the
notion of separation. Perfect self-consciousness whether in man or
in God requires a third unifying element. And in God mediation
between the “I” and the “Thou” must be the work of a Person also,
and the Person who mediates between the two must be in all
respects the equal of either, or he could not adequately interpret
the one to the other; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 57-59.

Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:179-189, 276-283—“It is one of the effects
of conviction by the Holy Spirit to convert consciousness into
self-consciousness.... Conviction of sin is the consciousness of
self as the guilty author of sin. Self-consciousness is trinal,
while mere consciousness is dual.... One and the same human spirit
subsists in two modes or distinctions—subject and object ... The
three hypostatical consciousnesses in their combination and unity
constitute the one consciousness of God ... as the three persons
make one essence.”

Dorner considers the internal relations of the Trinity (System,
1:412 _sq._) in three aspects: 1. Physical. God is _causa sui_.
But effect that equals cause must itself be causative. Here would
be duality, were it not for a third principle of unity. Trinitas
dualitatem ad unitatem reducit. 2. Logical. Self-consciousness
sets self over against self. Yet the thinker must not regard self
as one of many, and call himself “he,” as children do; for the
thinker would then be, not _self_-conscious, but _mente
alienatus_, “beside himself.” He therefore “comes to himself” in a
third, as the brute cannot. 3. Ethical. God—self-willing right.
But right based on arbitrary will is not right. Right based on
passive nature is not right either. Right as _being_—Father. Right
as _willing_—Son. Without the latter principle of freedom, we have
a dead ethic, a dead God, an enthroned necessity. The unity of
necessity and freedom is found by God, as by the Christian, in the
Holy Spirit. The Father—I; the Son—Me; the Spirit the unity of the
two; see C. C. Everett, Essays, Theological and Literary, 32.
There must be not only Sun and Sunlight, but an Eye to behold the
Light. William James, in his Psychology, distinguishes the _Me_,
the self as known, from the _I_, the self as knower.

But we need still further to distinguish a third principle, a
subject-object, from both subject and object. The subject cannot
recognize the object as one with itself except through a unifying
principle which can be distinguished from both. We may therefore
regard the Holy Spirit as the principle of self-consciousness in
man as well as in God. As there was a natural union of Christ with
humanity prior to his redeeming work, so there is a natural union
of the Holy Spirit with all men prior to his regenerating work:
_Job 32:18—_“there is a spirit in man, And the breath of the
Almighty giveth them understanding.” Kuyper, Work of the Holy
Spirit, teaches that the Holy Spirit constitutes the principle of
life in all living things, and animates all rational beings, as
well as regenerates and sanctifies the elect of God. Matheson,
Voices of the Spirit, 75, remarks on _Job 34:14, 15—_“If he gather
unto himself his Spirit and his breath; all flesh shall perish
together”—that the Spirit is not only necessary to man’s
salvation, but also to keep up even man’s natural life.

Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:172, speaks of the Son as the centrifugal,
while the Holy Spirit is the centripetal movement of the Godhead.
God apart from Christ is unrevealed (_John 1:18—_“No man hath seen
God at any time”); Christ is the organ of external revelation
(_18—_“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father,
he hath declared him”); the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal
revelation (_1 Cor. 2:10—_“unto us Christ revealed them through
the Spirit”). That the Holy Spirit is the principle of all
movement towards God appears from _Heb. 9:14_—Christ “_through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God_”; _Eph.
2:28—_“access in one Spirit unto the Father”; _Rom. 8:26—_“the
Spirit also helpeth our infirmity ... the Spirit himself maketh
intercession for us”; _John 4:24—_“God is a Spirit: and they that
worship him must worship in spirit”; _16:8-11—_“convict the world
in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” See
Twesten, Dogmatik, on the Trinity; also Thomasius, Christi Person
und Werk, 1:111. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 68—“It is the joy of
the Son to receive, his gladness to welcome most those wishes of
the Father which will cost most to himself. The Spirit also has
his joy in making known,—in perfecting fellowship and keeping the
eternal love alive by that incessant sounding of the deeps which
makes the heart of the Father known to the Son, and the heart of
the Son known to the Father.” We may add that the Holy Spirit is
the organ of internal revelation even to the Father and to the
Son.

(_c_) In the light of what has been said, we may understand somewhat more
fully the characteristic differences between the work of Christ and that
of the Holy Spirit. We may sum them up in the four statements that, first,
all outgoing seems to be the work of Christ, all return to God the work of
the Spirit; secondly, Christ is the organ of external revelation, the Holy
Spirit the organ of internal revelation; thirdly, Christ is our advocate
in heaven, the Holy Spirit is our advocate in the soul; fourthly, in the
work of Christ we are passive, in the work of the Spirit we are active. Of
the work of Christ we shall treat more fully hereafter, in speaking of his
Offices as Prophet, Priest, and King. The work of the Holy Spirit will be
treated when we come to speak of the Application of Redemption in
Regeneration and Sanctification. Here it is sufficient to say that the
Holy Spirit is represented in the Scriptures as the author of life—in
creation, in the conception of Christ, in regeneration, in resurrection;
and as the giver of light—in the inspiration of Scripture writers, in the
conviction of sinners, in the illumination and sanctification of
Christians.

_Gen. 1:2—_“The Spirit of God was brooding”; _Luke 1:35_—to Mary:
“_The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee_”, _John 3:8—_“born of the
Spirit”; _Ps. 37:9, 14—_“Come from the four winds, O breath.... I
will put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live”; _Rom. 8:11—_“give
life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit.” _1 John
2:1—_“an advocate (παράκλητον) with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous”; _John 14:16, 17—_“another Comforter (παράκλητον), that
he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”; _Rom.
8:26—_“the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us.” _2 Pet.
1:21—_“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; _John
16:8—_“convict the world in respect of sin”; _13—_“when he, the
Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth”;
_Rom. 8:14—_“as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are
sons of God.”

McCosh: The works of the Spirit are Conviction, Conversion,
Sanctification, Comfort. Donovan: The Spirit is the Spirit of
conviction, enlightenment, quickening, in the sinner; and of
revelation, remembrance, witness, sanctification, consolation, to
the saint. The Spirit enlightens the sinner, as the flash of
lightning lights the traveler stumbling on the edge of a precipice
at night; enlightens the Christian, as the rising sun reveals a
landscape which was all there before, but which was hidden from
sight until the great luminary made it visible. “The morning light
did not create The lovely prospect it revealed; It only showed the
real state Of what the darkness had concealed.” Christ’s advocacy
before the throne is like that of legal counsel pleading in our
stead; the Holy Spirit’s advocacy in the heart is like the
mother’s teaching her child to pray for himself.

J. W. A. Stewart: “Without the work of the Holy Spirit redemption
would have been impossible, as impossible as that fuel should warm
without being lighted, or that bread should nourish without being
eaten. Christ is God entering into human history, but without the
Spirit Christianity would be only history. The Holy Spirit is God
entering into human hearts. The Holy Spirit turns creed into life.
Christ is the physician who leaves the remedy and then departs.
The Holy Spirit is the nurse who applies and administers the
remedy, and who remains with the patient until the cure is
completed.” Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 78—“It is in vain that
the mirror exists in the room, if it is lying on its face; the
sunbeams cannot reach it till its face is upturned to them. Heaven
lies about thee not only in thine infancy but at all times. But it
is not enough that a place is prepared for thee; thou must be
prepared for the place. It is not enough that thy light has come;
thou thyself must arise and shine. No outward shining can reveal,
unless thou art thyself a reflector of its glory. The Spirit must
set thee on thy feet, that thou mayest hear him that speaks to
thee (Ez. 2:2).”

The Holy Spirit reveals not himself but Christ. _John 16:14—_“He
shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it
unto you.” So should the servants of the Spirit hide themselves
while they make known Christ. E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit,
40—“Some years ago a large steam engine all of glass was exhibited
about the country. When it was at work one would see the piston
and the valves go; but no one could see what made them go. When
steam is hot enough to be a continuous elastic vapor, it is
invisible.” So we perceive the presence of the Holy Spirit, not by
visions or voices, but by the effect he produces within us in the
shape of new knowledge, new love, and new energy of our own
powers. Denney, Studies in Theology, 161—“No man can bear witness
to Christ and to himself at the same time. _Esprit_ is fatal to
unction; no man can give the impression that he himself is clever
and also that Christ is mighty to save. The power of the Holy
Spirit is felt only when the witness is unconscious of self, and
when others remain unconscious of him.” Moule, Veni Creator,
8—“The Holy Spirit, as Tertullian says, is the vicar of Christ.
The night before the Cross, the Holy Spirit was present to the
mind of Christ as a person.”

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 318—“It was a point in the charge against
Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the
Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of his activity to the
church. The whole of life is certainly his. And yet, because his
special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which
alone are capable of holiness, that he exerts his special
influence. A special inbreathing of the divine Spirit gave to man
his proper being.” See _Gen. 2:7—_“Jehovah God ... breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”;
_John 3:8—_“The Spirit breatheth where it will ... so is every one
that is born of the Spirit.” E. H. Johnson, on The Offices of the
Holy Spirit, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:381-382—“Why is he specially
called the Holy, when Father and Son are also holy, unless because
he produces holiness, _i. e._, makes the holiness of God to be
ours individually? Christ is the principle of collectivism, the
Holy Spirit the principle of individualism. The Holy Spirit shows
man the Christ in him. God above all = Father; God through all =
Son; God in all = Holy Spirit (_Eph. 4:6_).”

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has never yet been scientifically
unfolded. No treatise on it has appeared comparable to Julius
Müller’s Doctrine of Sin, or to I. A. Dorner’s History of the
Doctrine of the Person of Christ. The progress of doctrine in the
past has been marked by successive stages. Athanasius treated of
the Trinity; Augustine of sin; Anselm of the atonement; Luther of
justification; Wesley of regeneration; and each of these
unfoldings of doctrine has been accompanied by religious
awakening. We still wait for a complete discussion of the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit, and believe that widespread revivals will
follow the recognition of the omnipotent Agent in revivals. On the
relations of the Holy Spirit to Christ, see Owen, in Works,
3:152-159; on the Holy Spirit’s nature and work, see works by
Faber, Smeaton, Tophel, G. Campbell Morgan, J. D. Robertson,
Biederwolf; also C. E. Smith, The Baptism of Fire; J. D. Thompson,
The Holy Comforter; Bushnell, Forgiveness and Law, last chapter;
Bp. Andrews, Works, 3:107-400; James S. Candlish, Work of the Holy
Spirit; Redford, Vox Dei; Andrew Murray, The Spirit of Christ; A.
J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit; Kuyper, Work of the Holy
Spirit; J. E. Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit; Lechler, Lehre
vom Heiligen Geiste; Arthur, Tongue of Fire; A. H. Strong,
Philosophy and Religion, 250-258, and Christ in Creation, 297-313.

3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.

That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7. “This
day have I begotten thee” is most naturally interpreted as the declaration
of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the
baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of
Christ’s Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but
recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from
his Godhood. He is “born before every creature” (while yet no created
thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and “by the resurrection of the
dead” is not _made_ to be, but only “_declared_ to be,” “according to the
Spirit of holiness” (= according to his divine nature) “the Son of God
with power” (see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is
unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures
intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal
procession of the Spirit.

_Psalm 2:7—_“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou
art my Son; This day I have begotten thee” see Alexander, Com. _in
loco_; also Com. on _Acts 13:33_—“‘To-day’ refers to the date of
the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so
must be the Sonship which it affirms.” Philo says that “to-day”
with God means “forever.” This begetting of which the Psalm speaks
is not the resurrection, for while Paul in _Acts 13:33_ refers to
this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus’ Sonship, he refers in
_Acts 13:34, 35_ to another Psalm, the _sixteenth_, to establish
the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is
shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (_Heb. 1:5, 6—_“when he
again bringeth in the firstborn into the world he saith, And let
all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (_Mat.
3:17—_“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (_Mat.
17:5—_“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (_Acts 13:34,
35—_“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he
saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to
see corruption”). _Col. 1:15—_“the firstborn of all
creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως = “begotten first before all
creation” (Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or “first-born before
every creature, _i. e._, begotten, and that antecedently to
everything that was created” (Ellicott, Com. _in loco_). “Herein”
(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, on _Col. 1:15_) “is
indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to
the divine nature.” Lightfoot, on _Col. 1:15_, says that in Rabbi
Bechai God is called the “_primogenitus mundi_.”

On _Rom. 1:4_ (ὁρισθέντος = “manifested to be the mighty Son of
God”) see Lange’s Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce,
Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of
Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as
thereto belonged, not only the _inner_ of a holy spiritual
essence, but also the _outer_ of an existence in power and
heavenly glory.” Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves
aside eternal generation as an ‘absurd fiction.’ But to maintain
the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to
his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the
rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes
obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the
last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to
ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent
eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been
called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the
economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”

If Westcott and Hort’s reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός, “_the only
begotten God_,” in _John 1:18_, is correct, we have a new proof of
Christ’s eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ in _Rom.
8:3—_“God, sending his own Son,” as an allusion to the
metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain from
_John 1:14, 18—_“the only begotten from the Father ... the only
begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”; _Rom. 8:32—_“his
own Son”; _Gal. 4:4—_“sent forth his Son”; _cf._ _Prov.
8:22-31—_“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I
was by him as a master workman”; _30:4—_“Who hath established all
the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son’s
name, if thou knowest?” The eternal procession of the Spirit seems
to be implied in _John 15:26—_“the Spirit of truth which
proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_;
_Heb. 9:14—_“the eternal Spirit.” Westcott here says that παρά
(not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of
the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time
he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.

The Scripture terms “generation” and “procession,” as applied to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and
we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect
impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in
a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all
notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal
generation of the Son to which we hold is

(_a_) Not creation, but the Father’s communication of himself to the Son.
Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the
divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions,
they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the
Father.

The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as
derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the
Son and yet retain it. The Father is _fons trinitatis_, not _fons
deitatis_. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol.,
1:287-299; _per contra_, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.

(_b_) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the
Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when
the Son did not exist as God with the Father.

If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must
have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must
have evermore proceeded from the sun. When Cyril was asked whether
the Son existed before generation, he answered: “The generation of
the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and
that by generation.”

(_c_) Not an act of the Father’s will, but an internal necessity of the
divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than
the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent
with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.

The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon
the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the
Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is
dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be
no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is
logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a
subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential
subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius,
Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66,
67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten =
independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit =
necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words
and actions whereby we design to affect others are “begotten.” The
atmosphere of unconscious influence is not “begotten,” but
“proceeding.”

(_d_) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a
life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an
order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the
Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the
Spirit.

The subordination of the _person_ of the Son to the _person_ of
the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and
operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son
second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with
equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility
of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated
by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and
woman second, but woman’s soul is worth as much as man’s; see _1
Cor. 11:3—_“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the
woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.” On _John
14:28—_“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., _in
loco_.

Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the
Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated
or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed
again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”
Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The
Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and
most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The
Son is the Deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an
Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the
Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and
breathed forth in God’s infinite love to and delight in himself.
And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly
subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each
of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other
attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or
that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of
God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may
be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The
Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son’s being in him....
Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”
Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be “eternal
nonsense,” and is thought to have hid Edwards’s unpublished Essay
on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.

The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly
recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we
maintain at the same time that this subordination is a
subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination
of essence. “Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.” E. G.
Robinson: “An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal
subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even
by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and
Hooker. Christ’s subordination to the Father is merely official,
not essential.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early
Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the
very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus
next, that this outward expression of God is not something other
than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the
hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip’s cry, ‘show us the
Father, and it sufficeth us’_ (John 14:8)_, and thus they affirmed
Jesus’ declaration, they secured Paul’s faith that God has never
left himself without witness. They meant, ‘he that hath seen me
hath seen the Father’_ (John 14:9)_.... The Father is the Life
transcendent, the divine Source, ‘_above all_’; the Son is the
Life immanent, the divine Stream, ‘_through all_’; the Holy Spirit
is the Life individualized, ‘in all’_ (Eph. 4:6)_. The Holy Spirit
has been called ‘the executive of the Godhead.’ ” Whiton is here
speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true
of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib.
Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord;
Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib.
Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures
on Theology, 1:347-350.

The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ’s
eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father
through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit’s
equal dignity and glory.

We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in
Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and
prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in
the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are
best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal
object of Christian worship.

We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal
distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations,
respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is
the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this
relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment,
Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.

John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that
of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assign
_opera naturæ_; to the Son, _opera gratiæ procuratæ_; to the
Spirit, _opera gratiæ applicatæ_.” All God’s revelations are
through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former.
Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices
respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation;
the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects.
Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the
Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal,
omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards
regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent
third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to
love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this love _is_
the Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the
Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for love _is_ the Holy
Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or
divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was
constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial
image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God’s light and has
Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of “1. God,
the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as
self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul,
and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of
what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation
to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are
himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and
constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting
above all in created personalities the full reality of their
personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in
himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body;
and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily
utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or
expression of himself.” Moberly seeks thus to find in man’s nature
an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.

VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the
Key to all other Doctrines.

1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable.

It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite
experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent
it;

(_a_) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet
trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist
(Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic,
luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar
Hieroglyphics, 34).

Luther: “When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not
square with her rules, we must say; ‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’ ”
Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be
distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy;
see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July,
1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite
space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain,
mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar
Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The
Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being
immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its
nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in
other words is essentially three in its constitution, its
constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and
the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and
is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the
tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that “God is light, and in him
is no darkness at all”_ (1 John 1:5)_. The actinic rays are in
themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are
they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.

Joseph Cook: “Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father,
Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when
unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is
unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit,
figured by heat, is Christ’s continued life.” Ruder illustrations
are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the
candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one
wood, in the tree. In Geer’s illustration, mentioned above, from
the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is
not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we
cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far
as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot
conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.

(_b_) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the
psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held
by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
(Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object
(Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).

Augustine: “Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc
cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I
will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing
and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three
functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one
mind, one essence.... “Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore
aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor.
Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel
copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.” Calvin speaks
of Augustine’s view as “a speculation far from solid.” But
Augustine himself had said: “If asked to define the Trinity, we
can only say that it is not this or that.” John of Damascus: “All
we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.” By
this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that
the precise _mode_ of God’s triune existence is unrevealed and
inscrutable.

Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the
same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the
sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the
Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference,
of this otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.” Hegel calls
God “the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the
Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in
an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less
distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy,
321, 331. Hegel’s general doctrine is that the highest unity is to
be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation
of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing;
we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis,
Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief
is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both. _Zweifel_
comes from _Zwei_, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon “ein
Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.” Ladd, Introd.
to Philosophy, 202, speaks of “the monotonous tit-tat-too of the
Hegelian logic.” Ruskin speaks of it as “pure, definite, and
highly finished nonsense.” On the Hegelian principle good and evil
cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be
no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian
Philosophy “The Secret of Hegel,” and his readers have often
remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it
known.

Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand
all his poetry. “Ah, well,” replied the poet, “if a reader of your
calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be
content.” When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married
Miss Barrett, he said: “It is a good thing that these two
understand each other, for no one else understands them.” A pupil
once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter’s writings and asked
for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:
“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its
meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is
God.” Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon
the religious life of Berlin, says: “I could accommodate myself to
the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all
superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which
was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without
turtle.” When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take
up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair
and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence
and go away. Hegel’s doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is
translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.

The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject,
object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of
Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N.
Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in
Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and
Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174,
has a similar analogy: 1. A man’s invisible self; 2. the visible
expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of
this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held
to be even better, because no man’s personality is complete in
itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect
unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church
the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a
mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational
dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the
reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen’s
characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we
would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete
exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact,
different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole,
it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in
its processes and powers, points towards something higher than
itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute
that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love,
worship and service.

No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no
one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such
illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish
no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless
carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.

2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.

This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same
numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We
assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is
three with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with
respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be
denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the
measure of the divine.

The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing
differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in
the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many
faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent
man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until
intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative
independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between
them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine
that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so
that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are
united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible
essence.

Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God
who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not
say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three
persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is
one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to
the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the
persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man’s nature furnishes
any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not
distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might
furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the
figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this
agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul’s
conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan.
1887.

_Ps. 86:11—_“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a
complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to
sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to
order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a
long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she
“unanimously consented.” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,
and with all thy mind”_ (Luke 10:27)._ Man must not lead a dual
life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The
good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden: “Theoretically,
symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old
Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate
‘temperance’ or ‘self-control’ is better expressed by
‘whole-mindedness.’ ”

Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of
divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Man’s personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a
subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and
unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own
personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity,
which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for
completion, as for example in the family.... But God’s personality
has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the
most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts
of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful
mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two
cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence
of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference
of form and function, each separate part having an individuality
and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but
complex.” Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons
are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible
that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against
the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite
personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human
society.”

The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one
and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than
one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the
possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God.
Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism,
if it attained the highest level of psychical perfection, might be
endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling
it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of
families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral
personality which implies responsibility and accountability. “The
_Zeitgeist_,” he says, “is the product of a kind of collective
psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the
individual minds of a generation.” We do not maintain that any one
of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains
personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain
that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible
than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no
necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the
one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H.
Hutton: “A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be
expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations
in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our
humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the
simplicity of absolute unity.”

3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.

A. It is essential to any proper theism.

Neither God’s independence nor God’s blessedness can be maintained upon
grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes
creation indispensable to God’s perfection, tends to a belief in the
eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in
modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism. “Love is an impossible
exercise to a solitary being.” Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living
Unity in the Godhead.

Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to
find a _perfect objective_, congruous and fitting, for a perfect
intelligence, and the answer is: ‘_a perfect intelligence_.’ ” The
author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian
philosopher, as follows: “There is only one resource left for
completing the needful Objectivity for God, _viz._, to admit in
some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or
medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof
[of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with the
_divine cause_, and the _material condition_ of all nature, in
eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and
rudimentary object.” See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying
that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak
only of self-existent _causes_. A self-existence which is _not_ a
cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a
self-existence which _is_ a cause; nay, is even required for the
exercise of its causality.” Here we see that Martineau’s
Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God’s
blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal
universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford
fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily
bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not
himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free.
The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God’s
self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words,
exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.

E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham’s
Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago
James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald: ‘Neither my
intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with
the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites,
Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with
their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy,
on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’ In his paper
entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says
that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships
the Son: ‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the
other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the
pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval
essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’ ” Dr. Johnson adds:
“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and
professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance
of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so
profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship
the Son, because all that we know of God was revealed by act of
the Son.” After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau
withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united
with any Trinitarian church.

H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of
Martineau’s most significant utterances, such as the following:
“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in
the appeal it makes to the inward ‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight
whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness
of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow
of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the
most terrible of all mistakes, _viz._, _to get rid_ of the burden,
by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For
myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture
and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the
product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns
of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law
and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely
feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than
ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive
article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of
belief by asserting that “both Trinitarians and Unitarians are
coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine.
The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they
declared Christ _homoousios_ with the Father. We assert the same
of mankind.” But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture.
Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before
Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness
of the Godhead bodily (_John 8:57_; _Col. 2:9_).

Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency
by this “facilis descensus Averno,” this lapse from theism into
pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing
degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker,
and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern
Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the
later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is
felt to be insufficient to the mind’s conception of Absolute
Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.
“We take refuge in the term ‘Godhead.’ The literati find relief in
speaking of ‘the gods.’ ” Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac.,
3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though
disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the
Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of
the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.” Twesten,
quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God.
Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness
which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness
ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself
and independently of the finite.” Shedd himself remarks: “The
attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of
divine _Unity_ is a failure, because it fails to construct the
doctrine of the divine _Personality_. It contends by implication
that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without
an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject
contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the
identity of both.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless
unit.” Bp. Phillips Brooks: “Unitarianism has got the notion of
God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is
dying of its meagre Deity.” Unitarianism is not the doctrine of
one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the
unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either
an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the
Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that
“Nature and God are the same.” It is the old worship of Baal and
Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For “Nature”
includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man
discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the
manifestations of God.

Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus
Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the
great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire
universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.” Even
James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors,
436, admits that “there is an essential truth hidden in the idea
of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it
has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human
heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.” William
Adams Brown: “If God is by nature love, he must be by nature
social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the
limitations of finite personality are removed.” But Dr. Brown
wrongly adds: “Not the mysteries of God’s being, as he is in
himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this
doctrine.” Similarly P. S. Moxom: “I do not know how it is
possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is
absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived
of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as
righteous.” But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other
moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that
righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons
within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre,
1:462-524.

W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer
of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without
attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be
non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an
antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, or _natura
naturans_ and _natura naturata_, or in some other way. This
antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think
of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in
existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we
cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune
God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God
revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and
God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the
Spirit that proceeds from both.” This confession of an economic
Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent
and eternal.

B. It is essential to any proper revelation.

If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or
reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final
revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each
of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too
with the Holy Spirit. “As God can be revealed only through God, so also
can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God,
then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a
reality.” In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back
to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is
ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and
his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer
the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see
the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father,
pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the
Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either
the Son or the Spirit. See _Rom. 8:27—_“he that searcheth the
hearts [_i. e._, God] knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,
because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the
will of God.” See also Godet on _John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God
at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ
ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I: “Christianity says with simplicity,
‘No man hath seen God, except God.’ ” _John 16:15—_“All things
whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he
taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims
for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the
Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this,
even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to
take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, on _John
14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou,
Show us the Father?”

The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be
no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation
in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce,
in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an
infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual
minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake.
Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if
Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God’s
will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as
only “one of the day’s works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in
the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand
regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom
we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all
truth and the judge of all mankind. “Heaven and earth shall pass
away, but my words shall not pass away”_ (Mat. 24:35)._ The
resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (_John 5:28_),
and future retribution shall be “the wrath of the Lamb”_ (Rev.
6:16)_. Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except
through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts
only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of
the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

C. It is essential to any proper redemption.

If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or
atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is
infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only
one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can
purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality,
may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our
Sanctifier.

“God is the way to himself.” “Nothing human holds good before God,
and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.” The best method of
arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin;
for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that
only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a
slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of
the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It
would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when
logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has
also always led to Unitarianism.” In the reverse order, too, it is
manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render
more superficial men’s views of the sin and guilt and punishment
from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden
religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and
missionary effort (_John 12:44_; _Heb. 10:26_). See Arthur, on the
Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in
Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol.
Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to
see God in the light of nature, while he said: ‘In thy light shall
we see light’_ (Ps. 36:9)_.” We should see nature in the light of
Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God
in Christ (_John 16:9_). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God;
to reject Christ is to turn one’s back on God: _John 12:44—_“He
that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent
me”; _Heb. 10:26, 29—_“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin
... [for him] who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”

In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure
pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct
to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch
housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through
him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King,
whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we
come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is
himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a
convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer’s wife and
pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the
murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a
pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the
murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have
heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken,
blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at
Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen’s dress; but I have
also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees,
and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put
him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we
may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can
ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it
will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he
whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God
before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”

Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had
strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the
doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his
Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says: “I
regard Smith’s conversion as the most remarkable event in College
in my day.” Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his
own heart; and doubts about Christ’s divinity could not hold their
own against the confession: “Of one thing I feel assured: I need
an infinite Savior.” Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian
doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and
brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of
God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul: “None but an
infinite Savior can ever save me!” Only in a divine Christ—Christ
_for_ us upon the Cross, and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit—can the
convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true
religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B.
Smith wrote in his later life: “When the doctrine of the Trinity
was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement
and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical
necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems,
the gems all fall asunder.”

D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.

If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in
God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no
longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary
purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God,
then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these
respects as the highest dignity of our being.

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God’s
absolute and essential nature; not simply what he is _to us_, but
what he is _in himself_. If Christ is the eternal Son of the
Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature,
the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being;
the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates
from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian
idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God,
reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and
thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father
is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the
universe.” Hence _1 John 2:23—_“Whosoever denieth the Son, the
same hath not the Father.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If
God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as
waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished
before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself.
His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to
his relation to some of his creatures. The words ‘God is love’_ (1
John 4:8)_ become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the
expression of a truth about the divine nature.”

Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a
perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing
in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual
want. It is a Father’s perfection to originate—a Son’s to receive.
We need sympathy and aid in this _receptive_ life; hence, the help
of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are
heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ’s filial life to the root of all
filial life in us. See _Gal. 2:19, 20—_‘it is no longer I that
live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in
the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God,
who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’” Thomas Erskine of
Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in
this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.” Gore,
Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of
manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the
prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is
love.” On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the
Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M.
Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On
the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289;
Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed
Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.

On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod.
Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,
‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one;
the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these
three made all things.’ ” The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris,
Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true
persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the
Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was
pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29;
Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of
the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three
dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man
creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?

The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given
the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a
personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in
good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the
three mystic letters of the syllable _Om_, or _Aum_, and by the
image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick,
Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The places of the three are
interchangeable. Williams: “In the three persons the one God is
shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva,
Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the
blessed three.” There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men’s
salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which
temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced
to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is
only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity.
According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in
later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first
principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of
matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the
mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light
of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.

The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo
or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus. “These three
surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential
care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing
relations to each other, that they may be said to ‘agree in
one’ ”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone,
Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it
gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is
a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a
philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.

Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are “residuary
fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a
process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and
spiritual degradation.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated
by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only
names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity
invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a
latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the
objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is
never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The
personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is
scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering
breeze or sullen moaning restless sea. ‘There is but one,’ they
say, ‘though the poets call him by different names.’ The
all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of
these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was
implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in
Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of
philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find
in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying
essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal
substance, and he wished to look at all things ‘under the form of
eternity.’ All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the
infinite substance which we call God.” See also L. L. Paine,
Ethnic Trinities.

The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God,
together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of
it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the
Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the
inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our
treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor: “He who goes about to
speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and
names of man’s invention, talking of essence and existences,
hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in
pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head,
and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that
feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom,
sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the
Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand
nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

Chapter III. The Decrees Of God.

I. Definition of Decrees.

By the decrees of God we mean that eternal plan by which God has rendered
certain all the events of the universe, past, present, and future. Notice
in explanation that:

(_a_) The decrees are many only to our finite comprehension; in their own
nature they are but one plan, which embraces not only effects but also
causes, not only the ends to be secured but also the means needful to
secure them.

In _Rom. 8:28—_“called according to his purpose”—the many decrees
for the salvation of many individuals are represented as forming
but one purpose of God. _Eph. 1:11—_“foreordained according to the
purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his
will”—notice again the word “_purpose_,” in the singular. _Eph.
3:11—_“according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in
Christ Jesus our Lord.” This one purpose or plan of God includes
both means and ends, prayer and its answer, labor and its fruit.
Tyrolese proverb: “God has his plan for every man.” Every man, as
well as Jean Paul, is “der Einzige”—the unique. There is a single
plan which embraces all things; “we use the word ‘decree’ when we
think of it partitively” (Pepper). See Hodge, Outlines of
Theology, 1st ed., 165; 2d ed., 200—“In fact, no event is
isolated—to determine one involves determination of the whole
concatenation of causes and effects which constitutes the
universe.” The word “plan” is preferable to the word “decrees,”
because “plan” excludes the ideas of (1) plurality, (2)
short-sightedness, (3) arbitrariness, (4) compulsion.

(_b_) The decrees, as the eternal act of an infinitely perfect will,
though they have logical relations to each other, have no chronological
relation. They are not therefore the result of deliberation, in any sense
that implies short-sightedness or hesitancy.

Logically, in God’s decree the sun precedes the sunlight, and the
decree to bring into being a father precedes the decree that there
shall be a son. God decrees man before he decrees man’s act; he
decrees the creation of man before he decrees man’s existence. But
there is no chronological succession. “_Counsel_” in _Eph.
1:11—_“the counsel of his will”—means, not deliberation, but
wisdom.

(_c_) Since the will in which the decrees have their origin is a free
will, the decrees are not a merely instinctive or necessary exercise of
the divine intelligence or volition, such as pantheism supposes.

It belongs to the perfection of God that he have a plan, and the
best possible plan. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty
that infinite wisdom will act wisely. God’s decrees are not God;
they are not identical with his essence; they do not flow from his
being in the same necessary way in which the eternal Son proceeds
from the eternal Father. There is free will in God, which acts
with infinite certainty, yet without necessity. To call even the
decree of salvation necessary is to deny grace, and to make an
unfree God. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:355; lect. 34.

(_d_) The decrees have reference to things outside of God. God does not
decree to be holy, nor to exist as three persons in one essence.

Decrees are the preparation for external events—the embracing of
certain things and acts in a plan. They do not include those
processes and operations within the Godhead which have no
reference to the universe.

(_e_) The decrees primarily respect the acts of God himself, in Creation,
Providence, and Grace; secondarily, the acts of free creatures, which he
foresees will result therefrom.

While we deny the assertion of Whedon, that “the divine plan
embraces _only_ divine actions,” we grant that God’s plan has
reference _primarily_ to his own actions, and that the sinful acts
of men, in particular, are the objects, not of a decree that God
will efficiently produce them, but of a decree that God will
permit men, in the exercise of their own free will, to produce
them.

(_f_) The decree to act is not the act. The decrees are an internal
exercise and manifestation of the divine attributes, and are not to be
confounded with Creation, Providence, and Redemption, which are the
execution of the decrees.

The decrees are the first operation of the attributes, and the
first manifestation of personality of which we have any knowledge
within the Godhead. They presuppose those essential acts or
movements within the divine nature which we call generation and
procession. They involve by way of consequence that execution of
the decrees which we call Creation, Providence, and Redemption,
but they are not to be confounded with either of these.

(_g_) The decrees are therefore not addressed to creatures; are not of the
nature of statute law; and lay neither compulsion nor obligation upon the
wills of men.

So ordering the universe that men _will_ pursue a given course of action
is a very different thing from declaring, ordering, or commanding that
they _shall_. “Our acts are in accordance with the decrees, but not
_necessarily_ so—we _can_ do otherwise and often _should_” (Park). The
Frenchman who fell into the water and cried: “I will, drown,—no one shall
help me!” was very naturally permitted to drown; if he had said: “I shall
drown,—no one will help me!” he might perchance have called some friendly
person to his aid.

(_h_) All human acts, whether evil or good, enter into the divine plan and
so are objects of God’s decrees, although God’s actual agency with regard
to the evil is only a permissive agency.

No decree of God reads: “You shall sin.” For (1) no decree is
addressed to _you_; (2) no decree with respect to you says
_shall_; (3) God cannot cause _sin_, or decree to cause it. He
simply decrees to create, and himself to act, in such a way that
you will, of your own free choice, commit sin. God determines upon
his own acts, foreseeing what the results will be in the free acts
of his creatures, and so he determines those results. This
permissive decree is the only decree of God with respect to sin.
Man of himself is capable of producing sin. Of himself he is not
capable of producing holiness. In the production of holiness two
powers must concur, God’s will and man’s will, and God’s will must
act first. The decree of good, therefore, is not simply a
permissive decree, as in the case of evil. God’s decree, in the
former case, is a decree to bring to bear positive agencies for
its production, such as circumstances, motives, influences of his
Spirit. But, in the case of evil, God’s decrees are simply his
arrangement that man may do as he pleases, God all the while
foreseeing the result.

Permissive agency should not be confounded with conditional
agency, nor permissive decree with conditional decree. God
foreordained sin only indirectly. The machine is constructed not
for the sake of the friction, but in spite of it. In the parable
_Mat. 13:24-30_, the question “_Whence then hath it tares?_” is
answered, not by saying, “I decreed the tares.” but by saying:
“_An enemy hath done this_.” Yet we must take exception to
Principal Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Theology, 456, when he
says: “God did not _permit_ sin to be; it is, in its essence, the
transgression of his law, and so his only attitude toward it is
one of opposition. It _is_, because man has contradicted and
resisted his will.” Here the truth of God’s opposition to sin is
stated so sharply as almost to deny the decree of sin in any
sense. We maintain that God does decree sin in the sense of
embracing in his plan the foreseen transgressions of men, while at
the same time we maintain that these foreseen transgressions are
chargeable wholly to men and not at all to God.

(_i_) While God’s total plan with regard to creatures is called
predestination, or foreordination, his purpose so to act that certain will
believe and be saved is called election, and his purpose so to act that
certain will refuse to believe and be lost is called reprobation. We
discuss election and reprobation, in a later chapter, as a part of the
Application of Redemption.

God’s decrees may be divided into decrees with respect to nature,
and decrees with respect to moral beings. These last we call
foreordination, or predestination; and of these decrees with
respect to moral beings there are two kinds, the decree of
election, and the decree of reprobation; see our treatment of the
doctrine of Election. George Herbert: “We all acknowledge both thy
power and love To be exact, transcendent, and divine; Who dost so
strongly and so sweetly move. While all things have their will—yet
none but thine. For either thy _command_ or thy _permission_ Lays
hands on all; they are thy right and left. The first puts on with
speed and expedition; The other curbs sin’s stealing pace and
theft. Nothing escapes them both; all must appear And be disposed
and dressed and tuned by thee Who sweetly temperest all. If we
could hear Thy skill and art, what music it would be!” On the
whole doctrine, see Shedd, Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:1-25.

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Decrees.

1. From Scripture.

A. The Scriptures declare that all things are included in the divine
decrees. B. They declare that special things and events are decreed; as,
for example, (_a_) the stability of the physical universe; (_b_) the
outward circumstances of nations; (_c_) the length of human life; (_d_)
the mode of our death; (_e_) the free acts of men, both good acts and evil
acts. C. They declare that God has decreed (_a_) the salvation of
believers; (_b_) the establishment of Christ’s kingdom; (_c_) the work of
Christ and of his people in establishing it.

A. _Is. 14:26, 27—_“This is the purpose that is purposed upon the
whole earth; and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all
the nations; for Jehovah of hosts hath purposed ... and his hand
is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?” _46:10,
11—_“declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times
the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand,
and I will do all my pleasure ... yea, I have spoken, I will also
bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it.” _Dan.
4:35—_“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and
among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or
say unto him, What doest thou?” _Eph. 1:11—_“the purpose of him
who worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”

B. (_a_) _Ps. 119:89-91—_“For ever, O Jehovah, thy word is settled
in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: Thou hast
established the earth and it abideth. They abide this day
according to thine ordinances; For all things are thy servants.”
(_b_) _Acts 17:26—_“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on
all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed
seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; _cf._ _Zach.
5:1—_“came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the
mountains were mountains of brass”—the fixed decrees from which
proceed God’s providential dealings? (_c_) _Job 14:5—_“Seeing his
days are determined, The number of his months is with thee, And
thou hast determined his bounds that he cannot pass.” (_d_) _John
21:19—_“this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he
should glorify God.” (_e_) Good acts: _Is. 44:28—_“that saith of
Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even
saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy
foundation shall be laid”; _Eph. 2:10—_“For we are his
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God
afore prepared that we should walk in them.” Evil acts: _Gen.
50:20—_“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for
good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people
alive”; _1 K. 12:15—_“So the king hearkened not unto the people,
for it was a thing brought about of Jehovah”; _24—_“for this thing
is of me”; _Luke 22:23—_“For the Son of man indeed goeth, as it
hath been determined: but woe unto that man through whom he is
betrayed”; _Acts 2:23—_“him, being delivered up by the determinate
counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men
did crucify and slay”; _4:27, 28—_“of a truth in this city against
thy holy Servant Jesus, who thou didst anoint, both Herod and
Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were
gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel
foreordained to come to pass”; _Rom. 9:17—_“For the scripture
saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up,
that I might show in thee my power”; _1 Pet 2:3—_“They stumble at
the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed”;
_Rev. 17:17—_“For God did put in their hearts to do his mind, and
to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast,
until the words of God should be accomplished.”

C. (_a_) _1 Cor. 2:7—_“the wisdom which hath been hidden, which
God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”; _Eph 3:10,
11—_“manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose
which he purposed in Christ Jesus our lord.” _Ephesians 1_ is a
pæan in praise of God’s decrees. (_b_) The greatest decree of all
is the decree to give the world to Christ. _Ps. 2:7, 8—_“I will
tell of the decree:... I will give thee the nations for thine
inheritance”; _cf._ _verse 6—_“I have set my king Upon my holy
hill of Zion”; _1 Cor. 15:25—_“he must reign, till he hath put all
his enemies under his feet.” (_c_) This decree we are to convert
into our decree; God’s will is to be executed through our wills.
_Phil. 2:12, 13—_“work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to
work, for his good pleasure.” _Rev. 5:1, 7—_“I saw in the right
hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on
the back, close sealed with seven seals.... And he [the Lamb]
came, and he taketh it out of the right hand of him that sat on
the throne”; _verse 9—_“Worthy art thou to take the book, and to
open the seals thereof”—Christ alone has the omniscience to know,
and the omnipotence to execute, the divine decrees. When John
weeps because there is none in heaven or earth to loose the seals
and to read the book of God’s decrees, the Lion of the tribe of
Judah prevails to open it. Only Christ conducts the course of
history to its appointed end. See A. H. Strong, Christ in
Creation, 268-283, on The Decree of God as the Great Encouragement
to Missions.

2. From Reason.

A. From the Divine Foreknowledge.

Foreknowledge implies fixity, and fixity implies decree.—From eternity God
foresaw all the events of the universe as fixed and certain. This fixity
and certainty could not have had its ground either in blind fate or in the
variable wills of men, since neither of these had an existence. It could
have had its ground in nothing outside the divine mind, for in eternity
nothing existed besides the divine mind. But for this fixity there must
have been a cause; if anything in the future was fixed, something must
have fixed it. This fixity could have had its ground only in the plan and
purpose of God. In fine, if God foresaw the future as certain, it must
have been because there was something in himself which made it certain;
or, in other words, because he had decreed it.

We object therefore to the statement of E. G. Robinson, Christian
Theology, 74—“God’s knowledge and God’s purposes both being
eternal, one cannot be conceived as the ground of the other, nor
can either be predicated to the exclusion of the other as the
cause of things, but, correlative and eternal, they must be
coequal quantities in thought.” We reply that while decree does
not chronologically precede, it does logically precede,
foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is not of possible events, but of
what is certain to be. The certainty of future events which God
foreknew could have had its ground only in his decree, since he
alone existed to be the ground and explanation of this certainty.
Events were fixed only because God had fixed them. Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:397—“An event must be _made_ certain, before it can be
_known_ as a certain event.” Turretin, Inst. Theol., loc. 3,
quaes. 12, 18—“Præcipuum fundamentum scientiæ divinæ circa futura
contingentia est deoretum solum.”

Decreeing creation implies decreeing the foreseen results of creation.—To
meet the objection that God might have foreseen the events of the
universe, not because he had decreed each one, but only because he had
decreed to create the universe and institute its laws, we may put the
argument in another form. In eternity there could have been no cause of
the future existence of the universe, outside of God himself, since no
being existed but God himself. In eternity God foresaw that the creation
of the world and the institution of its laws would make certain its actual
history even to the most insignificant details. But God decreed to create
and to institute these laws. In so decreeing he necessarily decreed all
that was to come. In fine, God foresaw the future events of the universe
as certain, because he had decreed to create; but this determination to
create involved also a determination of all the actual results of that
creation; or, in other words, God decreed those results.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 84—“The existence of divine
decrees may be inferred from the existence of natural law.” Law =
certainty = God’s will. Positivists express great contempt for the
doctrine of the eternal purpose of God, yet they consign us to the
iron necessity of physical forces and natural laws. Dr. Robinson
also points out that decrees are “implied in the prophecies. We
cannot conceive that all events should have converged toward the
one great event—the death of Christ—without the intervention of an
eternal purpose.” E. H. Johnson, Outline Syst. Theol., 2d ed.,
251, note—“Reason is confronted by the paradox that the divine
decrees are at once absolute and conditional; the resolution of
the paradox is that God absolutely decreed a conditional system—a
system, however, the workings of which he thoroughly foreknows.”
The rough unhewn stone and the statue into which it will be
transformed are both and equally included in the plan of the
sculptor.

No undecreed event can be foreseen.—We grant that God decrees primarily
and directly his own acts of creation, providence, and grace; but we claim
that this involves also a secondary and indirect decreeing of the acts of
free creatures which he foresees will result therefrom. There is therefore
no such thing in God as _scientia media_, or knowledge of an event that is
to be, though it does not enter into the divine plan; for to say that God
foresees an undecreed event, is to say that he views as future an event
that is merely possible; or, in other words, that he views an event not as
it is.

We recognize only two kinds of knowledge: (1) Knowledge of
undecreed possibles, and (2) foreknowledge of decreed actuals.
_Scientia media_ is a supposed intermediate knowledge between
these two, namely (3) foreknowledge of undecreed actuals. See
further explanations below. We deny the existence of this third
sort of knowledge. We hold that sin is decreed in the sense of
being _rendered certain_ by God’s determining upon a system in
which it was foreseen that sin would exist. The sin of man can be
foreknown, while yet God is not the immediate cause of it. God
knows possibilities, without having decreed them at all. But God
cannot foreknow actualities unless he has by his decree made them
to be certainties of the future. He cannot foreknow that which is
not there to be foreknown. Royce, World and Individual, 2:374,
maintains that God has, not _fore_knowledge, but only _eternal_
knowledge, of temporal things. But we reply that to foreknow how a
moral being _will_ act is no more impossible than to know how a
moral being in given circumstances _would_ act.

Only knowledge of that which is decreed is foreknowledge.—Knowledge of a
plan as ideal or possible may precede decree; but knowledge of a plan as
actual or fixed must follow decree. Only the latter knowledge is properly
_fore_knowledge. God therefore foresees creation, causes, laws, events,
consequences, because he has decreed creation, causes, laws, events,
consequences; that is, because he has embraced all these in his plan. The
denial of decrees logically involves the denial of God’s foreknowledge of
free human actions; and to this Socinians, and some Arminians, are
actually led.

An Arminian example of this denial is found in McCabe,
Foreknowledge of God, and Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies
a Necessity. _Per contra_, see notes on God’s foreknowledge, in
this Compendium, pages 283-286. Pepper: “Divine volition stands
logically between two divisions and kinds of divine knowledge.”
God knew free human actions as _possible_, _before_ he decreed
them; he knew them as _future_, _because_ he decreed them.
Logically, though not chronologically, decree comes before
foreknowledge. When I say, “I know what I will do,” it is evident
that I have determined already, and that my knowledge does not
precede determination, but follows it and is based upon it. It is
therefore not correct to say that God foreknows his decrees. It is
more true to say that he decrees his foreknowledge. He foreknows
the future which he has decreed, and he foreknows it because he
has decreed it. His decrees are eternal, and nothing that is
eternal can be the object of foreknowledge. G. F. Wright, in Bib.
Sac., 1877:723—“The _knowledge_ of God comprehended the details
and incidents of every possible plan. The _choice_ of a plan made
his knowledge determinate as _fore_knowledge.”

There are therefore two kinds of divine knowledge: (1) knowledge
of what may be—of the possible (_scientia simplicis
intelligentiæ_); and (2) knowledge of what is, and is to be,
because God has decreed it (_scientia visionis_). Between these
two Molina, the Spanish Jesuit, wrongly conceived that there was
(3) a middle knowledge of things which were to be, although God
had not decreed them (_scientia media_). This would of course be a
knowledge which God derived, not from himself, but from his
creatures! See Dick, Theology, 1:351. A. S. Carman: “It is
difficult to see how God’s knowledge can be caused from eternity
by something that has no existence until a definite point of
time.” If it be said that what is to be will be “in the nature of
things,” we reply that there is no “nature of things” apart from
God, and that the ground of the objective certainty, as well as of
the subjective certitude corresponding to it, is to be found only
in God himself.

But God’s decreeing to create, when he foresees that certain free
acts of men will follow, is a decreeing of those free acts, in the
only sense in which we use the word decreeing, _viz._, a rendering
certain, or embracing in his plan. No Arminian who believes in
God’s foreknowledge of free human acts has good reason for denying
God’s decrees as thus explained. Surely God did not foreknow that
Adam would exist and sin, whether God determined to create him or
not. Omniscience, then, becomes _fore_knowledge only on condition
of God’s decree. That God’s foreknowledge of free acts is
intuitive does not affect this conclusion. We grant that, while
man can predict free action only so far as it is rational (_i.
e._, in the line of previously dominant motive), God can predict
free action whether it is rational or not. But even God cannot
predict what is not certain to be. God can have intuitive
foreknowledge of free human acts only upon condition of his own
decree to create; and this decree to create, in foresight of all
that will follow, is a decree of what follows. For the Arminian
view, see Watson, Institutes, 2:375-398, 422-448. _Per contra_,
see Hill, Divinity, 512-582; Fiske, in Bib. Sac., April, 1862;
Bennett Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 214-254; Edwards the younger,
1:398-420; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 98-101.

B. From the Divine Wisdom.

It is the part of wisdom to proceed in every undertaking according to a
plan. The greater the undertaking, the more needful a plan. Wisdom,
moreover, shows itself in a careful provision for all possible
circumstances and emergencies that can arise in the execution of its plan.
That many such circumstances and emergencies are uncontemplated and
unprovided for in the plans of men, is due only to the limitations of
human wisdom. It belongs to infinite wisdom, therefore, not only to have a
plan, but to embrace all, even the minutest details, in the plan of the
universe.

No architect would attempt to build a Cologne cathedral without a
plan; he would rather, if possible, have a design for every stone.
The great painter does not study out his picture as he goes along;
the plan is in his mind from the start; preparations for the last
effects have to be made from the beginning. So in God’s work every
detail is foreseen and provided for; sin and Christ entered into
the original plan of the universe. Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:156,
says this implies that God cannot govern the world unless all
things be reduced to the condition of machinery; and that it
cannot be true, for the reason that God’s government is a
government of persons and not of things. But we reply that the
wise statesman governs persons and not things, yet just in
proportion to his wisdom he conducts his administration according
to a preconceived plan. God’s power might, but God’s wisdom would
not, govern the universe without embracing all things, even the
least human action, in his plan.

C. From the Divine Immutability.

What God does, he always purposed to do. Since with him there is no
increase of knowledge or power, such as characterizes finite beings, it
follows that what under any given circumstances he permits or does, he
must have eternally decreed to permit or do. To suppose that God has a
multitude of plans, and that he changes his plan with the exigencies of
the situation, is to make him infinitely dependent upon the varying wills
of his creatures, and to deny to him one necessary element of perfection,
namely, immutability.

God has been very unworthily compared to a chess-player, who will
checkmate his opponent whatever moves he may make (George Harris).
So Napoleon is said to have had a number of plans before each
battle, and to have betaken himself from one to another as fortune
demanded. Not so with God. _Job 23:13—_“he is in one mind, and who
can turn him?” _James 1:17-_“the Father of lights, with whom can
be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning.” Contrast
with this Scripture McCabe’s statement in his Foreknowledge of
God, 62—“This new factor, the godlike liberty of the human will,
is capable of thwarting, and in uncounted instances does thwart,
the divine will, and compel the great I AM to modify his actions,
his purposes, and his plans, in the treatment of individuals and
of communities.”

D. From the Divine Benevolence.

The events of the universe, if not determined by the divine decrees, must
be determined either by chance or by the wills of creatures. It is
contrary to any proper conception of the divine benevolence to suppose
that God permits the course of nature and of history, and the ends to
which both these are moving, to be determined for myriads of sentient
beings by any other force or will than his own. Both reason and
revelation, therefore, compel us to accept the doctrine of the Westminster
Confession, that “God did from all eternity, by the most just and holy
counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes
to pass.”

It would not be benevolent for God to put out of his own power
that which was so essential to the happiness of the universe.
Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 231-243—“The denial of decrees
involves denial of the essential attributes of God, such as
omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence; exhibits him as a
disappointed and unhappy being; implies denial of his universal
providence; leads to a denial of the greater part of our own duty
of submission; weakens the obligations of gratitude.” We give
thanks to God for blessings which come to us through the free acts
of others; but unless God has purposed these blessings, we owe our
thanks to these others and not to God. Dr. A. J. Gordon said well
that a universe without decrees would be as irrational and
appalling as would be an express-train driving on in the darkness
without headlight or engineer, and with no certainty that the next
moment it might not plunge into the abyss. And even Martineau,
Study, 2:108, in spite of his denial of God’s foreknowledge of
man’s free acts, is compelled to say: “It cannot be left to mere
created natures to play unconditionally with the helm of even a
single world and steer it uncontrolled into the haven or on to the
reefs; and some security must be taken for keeping the deflections
within tolerable bounds.” See also Emmons, Works, 4:273-401: and
Princeton Essays, 1:57-73.

III. Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.

1. That they are inconsistent with the free agency of man.

To this we reply that:

A. The objection confounds the decrees with the execution of the decrees.
The decrees are, like foreknowledge, an act eternal to the divine nature,
and are no more inconsistent with free agency than foreknowledge is. Even
foreknowledge of events implies that those events are fixed. If this
absolute fixity and foreknowledge is not inconsistent with free agency,
much less can that which is more remote from man’s action, namely, the
hidden cause of this fixity and foreknowledge—God’s decrees—be
inconsistent with free agency. If anything be inconsistent with man’s free
agency, it must be, not the decrees themselves, but the execution of the
decrees in creation and providence.

On this objection, see Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 244-249;
Forbes, Predestination and Free Will, 3—“All things are
_predestinated_ by God, both good and evil, but not
_prenecessitated_, that is, causally preördained by him—unless we
would make God the author of sin. Predestination is thus an
indifferent word, in so far as the originating author of anything
is concerned; God being the originator of good, but the creature,
of evil. Predestination therefore means that God included in his
plan of the world every act of every creature, good or bad. Some
acts he predestined causally, others permissively. The certainty
of the fulfilment of all God’s purposes ought to be distinguished
from their necessity.” This means simply that God’s decree is not
the _cause_ of any act or event. God’s decrees may be executed by
the causal efficiency of his creatures, or they may be executed by
his own efficiency. In either case it is, if anything, the
execution, and not the decree, that is inconsistent with human
freedom.

B. The objection rests upon a false theory of free agency—namely, that
free agency implies indeterminateness or uncertainty; in other words, that
free agency cannot coëxist with certainty as to the results of its
exercise. But it is necessity, not certainty, with which free agency is
inconsistent. Free agency is the power of self-determination in view of
motives, or man’s power (_a_) to chose between motives, and (_b_) to
direct his subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen.
Motives are never a cause, but only an occasion; they influence, but never
compel; the man is the cause, and herein is his freedom. But it is also
true that man is never in a state of indeterminateness; never acts without
motive, or contrary to all motives; there is always a reason why he acts,
and herein is his rationality. Now, so far as man acts according to
previously dominant motive—see (_b_) above—we may by knowing his motive
predict his action, and our certainty what that action will be in no way
affects his freedom. We may even bring motives to bear upon others, the
influence of which we foresee, yet those who act upon them may act in
perfect freedom. But if man, influenced by man, may still be free, then
man, influenced by divinely foreseen motives, may still be free, and the
divine decrees, which simply render certain man’s actions, may also be
perfectly consistent with man’s freedom.

We must not assume that decreed ends can be secured only by
compulsion. Eternal purposes do not necessitate efficient
causation on the part of the purposer. Freedom may be the very
means of fulfilling the purpose. E. G. Robinson, Christian
Theology, 74—“Absolute certainty of events, which is all that
omniscience determines respecting them, is not identical with
their necessitation.” John Milton, Christian Doctrine: “Future
events which God has foreseen will happen certainly, but not of
necessity. They will happen certainly, because the divine
prescience will not be deceived; but they will not happen
necessarily, because prescience can have no influence on the
object foreknown, inasmuch as it is only an intransitive action.”

There is, however, a smaller class of human actions by which character is
changed, rather than expressed, and in which the man acts according to a
motive different from that which has previously been dominant—see (_a_)
above. These actions also are foreknown by God, although they cannot be
predicted by man. Man’s freedom in them would be inconsistent with God’s
decrees, if the previous certainty of their occurrence were, not
certainty, but necessity; or, in other words, if God’s decrees were in all
cases decrees efficiently to produce the acts of his creatures. But this
is not the case. God’s decrees may be executed by man’s free causation, as
easily as by God’s; and God’s decreeing this free causation, in decreeing
to create a universe of which he foresees that this causation will be a
part, in no way interferes with the freedom of such causation, but rather
secures and establishes it. Both consciousness and conscience witness that
God’s decrees are not executed by laying compulsion upon the free wills of
men.

The farmer who, after hearing a sermon on God’s decrees, took the
break-neck road instead of the safe one to his home and broke his
wagon in consequence, concluded before the end of his journey that
he at any rate had been predestinated to be a fool, and that he
had made his calling and election sure. Ladd, Philosophy of
Conduct, 146, 187, shows that the will is free, first, by man’s
consciousness of ability, and, secondly, by man’s consciousness of
imputability. By nature, he is _potentially_ self-determining; as
matter of fact, he often _becomes_ self-determining.

Allen, Religious Progress, 110—“The coming church must embrace the
sovereignty of God and the freedom of the will; total depravity
and the divinity of human nature; the unity of God and the triune
distinctions in the Godhead; gnosticism and agnosticism; the
humanity of Christ and his incarnate deity; the freedom of the
Christian man and the authority of the church; individualism and
solidarity; reason and faith; science and theology; miracle and
uniformity of law; culture and piety; the authority of the Bible
as the word of God with absolute freedom of Biblical criticism;
the gift of administration as in the historic episcopate and the
gift of prophecy as the highest sanction of the ministerial
commission; the apostolic succession but also the direct and
immediate call which knows only the succession of the Holy Ghost.”
Without assenting to these latter clauses we may commend the
comprehensive spirit of this utterance, especially with reference
to the vexed question of the relation of divine sovereignty to
human freedom.

It may aid us, in estimating the force of this objection, to note the four
senses in which the term “freedom” may be used. It may be used as
equivalent to (1) _physical_ freedom, or absence of outward constraint;
(2) _formal_ freedom, or a state of moral indeterminateness; (3) _moral_
freedom, or self-determinateness in view of motives; (4) _real_ freedom,
or ability to conform to the divine standard. With the first of these we
are not now concerned, since all agree that the decrees lay no outward
constraint upon men. Freedom in the second sense has no existence, since
all men have character. Free agency, or freedom in the third sense, has
just been shown to be consistent with the decrees. Freedom in the fourth
sense, or real freedom, is the special gift of God, and is not to be
confounded with free agency. The objection mentioned above rests wholly
upon the second of these definitions of free agency. This we have shown to
be false, and with this the objection itself falls to the ground.

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 133-188, gives a good
definition of this fourth kind of freedom: “Freedom is
self-determination by universal ideals. Limiting our ends to those
of family or country is a refined or idealized selfishness.
Freedom is self-determination by universal love for man or by the
kingdom of God. But the free man must then be dependent on God in
everything, because the kingdom of God is a revelation of God.”
John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:133—“In being
determined by God we are self-determined; _i. e._, determined by
nothing alien to us, but by our noblest, truest self. The
universal life lives in us. The eternal consciousness becomes our
own; for ‘he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth
in him’_ (1 John 4:16)_.”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 226—“Free will is not the
independence of the creature, but is rather his self-realization
in perfect dependence. Freedom is self-identity with goodness.
Both goodness and freedom are, in their perfectness, in God.
Goodness in a creature is not distinction from, but correspondence
with, the goodness of God. Freedom in a creature is correspondence
with God’s own self-identity with goodness. It is to realize and
to find _himself_, his _true_ self, in Christ, so that God’s love
in us has become a divine response, adequate to, because truly
mirroring, God.” G. S. Lee, The Shadow Christ, 32—.“The ten
commandments could not be chanted. The Israelites sang about
Jehovah and what he had done, but they did not sing about what he
told them to do, and that is why they never did it. The conception
of duty that cannot sing must weep until it learns to sing. This
is Hebrew history.”

“There is a liberty, unsung By poets and by senators unpraised,
Which monarchs cannot grant nor all the powers Of earth and hell
confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud,
Oppressions, prisons, have no power to bind; Which whoso tastes
can be enslaved no more. ’T is liberty of heart, derived from
heaven, Bought with his blood who gave it to mankind, And sealed
with the same token.” Robert Herrick: “Stone walls do not a prison
make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for
a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.”

A more full discussion of the doctrine of the Will is given under
Anthropology, Vol. II. It is sufficient here to say that the
Arminian objections to the decrees arise almost wholly from
erroneously conceiving of freedom as the will’s power to decide,
in any given case, against its own character and all the motives
brought to bear upon it. As we shall hereafter see, this is
practically to deny that man has character, or that the will by
its right or wrong moral action gives to itself, as well as to the
intellect and affections, a permanent bent or predisposition to
good or evil. It is to extend the power of contrary choice, a
power which belongs to the sphere of transient volition, over all
those permanent states of intellect, affection, and will which we
call the moral character, and to say that we can change directly
by a single volition that which, as a matter of fact, we can
change only indirectly through process and means. Yet even this
exaggerated view of freedom would seem not to exclude God’s
decrees, or prevent a practical reconciliation of the Arminian and
Calvinistic views, so long as the Arminian grants God’s
foreknowledge of free human acts, and the Calvinist grants that
God’s decree of these acts is not necessarily a decree that God
will efficiently produce them. For a close approximation of the
two views, see articles by Raymond and by A. A. Hodge,
respectively, on the Arminian and the Calvinistic Doctrines of the
Will, in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia, 10:989, 992.

We therefore hold to the certainty of human action, and so part
company with the Arminian. We cannot with Whedon (On the Will),
and Hazard (Man a Creative First Cause), attribute to the will the
freedom of indifference, or the power to act without motive. We
hold with Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 188, that action without
motive, or an act of pure will, is unknown in consciousness (see,
however, an inconsistent statement of Calderwood on page 188 of
the same work). Every future human act will not only be performed
with a motive, but will certainly be one thing rather than
another; and God knows what it will be. Whatever may be the method
of God’s foreknowledge, and whether it be derived from motives or
be intuitive, that foreknowledge presupposes God’s decree to
create, and so presupposes the making certain of the free acts
that follow creation.

But this certainty is not necessity. In reconciling God’s decrees
with human freedom, we must not go to the other extreme, and
reduce human freedom to mere determinism, or the power of the
agent to act out his character in the circumstances which environ
him. Human action is not simply the expression of previously
dominant affections; else Neither Satan nor Adam could have
fallen, nor could the Christian ever sin. We therefore part
company with Jonathan Edwards and his Treatise on the Freedom of
the Will, as well as with the younger Edwards (Works, 1:420),
Alexander (Moral Science, 107), and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theology,
2:278), all of whom follow Jonathan Edwards in identifying
sensibility with the will, in regarding affections as the causes
of volitions, and in speaking of the connection between motive and
action as a necessary one. We hold, on the contrary, that
sensibility and will are two distinct powers, that affections are
occasions but never causes of volitions, and that, while motives
may infallibly persuade, they never compel the will. The power to
make the decision other than it is resides in the will, though it
may never be exercised. With Charnock, the Puritan (Attributes,
1:448-450), we say that “man hath a power to do otherwise than
that which God foreknows he will do.” Since, then, God’s decrees
are not executed by laying compulsion upon human wills, they are
not inconsistent with man’s freedom. See Martineau, Study, 2:237,
249, 258, 261; also article by A. H. Strong, on Modified
Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Baptist Review,
1883:219-243; reprinted in the author’s Philosophy and Religion,
114-128.

2. That they take away all motive for human exertion.

To this we reply that:

(_a_) They cannot thus influence men, since they are not addressed to men,
are not the rule of human action, and become known only after the event.
This objection is therefore the mere excuse of indolence and disobedience.

Men rarely make this excuse in any enterprise in which their hopes
and their interests are enlisted. It is mainly in matters of
religion that men use the divine decrees as an apology for their
sloth and inaction. The passengers on an ocean steamer do not deny
their ability to walk to starboard or to larboard, upon the plea
that they are being carried to their destination by forces beyond
their control. Such a plea would be still more irrational in a
case where the passengers’ inaction, as in case of fire, might
result in destruction to the ship.

(_b_) The objection confounds the decrees of God with fate. But it is to
be observed that fate is unintelligent, while the decrees are framed by a
personal God in infinite wisdom; fate is indistinguishable from material
causation and leaves no room for human freedom, while the decrees exclude
all notion of physical necessity; fate embraces no moral ideas or ends,
while the decrees make these controlling in the universe.

North British Rev., April, 1870—“Determinism and predestination
spring from premises which lie in quite separate regions of
thought. The predestinarian is obliged by his theology to admit
the existence of a free will in God, and, as a matter of fact, he
does admit it in the devil. But the final consideration which puts
a great gulf between the determinist and the predestinarian is
this, that the latter asserts the reality of the vulgar notion of
moral desert. Even if he were not obliged by his interpretation of
Scripture to assert this, he would be obliged to assert it in
order to help out his doctrine of eternal reprobation.”

Hawthorne expressed his belief in human freedom when be said that
destiny itself had often been worsted in the attempt to get him
out to dinner. Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, quotes the
Indian’s excuse for getting drunk: “The Great Spirit made all
things for some use, and whatsoever use they were made for, to
that use they must be put. The Great Spirit made rum for Indians
to get drunk with, and so it must be.” Martha, in Isabel Carnaby,
excuses her breaking of dishes by saying: “It seems as if it was
to be. It is the thin edge of the wedge that in time will turn
again and rend you.” Seminary professor: “Did a man ever die
before his time?” Seminary student: “I never knew of such a case.”
The decrees of God, considered as God’s all-embracing plan, leave
room for human freedom.

(_c_) The objection ignores the logical relation between the decree of the
end and the decree of the means to secure it. The decrees of God not only
ensure the end to be obtained, but they ensure free human action as
logically prior thereto. All conflict between the decrees and human
exertion must therefore be apparent and not real. Since consciousness and
Scripture assure us that free agency exists, it must exist by divine
decree; and though we may be ignorant of the method in which the decrees
are executed, we have no right to doubt either the decrees or the freedom.
They must be held to be consistent, until one of them is proved to be a
delusion.

The man who carries a vase of gold-fish does not prevent the fish
from moving unrestrainedly within the vase. The double track of a
railway enables a formidable approaching train to slip by without
colliding with our own. Our globe takes us with it, as it rushes
around the sun, yet we do our ordinary work without interruption.
The two movements which at first sight seem inconsistent with each
other are really parts of one whole. God’s plan and man’s effort
are equally in harmony. Myers, Human Personality, 2:272, speaks of
“molecular motion amid molar calm.”

Dr. Duryea: “The way of life has two fences. There is an Arminian
fence to keep us out of Fatalism; and there is a Calvinistic fence
to keep us out of Pelagianism. Some good brethren like to walk on
the fences. But it is hard in that way to keep one’s balance. And
it is needless, for there is plenty of room between the fences.
For my part I prefer to walk in the road.” Archibald Alexander’s
statement is yet better: “Calvinism is the broadest of systems. It
regards the divine sovereignty and the freedom of the human will
as the two sides of a roof which come together at a ridgepole
above the clouds. Calvinism accepts both truths. A system which
denies either one of the two has only half a roof over its head.”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:176, and The Best Bread, 109—“The
system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one
straight line but two, and no man will ever get a right view of
the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once....
These two facts [of divine sovereignty and of human freedom] are
parallel lines; I cannot make them unite, but you cannot make them
cross each other.” John A. Broadus: “You can see only two sides of
a building at once; if you go around it, you see two different
sides, but the first two are hidden. This is true if you are on
the ground. But if you get up upon the roof or in a balloon, you
can see that there are four sides, and you can see them all
together. So our finite minds can take in sovereignty and freedom
alternately, but not simultaneously. God from above can see them
both, and from heaven we too may be able to look down and see.”

(_d_) Since the decrees connect means and ends together, and ends are
decreed only as the result of means, they encourage effort instead of
discouraging it. Belief in God’s plan that success shall reward toil,
incites to courageous and persevering effort. Upon the very ground of
God’s decree, the Scripture urges us to the diligent use of means.

God has decreed the harvest only as the result of man’s labor in
sowing and reaping; God decrees wealth to the man who works and
saves; so answers are decreed to prayer, and salvation to faith.
Compare Paul’s declaration of God’s purpose (_Acts 27:22,
24—_“there shall be no loss of life among you.... God hath granted
thee all them that sail with thee”) with his warning to the
centurion and sailors to use the means of safety (_verse
31—_“Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved”). See
also _Phil. 2:12, 13—_“work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling, for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to
work, for his good pleasure”; _Eph. 2:10—_“we are his workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared
that we should walk in them”; _Deut. 29:29—_“the secret things
belong unto Jehovah our God: but the things that are revealed
belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all
the words of this law.” See Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures,
252-354.

_Ps. 59:10 (A. V.)—_“The God of my mercy shall prevent me”—shall
anticipate, or go before, me; _Is. 65:24—_“before they call, I
will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear”; _Ps.
23:2—_“He leadeth me”; _John 10:3—_“calleth his own sheep by name,
and leadeth them out.” These texts describe prevenient grace in
prayer, in conversion, and in Christian work. Plato called reason
and sensibility a mismatched pair, one of which was always getting
ahead of the other. Decrees and freedom _seem_ to be mismatched,
but they are not so. Even Jonathan Edwards, with his deterministic
theory of the will, could, in his sermon on Pressing into the
Kingdom, insist on the use of means, and could appeal to men as if
they had the power to choose between the motives of self and of
God. God’s sovereignty and human freedom are like the positive and
the negative poles of the magnet,—they are inseparable from one
another, and are both indispensable elements in the attraction of
the gospel.

Peter Damiani, the great monk-cardinal, said that the sin he found
it hardest to uproot was his disposition to laughter. The homage
paid to asceticism is the homage paid to the conqueror. But not
all conquests are worthy of homage. Better the words of Luther:
“If our God may make excellent large pike and good Rhenish wine, I
may very well venture to eat and drink. Thou mayest enjoy every
pleasure in the world that is not sinful; thy God forbids thee
not, but rather wills it. And it is pleasing to the dear God
whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.”
But our freedom has its limits. Martha Baker Dunn: “A man fishing
for pickerel baits his hook with a live minnow and throws him into
the water. The little minnow seems to be swimming gaily at his own
free will, but just the moment he attempts to move out of his
appointed course he begins to realize that there is a hook in his
back. That is what we find out when we try to swim against the
stream of God’s decrees.”

3. That they make God the author of sin.

To this we reply:

(_a_) They make God, not the author of sin, but the author of free beings
who are themselves the authors of sin. God does not decree efficiently to
work evil desires or choices in men. He decrees sin only in the sense of
decreeing to create and preserve those who will sin; in other words, he
decrees to create and preserve human wills which, in their own self-chosen
courses, will be and do evil. In all this, man attributes sin to himself
and not to God, and God hates, denounces, and punishes sin.

Joseph’s brethren were none the less wicked for the fact that God
meant their conduct to result in good (_Gen. 50:20_). Pope Leo X
and his indulgences brought on the Reformation, but he was none
the less guilty. Slaveholders would have been no more excusable,
even if they had been able to prove that the negro race was cursed
in the curse of Canaan (_Gen. 9:25—_“Cursed be Canaan; a servant
of servants shall he be unto his brethren”). Fitch, in Christian
Spectator, 3:601—“There can be and is a purpose of God which is
not an _efficient_ purpose. It embraces the voluntary acts of
moral beings, without creating those acts by divine efficiency.”
See Martineau, Study, 2:107, 136.

_Mat. 26:24—_“The Son of man goeth even as it is written of him:
but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed!
good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was
appointed that Christ should suffer, but that did not make men
less free agents, nor diminish the guilt of their treachery and
injustice. Robert G. Ingersoll asked: “Why did God create the
devil?” We reply that God did not create the devil,—it was the
devil who made the devil. God made a holy and free spirit who
abused his liberty, himself created sin, and so made himself a
devil.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:299—“Evil has been referred to 1.
an extra-divine principle—to one or many evil spirits, or to fate,
or to matter—at all events to a principle limiting the divine
power; 2. a want or defect in the Deity himself, either his
imperfect wisdom or his imperfect goodness; 3. human culpability,
either a universal imperfection of human nature, or particular
transgressions of the first men.” The third of these explanations
is the true one: the first is irrational; the second is
blasphemous. Yet this second is the explanation of Omar Khayyám,
Rubáiyat, stanzas 80, 81—“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with
gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with
predestined evil round Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. Oh
Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise
devise the snake: For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is
blackened—man’s forgiveness give—and take!” And David Harum
similarly says: “If I’ve done anything to be sorry for, I’m
willing to be forgiven.”

(_b_) The decree to permit sin is therefore not an efficient but a
permissive decree, or a decree to permit, in distinction from a decree to
produce by his own efficiency. No difficulty attaches to such a decree to
permit sin, which does not attach to the actual permission of it. But God
does actually permit sin, and it must be right for him to permit it. It
must therefore be right for him to decree to permit it. If God’s holiness
and wisdom and power are not impugned by the actual existence of moral
evil, they are not impugned by the original decree that it should exist.

Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:100—“The sun is not the _cause_ of the
darkness that follows its setting, but only the _occasion_”;
254—“If by the author of sin be meant the sinner, the agent, or
the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing—so it would be a
reproach and blasphemy to suppose God to be the author of sin....
But if by author of sin is meant the permitter or non-hinderer of
sin, and at the same time a disposer of the state of events in
such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and
purposes, _that sin_, if it be permitted and not hindered, _will
most certainly follow_, I do not deny that God is the author of
sin: it is no reproach to the Most High to be _thus_ the author of
sin.” On the objection that the doctrine of decrees imputes to God
two wills, and that he has foreordained what he has forbidden, see
Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 250-252—“A ruler may forbid
treason; but his command does not oblige him to do all in his
power to prevent disobedience to it. It may promote the good of
his kingdom to suffer the treason to be committed, and the traitor
to be punished according to law. That in view of this resulting
good he chooses not to prevent the treason, does not imply any
contradiction or opposition of will in the monarch.”

An ungodly editor excused his vicious journalism by saying that he
was not ashamed to describe anything which Providence had
permitted to happen. But “permitted” here had an implication of
causation. He laid the blame of the evil upon Providence. He was
ashamed to describe many things that were good and which God
actually caused, while he was not ashamed to describe the immoral
things which God did not cause, but only permitted men to cause.
In this sense we may assent to Jonathan Edwards’s words: “The
divine Being is not the author of sin, but only disposes things in
such a manner that sin will certainly ensue.” These words are
found in his treatise on Original Sin. In his Essay on Freedom of
the Will, he adds a doctrine of causation which we must repudiate:
“The essence of virtue and vice, as they exist in the disposition
of the heart, and are manifested in the acts of the will, lies not
in their _Cause_ but in their _Nature_.” We reply that sin could
not be condemnable in its nature, if God and not man were its
cause.

Robert Browning, Mihrab Shah: “Wherefore should any evil hap to
man—From ache of flesh to agony of soul—Since God’s All-mercy
mates All-potency? Nay, why permits he evil to himself—man’s sin,
accounted such? Suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit
inhabitant—Man pure of evil in thought, word and deed—were it not
well? Then, wherefore otherwise?” Fairbairn answers the question,
as follows, in his Christ in Modern Theology, 456—“Evil once
intended may be vanquished by being allowed; but were it hindered
by an act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the
evil which had compelled the Creator to retrace his steps. And, to
carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possibility of
evil had hindered the creative action of God, then he would have
been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow. But why did he
create a being capable of sinning? Only so could he create a being
capable of obeying. The ability to do good implies the capability
of doing evil. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the
creature who was without this double ability might be a machine,
but could be no child. Moral perfection can be attained, but
cannot be created; God can make a being capable of moral action,
but not a being with all the fruits of moral action garnered
within him.”

(_c_) The difficulty is therefore one which in substance clings to all
theistic systems alike—the question why moral evil is permitted under the
government of a God infinitely holy, wise, powerful, and good. This
problem is, to our finite powers, incapable of full solution, and must
remain to a great degree shrouded in mystery. With regard to it we can
only say:

Negatively,—that God does not permit moral evil because he is not
unalterably opposed to sin; nor because moral evil was unforeseen and
independent of his will; nor because he could not have prevented it in a
moral system. Both observation and experience, which testify to multiplied
instances of deliverance from sin without violation of the laws of man’s
being, forbid as to limit the power of God.

Positively,—we seem constrained to say that God permits moral evil because
moral evil, though in itself abhorrent to his nature, is yet the incident
of a system adapted to his purpose of self-revelation; and further,
because it is his wise and sovereign will to institute and maintain this
system of which moral evil is an incident, rather than to withhold his
self-revelation or to reveal himself through another system in which moral
evil should be continually prevented by the exercise of divine power.

There are four questions which neither Scripture nor reason
enables us completely to solve and to which we may safely say that
only the higher knowledge of the future state will furnish the
answers. These questions are, first, how can a holy God permit
moral evil? secondly, how could a being created pure ever fall?
thirdly, how can we be responsible for inborn depravity? fourthly,
how could Christ justly suffer? The first of these questions now
confronts us. A complete theodicy (Θεός, God, and δική, justice)
would be a vindication of the justice of God in permitting the
natural and moral evil that exists under his government. While a
complete theodicy is beyond our powers, we throw some light upon
God’s permission of moral evil by considering (1) that freedom of
will is necessary to virtue; (2) that God suffers from sin more
than does the sinner; (3) that, with the permission of sin, God
provided a redemption; and, (4) that God will eventually overrule
all evil for good.

It is possible that the elect angels belong to a moral system in
which sin is prevented by constraining motives. We cannot deny
that God could prevent sin in a moral system. But it is very
doubtful whether God could prevent sin in the _best_ moral system.
The most perfect freedom is indispensable to the attainment of the
highest virtue. Spurgeon: “There could have been no moral
government without permission to sin. God could have created
blameless puppets, but they could have had no virtue.” Behrends:
“If moral beings were incapable of perversion, man would have had
all the virtue of a planet,—that is, no virtue at all.” Sin was
permitted, then, only because it could be overruled for the
greatest good. This greatest good, we may add, is not simply the
highest nobility and virtue of the creature, but also the
revelation of the Creator. But for sin, God’s justice and God’s
mercy alike would have been unintelligible to the universe. E. G.
Robinson: “God could not have revealed his character so well
without moral evil as with moral evil.”

Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, tells us that it was God’s plan to
make man in his own image: “To create man, and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him
too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all
unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made
perfect as a thing of course.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268-270,
324, holds that sin and wickedness is an absolute evil, but an
evil permitted to exist because the effacement of it would mean
the effacement at the same time both for God and man, of the
possibility of reaching the highest spiritual good. See also
Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:108; Momerie, Origin of Evil; St.
Clair, Evil Physical and Moral; Voysey, Mystery of Pain, Death and
Sin.

C. G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Studies, 26,
27—“Infinite goodness, knowledge and power imply only that, if a
universe were made, it would be the best that was naturally
possible.” To say that God could not be the author of a universe
in which there is so much of evil, he says, “assumes that a better
universe, upon the whole, was a natural possibility. It assumes
that a universe of moral beings could, under a moral government
administered in the wisest and best manner, be wholly restrained
from sin; but this needs proof, and never can be proved.... The
best possible universe may not be the best conceivable universe.
Apply the legal maxim, ‘The defendant is to have the benefit of
the doubt, and that in proportion to the established character of
his reputation.’ There is so much clearly indicating the
benevolence of God, that we may _believe_ in his benevolence,
where we cannot _see_ it.”

For advocacy of the view that God cannot prevent evil in a moral
system, see Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 17; Young, The Mystery,
or Evil not from God; Bledsoe, Theodicy; N. W. Taylor, Moral
Government, 1:288-349; 2:327-356. According to Dr. Taylor’s view,
God has not a complete control over the moral universe; moral
agents can do wrong under every possible influence to prevent it;
God prefers, all things considered, that all his creatures should
be holy and happy, and does all in his power to make them so; the
existence of sin is not on the whole for the best; sin exists
because God cannot prevent it in a moral system; the blessedness
of God is actually impaired by the disobedience of his creatures.
For criticism of these views, see Tyler, Letters on the New Haven
Theology, 129, 219. Tyler argues that election and non-election
imply power in God to prevent sin; that _permitting_ is not mere
_submitting_ to something which he could not possibly prevent. We
would add that as a matter of fact God has preserved holy angels,
and that there are “just men” who have been “made perfect” (_Heb.
12:23_) without violating the laws of moral agency. We infer that
God could have so preserved Adam. The history of the church leads
us to believe that there is no sinner so stubborn that God cannot
renew his heart,—even a Saul can be turned into a Paul. We
hesitate therefore to ascribe limits to God’s power. While Dr.
Taylor held that God could not prevent sin in _a_ moral system,
that is, in _any_ moral system, Dr. Park is understood to hold the
greatly preferable view that God cannot prevent sin in the _best_
moral system. Flint, Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth, 59—“The
alternative is, not evil or no evil, but evil or the miraculous
prevention of evil.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:406-422.

But even granting that the present is the best moral system, and
that in such a system evil cannot be prevented consistently with
God’s wisdom and goodness, the question still remains how the
decree to initiate such a system can consist with God’s
fundamental attribute of holiness. Of this insoluble mystery we
must say as Dr. John Brown, in Spare Hours, 273, says of Arthur H.
Hallam’s Theodicæa Novissima: “As was to be expected, the
tremendous subject remains where he found it. His glowing love and
genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom, but it is as
brief as the lightning in the collied night—the jaws of darkness
do devour it up—this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and
dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, ‘all
dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,’ no steady ray has ever or will
ever come; over its face its own darkness must brood, till he to
whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the
night shineth as the day, says ‘Let there be light!’ ”

We must remember, however, that the decree of redemption is as old
as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in
Christ shows at how great a cost to God was permitted the fall of
the race in Adam. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement
for sin and a way of escape from it. Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:388—“The permission of sin has cost God more than it has man. No
sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by
any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God.
This shows that God is not acting selfishly in permitting it.” On
the permission of moral evil, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s ed.,
177, 232—“The Government of God, and Christianity, as Schemes
imperfectly Comprehended”; Hill, System of Divinity, 528-559;
Ulrici, art.: Theodicée, in Herzog’s Encyclopädie; Cunningham,
Historical Theology, 2:416-489; Patton, on Retribution and the
Divine Purpose, in Princeton Rev., 1878:16-23; Bib. Sac,
20:471-488; Wood, The Witness of Sin.

IV. Concluding Remarks.

1. Practical uses of the doctrine of decrees.

(_a_) It inspires humility by its representation of God’s unsearchable
counsels and absolute sovereignty. (_b_) It teaches confidence in him who
has wisely ordered our birth, our death, and our surroundings, even to the
minutest particulars, and has made all things work together for the
triumph of his kingdom and the good of those who love him; (_c_) It shows
the enemies of God that, as their sins have been foreseen and provided for
in God’s plan, so they can never, while remaining in their sins, hope to
escape their decreed and threatened penalty. (_d_) It urges the sinner to
avail himself of the appointed means of grace, if he would be counted
among the number of those for whom God has decreed salvation.

This doctrine is one of those advanced teachings of Scripture
which requires for its understanding a matured mind and a deep
experience. The beginner in the Christian life may not see its
value or even its truth, but with increasing years it will become
a staff to lean upon. In times of affliction, obloquy, and
persecution, the church has found in the decrees of God, and in
the prophecies in which these decrees are published, her strong
consolation. It is only upon the basis of the decrees that we can
believe that “all things work together for good”_ (Rom. 8:28)_ or
pray “Thy will be done”_ (Mat. 6:10)_.

It is a striking evidence of the truth of the doctrine that even
Arminians pray and sing like Calvinists. Charles Wesley, the
Arminian, can write: “He wills that I should holy be—What can
withstand his will? The counsel of his grace in me He surely will
fulfill.” On the Arminian theory, prayer that God will soften hard
hearts is out of place,—the prayer should be offered to the
sinner; for it is his will, not God’s, that is in the way of his
salvation. And yet this doctrine of Decrees, which at first sight
might seem to discourage effort, is the greatest, in fact is the
only effectual, incentive to effort. For this reason Calvinists
have been the most strenuous advocates of civil liberty. Those who
submit themselves most unreservedly to the sovereignty of God are
most delivered from the fear of man. Whitefield the Calvinist, and
not Wesley the Arminian, originated the great religious movement
in which the Methodist church was born (see McFetridge, Calvinism
in History, 153), and Spurgeon’s ministry has been as fruitful in
conversions as Finney’s. See Froude, Essay on Calvinism; Andrew
Fuller, Calvinism and Socinianism compared in their Practical
Effects; Atwater, Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton
Review, 1876:73; J. A. Smith, Historical Lectures.

Calvinism logically requires the separation of Church and State:
though Calvin did not see this, the Calvinist Roger Williams did.
Calvinism logically requires a republican form of government:
Calvin introduced laymen into the government of the church, and
the same principle requires civil liberty as its correlate.
Calvinism holds to individualism and the direct responsibility of
the individual to God. In the Netherlands, in Scotland, in
England, in America, Calvinism has powerfully influenced the
development of civil liberty. Ranke: “John Calvin was virtually
the founder of America.” Motley: “To the Calvinists more than to
any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland,
England and America are due.” John Fiske, The Beginnings of New
England: “Perhaps not one of the mediæval popes was more despotic
than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promulgation of
his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind have taken
towards personal freedom.... It was a religion fit to inspire men
who were to be called to fight for freedom, whether in the marshes
of the Netherlands or on the moors of Scotland.”

Æsop, when asked what was the occupation of Zeus, replied: “To
humble the exalted and to exalt the humble.” “I accept the
universe,” said Margaret Fuller. Some one reported this remark to
Thomas Carlyle. “Gad! she’d better!” he replied. Dr. John Watson
(Ian McLaren): “The greatest reinforcement religion could have in
our time would be a return to the ancient belief in the
sovereignty of God.” Whittier: “All is of God that is and is to
be, And God is good. Let this suffice us still Resting in
childlike trust upon his will Who moves to his great ends
unthwarted by the ill.” Every true minister preaches Arminianism
and prays Calvinism. This means simply that there is more, in
God’s love and in God’s purposes, than man can state or
comprehend. Beecher called Spurgeon a camel with one
hump—Calvinism. Spurgeon called Beecher a camel without any hump:
“He does not know what he believes, and you never know where to
find him.”

Arminians sing: “Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul
on thee”; yet John Wesley wrote to the Calvinist Toplady, the
author of the hymn: “Your God is my devil.” Calvinists replied
that it was better to have the throne of the universe vacant than
to have it filled by such a pitiful nonentity as the Arminians
worshiped. It was said of Lord Byron that all his life he believed
in Calvinism, and hated it. Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly, in
all his novels except Elsie Venner, makes the orthodox thinblooded
and weakkneed, while his heretics are all strong in body. Dale,
Ephesians, 52—“Of the two extremes, the suppression of man which
was the offense of Calvinism, and the suppression of God which was
the offense against which Calvinism so fiercely protested, the
fault and error of Calvinism was the nobler and grander.... The
most heroic forms of human courage, strength and righteousness
have been found in men who in their theology seemed to deny the
possibility of human virtue and made the will of God the only real
force in the universe.”

2. True method of preaching the doctrine.

(_a_) We should most carefully avoid exaggeration or unnecessarily
obnoxious statement. (_b_) We should emphasize the fact that the decrees
are not grounded in arbitrary will, but in infinite wisdom. (_c_) We
should make it plain that whatever God does or will do, he must from
eternity have purposed to do. (_d_) We should illustrate the doctrine so
far as possible by instances of completeness and far-sightedness in human
plans of great enterprises. (_e_) We may then make extended application of
the truth to the encouragement of the Christian and the admonition of the
unbeliever.

For illustrations of foresight, instance Louis Napoleon’s planning
the Suez Canal, and declaring his policy as Emperor, long before
he ascended the throne of France. For instances of practical
treatment of the theme in preaching, see Bushnell, Sermon on Every
Man’s Life a Plan of God, in Sermons for the New Life; Nehemiah
Adams, Evenings with the Doctrines, 243; Spurgeon’s Sermon on _Ps.
44:3—_“Because thou hadst a favor unto them.” Robert Browning,
Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in
his hand Who saith ‘A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust
God: See all nor be afraid!’ ”

Shakespeare, King Lear, 1:2—“This is the excellent foppery of the
world that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our
own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon
and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by
heavenly compulsion, and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on; an admirable evasion of man to lay his disposition
to the charge of a star!” All’s Well: “Our remedies oft in
ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives
us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we
ourselves are dull.” Julius Cæsar, 1:2—“Men at some time are
masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our
stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

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