THE BEING OF GOD
AS UNITY AND
TRINITY

P. H. STEENSTRA, D. D.
>F OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND EXEG
EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND EXEGESIS IN THE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Sffje JRtuettfttie Wregg, Canvcribfle
1891

Copyright, 1891,
By P. H. STEENSTRA.
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., XT. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton St, Company.

NOTE.
The occasion by which these lectures were called
forth is stated on the first page. Their publication is
due in part to the strongly urged wishes of many
of the young men who heard them, and in part
to considerations which it is not necessary here to
explain, but among which the vanity of authorship
had no part. That they may aid some minds to
adjust new forms of thought to the old truth is
my highest hope, and will be my best reward.
P. H. S.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
January 24, 1891.

CONTENTS.
PAQE
LECTURE L
Preliminary Fundamental Questions  1
LECTURE II.
Arguments for the Existence of God — the Cosmo-
IiOGICAL and Teleological  26
LECTURE HL
The Moral and Ontological Arguments  63
LECTURE IV.
Recapitulation. — Transition to the Attributes . . 89
LECTURE V.
The Omnipresence, Eternity, and Omnipotence of
God  112
LECTURE VI
The Omniscience, Holiness, and Love of God . . . 140
LECTURE VIL
The Christian Consciousness in Relation to the Doc
trine of the Trinity  159

vi CONTENTS.
LECTURE VHI.
The Trinity : its Historical Revelation  188
LECTURE IX.
The Trinity: its Interpretative Revelation . . . 217

LECTURE X.
The Speculative Construction of the Doctrine of
the Trinity  246

THE BEING OF GOD
AS UNITY AND TRINITY.

LECTUKE I.
PRELIMINARY FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS.
The present is the first of three courses of lec
tures projected for the current year by the Trus
tees of the School.1 The intention, as I under
stand it, is that the three courses shall cover,
as far as may be, the three main divisions of the
ancient Christian creeds, relating respectively to
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost. With this understanding, I interpret the
theme assigned to me, viz., " The Doctrine of the
Trinity, with especial reference to the Father,"
as calling for a consideration of the chief topics
involved in the first part of the creeds. In the
1 The occasion for providing- these lecture-courses was the ill
ness of Dean Gray, the professor of Systematic Divinity in the
Cambridge School. It was hoped that a year's rest would re
store him to health and duty ; but before the opening of the
scholastic year 1889-90, during which the lectures were delivered,
he had already passed from earthly toil to heavenly rest.

THE BEING OF GOD

shorter, the so - called Apostles' Creed, this part
reads : " I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth." In what is com
monly called the Nicene Creed its form is enlarged
but not essentially changed : " I believe in one
God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth, and of all things visible and invisible."
The phrase " I believe " has for its object not
one part of the creed, but all three, and is there
fore repeated at the beginning of the third, after
the intervention of the long second part. Its con
sideration belongs, therefore, to every course as
much as to any one in particular. The importance
of considering it at all depends chiefly on the view
taken of the nature of the irco-ris, faith or belief,
here professed. If it were to be understood of
fides justificans, then an inquiry into its nature
would be of peculiar and far-reaching importance.
But in that case it would find its proper place in
connection with the third part of the creed. The
truth, however, is that the ancient symbols are
statements of doctrinal belief; so that the words
" I believe " can scarcely be regarded as other or
more than a declaration of intellectual assent.
When the early creeds originated, the distinction
between dogmatic belief and that spiritual atti
tude of man toward God to which we more espe
cially restrict the word " faith," however distinctly

INTRODUCTORY 3
felt in the Christian life, was not made in theory.
Taken, then, in the sense of what may be called
an oral subscription to the doctrine of the creed,
the formula " I believe " requires no special treat
ment. The first subject, therefore, properly presented
to us is God. The creeds bid us say, "1 be
lieve in God." Historically considered, this is not
so much a profession of belief that God exists, as
a rejection of all false gods. Nevertheless, the ex
istence of God is the necessary basis and starting-
point of both religion and theology. But while
the former holds it as a datum of Christian con
sciousness, and thus of immediate certitude, the
latter must treat it as a subject of thought and
reflection, and seek for it a ground of certitude in
reason. For theology, scientific theology, is not
merely a systematic exhibit of what we believe, but
its rational justification. The Christian mind can
not permanently rest satisfied with the intuitions
of the heart, i. e., with faith ; it longs to see and
know in its own way. And he assuredly is no
true friend of faith who would suppress this long
ing, or discourage the attempt to satisfy it. The
intellect of man is as truly and integrally a part of
the divine image after which he was made, as his
spiritual nature. The power to think and the ne
cessity to exercise it belong to his being as inalien-

4 THE BEING OF GOD
ably and eternally as the insight of conscience.
They are mutually complementary — acting and
reacting on each other. Neither can be neglected
without injury to the other. Both alike must be
fed and exercised, if the whole man is to advance
and grow in well-proportioned symmetry. What
is all the bigotry, fanaticism, and intolerance, from
which Christianity has suffered so fearfully within
the house of its friends, but the result of a distorted
development of the faith-side of human nature —
distorted for the very reason that it left the thought-
side uncultivated? The leaders in the spiritual up
building of the Church — have they not always been
those who were also the leaders of her thinking ?
True, the great majority of the Christian people
cannot rise to the higher levels of thought ; but
the whole atmosphere of Christian worship and
teaching is made one of intellectual enlightenment
as well as spiritual culture for them also, by those
who can. Hence that age and that church uni
formly produce the highest results in Christian
character in which faith and thought go hand in
hand. The mind desires and seeks to grasp in
thought the contents of its Christian faith, hope,
and experience, not primarily to convert its faith-
assurance into intellectual certitude, but much
rather to become more and more fully conscious of
the wealth that is its own, and to add to its love

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 5
and gratitude the noble tribute of intelligent ado
ration. Theology therefore begins with the evidences of
the existence of God. Not to quell doubt, but
to know; and not to know the bare fact of the
divine existence, but whatever else that fact may
reveal. For since God is the ground of all that is,
the thought of God, if we could but exhaustively
think it, is the sum of all thought ; the knowledge
that God is, by the only way in which it is for us
attainable, itself includes (as we shall find) much
of our highest knowledge of what he is.
But before proceeding with our subject, it is well
to hear their reasons who tell us that we are un
dertaking the impossible. This warning comes
from various sides; philosophers, scientists, and
theologians unite in uttering it. It is enforced by
two closely related allegations: the one broadly
asserts that it is impossible for man to attain to
any true knowledge of God ; the other is content
with declaring that the existence of God cannot
be established or proved by any processes of the
understanding. Neither of these positions is ne
cessarily destructive of faith in God. The second
is held by numerous thoroughly theistic theolo
gians ; and even the first has been put forth as the
very panacea for philosophic unbelief, and the best

6 THE BEING OF GOD
means of leading men to the faith of the Church.
But they leave the prospect of mental satisfaction
so hopeless that it may well be doubted whether
the confidence of faith can continue to maintain
itself. In any case, if they are true, our wings are
clipped before we attempt our flight ; if not true,
or even if not proven, they leave us at least the
hope of success.
We turn then first to the contention that it is
impossible for us to reach true knowledge of God.
It would be highly serviceable at this point to
inquire into the nature of knowledge, as to which
mistaken conceptions are not rare ; but it must suf
fice for the present to say that to know God means
to have intellectual concepts, ideas, or notions, of
his being and character corresponding to the facts.
The impossibility of obtaining these is argued
especially by what is called " the doctrine of the
relativity of human knowledge." This doctrine
owes its elaboration chiefly to impulses furnished
by modern physical science, and is supposed to be
peculiarly scientific and unanswerable, and to give
the death-blow to all attempts to arrive at a
rational knowledge of God. It is on this account
that I feel constrained to devote a few paragraphs
to its exposition, although twenty entire lectures
would be needed to deal with it fully. It is not
stated alike by all who use it. Indeed, it assumes

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 7
very different forms, and is combined with radi
cally different doctrines, in the hands of Auguste
Comte, Sir William Hamilton, John Stuart Mill,
Herbert Spencer, and others. But it always in
volves and starts with the proposition that we know
nothing of objects in themselves, but only of their
relations, first towards our cognitive faculties, and
secondly towards each other. Knowledge is know
ledge not of things but of relations ; hence the
phrase, relativity of knowledge. As to the rela
tions of external objects towards ourselves (that is,
towards our cognitive faculties), we only know that
they give rise in us to certain perceptions or sensa
tions. When I see a tree, I know only that there
is an object that produces a number of peculiar
modifications in my consciousness through the me
dium of my sense of sight. When I hear the wind
rustling among its branches and foliage, all I know
is that something produces another set of impres
sions through my sense of hearing. Even when I
lay my hand on its bark, I know only that here is
something that produces a peculiar form of the
sensation of touch or feeling. Beyond these sensa
tions my knowledge does not go. In fact, when I
spoke of the tree as an object, implying that it has
real existence, I went too far. So far as my per
ceptive faculties go, they do not and cannot assure
me that there is a tree at all. I have sensations ;

8 THE BEING OF GOD
that I know ; but the producing cause of those sen
sations may be God's power immediately exerting
itself, as Berkeley thought, or it may be some hid
den property of my own being that brings them out.
All I know is the sensation. Whether this paper
exists, whether this table, whether you, whether the
whole physical universe is or is not, I cannot learn
from eye, or ear, touch, or any other sense. Now,
if this be a true account of what our senses can tell
us, — and I am bound to add that I believe it is
true, — it follows that unless we have another
source of knowledge than that of sense-perception,
we can have no knowledge of any form of existence
except our own. How then can we know that God
exists, to say nothing of what he is ? If we cannot
know the least, how can we know the greatest ?
Sir William Hamilton's philosophy adds still an
other difficulty, — a difficulty, so serious that it is
hard to see how he maintains the philosophic real
ism he professes. Admit for the moment that the
tree has a real existence ; still the knowledge ob
tained of it through perception is unreliable. We
know it not " as it is, but as it seems to us to be."
It is, or at least may be, materially modified by
the medium (the atmosphere) through which the
eye views it ; and the eye itself may contribute
elements of its own, — elements, e. g., such as a
differently constructed eye would see differently

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 9
and perhaps more truly. The result is that the
supposed knowledge imparted in perception is, or
may be, drawn from three sources : first, from the
tree itself ; secondly, from the atmosphere through
which it is seen ; thirdly, from the seeing eye.
Hamilton himself illustrates his doctrine by sup
posing that if the whole knowledge of an object be
twelve, four are contributed by the object itself,
four by the medium that intervenes between the
object and the percipient organ, and four by this
organ. What must be inferred from this, if not
that we cannot be sure of knowing anything ? If
two thirds of our supposed knowledge may be made
up of spurious contributions, why not eleven
twelfths? And if any part of the information
gained in perception be spurious, how are we to
distinguish that part from the genuine? Practi
cally nothing but unqualified nescience remains.
The same conclusion seems to follow when we
consider the other group of relations cognizable by
us — those of objects to each other. All our know
ledge of external objects, apart from that gained
in perception, such as it is, begins and ends with
points of resemblance or difference between them.
It is, always, not insight into what the object is in
itself, but mere classification. Let us go back to
the tree, and ask, What is it ? It is not an animal,
for it does not move from the place it occupies, and

10 THE BEING OF GOD
has not any of the means of locomotion found in
the class of objects we call animals. On the other
hand, it is not a rock, for it is an organic object,
which a rock is not. It feeds and grows; and
when awake during the summer, the sap flows
through the trunk and all the branches. There is
but one class of things it can belong to — trees.
Looking again, we find that it is not a pine, nor a
maple, but one of that class of trees we call oaks.
Think about the tree, and reason about it as you
will, you will never be able to say anything more
than It is not like that, but it is like this. Say, it
is wood : but what is wood ? It is not metal, it is
not soil, it is not water ; it is something we meet
with frequently, and which we classify as wood.
The oak is hard wood. What is hard ? Not soft.
Hard and soft are merely correlative terms. Oak
is hard wood compared with pine or even maple.
Once again, nothing but classification, or putting
one object in relation to another ; no knowledge of
the thing itself, in and by itself. How, then, can
you know the Infinite, — you who cannot even
know a tree ? Assuming that he exists, — and you
certainly cannot prove it, — you can only say, He
is not like this, nor like that, nor like anything
else ; and put him in a class by himself, entitled
the Unknowable.
I have brought these principles before you, not

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 11
to refute nor to deny them. Deny them I cannot,
at least not without a great deal of qualification.
To refute them, so far as that is possible, would
lead us too far afield. In one sense we are bound
to admit that our knowledge is relative, — relative
to our faculties and mental limitations. Nor can
we claim to have immediate and positive knowledge
of substance apart from qualities. What I wish
to do is to point out the scope of this doctrine.
We hear much of agnosticism; and it is always
in matters of religion. The inference naturally
suggests itself, and is undoubtedly drawn by many,
that religious truth differs from physical and math
ematical truth as to its ultimate basis. Sometimes
the very persons who talk with the utmost assur
ance and certitude about the composition of the
sun, the origin of the planetary system, or the evo
lution of organic life, when they come to religion,
i. e., to man's relations to the Infinite, say, We
know nothing, we can know nothing, about it ; hu
man knowledge is relative, — it can never reach ab
solute existence. Now if such persons were as good'
logicians as perhaps they are scientists, they would
see and acknowledge that the doctrine of the rela
tivity of knowledge applies to all knowledge : that
when they say, e. g., the phenomena presented by
the sun are such as to suggest that it is composed
of such and such material, that, on their own doc-

12 THE BEING OF GOD
trine, leaves them just as much in the dark about
the sun in itself as ever they were, — nay, more, that
even of the phenomena, which are all they know,
they can only say, Such they appear to us ; whether
they are so in reality, or may not appear very dif
ferently to other intelligent beings, if such there
be, we do not know. In short, whether any part of
our science is objectively true, we cannot affirm ; we
only know that it is true to us, — true in relation
to our human faculties.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, far enough from assuming
postulates which he can possibly do without, feels
the sweeping destructiveness of the doctrine of the
relativity of knowledge so keenly that he boldly
argues that this doctrine itself involves the reality
of absolute being. " Every one of the arguments "
(he says x) " by which the relativity of our know
ledge is demonstrated, distinctly postulates the pos
itive existence beyond the relative. To say that
we cannot know the Absolute, is, by implication,
to affirm that there is an absolute. In the very
denial of our power to learn what the Absolute is,
there lies hidden the assumption that it is. . . .
It is rigorously impossible to conceive that our
knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances only,
without at the same time conceiving a Reality of
which they are appearances ; for appearance with-
1 First Principles, p. 83, Appleton's edit.

THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE 13
out reality is unthinkable." He speaks of " our
firm belief in objective reality," — i. e. our firm be
lief that when our eyes see a tree, there is a real
object that affects them, — and says of this belief
that " metaphysical criticisms cannot for a moment
shake " it.1 That is to say, without acknowledging
it, and contrary to the fundamental principles of
his philosophy, he takes refuge in what are com
monly called " primary truths," " necessary ideas,"
" irresistible convictions." But even thus the fell
swoop of the doctrine is not to be evaded. It is
true, he admits inferences drawn from perceptions
as reliable guides to truth, — as who does not ? —
but on what ground? Though my mind be so
constituted that I cannot but believe that two is
more than one, who can assure me that this belief
is equally necessary to the inhabitants of other
worlds, if such there be ? Though we may all
agree on the laws of logic, and say that such and
such modes of reasoning necessarily lead to true
results, who shall assure us that even our algebra
and geometry are not masses of absurdity to the
people of Mars or Jupiter? In one word, the
question raised by the doctrine of the relativity of
knowledge, grounded on philosophic sensational
ism, is neither more nor less than the question,
How do we know that anything is true, — that
1 First Princ, p. 93.

14 THE BEING OF GOD
knowledge of any kind or degree is possible ?
The astronomer's most carefully worked-out train
of reasoning depends for its truth on the validity,
first of logical processes, and secondly of the ax
ioms and postulates that lie at the foundation of
all mathematics ; and who can show that these are
anything but relative truths ?
This is the bottom question of this doctrine ; and
you see that it covers the whole field of possible or
impossible knowledge. Agnosticism is an egregious
self-deception when it limits itself to religion.1
And the answer to it may be indicated in few
words. We cannot prove the absolute and univer
sal truth of what we accept as axioms, postulates,
or primary truths. We cannot demonstrate the
universal validity of the syllogism, or any of the
laws of reasoning. We must assume that the
universe is constructed on honest principles ; that
there is truth, and that we can attain it. On this
assumption we set out, and then find its verification
at every step. The astronomer predicts an eclipse,
and the event confirms the truth of the principles
on which he reasons. Experience shows every day
in myriads of instances that we do get at the
truth of nature, and that therefore our logic and
our primary principles, albeit we cannot apriorily
1 Cf. on this point the acute volume of Arthur James Balfour,
Defense of Philosophic Doubt.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE 15
prove them true, are certified as true by their re
sults. Can we consistently reject them as falla
cious when they exercise themselves on matters be
yond nature, simply because their verification —
by no means wanting — is less direct and compul
sory ? All knowledge does start with sense-per
ception — that we admit ; but why must inferential
reasoning, implicitly trusted within the bounds of
nature, be traduced as a deceitful ignis Jatuus
when it leads to conclusions concerning what lies
beyond ?
Thus far I have treated the doctrine of the rela
tivity of knowledge in what, for the sake of distinc
tion, may be termed its physical-science form ;
but it appears also in a more abstract, dialectic
habit. In this form it sets out with the conception
of God as the Absolute and Infinite, and disports
itself in a boundless field of what I cannot but re
gard as word-jugglery. Especially is this the case
with the term "absolute," which each one may define
in his own way, according to the needs of his phi
losophy. Mansel's " Limits of Religious Thought "
made us of the elder generation now living nause-
atingly familiar with the capabilities of the argu
ment in this shape, although it was done in the
supposed interests of faith. If the Absolute Being
is to be regarded as a being who cannot stand in

16 THE BEING OF GOD
relations of any kind to any other being or even to
himself, then, of course, he cannot be known ; not
only because we can only know relations, but also
because, the moment he is known, he stands to the
knower in the relation of the known. And by
parity of reasoning he cannot know himself; for
that would imply a relation of himself to himself.
But is this reasoning, or is it mere word-play ? Is
it not assumed here that whatever may be truly af
firmed of one relation is applicable to all? and
that relatedness, whatever else it may include, al
ways implies a limitation imposed from without?
Is the relation of knowing subject and known ob
ject of the same or similar nature and import as
the relation of master and slave, of restrainer and
restrained, of conscious mind to unconscious na
ture ? When A knows B, makes him the object
of thought and contemplation, is B, though per
haps utterly unconscious of A and his thought,
thereby in any way affected, changed, hindered, or
limited ? Why, then, should our knowing God be
incompatible with the divine nature or inconsistent
with any true idea of God ? If this flow necessarily
from the contents of the term " absolute," by what
right or reason is that term applied to God ? Cer
tainly, the idea of the God in whose existence the
Christian believes is not by him conceived as abso
lute in that sense. Conceive of the Absolute, not

THE INFINITE AS UNKNOWABLE 17
as the necessarily unrelated, but as the not neces
sarily related, as the always Independent, i. e. as
the One who has his cause and source of existence,
not outside of himself, but in himself, — and that
difficulty vanishes.
Similar difficulties are found in the idea of God
as the Infinite. From the time of Plato down to
Hamilton and Mansel, the Infinite, as such, has
been regarded by many philosophers as unknow
able. It is said that we cannot conceive of the in
finite, and hence cannot know it. Now, if that
means — and it can scarcely mean anything else —
that we cannot form a mental image of infinitude,
be it time, space, or being, it is true. But even
Mr. Spencer, although he seems to use the words
" inconceivable " and " unimaginable " as synony
mous,1 allows of what he not inaptly designates
" symbolic conceptions " as useful and necessary,
notwithstanding their inadequacy as images.2 Or
must we say that we can know nothing that we can
not depict in the imagination ? How, then, can we
think or know time ? All our abstract and generic
conceptions are thoughts of which we can form
no mental images. Who can conjure up a men
tal picture of wisdom, evil, mankind, vertebrates ?
Yet we think thoughts in those words, and we
1 Cf. Balfour, p. 196.
2 First Princ, p. 26 6.

18 THE BEING OF GOD
know the contents of the thoughts, and can com
municate them. Why, then, can we not think the
Infinite ? If to think necessarily implies the ac
tual and simultaneous perception by the conscious
ness of all contents of the thought, then indeed we
cannot ; but does it ? When I say, The year is
drawing to a close, do I think nothing unless every
day and every hour of the year is distinctly present
to my consciousness ? It is true that I could think
over the year in such a manner as to bring every
day, hour, and minute successively before my men
tal vision ; but it would take another year to do it
in, just as Hamilton says that it would take eter
nity in which to " construe to the mind " an infi
nite whole, the possibility of knowing which he
therefore denies.1 But if I can think the thought
" the year " only in this way, then I practically
can think it as little as, according to Hamilton, I
can think the Infinite, — which would annihilate
all thinking. In fact, however, we can think the
Infinite ; and that not only as a negative thought,
but quite positively. The form of the word is in
deed negative, but the thought is as positive as
that expressed in the words " omnipotent " and
"omniscient." The positiveness of the thoughts
" infinite time " and " infinite space " is, it seems to
me, very evident from the fact that every effort to
1 Wight's Ham. Phil., p. 354.

CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 19
think of a limit to them fails. Carry the idea of
duration backward or forward until the mind wea
ries in the effort ; still you cannot stop. Why not ?
Because prior to your efforts you had the idea of
infinite time in your mind, and you know that you
have not yet fulfilled its demands. You had it as
a model, and that model tells you that there are
no limits. The infinitude of time and space are
not ideas given by experience, or logically deduced
from what experience gives. They are given in
the constitution of the mind. Therefore, so far as
the infinitude of God is concerned, albeit we can
neither picture it nor fully embrace it in thought,
it erects no absolute barrier against our knowing
God, although it does make our knowledge una
voidably incomplete.
Let us pass on to the second allegation above
adduced. God, we are assured, exists, and may
be known ; but his existence cannot be demon
strated by the reason, — it is given. But given
how, and where ? Some theologians would reply,
In the Scriptures. They may not deny the possi
bility of other proof ; and in so far as they do not,
their opinion does not fall under this head. But
they probably do ; for, as a class, their rega»d for
the powers of the understanding in the region of
metaphysical truth is not great. Jealousy for the

20 THE BEING OF GOD
honor of revelation gives rise to this unfortunate
bias. The effort to prove the existence of God is
at all events useless in their view. However,
whether they would say impossible or useless, their
position in either case is not without direct bearing
on the point before us, and may therefore right
fully be adverted to here. They claim that the
sacred Scriptures reveal the existence of God. But
the Scriptures themselves appeal to proofs outside
of themselves. St. Paul, for example, says : "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." And hence the heathen,
though they have not the Scriptures, do have some
knowledge of God, — sufficient to render them ex-
cuseless. The conclusive consideration, however,
is that the divine authority of the Scriptures can
in reason be grounded only on their demonstrated
divine origin ; so that the argument, if argument it
can be called, moves in a vicious circle, in that it
assumes the existence of God in order to establish
the authority of the Scriptures, and then uses the
Scriptures to establish what has already been as
sumed. I am not denying that, if the Bible were
placed in the hands of a heathen, it could enlarge
and correct his defective notion of God ; nay, more,
— if the case were supposable of a sound mind

CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 21
utterly destitute of any idea of God, the Scrip
tures could put such a mind in possession of a very
lofty conception of God, inferior only to that which
has been attained by Christian theology through
ages of divinely guided experience and thinking.
But to impart an idea is not to prove its objective
truth. The mind thus instructed, even while it ac
cepted the idea as carrying in itself the highest
notes of truth short of absolute necessity, would
still ask for proof, and be restless till it found it.
All this is so clear that the appeal to the Bible at
this point can only be made by such as are hostile
to scientific theology, and regard dogmatic theol
ogy as merely a systematic exhibition of biblical
teaching. Very different is the contention of those theolo
gians who deny the possibility of rationally prov
ing the existence of God on the ground that " its
very certainty precludes demonstration ; " and that
belief in it is already present in the mind that at
tempts it, and " vitiates all the reasoning in such
demonstrations."1 That a preceding conviction
often leads to loose and inaccurate reasoning in
support of it cannot be doubted ; but to conclude
that therefore such a conviction cannot possibly be
logically demonstrated would itself be a specimen
of very loose reasoning. Does not the author
1 Hedge, Ways ofthe Spirit, p. 185 f.

22 THE BEING OF GOD
whose words I just now quoted himself suggest an
argument of utmost force and value when, but a
few lines farther on, he says, " Of all existence, the
correlate in reason is Absolute Being, — i. e. God " ?
Very true, I say; but suppose I propound this
sentence to the agnostic, will he not at once reply,
Prove it ? And if I cannot so explicate the con
tents of the concepts, existence, correlate, reason,
and absolute being, as to make the truth of the
statement apparent, what is its value, either for
him or for me ? Or, if I can and do, is not that
a demonstration that for reason the absolute being
exists ?
I do not deny that the idea of God is an intui
tive, necessary idea of the reason. But the neces
sity of all necessary ideas is not equally obvious.
Some carry it on their faces, so to speak ; others
allow it to be seen only upon the closest scrutiny.
If the idea of God be among the latter, to show that
fact will be to prove it, or, if you please, to prove
that it neither needs nor admits of " syllogistic
proof." That it is not one of the former seems to
my mind very clear. I attach no value to the oft-
repeated assertion that savage tribes have been
found without any idea of God whatsoever. Ac
cepting its truth, it might be considered as proof
that such tribes had not yet fully risen to the level
of true humanity, or had by retrogression fallen far

CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 23
below it. It is, however, far more probable that
the reporter, whether traveler or missionary, failed
to elicit the exact truth. Be that as it may, it
is certain that the idea is found in very different
degrees of perfection. Its import is realized in
forms of expression and acts of worship so far
asunder as to obscure their relationship to a com
mon thought. It is always and everywhere a grow
ing idea, keeping pace upon the whole with the de
velopment of the intellectual powers. It never
appears with the full force of an idea or conviction
which no one can in good faith deny or doubt. No
sane mind can doubt that every effect has a cause,
that the whole is greater than one of its parts, or
that a body can be in but one place in the same
instant of time. These are propositions that only
need to be presented to the mind to be recognizefl
as necessarily true. No logical processes, other
than mere definition of words, intervene, or can in
tervene, between the conception of them and their
acceptance as true. The illiterate mind may possi
bly fail to understand the terms " cause and effect,"
or the technical element in the assertion that the
whole is greater than the part ; but the moment
it does understand, it assents. It can no more
think it possible that a part is equal to the whole
than it can believe that pleasure and pain are iden
tical. But it is possible to say, " There is no God,"

24 THE BEING OF GOD
without feeling that the assertion cannot be true.
The " fool " may doubt and tremble while he says
it, but he is not self-convicted of uttering an ab
surdity. The idea of God, though necessary, is
not immediately self-evident. The very fact that
men are always seeking for arguments to prove it
shows this. For it never occurs to any one to seek
for proof of what he cannot but believe.
Others describe the idea of God as a moral intu
ition or conviction, or as the utterance of the faith-
principle. Exactly what is meant by this is not
easily ascertainable, if at all. There is no doubt
that the moral nature is strongly operative in bring
ing the idea of God home to the consciousness of
men as an effective moral regulative. But whether
the moral faculty can either discover or receive
ideas without the intervention of the reason is
quite another question, on which I shall not enter.
Enough for my present purpose that, as a moral
conviction, the idea of God is not antecedently de
barred from the possibility of rational demonstra
tion. The moral, no matter how immediate and
fundamental, ever seeks expression and confirma
tion in terms of the intellectual, and conversely.
In beings both moral and intellectual, the two
sides cannot permanently rest in unmediated sepa-
rateness. Both seek to realize their perfect coales-

CAN IT BE DEMONSTRATED? 25
cence in unity. No one can be satisfied with logi
cally reached conclusions that contradict his moral
instincts, or even fail to manifest their harmony
with them. But just as little can he be content
with moral convictions, the rationality of which
cannot be made out. To assert that the idea of
God is a moral intuition, and as such incapable of
rational demonstration, is to deny the unity of our
nature, and to make it the prey of miserable inter
nal discord.
One other phase of the same general objection
might engage us ; but it is better to dismiss it for
the present with a mere mention. It is said that
no arguments yet brought forward to prove the ex
istence of God are sound and conclusive. Whether
this be true, or how far it is true, will manifest it
self as we pass them in review.

LECTURE II.
ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD — THE
COSMOLOGICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL.
The arguments most frequently adduced to
prove the existence of God are five in number,
respectively designated as the ontological, the cos-
mological, the teleological, the moral, and the his
torical. Most writers who treat them do so in the
order in which they have just been named. The
advantage of so doing is that the discussion of the
ontological argument at the outset furnishes a num
ber of determinations by which the others gain a
wider reach than they possess in themselves. For
these arguments are not to be regarded as five
wholly distinct and mutually independent lines of
reasoning, leading severally to the same immedi
ate result. That is true only within very nar
row limits ; beyond these limits, they are comple
mentary of each other ; and of no one of them
can it be said that by itself it establishes the exist
ence of a being containing in himself all that our
idea of God demands. But there is also, and I
think greater, advantage in following the order in

GROWTH OF THE IDEA OF GOD 27
which we may suppose the arguments to have been
originally thought out or discovered. This will
help us to estimate the exact weight of each, taken
by itself, and (what is of more importance) will
enable us to trace the gradual growth of the idea
of God, to the successive stages of which the sev
eral arguments more or less closely correspond,
and which gives life and inherent probability to
logical processes which in books of systematic the
ology too often appear abstract and dead.
If the allusion just made to the historical growth
of the idea of God — i. e. the gradual increase
of the contents of that idea to human thought —
be objected to by any, it can only be by such as
imagine that primeval man, prior to his lapse into
sin, was in possession of the most perfect intel
lectual knowledge of God attainable by the hu
man mind, and that, notwithstanding the fall, this
knowledge survived, and was transmitted by the
first man adown the line of his descendants, albeit
with ever-diminishing purity and clearness. But
of this there is no evidence whatever. Even the
first chapters of Genesis, supposing them to offer
literally true history, do not furnish a particle of it.
They do exhibit man as the son of God, made
in his image, and therefore full of intellectual pos
sibilities, and in original moral harmony with his
Maker, but yet as an undeveloped being, who

28 THE BEING OF GOD
could not hand down to his posterity that which he
himself did not possess. As he had neither art
nor science, but was soon surpassed in these re
spects by his offspring, so he had no such intellec
tual conceptions of God as to place him far above
their level. He knew God as good to him, as far
more powerful than himself, and as his Master.
Until his mind was unfolded and trained in the
school of experience, he could know no more. But
not to insist on this, assume that he knew all that
imagination can ascribe to him ; you do not thereby
set aside the historical growth of the idea of God.
For history has nothing to do with the Garden of
Eden. It deals always with sinful, and through
long ages with ignorant, savage men, by whom
scarce a hint of primitive knowledge, if it came to
them, appears to have been apprehended or re
tained. And it finds that their idea of God grew
in the same way that their ideas about the physical
world grew. True, it nowhere witnesses the birth
of the idea ; but it meets it innumerable times in
the state of weakest, scarcely breathing existence.
It does not, as was once supposed, find that the first
stage in religious belief is that of fetichism. That
error has been effectually set aside.1 But man's
earliest conceptions of God were undoubtedly an
thropomorphic and anthropopathic in the extreme.
1 Cf. Max Miiller, Origin of Religion, Lect. 2.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 29
What are the gods of oldest Egypt, Chaldea,
Greece, but magnified human beings? Is not the
distance betweeen those conceptions of God or
gods, and that presented by the Christian church
of the one Infinite and Eternal Spirit, almost too
vast to be apprehended? Surely, the transition
from the one to the other of conceptions so far
apart caunot have been otherwise than gradual.
The sacred Scriptures themselves fully warrant this
assertion. From the early Hebrew conception of a
God whose footsteps are heard in the garden, and
who walks and talks with man in face-to-face com
munion, to the prophetic idea of the unapproach
able transcendence of Jehovah is a great advance ;
and greater still, from an intellectual point of view,
is that from the conception of God as distinctionless
personal unity, to the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity. But it is not to be supposed that the ages
that intervened between these flood -points were
periods of mental stagnation. They were spring
times of deeper and broader views, — intervals dur
ing which, under the brooding of the Divine Spirit,
the chaos-like confusion of thought assumed ever
greater order and harmony.
Now that which first brought the existence of
God home to men as an element of conscious
thought may be assumed to have been some form
of the cosmological argument, so called because it

»

30 THE BEING OF GOD
is suggested to the mind upon the contemplation
of the kcV/aos, the physical world. With this, there
fore, we fitly begin. It has been presented in
numerous modifications. Aristotle, more than
three hundred years before Christ, argued from
the presence of perpetual motion, i. e. change and
transition, in the world to the existence of a being
from whom all motion proceeds, a prime mover,
whom he identified with God. Modern philosophy
presents what is substantially the same argument,
in this form : everything in the world is perishable
and transitory, contingent, — i. e. dependent for
existence on something else. Hence there must
be something which is not contingent, but neces
sarily (i. e. self-) existent. The cogency of the
reasoning in either form is derived from our con
ception of causation. Every movement or change,
we say, has a cause ; and experience teaches us
that in the physical world every effect-producing
cause is itself an effect of a remoter cause, and
that of one still more remote, and so on as far as
we can trace the line. But the mind, by constitu
tional necessity, refuses to conceive this line or
chain of causation as running forever backward
into the past without commencement or starting-
point. For, since every particular change or effect
— that is, every link in the chain — has a begin
ning, the chain as such must have had a beginning.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 31
To say that it had not would be to say that some
where there was a cause that had a beginning
and yet did not begin, which would be absurd.
Hence the mind is driven to the conclusion that,
back of the whole chain of causation, there ex
isted and operated a cause which, unlike all causes
of which we have experience, was not itself the
effect of an antecedent cause, but — for this is the
only possible alternative — has the source of its
own existence in itself.
Nor is this all. That which urges to this conclu
sion necessitates another step. The self-existent
cause or causes cannot be conceived as impersonal.
It cannot be mere physical energy. The very idea
of a physical cause implies that it is itself an effect,
a something through which energy is transmitted,
but by which it cannot be originated. It is just
for that reason that every cause in the cosmic sys
tem drives us back to another more ulterior cause.
Moreover, as a stream cannot rise higher than its
source, so a cause must be adequate to its effect.
Therefore, since in the world we find not merely
organic objects, but personal beings, men, person
ality must be found in the First Cause.
This conclusion is as old as human intelligence.
Its root exists in the mind in the form of a first
principle of thought or inborn conviction, prior to
all philosophical analysis. The mind is so made

32 THE BEING OF GOD
that it demands a cause for every effect, and re
gards an effect without a cause as impossible. It
was this innate conviction that gave to men their
first intellectual assurance of the existence of some
thing higher, more powerful, than themselves.
They saw the rain and lightning, heard the thun
der, felt the wind, and instinctively said — not, as
we say, it rains, it lightens, but — He rains, He
lightens, He gives forth his voice. They knew
that these phenomena had a cause beyond the com
pass of their own force, and thence inferred the
existence of power or powers above themselves.
The nature and steps of the reasoning were by no
means as clear to them as they are to us. They
did not even ask themselves why it was impossible
to suppose that thunder, rain, and lightning had
no cause, but just happened ; still less did they
inquire by what right they inferred the personality
of the source of energy. Their intellects — unintim-
idated by the analytic habit, which, while it tends
to accuracy of reasoning, too often seems to liquefy
the mind, and incapacitate it for retaining the im
press of any conviction except that knowledge is
difficult — worked automatically, without much aid
from reflection, under the powerful influence of the
inborn idea of causation. It did not at all occur
to them at first to take account of the fact that be
tween the rain and the rain-maker, whose existence

THE UNITY OF THE FIRST CAUSE 33
they confidently inferred, there might be many
other causes, such as clouds to carry the water,
and winds to waft them on. Even the personality
of the rain-maker was but an unconscious inference
from the general principle of causation. Under
the influence of this apriori conception, imbedded
in the constitution of their minds, they passed at
once from the rain to a personal rain-maker. Ob
serve, I do not say that man's conscious albeit ellip
tical and unanalytical reasoning first suggested the
thought of a higher being. That thought he had
before, perhaps long before, in the shadowy form
of what the Germans call Ahnung, — foreboding ;
but it now found a place in his reason, became an
accepted truth, of which he could give some ac
count, and which henceforth exerted a strong deter
mining influence over his thought and conduct.
The existence of higher powers explained not only
the rain, lightning, thunder, wind, or whatever else
first led his mind up to them, but also the flowing
river, the drifting" cloud, the changing seasons, the
appearance and disappearance of organized life in
all its forms.
But to return to the argument. It is evident
that neither in the form in which primitive men
employed it, nor in that which maturer thought
has given to it, does it of necessity lead to one
First Cause. That it did not do so in early ages

34 THE BEING OF GOD
is shown by the prevalence of polytheism. Each
god is, in his own special sphere, a first cause.
That it does not in the modern form may be seen
when we give it the most general expression of
which it admits, as thus : If anything exists, then
something self-existent exists ; but something does
exist, e. g. myself : therefore something self -exist
ent exists; The argument is good as far as it goes ;
but it does not go so far as to show that the self-
existent something is numerically one and unique.
In order to justify that conclusion, the major pre
mise should be : If anything exists, then there
must be one, sole, unique, self-existent something.
Can we justify the general proposition in that
form ? Not absolutely, but with high probabil
ity. We can, at all events, come much nearer it
than men did in polytheistic days. Our larger ac
quaintance with the processes of the physical world
tends strongly to lead us to one sole author of all
that is. No doubt even the most primitive man
had some conception of what we call intermediate
causes. The veriest savage, when the wind over
turns his hut, knows that the wind is not the first
cause of the catastrophe. He goes back to the
maker, ruler, or soul of the wind. But where he
can trace two or three links in the chain of cause
and effect, we can follow it up through an almost
endless succession of actions and reactions. Where

THE UNITY OF THE FIRST CAUSE 85
his attention is arrested by but a few of the more
striking phenomena, science has taught us to rec
ognize causality everywhere. True, the inference
from a long chain is not more cogent than that
from a short one ; nor that from many chains
necessarily more conclusive than from a few. But
tlie long chains and the many have brought us to
perceive the unity that pervades the world. We
see that innumerable lines of causation work in
perfect harmony ; that movements in the most
widely separated parts, and of the most opposite,
yea, mutually destructive character, are so bal
anced that nevertheless the world is what the
Greek philosophers already called it, a Cosmos,
a well-ordered whole. We see even more. We
see that even- cause and effect is so interlinked
with others as to suggest that, when we talk of
chains of causation as if they were lying alongside
of each other without manifold mutual connections,
we are wide of the truth. A much better symbol
is furnished by the genealogical tree of some an
cient family, with its countless lines of descent.
direct and collateral, and its equally numerous in
termixtures by marriage with other families. In
trntli, all the great doctrines and theories of recent
physical science, such as the conservation and cor
relation of force, tend directly toward the conclu
sion that energy circulates in the universe as the

36 THE BEING OF GOD
blood in the living organism ; and that, as the lat
ter has its propelling centre in the heart, so the
former must have some one analogous central
cause. It is doubtless because some glimmerings
of this truth have always been perceived by men
that germs of monotheistic thought so frequently
appear in the midst of the densest polytheism.
Just so far as we find causation leading us back to
one centre, so far are we constrained to assume
one sole cause of the physical universe. Nor,
though this argument trenches closely on the bor
ders of the teleologijcal, is it justly chargeable with
being a mere anticipation thereof. It is wholly
independent of the idea of design. It plants itself,
on the one hand, on the indestructibleness and
therefore unity of force, however numerous its
metamorphoses ; and on the other, on the perma
nence of the world, notwithstanding the apparent
variety of incompatible energies. But it fails of
absolute conclusiveness because neither of its alter
native bases rests on anything more than a very
incomplete induction.
Here let us pause to consider one or two objec
tions. The cosmological argument is worthless if
the conception of causation on which it depends be
vulnerable. Now, Hume maintained that it is.
The relation between cause and effect, he contended,
may, for aught we know, be nothing more than

HUME ON THE IDEA OF CAUSE 87
invariable sequence, — invariable so far as our
experience goes; and beyond experience we have
no knowledge. As often as we see event A, we
find it followed by event B: and this frequently
recurring sequence begets in us the confident belief
that B is dependent on A, and that A determines
B. There may be more than sequence ; but we can
never know, and therefore have no right to assume,
that there is. All our knowledge springs from ex
perience ; and experience does not tell us anything
about the relation between what we term cause and
effect, except that the one goes before and the other
follows after. Of course, if this be all we know
of causation, the cosmological argument falls to the
ground. But is it all we know ? Night invariably
follows day, and winter summer ; but does any one
ever think of them as causes and effects ? Year in,
year out, the factory bell rings at noon, and before
it has ceased to vibrate a stream of operatives
issues from the building. Year in, year out, the
engine in the same factory starts up at say six
o'clock in the morning, and at once a hundred
machines throughout the building begin to spin
or knit or weave. Here are two sets of sequences ;
but of one you say, it is mere sequence, — of the
other, it is cause and effect. Why this difference,
if you know nothing but sequence ? Experience,
observation ? But experience, as Hume truly says,

38 THE BEING OF GOD
tells us nothing about the nature of that which
connects cause and effect. On the other hand,
while experience is needed to assure us that night
will follow day, and that the operatives will take
their nooning as soon as the bell rings, it is not
needed to teach us that, if machines spin or weave
or make watches, there is a cause, a whole series
of causes, for it. Even a child, whose prior expe
rience is null, if it burn a finger in the flame of a
candle, does not need to burn itself a second time
to know that the pain is an effect and the flame a
cause. It has an innate sense of efficiency long
before it understands the meaning of the words
" cause and effect." Between cause and effect the
mind apprehends a necessary connection, so that
if one be present the absence of the other is felt to
be impossible, unthinkable. Not so with mere
sequence. I can think of summer and winter as
existing apart, as they actually do under the equa
tor and at the poles ; but I cannot think that a
new life springs into being, or that a boulder
changes its place, without a cause.
Another objection is that of Kant, who asserts
that the " principle of causality is valid only within
the field of experiences, but inapplicable, yea
meaningless, beyond it." But since the principle
of causality is in no way indebted for its authority
to experience, it is difficult to see why its validity

KANT ON CAUSALITY 39
should be limited to the field of experience. Cer
tainly, the mind is aware of no such limitation, but
as the author of the " Critical Philosophy " himself
says, urgently demands to find repose in a first
cause. The principle is a law of mind, with the
origin of which neither human thought nor human
experience had anything to do. Experience merely
furnishes the occasions on which it asserts itself ;
and it does that as strongly when, in the regress of
thought, it reaches the first link in the chain of
causation, as when it contemplates the latest
change that falls under its notice. True, no
sense-perception can trace the first physical effect
that ever took place in the world to its supersen-
suous cause. The physical trail breaks off where
the first physical effect begins ; but the innate
conception of causality is as clear and imperious
at that point as at any other. And though it may
be urged that the concept of causality is called into
play only by phenomena, concerning the realities
back of which we know nothing, yet that which it
demands, efficiency, is confessedly not phenomenal,
but an attribute of the otherwise perhaps unknown
reality. It would seem, therefore, that to refuse
credence to that necessity of mind which the prin
ciple expresses when it leads across the boundary
of experience, is to discredit it in all its utterances,
and in fact to make knowledge of any kind impos
sible.

40 THE BEING OF GOD
But the objection may be urged in another way.1
It may be said that that which connects cause and
effect in the physical world is the transition of
physical force ; and that from the prime physical
impulse we cannot pass to a spiritual power with
out leaping a chasm. But we do make this leap —
if leap it be — every time we reason from some
physical effect, say a painting or a statue, to an an
tecedent act of spiritual power in man. The objec
tion assumes that the demand for a cause, which
the mind necessarily makes in the presence of an
effect, is a demand for a cause of the same nature
with the object in which the effect is wrought. But
this is not the case. When we see an effect, a
movement or change of any kind, we know there is
a cause for it, although we may not know what the
cause is, or where it is. Concerning its nature, we
do not necessarily make any affirmation whatever.
When in the morning I find that my boat, which
last night I saw riding safely at its mooring in the
stream, has disappeared, I know that some cause
has removed or set it adrift ; but until I investi
gate I do not know whether that cause was physical
or spiritual, — - whether it was a violent squall that
passed while I slept, an unusually high and heavy
tide, a piece of entangled driftwood that chafed
and parted the mooring-rope, or a knife in a human
1 Cf . Mnlf ord, Republic of God, p. 7 f .

RECAPITULATION 41
hand, directed and impelled by a human will, i. e.
by a spiritual power. The only tiling of which I
am absolutely certain is that some cause, equal to
the effect, has removed the boat from its place. So,
when I see the change from summer to winter, or
the converse, I know that there is a cause for it ;
but I do not know that the cause is physical, until
I am told of the inclination of the equator to
the ecliptic, and its consequences. Until thus in
structed, I might imagine that it was effected by
the energy of gnomes or earth-spirits. The innate
idea of causality, as such, makes no distinction be
tween physical and spiritual energy. Nor, indeed,
can we. When we speak of physical and spiritual
causes, we classify, not the force or energy, but the
substance or being in which it inheres. Of energy
we have no conception at all, except as the source
of motion ; and that we have only because we are
conscious of exerting energy ourselves.
Let us now cast a reviewing glance over the ar
gument, and see what we have gained. We have
found that the presence of motion, change, life, and
decay in the world involve the existence of a self-
existent first cause or causes. This conclusion has
the highest possible certitude for us, because it is
the unequivocal deliverance of a principle inherent
in our mental constitution. It is true that a self-
existent first cause is as inconceivable to us as a

42 THE BEING OF GOD
self -existent universe ; J but it is not the inconceiv
able, in the proper sense of the word, of which the
idea of causality takes cognizance. It applies only
to whatever had a beginning, and is satisfied when
it reaches that which had no beginning. As for
the difficulty of the idea of the creation of matter,
the raw material of the universe, the non-eternity
of which is not apparent, it does not concern us
here. We make no claim that the cosmological
argument infers more than a self -existent fashioner
of the cosmos.
We have found, secondly, that the self-existent
cause or causes must be conceived of as personal.
This, if not directly expressed by the idea of cau
sality, is legitimately deducible from it, and appears
no less certain than the preceding conclusion.
And, thirdly, we have found good reason to con
clude that there are not first causes, but one only
First Cause. The ground for this is furnished by
the unity of the cosmos, notwithstanding its many
contrarieties. It is therefore established just so
far as that unity can be proved, and no farther.
The originally strong presumption for it has hith
erto increased as physical science has advanced, and
may be expected to do so in the future. The con
clusion founded upon it may therefore be described
as highly probable, but not, as yet, demonstrative.
1 Cf. Hedge, Ways ofthe Spirit, p. 149.

PANTHEISTIC OBJECTION 43
We find, then, as the result of the cosmological ar
gument, taken by itself, that there is a self-existent
personal First Cause of the physical universe, and
with only less certainty that there is but one.
But does the argument also justify the conclu
sion that the one, personal First Cause exists in
dependently of the universe, — that he is, in that
sense, an extra-mundane being ? Pantheism says,
No ! It admits an eternal first cause, but finds it
in the world itself, taken as substance. The phe
nomenal world, it says, is indeed contingent, depen
dent, perishable, — always beginning and always
ending ; but the real world, back of the phenome
nal, is eternal and self -existent. It is an ocean of
being, out of which, by the necessity of its immuta
ble nature, all forms of life emerge, and into which
they return. To this I reply that, if the world be
such as pantheism regards it, it must be a personal
being. The personality of the First Cause has, I
think, been already shown to follow from our con
ception of causality ; but a word or two more may
here be added. The mind rests satisfied in no
impersonal, unconscious cause. Such a cause we
call intermediate, meaning thereby that it is but
a storage-point of energy, received, held, and ex
pended under fixed conditions. The whole com
plex of causal sequences in the unconscious world
seems to be but a gigantic system of powerful ma-

44 THE BEING OF GOD
chinery, of which every wheel and cog, every shaft
and belt, confesses — the source of power is not in
me. In other words, the mind finds no explana
tion of the origin of power or energy until it comes
to something like itself, — i. e. personal being.
Therefore, the world, if it be the sum and source
of being, should be personal. But is it ? Does the
universe, so far as we know it, produce the impres
sion of self-conscious personality ? Does it not at
every point produce the opposite impression ? Not
withstanding all its beauty, order, stability, and
sublimity, does it not, apart from the thought of
God, impress us as cold and heartless ; unfree, nay,
fettered, and blindly moving in endless cycles,
without aim or purpose ? Do we not know that,
just so far as we ourselves are included in the cos
mic mechanism, we are repressed, bound, and en
slaved, with scarce a joy in life save that which
springs from the possession of personality, which,
while it lasts, lifts us a little above the physical
process, and gives us a taste of freedom and inde
pendence of material conditions ? The answer, I
know, does not demonstrate the impossibility of the
pantheistic assumption ; but until that assumption
is backed by stronger evidence than has ever yet
been brought for it, it may be considered to turn
the scales. And so we may add that the eternal
First Cause of the universe is not a part of the uni-

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 45
verse itself, not a world-soul, but a super-cosmic
being. Have we, then, proved the existence, not of
a god, but of God ? the Christian God ? By no
means. The argument from causality can never
prove a cause whose measure exceeds the measure
of the effect. Whether the Maker of the physical
universe be or be not equal to other effects, infi
nitely higher and grander, is a question as to which
the cosmological argument is utterly dumb. And
it is only by a glaring non sequitur, by which the
argument itself has been unjustly discredited, that
theologians have so generally drawn from it the full
conclusion that God, our God, is. The fact, sin
gular as it seems, is easily explained. The mind,
said Tertullian, is naturally Christian. So we may
say, the mind naturally inclines to believe in
God, infinite in being and perfections, and, in its
eagerness to find and point him out, forgets to
watch and weigh, at every step, the processes of
its reasoning.
We turn next to the teleological, or, as it is also
termed, the physico-theological argument. Here
the reasoning is from the presence of design in the
world to a designer. In the constitution of the
world, — thus runs this argument, — there is every
where adaptation of means to ends ; therefore the
universe was constructed by an intelligent designer.

46 THE BEING OF GOD
Peculiarly adapted to the Greek mind, because
related to the perception of measure, proportion,
and beauty in physical forms, for which the
Greeks had keen eyes, it was already used by Soc
rates, in the fifth century B. c. And the concep
tion of God to which it leads, as working according
to weight and measure, is, as Dorner points out,1
found a century earlier in the second Isaiah, and
before him in the book of Job. It cannot, how
ever, have suggested itself to the untutored mind
nearly so early as the argument from causality.
It presupposes higher development of thought
and more extended habits of reflection. The child
of to-day apprehends the working of causality in
nature long before it perceives that of design.
The same must have been true of primitive man.
The inseparable connection of causal force with
every instance of design or purpose carried into
effect — the necessary condition under which alone
we can recognize previously existing design — is
apt to put a stop to all further investigation by
the ordinary mind. Eyen the cultivated mind is
not so immediately impressed by design as by cau
sality. A person sees for the first time a piece of
mechanism — say a stocking-knitter. He thinks at
once, Somebody made it, and asks, Who? That
question answered, he probably feels satisfied. He
1 Glaubenslehre, i. p. 259.

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 47
thinks it will save work and make stockings
cheaper, and goes his way. Of the intelligence
involved in the machine, of the curious adaptation
of part to part for the automatic production of a
thing of such peculiar shape, he takes but small if
any note, unless he be, as we say, of a mechanical
turn of mind. It is in that way that nine persons
out of ten gaze on the constructions of an exhibi
tion of machinery. And though the tenth may be
instantly impressed by the marks of intelligence,
he can form no adequate conception of the amount
and quality of that intelligence, until after minute
examination of the machine and careful reflection.
If such be the case when the mechanism is so com
pact as to be visible in all its parts at once, how
much less probably will the observation of intelli
gence occupy the foreground when the parts are
scattered over miles of distance, and can only with
difficulty be combined in one mental image. Who
of you when he first beheld an electric light, an
effect the producing cause of which was far away,
thought of the intelligence behind it ? You
thought of its intensity, its disagreeable color, the
density of the shadow it cast, — of everything but
the inferences it warranted as to its maker's char
acteristics. It was under similar circumstances
that primitive men looked upon the universe, except
— and that made the result in their case the more

48 THE BEING OF GOD
inevitable — that they did not behold it first in
mature years, so as to be roused by the shock of
novelty and surprise. Ages must have elapsed
before accidental discoveries and occasional flashes
of insight connected some distant or for other
reasons previously unobserved causes with present
useful effects, to such an extent, and in such a way,
as to suggest to them that their god or gods made
use of contrivances, employed means for precon
ceived ends, as they themselves built huts for shel
ter, constructed traps to catch game, and fashioned
weapons for war and tools for work. Probably
the greatest obstacle to this advance in knowledge
was the habit of early men of endowing almost
every natural object with life and powers like their
own. That habit had to be given up, as to any
given object, before it could occur to any one to
regard the object as the means or instrument by
which a higher being produced some useful end.
That done, it is not difficult to conceive what would
follow. The dark rain-cloud, e. g., rising on the
horizon, no larger than a man's hand, advancing
swiftly, and expanding until it covered the whole
sky, and distilled its waters over all the region,
refreshing grass and grain, man and his herds, —
seen, perhaps, for the hundredth time by the same
eyes, — at last awakened in some thoughtful mind
the notion of design : What an admirable contri-

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 49
vance for bringing water from afar ! Once started
on this track, other contrivances were speedily dis
covered. The river near by had been traced for
long distances far into the mountains, through
deep, rocky defiles, to brook-fed pools and lakes
which furnished its unfailing streams. Here also
contrivance was now seen. Thus men went on,
discovering ever new instances of adaptation of
means to ends, some beneficial, others hurtful, or
one or other by turns ; and the inference was
forced upon them that the higher powers, whether
propitious or angry, were all and always intelli
gent and wise.
It would be impracticable, as well as superfluous,
to attempt even an outline of the evidence of de
sign in nature, as it lies before the human mind
to-day. Whole volumes have been filled with
proofs afforded by different minute portions of the
universal system. There is not a spot in heaven
or on earth, to which telescope or microscope can
reach, that does not reveal what, in its ordinary
mood, the mind unhesitatingly recognizes as de
sign. Nor is there a living organism, whether
vegetable or animal, — in the air, on the land, in
the water, — that does not exhibit, as a whole and
in all its component parts, the marks of careful
adaptation. More than this : As in the individual
organism the several parts are not ends in them-

50 THE BEING OF GOD
selves, but rather means in relation to the whole, so
the individual is again a means to the species from
which it springs, the species to the genus, the genus
to the order, and the order to every other order ;
so that the world of organic objects presents a net
work of adaptations, running in every direction,
crossing and recrossing, acting and reacting. And
yet, while everything is thus acting on everything
else, closely or remotely, there is a rising scale of
e&istence, a steady progression from lower to higher
organisms, the less perfect of which exist as means
to the more perfect, until it culminates in man, for'
whose production, sustenance, and advancement
all else exists.
This is enough to indicate the nature and range
of the argument. Let us listen to the objections
made against it. They are at bottom but two. The
first, while admitting the prevalence of adaptation
(i. e., adaptedness), denies that it proves design;
the second contends that if there be design, it is so
far from universal, and in so many instances fails
of beneficent result, as to vitiate the theological
conclusion drawn from it.
The mere denial of telic causes or final ends in
nature can of course be taken only for what it is
worth. Spinoza declared them to be nothing but
figments of the imagination. All pantheists, as
such, are obliged to take similar ground ; for tele-

THE REALITY OF DESIGN 51
ology is wholly inconsistent with their tenet of the
identity of God and nature. The World-Spirit,
not being self-conscious, still less self-determining,
cannot be conceived to form purposes and pursue
them. The admission of design is in fact so fatal
to the doctrine of pantheists that their denial of it
is not a serious difficulty in the way of theism.
The case might stand differently, perhaps, if pan
theism rested on more solid grounds, and gave
more satisfactory explanations of existence, than it
does. However that may be, no mere denial is of
value. Nor is it to the purpose to dress the denial
in much-promising but really empty phraseology.
We see, or think we see, abundant evidence in the
physical universe of careful adjustment of means to
ends. Thoughtful and observant men of all lands
and ages have thought the same. If this belief be
a mistake, the cause of that mistake, and its expla
nation, ought to be pointed out. We have, more
over, a right to demand that some other and better
way of accounting for the facts of the universe
shall be suggested.
Pantheism, as such, does not do this ; but indi
viduals, whether pantheists, agnostics, or theists,
make at least attempts to do it. Two of these are
worthy of attention : the first would clear the
world of final causes by pronouncing adaptations,
the presence of which no one can deny, to be noth-

52 THE BEING OF GOD
ing else than conditions of existence. An organ
ism, a tree, or an animal, being what it is, can exist
only under certain conditions, say of soil, light, air,
temperature, food, and drink. Of course, therefore,
if a tree or an animal exist, these conditions are
found ; but beyond that you know nothing. Some
years ago I read an article, in a British review,
which presented this objection in an interesting
form. The writer thought to demolish teleology by
imagining the maggot in a cheese to say to itself,
" What a good world this, in which I find myself !
How well adapted to my needs, and how evidently
made for me ! " And yet, said the author, what
the maggot finds is nothing but the conditions that
make his existence possible !
The illustration is well adapted to mislead. For
unless the reader be on the alert, he is likely to
think of the dairyman, who certainly had no inten
tions favorable to the maggot, as the maker of the
cheese, and then the maggot's reasoning is suffi
ciently absurd. But the real maker of the cheese
is the author of those chemical properties of milk
and rennet, by the combination of which curds are
formed, and of whose action the dairyman merely
availed himself. Bearing that in mind, the mag
got's philosophy is more rational than that of his
critic. At any rate, the critic, without intending
it, confesses that he can suggest no better. No

DESIGN NOT TO BE DEFINED AWAY 53
doubt, adaptation is a condition of existence ; but
while the maggot goes on to ask after the origin of
this adaptation, the critic seems to think the whole
problem solved by the magic of a phrase, — condi
tion of existence. But existence and its conditions
are the very things to be accounted for. Whence
the conditions? Whence the organic being that
lives under them ? If there be no designer, who
made both and adjusted them to each other, there
are, so far as I can see, but three conceivable
modes of bringing maggot and cheese together.
We may suppose, in the first place, — leaving the
cheese still unaccounted for, — that the maggot,
under the favoring influence of some accidental
quality in the cheese, not designed for any such
purpose, springs into being spontaneously. But
although we once heard much about spontaneous
generation, it is, I believe, to-day one of the dead
and forgotten children of " the scientific imagina
tion," buried without even a headstone to mark its
place of repose. Or we may suppose, secondly,
that both the cheese and its inhabitant are the
chance result of an original blind concourse of
atoms ; or, lastly, that both separately and in their
mutual relations, they are a passing phase assumed
by a portion of the one universal substance — call
it matter or God — whose life is one eternal
process of evolution and involution according to

54 THE BEING OF GOD
its own inherent and necessary laws. The chance-
solution might not seem irrational in this instance
of the maggot and the cheese. The creature, what
ever its use may be, is an object of disgust, which
one woidd willingly give up to chance. But what
if the chance-theory be extended to the universe as
a whole? Pantheism, with its unconscious sub
stance, flashing out on every side into conscious,
thinking existences, is rationality itself compared
with this absurdity.
The objection is not essentially altered when we
are told that in finding design back of the adapta
tions in nature, we merely import our own subjec
tivity into nature, — in other words, that we infer
design in nature simply because we are conscious
of it in ourselves when we build a house, construct
an engine, or use any contrivance whatever for a
given end. It is doubtless true that any view of
the universe is radically defective which regards
it as a mere machine, contrived by a Power wholly
outside of it, for the attainment of preconceived
ends. There is indeed a sense in which it must
be said that " the universe is not a machine, but
an organism, with an indwelling principle of life,"
and " that it was not made, but has grown." 1 But
it does not follow from that that the mind can rest
in the assumption that it had no Maker. Dr.
1 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 131.

FINAL OR MECHANICAL CAUSES 55
Hedge 1 thinks that " if we came to the contem
plation of nature without the idea of God in our
minds, we should not view it as cunning mechanism,
or at all as something created by antecedent power,
but rather as a self-subsisting whole. The ques
tion of its origin would hardly force itself upon us ;
we should accept it as it is, and suppose it to have
been always as it is, and self-perpetuating. But
if the cosmological argument has any bases in
truth, this is precisely what we should not and
could not do. And if that be riot enough, the con
scious possession by us as personal beings of a de
gree of independence of all things else makes it
forever impossible to regard the universe as a seif-
existent and self-perpetuating living entity of which
we ourselves are but organic parts.
The other method of banishing final causes is
to make them incompatible with efficient, produc
ing causes. The force that works in the physical
world, it is said, is mechanical, unintelligent, and
therefore excludes design. It works with absolute,
undeviating regularity, goes out of its way for
neither king nor beggar, is as blind and deaf to
the tears' and groans of a smitten nation as to the
life of an insect ; what room is there there for the
operation of final causes? I can hardly under
stand the logic of this objection, unless it tacitly
1 Ways ofthe Spirit, p. 158.

56 THE BEING OF GOD
assumes that 'there is or can be nothing over or
back of the mechanical force, or else that teleology
necessarily involves interference with the stable
order of nature. The objection suggests more
than one question which it would be interesting to
pursue. What is the nature of the force that
%orks in the physical universe ? Does it belong to
matter as matter ? Assume that it does, then how
did matter get this force ? If matter was created,
then of course the creator imparted it. But we
have no right to assume the creation of matter.
If, on the other hand, we suppose it to be un
created, two possibilities still exist : either matter
had this force eternally, in its own right and by
its own nature, or it did not have it in its original
condition, but received it as a donum superaddi-
tum from the world-builder. In the former case,
— to say nothing now of the fact that this would
involve a beginningless, constantly proceeding evo
lution of finite things, — what reason is there to
assume that a sufficient, intelligent Power could
not direct the energies of matter towards the at
tainment of his own purposes, a thing which man
does every time he constructs a mill-wheel or a
steam-engine ? In the latter, what shall hinder us
from believing that a Power great enough to give
to matter the force now inherent in it did not
merely direct it to his own purposes, but actually

FORCE AND PURPOSE 57
made the automatic working out of all his plans
the inevitable goal of the force he bestowed? so
that, if we chose, we might conceive him as resting
in perfect oblivion of his great machine, and yet
believe most firmly in final causes ?
The truth is, that when the existence of a First
Cause (or Causes) has once been recognized by
thought as absolutely necessary, the presence of
purpose throughout the physical universe, and es
pecially throughout the boundless ranges of organic
beings, is so overwhelmingly evident that few phi
losophers of note have ever thought of doubting it.
Not only Kant and Schelling and Hegel, but
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, admit it not merely,
but vie with each other in pointing it out. Testi
mony such as this, inspired by no theological bias,
for the most part, indeed, accompanied with express
denial of the theological conclusion drawn from it,
is surely as authoritative as that of human thought
can be. The universe may be full of mechani
cal causes — although I confess that I can form no
idea of their nature, unless they are manifestations
of divine energy, and then " mechanical " is not a
good description of them ; but whatever their na
ture, they are working under a yoke imposed by
intelligence for clearly defined purposes. And no
scientific theories of how the several parts of the
cosmos arose can obscure this fact. Assume that

58 THE BEING OF GOD
the stellar worlds were made out of star-dust or
fire-mist, and that all forms of organic life that
have ever existed sprang by slow evolution from
one infinitesimal atom of protoplasm or from a
single microscopic life-cell, then how grand beyond
all power of human conception was the mind that
put into the fire-mist and the cell — or, if you
please, into the whole mass of matter that evolved
the mist and cell — all that has come forth from
them !
The last objection to the teleological argument
to be noticed is that it is incomplete, and there
fore inconclusive. It is indeed incomplete in the
sense that it rests on an induction far from ex
haustive ; but is it therefore inconclusive ? How
much of what is universally accepted as absolutely
certain in physical science rests on even approxi
mately exhaustive induction? But there may be
incompleteness of another kind. It is urged that
in many instances the adaptation of means to ends
in nature is imperfect, not being the best conceiva
ble ; that the result supposed to be aimed at is
reached in comparatively few individuals of a class,
say in a thousand fruit-blossoms out of a million,
in one infant out of a hundred that are born ; that
there are destructive as well as constructive exhibi
tions of energy, hideous deformity as well as beauty,
cruelty as well as beneficence. All this is stated

SCOPE OF ARG UMENT FROM DESIGN 59
by Dr. Mulford x with great force ; and all this has
been felt for ages. It drove men to worship de
mons as well as gods, — to set Ahriman on a throne
almost as high and eternal as that of Ahura-Mazda.
But does it necessarily conflict with the assump
tion of an intelligent world-designer? If out of a
million of apple-blossoms only a thousand grow into
perfect fruit, may not the remaining thousands
serve well-devised purposes, perchance even aiding,
directly or indirectly, in the perfecting of their
fellows ? Is there no reason to believe that what
to us is hideous and discordant in nature raises the
value and efficiency of the beautiful and harmoni
ous ? Are we so thoroughly acquainted with even
that part of the organic world of which we know
most, and with all its bearings on ultimate results,
as to entitle us to pronounce anything absolutely
useless, hideous, or cruel ? However that question
may be answered, it cannot be denied that even
what we call hideous and cruel is full of inteUigent
adaptation. There is in it not a trace of igno
rance or weakness. It was intended to be what it
is, and fashioned for what it does. Its ultimate
end only is hidden from us.
The thing too often forgotten by both elabora-
tors and critics of the teleological argument is its
limited scope. It is not in itself capable of prov-
1 Republic of God, p. 8 ff .

60 THE BEING OF GOD
ing the existence of a First Cause, — although it
furnishes strong corroborative evidence for that
position, — much less that of God, in the highest
sense of that word, as the Holy and the Good.
Dr. Mulford is right when he says that the " phys
ical process" is devoid of the moral element.
Strong as it is, the expression, rigidly construed,
is not too strong. The physical process is just as
wrtmoral (observe, not immoral) as the steam-
engine or the electric current. Physical teleology
alone certainly does not lead us to a moral author
of the world, nor to one that is absolutely good and
kind. And that because it leaves the ultimate end
for which the world exists in obscurity. It shows
us clearly that all organic life leads up to man,
and exists for him ; but there it stops. It shows
us man as the aim of creation, from the first reduc
tion of chaos until now, but does not tell us what is
the end of his existence. He lives and dies like
every other creature ; he lives in toil and sorrow
beyond every other creature ; why was he made ?
what was the Maker's final purpose, his last and
highest aim, to which the whole creation tends ?
To that question, the question of human existence,
physical teleology gives no answer. The answer is
found in man's moral nature ; but as a moral be
ing, man is outside of physical nature, — not wholly
independent of it, but by his personality and free-

SCOPE OF ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN 61
dom superior to it. So far, then, as he is indepen
dent, free, and superior to the mechanism of nature,
he is not comprehended within its physical teleol
ogy. In this sense, it is true that the physical
process is devoid of the moral. There is in nature
much that suggests the moral ; but before we can
receive its suggestions, we must get our idea of the
moral character of nature's Maker from another
source. The true scope of teleology is that it exhibits
the First Cause to be an intelligent and intellectu
ally powerful being. Moreover, it corroborates
most strongly the reasoning against the pantheistic
identification of God and the universe, in that it
makes the self-consciousness of the First Cause
absolutely certain ; for no unconscious being can
make plans and adapt means to their attainment.
But it does not go beyond the physical cosmos.
It proves an intelligent world-maker or, more ac
curately, world-builder, — for as to the origin of
matter teleology has nothing to say ; it shows him
to be possessed of inconceivably great resources of
intelligence, foresight, and adaptation. There its
conclusion ends. We cannot logically extend it
beyond the premises on which it rests, and say, as
Dr. Hodge does, x " incomprehensibly great and
infinitely great are practically equivalent," and
1 Systematic Theology, i. 229.

62 THE BEING OF GOD
then claim that the argument proves an infinite
God. The greatness it proves is indeed overpower
ing to mortal thought; and few, perhaps, except
minds trained in this kind of reasoning, would hesi
tate to accept it as infinite, in spite of the logical
deficiency ; nevertheless, the deficiency exists ; and
its unconditional recognition will help us both to
understand the difficulties of other minds, and to
make our own position clearer and more rational,
if not convincing, to them.

LECTURE III.
THE MORAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS.
We come now to the third proof of the existence
of God, — that derived from the moral nature of
man. Much less attention has been given in the
schools to this argument than to those already con
sidered. It is looked for in vain in many treatises
on theology, even after Kant had declared it to
be the only, but all-sufficient ground, for rational
belief in God. Yet the moral force on which it
builds, to wit, conscience, has undoubtedly in all
ages, from the very earliest date of man's existence
as a moral being, been the most efficient revealer
of God and his existence. Wherever we get a
glimpse of living men, we find them beings whose
reasonings, as St. Paul expresses it, are much given
to accusing and excusing each other and — what
is even more to the point — themselves. We find
in them all alike the sense of right and wrong ; con
sciousness of happiness in the doing of the one,
and of poignant remorse and fearful apprehension
attendant on the other. From this experience,
what more natural than the inference that there

64 THE BEING OF GOD
is a power above man that loves and rewards that
which is good, and hates and punishes that which
is evil, — especially as men so often felt themselves
at variance with the moral direction, and thus were
forced to ascribe its voice to something outside of
themselves. The facts came home to every man
in his own daily experience. They needed no
lengthened observation and reflection to bring them
to light. They suggested their conclusion with a
power and directness far exceeding that which
attended the inferences from the changeableness
of the world and the presence of design. They
furnished, if not the earliest, certainly the most
efficient, suggestion to men of an authority inde
pendent of and above men. If philosophers paid
small regard to them, the reason may perhaps be
found in the universality and simplicity of the
facts, which seemed to leave nothing for the pro
foundly philosophical mind to exercise itself upon.
Concerning the foundation fact of this argument
there is and can be no dispute. There is in every
human being something that passes judgment on
his actions, and says, You ought, or You ought not,
as occasion requires. We call it " conscience," or
more exactly, the moral sense. Its deliverances,
we all know from experience, are ordinarily
prompt, clear, and persistent. Thus far all are
agreed. But can we thence infer the existence of

FREEDOM ESSENTIAL TO MORALITY 65
a moral being who is the author of this moral sense
in us ? Here opinions diverge. It is pointed out
that, in order to be a truly moral being, man must
himself make, or at least freely adopt, the moral
law under which he lives. If that law be imposed
upon him as authoritative by another, it may give
to his actions the outward show and semblance of
morality, but not its reality. Nor is it necessary
to this result that man should be deprived of the
power to choose and do the immoral. That is to
say, it is not at all necessary that he should be re
duced to a mere automaton, unconsciously working
what has the appearance of being good. It is
enough if the outside moral power wins him over
by promises of good or threats of evil. The only
really moral being is one who pursues the right be
cause it is right and as such valuable, — who
would pursue it even if it brought him misery in
stead of happiness. A bought or enforced morality
is a spurious morality. If man's morality be true
morality, it must originate within him, and conse
quently cannot testify to a moral lawgiver outside
of him. The argument from conscience can be
valid only at the expense of genuine morality itself.
And if man's morality be spurious, what sort of in
ference can be drawn from it as to a higher moral
being ?
The objection thus stated must be allowed. But

66 THE BEING OF GOD
it derives its force from the indefiniteness of the
term " moral law." What do we mean by it, or
rather what should we mean by it, when we speak
of it as imposed upon man or implanted in him ?
Nothing more, I apprehend, than the bare, unde
veloped, and at the outset inactive and latent fac
ulty of making moral distinctions, — of seeing dif
ferences between right and wrong. We certainly
do not mean that every man is born with a know
ledge of the decalogue or any other compendium
of moral law. History shows wide divergences
among men as to what is or is not moral. What
is considered right in one age or country is wrong
elsewhere or at another time. This holds not only
when we compare savage tribes with Christian na
tions, but also when savage tribe is compared
with savage tribe and Christian nation with Chris
tian nation. The frequency of persecution for
conscience' sake, and the heroism with which it is
endured, prove the strength of the convictions
held by conscience, but also the variability of its
utterances ; for persecutors have consciences as
well as persecuted. That which we bring with
us when we enter the world is, in the first place,
the latent notion of abstract right and wrong ; and
in the second place, the undeveloped faculty of
applying this notion in judging of actions. It is
at first neither in exercise, nor has it in itself any-

THE ORIGIN OF MORAL LAW 67
thing to exercise itself on. The moral sense is, in
these respects, in the same condition as the truth
sense, i. e., the reason and understanding. That,
too, is at the outset an unawakened possibility, sub
sequently supplied with material on which to work
by the external world. The same is true of all
our physical senses. The eye and ear must have
objects presented to them before they can see or.
hear ; and, what is not less to be considered, they
must also learn to see and hear aright, — i. e. they
must learn so to see and hear as to judge accu
rately of the nature of the objects seen or heard.
Now when the moral sense, in the course of the
individual's development, is brought face to face
with actions, how does it recognize them as right
or wrong ? Not immediately by its own intuition,
for then there could be no diversity of moral
judgment, but by the aid of the understanding.
The understanding points out the consequences of
actions, hurtful or helpful, to others ; and in view
of these consequences, the moral sense declares
them right or wrong. The understanding says,
If I take this man's bread, his wife and children
must suffer hunger ; whereupon conscience de
clares, It would be wrong — you must not do it.
The understanding says, This man's house is on
fire ; if I put it out, I shall savfe his goods and
insure his comfort and happiness ; and conscience

68 THE BEING OF GOD
instantly concludes, That is right — do it. Back
of the reasoning, in both instances, there lies the
conviction, itself the outcome of previous social
experiences, that I ought to treat my fellows as I
would have them treat me. The social life, you
see, from the first has acted on the understanding,
and the understanding has so presented questions
to the moral sense as to elicit its answers. All
three acting together, — social life, the under
standing, and the moral sense, — acting together,
yet each in its own sphere, formed in time catego
ries or catalogues of actions which were henceforth
instantly felt to be right or wrong, needed not to
be reasoned out again, but became the ready-made
contents of the conscience of succeeding genera
tions. This conjoint growth of society, the intel
lectual powers and the moral sense, explains the
partial diversity, but also the ever-growing sweep
and unanimity, of men's moral judgments. As to
the pleasure and pain that attend right and wrong
doing, they are not more inconsistent with free
self-determination than the physical comfort or
distress incident to many actions. Gently inciting
or deterring, they guard the moral nature against
injury through heedlessness, without overbearing
whatever considerations may suggest the opposite
course. The greater positive awards of prosperity
and happiness, or punishment and misery, either in

MORALITY NOT UTILITY 69
this or a future life, are not parts of the natural
moral law, but grow out of the reasonings of men on
the attitude which God must hold towards right
and wrong. They show that men, as soon as they
believe in a God, believe him to be the conservator
of moral order ; but they do not authenticate them
selves as immediate moral intuitions. Hence, of
these hopes and fears men may rid themselves,
and do rid themselves, when they cease to believe
in a personal God and his providential government
of the world ; but they do not thereby, and they
never can, lose the sense of right and wrong, and
the present peace or discomfort, that attends all
moral actions.
But it may seem that while we have thus made
man develop for himself the contents of the moral
law under which he lives, and have thereby shown
him to be free from moral compulsion, we have re
duced the moral element to mere social expediency
or utility. This, however, does not follow. When
stealing was seen to be subversive of society, and
the understanding brought it to the notice of the
moral sense, the latter, in declaring it wrong, made
an affirmation which the intellectual faculty cannot
make. It introduced a wholly new and distinct
element into the judgment. The understanding
may say, This is true, useful, expedient, — these
are the elements, the categories, as philosophers

70 THE BEING OF GOD
say, about which the understanding is conversant ;
it cannot say, This is right, or, This is wrong;
for the same reason that the eye cannot say, This
is loud ; or the ear, This is red ; or the touch, This
is sweet. The intellect, as such, knows nothing of
right or wrong. The social emergency does not
create the moral judgment. It merely furnishes
the occasion for the moral sense to act, just as the
perceptions of the physical senses give occasion for
the intellect to work.
That the moral sense cannot be the outcome of
nature, i. e. of anything short of a power superior
to nature and not part of it, is almost too evident
to need elucidation. Whence could it come ? Is
it imposed by the individual on himself ? But the
individual is frequently in flagrant rebellion against
it, and yet cannot rid himself of it. It fills him,
oftentimes with ceaseless misery, sometimes with
bitter remorse. Is it the creature of human so
ciety ? I have already shown that society fills out,
progressively, the catalogues of actions that are
right or wrong ; but also that it cannot originate
the distinction itself. Neither can it give to its
laws that sanction of unconditional obligatoriness
which never fails to attach to moral right. That is
why a system of pretended Moral Philosophy, like
Paley's, which accepts utilitarianism as its ultimate
principle, is of no more worth or interest than a

THE ORIGIN OF THE MORAL SENSE 71
book of municipal police regulations would be. No
human legislation, no matter how high, can give
the quality of immediately binding moral force to
any law of its enactment not previously recognized
as binding by the conscience. Can the moral, then,
be derived from external nature ? Nature, outside
of man, has not the moral ; how could it give what
it has not itself ? Moreover, the moral constantly
bids us counteract the natural. It commands us to
restrain and deny desires and impulses which na
ture as constantly bids us gratify without regard to
anything but opportunity. The moral sense — no
possibility for other conclusion is left — must come
from a source outside of nature.
This same conclusion is reached in yet another
way. Goodness is clearly the most valuable thing
there is in the world. We are constrained by our
moral perceptions to prize it above all else, and if
need be to sacrifice all else to it, even life itself. It,
and it alone, gives real dignity and value to life.
So far as our physical constitution is concerned, we
are nothing more than highly organized parts of
the universal mechanism. Even while we subdue
the forces of nature to our service, we are at best
nothing more than self-acting switches by which the
universal energy is turned in a particular direction.
But our moral nature makes us free, so far as its
power extends. It endows all our higher actions

72 THE BEING OF GOD
with the dignity of responsibility. They cease to
be the results of mere mechanism, or even of that
intelligence which to a degree all animals share
with us, and become expressions of true person
ality. If good, they are the noblest products of
existence; if evil, its basest and most harmful
monstrosities. Goodness, therefore, is the sum-
mum bonum of the universe ; and as such entitled
to rule and triumph. It must be intended to do
so by whatever power made all things. Now, as
there is much evil in the world, and as the powers
of individual good men are unable to cope with
this evil, the understanding infers that there must
be a moral being who in spme way will come to
their aid. To the pessimist, who would deny this
inference, and says that the triumph of goodness is
a pleasing but delusive ideal, never to be realized,
the understanding replies by pointing to history,
marked by evident progress toward its attainment,
and by great and terrible days of judgment on
nations in whom evil-doing had left no sufficient
powers of moral recuperation. Indeed, all history
is one continuous day of judgment for the elimina
tion and destruction of evil. The great catastro
phes of invasions, wars, and revolutions, in which
empires have been destroyed, dynasties overturned,
and new nations created, are but the critical points
of this process, — its great days of execution, so to

THE ORIGIN OF THE MORAL ORDER 73
speak. The pessimist who denies this, or doubts
it, needs to study history and the philosophy of
history, before he can be reasoned with. But
others, not pessimists, might say, All this is the
outcome of the moral order of the universe. Very
true. But what is this moral order of the uni
verse ? Does it inhere in the rocks and waves ?
Did it spring up in the bosom of chaos ? Was it
struck out by a fortuitous concourse of atoms?
Has the chemist found it among his ultimate ele
ments of matter ? Moral order must manifestly be
a quality of a moral being ; and hence the admit
ted moral order of the universe proves the pres
ence of a personal power who conserves moral or
der and has its triumph at heart — ay, and will
secure it. How secure it is another question ; but
not, I think, a difficult one. Just as we concluded
that the wise world-builder makes use of what, for
convenience' sake, we call the mechanical force of
the world to attain his plans and purposes, — puts
his final ends, so to speak, into the mechanism
itself, to be evolved by it in due time, — so the
securing of the moral order, i. e. the supreme final
end of the universe, was provided for in the me
chanical constitution of the whole. " All things
work together for good to them that love God " is
a dictum of Christian theism that challenges the
most unlimited application. All things tend in the

74 THE BEING OF GOD
long run to conserve goodness and destroy wrong.
The old feeling against which the book of Job con
tends so strenuously, that goodness must prosper
and wickedness succumb, is after all a true one ;
it only failed in that it applied to the individual
and his brief span of life, what God in history
measures on a scale in which a century is but a
fraction of the unit. Right is immortal, and
wrong is finally self-destructive ; the one, because
it falls in with the course of the world's wisely
arranged mechanism ; the other, because it lives
in heedless defiance of it, and is ultimately ground
to powder by it.
The conclusion of the argument is that the au
thor of the world is not only powerful and intelli
gent, but that he is a moral being ; and not that
only, but righteous. This reasoning, though per
haps less direct, or rather less readily grasped than
that of previous arguments, I hold to be no less
cogent and convincing. It requires a knowledge of
history, and some insight into the governing forces
of human life, to estimate it at its proper value ;
but once appreciated, it is invincible. And that, I
think, the history-studying world has attested by
the fact that it has allowed a book like Buckle's
" History of Civilization in England," in which
the attempt was made to construe history on the
principles of mechanical forces alone, to the en-

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT EXTENDED 75
tire exclusion of the moral, to find its place so
speedily among the interesting failures of our li
braries. 1
But in addition to this main conclusion, the ar
gument demonstrates a number of collateral points.
And first it proves, what no previous argument
established with equal clearness, the conscious per
sonality of the Maker of all things. Nothing
unconscious or impersonal can be moral. There
fore, pantheism, with its unconscious world-soul, is
now seen to be an utterly inadequate explanation
of a universe in which the moral holds so large a
place. And secondly, it completes the argument
from physico-teleology. Teleology, as we have seen,
shows that man is the final end of all material
things in this lower world ; but it does not show
what is the final end of man, the purpose for which
he and all things exist. That question we can now
answer : All things exist for man, and man exists
because, a moral being like his Maker, he is de
signed to attain perfect goodness, absolute moral
perfection. That purpose, and that alone, can to
reason serve as the raison d'etre, the final end, of
this world. Thus the teleological argument is very
much strengthened ; but is it not also so enlarged
in its scope as to suggest conclusions concerning
1 Cf. Mulford, The Nation, p. 69 f . : " The history of the world
cannot be deduced from its geography."

76 THE BEING OF GOD
the nature of the world-maker which we could not
hitherto reach ? If the world-maker's ultimate end
was the production of a moral being, perfect in
goodness, can we conceive him to design such a be
ing to fall back into dust and nothingness ? There
is nothing absolutely incongruous in the fact that
you and I die like any beasts of the field. There
would be nothing absolutely incongruous in the
supposition that death is the last of us ; that like
the beasts of the field, and all other organic things,
we have simply served as means to a higher end.
For, though moral beings, we are far from perfect ;
and we can see no absolutely valid reason why any
being less than perfect should be endowed with
perpetual existence. It may be best to annihilate
us altogether, so that no world in the vast universe
shall know us more. But, when the perfected
moral man has been evolved, let it be a million
centuries hence, will the Maker then be content to
have that perfect being sink back into nothingness ?
Will he be content with an endless succession of
moral beings, each in turn reflecting his own moral
perfections, and each in turn crumbling back into
nonentity? Can that have been the final end he
had in view when he built the world ? Impossible :
a succession of morally perfect beings is just as
unthinkable as a final end, as a beautiful, but ever-
perishing physical world can be that end. The

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT EXTENDED 77
Maker, when he made moral beings his final end,
must have had in view the immortality of perfected
moral beings, — must have looked forward to their
endless existence for endless purposes. And now
I ask what does this imply as to his own conscious
ness of himself and his nature ? Does it not imply
that before the foundations of the world were laid
the Maker was conscious of powers far transcend
ing all temporary effects, and of existence stretch
ing infinitely beyond all duration ? If the world-
builder was wise and intelligent, could he have so
misconceived his own nature, or miscalculated his
own power, as to adopt for his final end a purpose
which required infinite time and inexhaustible
power, if in fact he were finite and limited in power,
or so conditioned by other beings or forces that he
could not say, " I am the first, and I am the last ;
and beside me there is no God." I do not claim
that this corollary from the moral argument has
apodictic force. Formal logic may find flaws in it ;
but I hold that its probability is so high as to be
practically equivalent to demonstration, and that
on this ground alone we may rationally conclude
that the Great Moral First Cause and Wise World-
builder is a being of unbounded power and free
dom, untrammeled and unconditioned by any other
force or being whatsoever.

78 THE BEING OF GOD
The fourth argument is the famous one proposed
by Anselm, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury.
It has been named the Ontological, because, while
the cosmological and teleological arguments set out
from the phenomenal world, this builds on the idea
of pure being. As given by Anselm, it runs in
this wise : We believe God to be something than
which nothing greater can be conceived. But that
than which nothing greater can be conceived can
not exist in the mind only ; for if it did, it would
be possible to conceive it as existing not only in
the mind, but also in reality, which would be to
conceive something greater. Therefore, that than
which nothing greater can be conceived must exist
in fact as well as in thought, i. e. God exists not
only as an ideal, but in reality.1
The fallaciousness of this argument has been
pointed out a thousand times. It was already ex
posed by Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm, who
asserted that if one had the idea of an island than
which none could be more perfect, the same rea-
1 Anselm's Proslogion, together with Gaunilo's reply to the
above argument and Anselm's rejoinder, may be found trans
lated in the Bibliotheca Sacra for 1851, pp. 529 ff. and 699 ff.
The argument of the earlier Monologion (frequently confounded
with that of the Proslogion) has more affinity with the cosmolog
ical argument. Cf. Ueberweg, Hist. Philos., i. 381 ff. The text
of the Proslogion cited by Ueberweg is inferior to that given by
Migne.

ANSELM'S FALLACY 79
soning would establish its existence. Anselm re
joined that his argument could be applied to noth
ing whatever except the object to which he had
applied it, — the one thing than which no greater
can be conceived. This object, he said, must be
without beginning, always and everywhere exist
ent, since otherwise a greater might be conceived.
But this reached only the form of Gaunilo's illus
tration ; it failed to meet the real point of his ob
jection, which is that the presence in the mind of
the conception of the highest conceivable object
does not prove its existence in reality. Nor is this
the only hiatus in the Anselmic argument. For
whence comes this conception of that than which
nothing greater can be conceived ? Anselm simply
takes it as given — given in the Christian idea of
God. But how is the conception thus given
through faith to accredit itself to the reason ?
Undeniably defective, the argument has never
theless possessed wonderful fascination for innu
merable philosophical thinkers. It has been felt
that its author must have seen, or at least distantly
apprehended, some profound truth, which his lan
guage somehow fails to set forth. Hence, although
discarded for a time through the influence of
Kant's " Critique of the Pure Reason," it has never
fallen into the disrepute of mere sophistry. Men
of the highest speculative powers, Descartes, Spi-

80 THE BEING OF GOD
noza, Leibnitz, before Kant, and after him Hegel
and a host of philosophical, theologians down to
Dorner and Pfleiderer, have endeavored so to in
terpret or reconstruct Anselm's reasoning as to
eliminate its defects. It would be tedious and con
fusing to recount these efforts. Let me rather
simply present that form, due not to one thinker,
but to many, which commends itself to my own
mind. We shall find the Anselmic argument conclusive
provided we assume, first, that the thought of the
highest conceivable object, or what is the same
thing, the absolutely perfect being, is a necessary
thought ; that it is not the offspring of an arbitrary
effort of the imagination, as when I endeavor to
conceive the most perfect possible island or cathe
dral, but that all true thinking presupposes it, and
can neither escape from it, nor dispense with it.
And secondly, that every necessary thought (ne
cessary in the sense just explained), emerging in
the process of thinking, and not to be set aside, is
objectively valid — represents in the mind a reality
outside of it.
Grant these two propositions, and the argument
can be made good, as will appear if we reconstruct
it thus: We have the idea of the most perfect
being, than whom none more perfect can be con
ceived. As the most perfect conceivable, this being

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 81
is (as Anselm himself pointed out) dependent on
no other for existence, and possesses all possible
excellences in absolute perfection. We have this
idea not because we choose to set it up, but because
it is inwrought in our mental constitution, and
comes forth into consciousness more and more
clearly in proportion as our thinking penetrates
more deeply into the laws of its own activity. It
is therefore a necessary idea, and as such objec
tively true. Therefore, the absolutely perfect being
exists, — and that being is — God.
The argument thus put is logical and conclusive.
The question now is whether we can justify the
two interpolated propositions : that the idea is
necessary, and as such objectively true.
As to the first, Kant, probably the greatest an
alyst and critic of thought and thinking that ever
lived, says, Yes ; the mind unavoidably forms, or
rather comes to, the idea of the absolutely perfect
being, the source of all that is or can be, the total
ity of all reality and possibility. The reasoning
by which he reaches this result is far too extended
to be here intelligibly reproduced.1 A few words
of illustration may indicate its nature.
Did we enter life, not as infants, but as full-
grown persons, with ready-trained perceptive facul-
1 Cf . Critique of the Pure Reason, the section on the Transcen
dental Ideal ; and Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant, chapter x.

82 THE BEING OF GOD
ties and fully developed consciousness, the first
impression of the world we should get would
be that of a vast collection of unconnected objects.
It would be like the impression produced by a
great museum where countless objects lie scat
tered about in utter confusion. But such is the
constitution of the mind that it could not for one
instant entertain the belief that that impression
represented the true condition of things. An in
wrought conviction that there must be order, nay,
unity, would immediately assert itself, and set the
mind to work to discover it. The understanding
would examine things, compare object with object,
inquire into their relations to each other, and make
judgments (predicates) according to the data thus
obtained. Not a month would pass before enough
of knowledge had been gathered to verify the in
stinctive expectation, and give large glimpses of
order, full of promise to further inquiry. Now it
matters not that, entering the world as infants, we
pass through this initial experience gradually and
without subsequent knowledge of it. Its essential
features remain the same : in the first place, we are
irresistibly impelled to assume the existence of con
nection between the apparently unconnected, and
of unity underneath all multiplicity ; and, in the
second place, we recognize that we know things by
determining (defining) them, i. e. by what, on the

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 83
basis of experience, we are enabled to affirm or
deny of them and their relations. The knowledge
of the ordinary man, it is true, is largely desultory,
too scanty and superficial to admit of more than
rude attempts to combine its stores. Consequently
it does not advance far on the road towards unity.
Science, on the other hand, not only reduces large
classes of objects into subordinate unities, but it
discovers countless interconnections between the
classes which point to a higher, all-comprehending
unity. Indeed, it makes it manifest that science
can never be truly science until it has ceased to be
sciences. But the reason is not compelled to wait
for that far-off consummation before it can find rest
for itself. It finds it, as soon as the need of it be
comes imperiously felt, in the idea of the absolute
unity. This comprehensive, only universal idea is
not originated by thought ; it emerges, clothed with
the supreme authority of necessity, when the mind
contemplates its own activity. It is not a logical
generalization, dependent for validity upon the
completeness of induction and the accuracy of
every one of countless myriads of inferences.
That is the nature of the highest conclusions of
what we call the sciences. The idea of the abso
lute unity exists potentially in the nature of the
thinking Ego, although it needs the exercise of the
analytic reason to occasion its conscious recogni-

84 THE BEING OF GOD
tion. It is the ever-active regulative of all think
ing, — its guide, stimulant, and critic, all in one. It
is this to the casual observer of the phenomena
of existence, and to the scientific investigator of
nature, — neither of whom has perhaps ever heard
of it, — as effectually as to the philosopher whose
analysis of thought and thinking has brought
him face to face with it.
But what is the process by which this innate
function of the reason reveals itself in the form of
an idea? I find, replies the thinker, that know
ledge is determination ; that nothing is completely
known except in connection with the whole of ex
istence. For every object is related, not only to it
self, to the thinking mind that observes it, to the
nearer circle of its immediate congeners, but also,
through these, with everything that now exists or
ever has existed. To know one I must know all.
But as I can never fully explore infinite space to
find the sum of all that is, nor travel back through
time, along the line of successive existences ad
infinitum, or until the beginning of all existence is
reached, I am constrained to comprehend all that
now exists or has existed in the concept of all that
is possible. Complete knowledge of an object
therefore implies complete determination of it in
all its relations to the totality of possibility. More
over, my partial knowledge is knowledge only so

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 85
far as it rightly apprehends those relations. That
is to say, I find that all my knowledge, no matter
how reached, presupposes and rests upon the idea
of the totality of possibility. The categories un
der which all my judgments (predications) about
objects fall, and from which they derive their
authoritativeness, are themselves only partial ex
hibitions of this universal idea, in which alone they
coalesce into unity. In the ultimate analysis, my
knowledge of any object is, in fact, the resultant of
successively applying to it all the predicates of the
totality of possibility, and excluding those which it
refuses. In the logic of the reason there is but
one major premise, to which all other propositions
(if their certitude is to be formally demonstrated)
must be traced up through endless series of pro-
syllogisms. Thus, by analyzing the process and content of
my thinking, I have found the source and explana
tion of that persistent assumption of the unity of
all things by which, consciously or unconsciously, I
am ever led. I have found it in an idea which pre
cedes all thinking, or, to speak more exactly, in a
constitutional necessity of my rational nature which
involves this idea, and out of which upon due oc
casion it issues forth into my consciousness as a
clearly formed concept, marked with a logical ne
cessity as strong as the constitutional necessity of

86 THE BEING OF GOD
which it is the expression. The individual may
never consciously think it; but when thought, it
admits of neither doubt nor question.
Now, that the idea of the totality of possibility is
the idea of a simple, indivisible whole, not of an
aggregate of parts, is self-evident. The reason does
not arbitrarily assume it in despair of proceed
ing beyond it, but finds it, and in finding it, ob
tains rest and satisfaction. It is the idea of a unity
which excludes all composite multiplicity. So long
as a mere aggregation is contemplated, it has not
been found. It is the idea of one indivisible entity.
Further, the possibility is not empty logical
possibility, but the real possibility of existence.
It is what in philosophy is called the ens realissi-
mum. It includes in itself all reality, or better,
the ground of all possibility ; for it furnishes the
basis for all possible predicates concerning all pos
sible existence.
As the ground of all reality, it is free, self-
conscious, personal being ; for self-conscious per
sonality is to the mind the most real of all realities.
And finally, the ens realissimum is unconditioned,
independent of anything outside of itself ; for as it
is itself the source and support of all reality, there
is nothing by which it can be conditioned.
Thus we obtain as the content of the idea of the
totality of possibility the concept of an uncondi-

KANT'S OBJECTION 87
tioned, individual, personal being which contains
all the elements that enter into our idea of God.
I add, though I trust it is needless, that the histor
ical genesis of the idea of God is another matter
altogether. To this conclusion Kant fully assents. Indeed,
the very reasoning by which we have reached it is
only a very brief and (as I would fain believe) a
more readily intelligible reproduction of his own.
Nevertheless, he denies that it proves the existence
of God. The idea of the ens realissimum, he says,
is a necessary one ; it is presupposed in all reason
ing and regulates it ; but reason gives it only as an
idea, without requiring that all this reality shall be
considered as objectively given and as being itself
an object. In fact, no objects can be given us ex
cept objects of sense perception, or " anywhere but
in the context of a possible experience."
It is not necessary to repeat what has so often
been shown, that Kant's limitation of objective
knowledge to the field of the empirical principle
leads him into many inconsistencies with himself,
and that he escapes from its serious consequences
only by the questionable expedient of distinguish
ing between the pure and the practical reason.
Pfleiderer puts the answer to the negation now
before us in a nutshell.1 The laws of thought are
1 Religionsphilosophie, ii. 272 ff. ; cf ., also, i. 155 ff.

88 THE BEING OF GOD
neither deductions from, nor generalizations of, ex
perience. They antedate experience, and control
all reasoning about experience. But they manifest
their correspondence to the laws of existence by the
constant verifications they receive when the mind
busies itself about the latter. Celestial phenomena
occur as predicted ; the electric force transmits
signs, illuminates streets, moves loads ; and chemical
properties produce results, such as were expected
of them by the thinking mind under conditions
devised by itself. How can this correspondence be
explained? On no other assumption than that
both the laws of thought and the laws of existence
spring from one and the same Being, in whom
thought and being are one. Not the empty thought
of God, but the being of God, is the necessary pre
supposition of our thought-faculty.

LECTURE IV.
RECAPITULATION.  TRANSITION TO THE ATTRI
BUTES.
When a ship has been at sea for some time, it
takes the first favorable opportunity to ascertain
its exact position and the progress it has made.
It is time to recapitulate the course of reasoning
we have followed and sum up its results. We
have passed in review the four principal arguments
by which the reason seeks to prove the existence of
God. The first, the cosmological, starts from the
transitoriness and dependence of all material exist
ence. Everything that exists, being perishable,
had a beginning as it has an end. But if some
thing had not existed that had no beginning, no
thing could now exist ; for finite existence cannot
begin without a cause. Therefore something has
existed from eternity, by which all finite things
have been brought into being. The only possible
escape from this conclusion is to deny that anything
does exist ; but the denier cannot but admit that
he himself exists, whereby he overthrows his own
denial. The transitory material universe, there-

90 THE BEING OF GOD
fore, demonstrates the existence of a First Cause
— itself without a beginning, hence eternal, self-
existent, and of power equal to the production of
the universe. Besides this direct conclusion, the
argument suggests two corollaries, the first of
which can lay no claim to certainty, but only to a
high degree of probability. It runs thus: This
first cause is one; for the cosmos, regarded only
as a vast organism, pervaded by force moving or
acting under definite and stable laws, discloses to
the mind ever more abundantly the evidences of
its unity. It is one consistent whole, and calls for
one producing cause. The second corollary is
more absolutely conclusive : The first cause cannot
be impersonal, physical energy ; for first, whenever
we see physical energy, our minds cast about for
a personal being, a will, by whom that energy is
either generated, directed, or set free ; and sec
ondly, no cause can impart what it has not in it
self ; yet we ourselves are products of the First
Cause, and we are personal beings. Thus we
have, as the direct result of the cosmological argu
ment, the existence of an eternal, self-existent
Cause; and by deduction from it, the probable
oneness, and, may I not say, the certain personality
of this First Cause.
Next came the teleological argument. It says,
Everywhere in the constitution of the universe, we

RECAPITULATION 91
perceive design, contrivance, the intelligent adapta
tion of means to ends ; but design implies intelli
gence and self-determining will, i. e. personality ;
therefore the universe was constructed by a self-
conscious personality of inconceivably great intelli
gence and intellectual power. Combine this con
clusion with that from the cosmological argument,
and we reach the existence of an eternal, self-exist
ent First Cause, who is a personal being, of power
and intelligence equal to the production of the cos
mos. His personality, which in the previous argu
ment we already inferred by a sure deduction, is
here the main conclusion, and henceforth rests on
a doubly strong foundation. But the other corol
lary which we there found, viz., that the First Cause
is one, is also greatly strengthened ; for this unity
is once more made highly probable by the fact
which teleology all but demonstrates, that all final
causes in nature have man for their ultimate end
and aim. An infinite series of purposes, converg
ing towards one result, can scarcely be conceived
as the work of more than one mind. Finally, the
personality of the First Cause, clearly proved by
teleology, also justifies the further inference that
the First Cause is not the world-soul of pantheism,
but a being who is independent of the world ; for
the universe, regarded as an organism, a vast ma
chine, if you will, affords no traces that we can see
of consciousness or freedom in its action.

92 THE BEING OF GOD
The moral argument proceeds in this wise :
Man has a conscience, a moral sense, the origin of
which cannot be ascribed to either the individual,
society, or physical nature ; it must have its source,
therefore, in a power outside of all these. And
that this power is the same as that which made the
world is proven by the fact, attested by the history
of individuals, communities, and nations, that the
world as a whole is pervaded by a moral order —
that its very mechanism is so directed as to cher
ish goodness and destroy wickedness. The maker
of the world, when making it, had moral ends in
view, and must therefore be a moral being. If
anything more were needed to raise still higher
the already double certainty of the personality of
the First Cause, we have it here ; for nothing im
personal, i. e. nothing devoid of self consciousness
and freely working will, can be moral. Pantheism
is hereby rendered impossible. The unity of the
First Cause is also again, for the third time,
strongly indicated. The accumulated argument is
too strong to be resisted, although more direct evi
dence is yet to come : the power that organized
the universe so that its mechanical forces subserve
purposes infinitely various in themselves, yet all
uniting for the attainment of the highest end con
ceivable, the promotion and protection of right
eousness, must be one.

RECAPITULATION 93
The conclusion resulting from all these lines of
reasoning is, that there exists one First Cause, by
whom all things were made ; that he is self -exist
ent, and therefore eternal; that he is a personal,
moral, righteous being, not involved in nature or
the world, but independent of it and superior to it,
and of power and wisdom equal to the production
of the universe.
The last words of this summing up indicate the
remaining defect of the argument. It builds on
the facts of the universe, and cannot get beyond
their scope. It fails to prove the infinity of the
First Cause. Not infinity in the temporal sense, —
that is already expressed in his eternity, — but the
inanity of his nature, faculties, and properties. In
other words, it fails to prove the existence of a be
ing independent of time and space, untrammeled
by any imperfection in himself or by any power
or being outside of himself, unlimited in life,
power, and wisdom, — in short, absolutely uncondi
tioned. And yet no first cause, however great
and eternal, who is not all this, fills our concep
tions of God.
I suggested in my last lecture, when treating of
the moral argument, that the ultimate end of crea
tion which it revealed — viz., the production of per
fect moral beings, whose destiny for endless exist
ence reason can scarcely doubt — indicates the

94 THE BEING OF GOD
world - maker's consciousness of power and inde
pendence far exceeding those to be inferred from
the existing universe. In this there is a basis —
and I cannot but think one of such high proba
bility as to amount to practical certainty — on
which to ground the yet needed element of abso
lute unconditionedness. At all events, it serves to
prepare the mind for the ontological argument,
and anticipatively to corroborate it. Accepting
the latter argument, — the course of which is yet
fresh in our memories, — we have found once more
implicite all that we had previously gained, and in
addition that which our previous findings lacked.
The unconditioned being is one, unique, indepen
dent, unlimited. There is none above him, — there
is none beside him. There is no fate, nor other
form of external necessity, to limit his freedom.
There is no power, whether of matter or of intelli
gent beings, to impede or thwart his will. He is
unbounded might and wisdom and truth. To sum
up all in one word, he is absolute life, the ever-
flowing spring of being, — God.
To higher certainty than this, I, at least, cannot
carry the reasoning ; and here I should stop, but
that at the outset I mentioned another argument, a
fifth, — the historical. It cannot add to the scope
of the conclusion, but may serve as a buttress in its
support. A few words will suffice to indicate it.

ARGUMENT FROM UNIVERSAL CONSENT 95
There are several Hues of reasoning compre
hended under the general title " historical argu
ment ; " but the only one of logical value in this
connection is that drawn from the general consent
of mankind. Men have always and everywhere
recognized God or gods. The exceptions, as to
tribes, if any, are rare, and might without diffi
culty be accounted for ; as to individuals, they form
an insignificant fraction of the aggregate, and are
even more easily explained. " All men," says
Aristotle, " have a notion concerning gods." Max-
imus Tyrius, a philosopher of the second century be
fore Christ, says : " Among barbarians there is not
one who is ignorant of God." A Byzantine writer
of the third century after Christ, Sextus Empiricus,
says : " Almost all men, both Greeks and barbari
ans, hold the existence of Deity." And among the
four proofs of the divine existence which he ad
duces, one is, " the agreement of all men." It were
easy to collect many similar utterances, but let me
finish with one from Cicero in his treatise " On the
Nature of the Gods " (1. i., c. 16 f.), which not
only states the fact, but shows its bearing : " What
nation is there, or what race of men, that has not
some notion of the gods, prior to all instruction ?
. . . Since, therefore, this opinion was not estab
lished by any institution, custom, or law, and con
tinues to command the firm assent of all without

96 THE BEING OF GOD
exception, it is impossible not to conclude that
there are gods, seeing we have implanted (or,
rather, innate) knowledge of them. That in which
by nature all agree, must be true."
Cicero's reasoning is, in the main, that of all
those theologians who, on whatever grounds, regard
the arguments we have hitherto considered as in
conclusive. They hold that the idea of God is an
intuition, if not of the reason, of the moral nature.
I have already given my reasons for not accepting
this view. The proposition, God exists, is not,
properly speaking, axiomatic. But the truth it
declares is one which finds ready access to the
mind. The thought it expresses is of the same
nature with the idea of the most perfect possible
being. In fact, it is that idea cast in popular form,
and arrived at by popular and often very defective
modes of thinking. But the very insufficiency of
the thinking that leads to it shows how nearly it
has attained to the character of an axiomatic truth.
And hence it is a corroboration by the unschooled
mind of the validity of the ontological argument.
It is the utterance of the socially developed human
consciousness, — a belief originally, it may be,
evoked by reflection, confirmed by experience and
observation, which has approved itself in life from
generation to generation, and has thus become the
firm conviction of the race, a part of the normal

PRACTICAL RESULT 97
human mental and moral outfit. That individual
minds, possibly large multitudes, may cast it from
them, proves nothing more than that it is not in
nate or axiomatic. That it misapprehends God,
makes him human, cruel, savage; that it accepts
not one God, but a hundred, and worships these
under idolatrous forms, and but too often with re
pulsive rites, — shows, no doubt, that they who hold
it are untutored of mind and spiritually barbarous,
but does not alter the fact that they feel their de
pendence on higher powers, and have in them the
germ and starting-point of the loftiest thought to
which man can rise, — the thought of God.
It is not improbable that some who have listened
to the arguments now concluded are disappointed
in that they do not find their personal sense of
certitude noticeably intensified, and are therefore
inclined to sympathize with those who decry the
value of the reasonings. I suspect that similar ex
periences of his own and others have led many a
theologian to accept the notion that the existence
of God is given by intuition. But what arguments
on what subjects can strengthen convictions already
immovably firm ? Take the famous forty-seventh
proposition in the first book of Euclid as an illus
tration. If by actual measurement you have be
come absolutely certain that in right-angled tri-

98 THE BEING OF GOD
angles the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the
sum of the squares of the other two sides, what ac
cess of certainty can accrue to you from Euclid's
demonstration? But the demonstration might
nevertheless be helpful, if you had arrived at cer
tainty without knowing how. And that would be
a parallel to the case of the ordinary believer in
God. We are certain, but we also wish to give a
reason to ourselves for our certainty. We have the
moral conviction ; but we wish to give it its proper
place in the whole of our knowledge, and therefore
refer it to the scrutiny of the reason. And if the
reason cannot so demonstrate it as to compel the
assent at every step of every mind, we rest in the
assurance that as its power in this field has grown
in the past, so it will continue to grow in the future.
The remainder of the hour may suffice to pre
pare us for a brief survey of the Attributes of
God. The creeds speak of but one, — almighti-
ness, — "I believe in God the Father Almighty."
We are not to infer, however, that no others were
known or recognized in the early creed - making
days. This one is brought forward because it pre
pares the way for the immediately following state
ment : " Maker of heaven and earth." When the
" Apostles' Creed " was constructing, the interposi
tion by Gnosticism of a Demiurge between God

ATTRIB UTES - CONCEPTION DEFINED 99
and the world made it highly important to iden
tify God and the world-maker. The early creeds
were chiefly protests against threatening errors, 2
and were not meant to be exhaustive exhibits of
Christian belief.
A discussion of the attributes involves the pre
vious determination of one or two preliminary
points. In the first place, we need to know what
they are, or, what is the same thing, whence and
how we get knowledge of them. The older dog
matic systems of the Reformed theologians bring
forward as many as eighteen ; as Unity, Simpli
city, Immutability, Infinity, Immensity, Omnipres
ence, Eternity, Life, Omniscience, Wisdom, Holi
ness, Justice, Truthfulness, Power, Love, Goodness,
Blessedness, Will.2 But it is evident that these
are merely thrown together, pell-mell, without ref
erence to any principle of derivation or classifica
tion. No reason appears why more should not be
added, e. g. All-sufficiency, Wrath, Mercy, Long-
suffering. The root of the difficulty is, that they
were derived from the utterances of Scripture,
which were made occasionally and incidentally,
without a thought of scientific precision or com
pleteness. After collecting them all, we could not
know that they represented all the attributes, or
1 Cf. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. ill ff.
2 See Rothe, Dogmatik, i. 102 n.

100 THE BEING OF GOD
how they are related to the essence of the Deity ;
for as the Scriptures undertake no demonstration
of the existence of God, so neither do they attempt
to give an idea of his being or essence, as he is in
himself, apart from his manifestations of himself
in nature and history. Hence we must endeavor
to determine the principle by which we can know
what attributes belong to God.
But, first of all, we need a definite conception
of what we mean when we speak of attributes.
Etymologically, the word is plain enough. An
attribute is something attributed or ascribed to
God. But the thing itself is not thereby defined.
Speaking loosely, we ascribe existence to God as
well as omnipotence ; but is existence an attribute ?
Certainly not. Existence is inseparable from be
ing. No existence, no being ; and being can be no
attribute, because there is nothing but itself to
which it can be ascribed. We must evidently dis
tinguish in thought between the being, essence, or
substance of God and the attributes which belong
to him. An attribute is not a constitutive element
of the divine being, but an activity or characteris
tic of it. It corresponds to what in man we call a
faculty or quality. Thus thought is a faculty, but
not a constituent element, of the mind. The fac
ulty of thought, i. e. the power to think, cannot be
a prime element, but must inhere in something ;

DERIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 101
and that in which it inheres is the mind. Thought
is, therefore, an attribute of mind, and manifests
itself in action. But there may also be attributes
of mind which are not faculties or powers, but con
stitute qualities by which the action of other mind-
attributes is affected. You remember the old
maxim, Errare humanum est, — liability to error is
characteristic of man. This liability to error is not
an active power ; it is in itself a quiescent and yet
very fruitful quality, which but too often vitiates
our thinking. An attribute, then, is either an
active faculty or modifying quality of the mind or
being in which it inheres.
Now comes the main question : How are we to
determine what are truly divine attributes ? How
may we know that we have them all, and that we
include nothing among them that does not belong
there ? Manifestly, we must derive them from
our idea of God, — from the most perfect concep
tion of him that we can attain. Of course, this
involves liability to error. Our idea of God may
be incorrect and insufficient, and our reasoning
from it may go astray ; but, mutatis mutandis,
this is true of all our thinking and reasoning, what
soever the subject of their attention. Let us still
proceed by way of analogy. We have an idea of
man, and can distinguish the several logical ele
ments of which it is made up. Man is a finite,

102 THE BEING OF GOD
imperfect being, consisting of material body and
immaterial spirit. As spirit, i. e. in his real self,
he is mind, affections, will, conscience. He is a
dependent being who did not make himself. He
therefore had a beginning, and as to his material
part must have an end, and as to his spiritual being
may have an end, should it so please his Maker.
Such is our conception of man, so far at least as
we now need to complete it ; and from it, granted
that we had the ideas contained in the terms em
ployed, such as mind, will, etc., we could deduce
the attributes or faculties and characteristics of
man, even though, were the thing possible, we had
never seen a single specimen of the race, and be
longed ourselves to another order of intelligent
beings. Passing by his physical nature, we should
say, He is mind ; therefore the attributes of
thought, knowledge, and communication belong to
him. He has affections, i. e. he is receptive of,
and responsive to, influences of other beings or
things ; therefore he has the attributes of love and
hatred, joy and sorrow, delight and disgust. He
is will; therefore he has power. He has a con
science ; therefore he knows both good and evil.
He is finite, conditioned by time and space, and
morally imperfect ; therefore he is limited and im
perfect in all he thinks and feels and does.
Now apply this method to our idea of God. We

DERIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 103
have found God to be the infinite, eternal, right
eous, every way perfect Being, — the absolute, un
bounded life, and the source of all existence. It
may be objected that we have reached this idea
only by reasoning upward from the manifestation
of his attributes in the world and in our own
minds ; and that is true. Speculatively, we get
our knowledge of God from his attributes ; and
conversely, we deduce his attributes from the con
ception we have formed of him. The reasoning
is circular, but not so as to invalidate itself. It
is quite possible from a few, say five, data to es
tablish a general conclusion, from which then many
more, let us say twenty; partial conclusions may
be deduced. And if among these twenty the five
original data are included, they niay reappear in
modified forms, and invested with greater certainty
than they had before. It is this that makes the
increase of knowledge possible. But whether this
be admitted or not, in now seeking to deduce the
attributes of God from our idea of him, we do not
reverse the previously pursued process in order to
establish the truth of those already found, nor to
add to their number, although both results may
happen, but to guard against improper addition or
omission, and to verify or correct our conception
of each of them. After this explanation, let us
proceed. The idea of existence at once suggests

104 THE BEING OF GOD
relation to space and time — presence ; but when
applied to God, the infinite and eternal, this idea
is at once modified into that of omnipresence.
From our conception of God as personal being, it
follows that he has all those distinctions which we
have already found in man, — intellect, will, the
moral power, and that susceptibility to be affected
by other beings than himself (or by himself within
himself) which constitutes the basis of the affec
tions. Hence he has the attributes or qualities im
plied in them. He has thought, knowledge, power,
holiness, love. Again, as the infinite, eternal, and
perfect Being, he has the qualitative attributes of
infinity, eternity, and perfection ; and it is evident
that these must modify all the active attributes
that belong to him as a personal being, so that,
e. g., his power must be conceived as infinite, eter
nal, and perfect power, and his righteousness as in
finite, eternal, perfect righteousness. And finally,
as infinite, eternal, perfect personality, the attri
bute of absolute blessedness must belong to him.
Herewith we have exhausted the data given in
our idea of God, from which to deduce his attri
butes. Some predicates, now and then brought
forward as attributes, express conceptions concern
ing the divine essence, others are included in those
we have found. When, for instance, we speak of
God as the absolute life, we express our highest

DERIVATION OF ATTRIBUTES 105
conception of his essence, the substance of his be
ing, the dwelling-place, if I may so speak, of the
divine Ego. I cannot conceive of it as an attri
bute in any sense of the term. There is nothing to
which it can belong, — it is the very God. Strictly
speaking, the phrase " the living God " is as tauto
logical as "the living life" would be. When the
Scriptures or we ourselves use it, it is only to em
phasize the idea already contained in the word
God, — to bring out its prof oundest meaning. Sim
ilar remarks apply to the term " spirituality."
When we say " God is spirit," we seek to express,
as best we can, our conception of the divine sub
stance. " God is spirit " and " God is life " are co
terminous phrases. Both denote the same object,
the essence or substance of God, although their
contraries are different. Nor can Unity and
Uniqueness be properly classed as attributes ; but
for a different reason. These terms are at bottom
nothing more than negations, or rectifications of
imperfect conceptions of God. As such, they are
wholly unnecessary as soon as the idea of the infi
nite, perfect, personal God has been found. A per
sonal being is necessarily one, in the strictest
sense, excluding not only plurality, but also com-
positeness, the opposite of simplicity ; and an infi
nite being can have no compeers. Will and free
dom both appear in omnipotence and every other

106 THE BEING OF GOD
manifestation of divine life, and therefore need no
separate statement.
The classification of the attributes is difficult.
No principle has yet been discovered against
which no objections can be urged. Perhaps the
same might be said of any attempt at classifying
the manifestations of spirit-life even on the human
plane. Fortunately, perfect success is not indis
pensably necessary. Yet classification, by promot
ing clearness and order, is always an aid to think
ing ; so that even an imperfect system is usually
better than none. The most frequently adopted
division of the attributes is into absolute and rela
tive. The relative are those of which we become
cognizant when we contemplate God in relation to
the universe ; the absolute, those we discover when
we regard him as he is in himself. The latter are
also called quiescent, as resting in God ; the others,
transient or operative, as passing from to operate
outside of himself. It would be easy to find faults
in this division, but difficult to improve on it.
Adopting it, the two classes are as follows : Abso
lute (or Quiescent) attributes, — Infinity, Eternity.
Blessedness ; Relative (or Operative) — Omni
presence, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Holiness,
Love. Time will not permit a full discussion of all the
attributes. Holiness and Love can be properly

OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIBUTES 107
treated only in connection with the revelation of
God in Christ, which we cannot here presuppose.
Infinity, as the expression of God's absolute inde
pendence, underlies every other attribute ; as the
expression of his independence of space limitations,
it appears in omnipresence. Both it and bless
edness may be passed over. Those that remain
present problems of such wide reach and profound
interest that they will occupy all the time at our
disposal. A few words, in closing, about the question
whether the attributes connote objective differ
ences in the divine being, or represent nothing
more than man's subjective conceptions of God.1
From Augustine down to the middle of the present
century, the almost unanimous doctrine of theolo
gians has been that they have no real existence in
God, but are merely logical distinctions made by
the human mind. It was held that the divine
essence and the attributes are one and the same
thing, and that all the attributes are identical.
What this means, it is not easy to see ; but what it
is supposed to mean appears from the deductions
drawn from it. Thus, according to St. Augustine,
Blessedness, Greatness, Wisdom, Truth, Benevo-
1 Cf. Dr. Hodge's excellent section on this subject, Systematic
Theology, i. 368 ff.

108 THE BEING OF GOD
lence, are all the same thing. But by parity of
reasoning, knowledge and will must be the same
thing ; whence it would follow that whatever God
knows he also does, and that whatever he knows in
man he also approves and loves. The denial of
true distinctions between the attributes was made
in the interest of the " simplicity " of the divine
being, by which is meant that it is uncomposite,
that there is in it no combination of elements,
whether elements of material or form, of nature or
essence. This is well. Simplicity is, as we have
seen, implied in our conception of God as true
unity. But how does the recognition of truly dis
tinct attributes endanger this simplicity ? No one
conceives of the attributes as representing divisions
or departments, so to speak, in the divine essence.
But if one did, — and mediaeval Realism came very
near it, — the true way to set him right would be
to show that he misconceived the nature of an at
tribute, and its connection with essence. An attri
bute is a mode in which the divine life manifests
itself ; and the only thing it implies about the di
vine essence is that it has in it the conditions pre
supposed by such manifestation. In other words,
the attributes simply affirm that the divine essence
is such that God can know and work and love.
What composition or combination is there here to
exclude ? Distinctions are implied, it is true ; dis-

OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIBUTES 109
tinctions between knowing and doing, willing and
loving, action and non-action, etc. But if God is
to be regarded as an absolutely distinctionless be
ing, they are assuredly right who thence conclude
that it is impossible for us to attain to any true
knowledge of him. Take any object of thought,
eliminate distinction after distinction, and that
at which you arrive is — pure nothing. The re
moval of the last distinction carries with it the
extinction of the object for the thinker.
The intention of the old theologians was good,
but the necessarily logical outcome of their posi
tion is pernicious. If there be no distinction in
God, how can he be a personal being ? The very
idea of self-consciousness implies a distinction be
tween self as subject and self as object. Yet they
who maintained this view were equally decided
in their acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity,
which, if God be distinctionless being, is sheer con
tradiction. Modern theology has rightly aban
doned the old position. And it has abundant
ground for so doing in the nature of man himself,
apart from all philosophical considerations. Or
are we, in our spiritual nature, composite beings ?
Is the mind one thing by itself, the will another,
and the conscience a third ? Is not our conscious
ness a consciousness of unity undivided and in
divisible ? And yet we know that thought and

110 THE BEING OF GOD
knowledge and action are not the same thing in
us. They are movements of the same ego, but
different in their character. That the one ego
exercises all these different functions we know by
the surest of all tests, — that of consciousness.
What the ground for them in the essence of the
mind may be, it will be time enough to investigate
when we succeed in putting some captured speci
men ego under a microscope. If the reality of dif
ferent faculties in us does not make us composite
beings, why should it do so in God ?
It is possible that this reasoning may be objected
to as anthropomorphism. Well, then, anthropo
morphism let it be. But it is the anthropomor
phism of the doctrine that man was made in the
image of God, which is verified by all our know
ledge of the universe. What is all human science,
so far as it is science, but the result of a successful
rethinking of God's thought as incorporated in na
ture ? The finite mind that, however laboriously,
spells out the record written in the universe must,
to the extent of its powers, be conformed in struc
ture and modes of action to the Infinite Mind that
wrote it.
The God that logically results from the denial
of objective differences between the attributes is,
as Dorner says, a God who, while he has shown
himself to us as power, knowledge, love, has shown

OBJECTIVE REALITY OF ATTRIB UTES 111
not himself, but an illusive phantasm. In fact,
the God that results is not only an unknown God,
but a dead God, — a God who, if I may say it with
out irreverence, is drowned in the ocean of his own
life and perfections. Or if, to escape a conclusion
so utterly unthinkable, we describe God as actus
purus, sheer activity, pure movement, still we get
nothing but the God of pantheism, a blind, uncon
scious force.

LECTURE V.
THE OMNIPRESENCE, ETERNITY, AND OMNIPOTENCE
OF GOD.
We saw last week that we derive the attributes
of God by analysis of our idea of God. A discus
sion of them, therefore, cannot add to the sum of
our knowledge concerning God. It can only state
explicitly what we already possess implicitly, and
bring its several parts into relation to each other
and to thought generally. It is the latter of these
possible services that give it its main importance,
and that will shape the course of our inquiries.
We begin with Omnipresence. Some theolo
gians use instead the term Immensity, i. e. im-
measurableness ; while others again, making a
distinction between omnipresence and immensity,
apply the latter to the essence of God in itself, the
former to the being of God in his relations to the
universe. In either case, the word " immensity "
may very well be dispensed with. It adds no ele
ment which we shall not reach without it ; and its
very sound is, to my ear at least, suggestive of
gross, material conceptions of God.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD 113
The idea of omnipresence is by no means free
from difficulty. What are we to understand by
it ? Does it mean that God's essence fills all
space ? That is, in brief, its explanation by most
theologians, including those of modern days. But
that definition leads into most inextricable entan
glements of thought. If the divine essence fills all
space, where then is there room for the finite, phys
ical universe ? It could only be found within the
essence of God. We should have to conceive of
the essence or substance of God as a literally shore
less ocean, bearing on its bosom, here, there, and
yonder, millions of islands, great and small, each a
world with all that therein is, sin and misery not
excluded. It is certainly not in this sense that in
Him we live and move and have our being. But
even so, the essence of God would not fill all space.
There would be spaces or gaps within it, wherever
one of the island worlds was found. And that, too,
even though we conceived the divine essence to pen
etrate all matter, as the atmospheric air penetrates
it ; for though the densest substance has air in it,
it is not all air. Though not one atom of matter
be in actual contact with any other atom, but
leaves open channels for the air to enter and pass
through, the atoms themselves must by their very
definition be conceived as impervious. The only
possible way I can conceive of God as filling all

114 THE BEING OF GOD
space is that of the idealistic philosophy, carried to
the extreme of denying that there is any finite exist
ence at all, — that what we call such is but the
unreal creation of our own minds. But, says Dr.
Hodge, though " God fills all space, is not absent
from any portion of it, nor more present in one
portion than another, this of course is not to be
understood of extension or diffusion. Extension
is a property of matter, and cannot be predicated
of God. . . . Nor is this omnipresence to be un
derstood as a mere presence in knowledge and
power. It is an omnipresence of the divine es
sence." J But is not this replacing with one hand
what the other has taken away ? Of course, the
divine essence is not material ; but how can it fill
all space unless it has extension or diffusion in
some sense of the word? Surely space is not
filled by nothing ; nor can nothing be said to be in
space. God is spirit ; but even spirit must be con
ceived as having some relation to space. It is here
or there ; and even the Scholastics, when they de
bated how many angels could dance on the point
of a needle, did not think that two of them could
occupy the same infinitesimal portion of space, not
to speak of occupying the spaces already filled by
the solid material atoms of the needle.
But, admitting that the divine essence is of such
1 Syst. Theol., i. 383.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD 115
a nature as to be able to be in space also occupied
by matter, the omnipresence of God in that way is
still not merely inconceivable, but seems impossi
ble. For whether we conceive the consciousness
of God to be centralized somewhere within his es
sence, or to be diffused throughout the whole of it,
in either case only that part of him would be pres
ent in this world which filled this part of universal
space ; in other worlds other parts would be pres
ent, but the whole of God would not be present
anywhere or with anything. Dr. Hodge would
meet this by a passage which he quotes approv
ingly from Augustine, in which that great teacher
says that " the whole of God is in heaven alone,
the whole on the earth alone, the whole both in
heaven and on earth ; he is comprehended by no
place, but the whole of him is in himself and every
where." Stripped of its form, that is doubtless
good doctrine ; but it is with its form that I am
concerned just now. How am I to harmonize its
parts with each other, and the whole with the for
mula that God's essence fills all space ? The whole
God assuredly includes the whole essence ; but
how can the whole essence be in heaven, the whole
on earth, the whole everywhere, at one and the
same time ?
Once more : we conceive of space as unlimited,
— cannot conceive of it otherwise. If the essence

116 THE BEING OF GOD
of God fills all space, his essence must be unlim
ited ; but in that case, how can he be personal ?
Personality is inconsistent with unlimited — i. e.
boundary-less — extension in space. To be sure,
theologians say that extension is not predicable of
the essence of God ; but the affirmation that he fills
space is utterly unthinkable, unless, despite of
every disclaimer, the idea of extension, with which
we naturally start out, is furtively retained by the
mind. And therefore, if God is conceived to fill
space, he cannot also be conceived as a personal
being. For personality, as I have said, implies
definition. Whoever understands God's infinity
to involve his limitless diffusion through space
must admit that he cannot conceive him to be per
sonal. I have dwelt on these contradictions in order to
prepare the way for inquiring into their source.
Assuredly, God is omnipresent. That is the doc
trine, not of the Scriptures alone, but also of the
reason. It is the necessary sequence of his univer
sal causality. The fact stands firm, but the ordi
nary explanation of it obscures its truth. The ex
planation contains two elements of confusion. In
the first place, it connects the idea of omnipresence
with the idea of space ; and in the second place, it
asserts that the divine essence fills universal space.
The assertion seems to derive a good part of its

DIVINE INFINITY DEFINED 117
popular strength, at least, from a misconception of
the term " infinite " as applied to God. God, we
are prone to reason, is an infinite being ; therefore
his essence or substance, which is spirit, must be
infinite. But the word " infinite " is used in two
very different senses. Etymologically, it signifies
boundless, limitless. Thus, the edges of this table
are its bounds or limits. If they were absent, if
the table had absolutely no edges or limits, it would
be infinite in length and in breadth. If its sur
faces, upper and lower, were likewise absent, it
would furthermore be infinite in thickness, and fill
infinite space in all directions. But the word has
another sense, not only in philosophy, but also in
ordinary speech. A limit often means a weakness,
a barrier, restraint, an obstacle or adverse condi
tion, without the slightest regard to space or spa
tial relations. Thus, we confess that our minds
are limited, meaning that we soon exhaust our
powers of thought, without thinking for an instant
of size or extension as connected with mind. We
say of a person, His mind is powerful, but it has
its limitations ; meaning thereby that on some
subjects the strength of his intellect is counter
vailed or overborne by prejudice, want of informa
tion, or whatever else may hinder it from working
up to its normal power. The idea of space never
occurs to us. Now, unfortunately, when we apply

118 THE BEING OF GOD
the word " infinite " to the essence of God, we
almost involuntarily take it in the first, the spatial
sense. We know so little of immaterial spirit
that it is difficult to abstract the notion of exten
sion, suggested by the term " infinite," from the di
vine essence, and this natural difficulty is greatly
enhanced when we describe the divine essence as
omnipresent, a word strongly suggestive of exten
sion and solidity. The consequence is, that we in
terpret the infinity in a material sense, and con
clude that omnipresence means that God's essence
fills all space, thereby involving our further thought
in endless confusions and contradictions. "Infi
nite," in connection with God, must be taken in the
other, non-spatial sense. It properly means that he
is absolutely unconditioned, uncontrolled, — inde
pendent of every possible let or hindrance, barrier
or restraint, that could be interposed from without,
or spring from imperfections within himself. It
has nothing whatever to do with space, except to
say that he is wholly independent of it. It makes
no affirmation concerning the spatial relations of
the essence of God, except that it is not subject to
them. It may occur to you that the substitution of one
definition of the word " infinite " for another does
not alter the actual relations of God to space. Ad
mitted, it may be said, that the word properly char-

NATURE OF SPACE AND TIME 119
acterizes God as the unconditioned, who, as such, is
above space, one result may be that you avoid the
contradictions previously spoken of, but another will
be that you leave the relation of omnipresence
to space wholly undetermined. That is true ; and
therefore we must now ask, What is space ? Some
philosophers, with Kant at their head, maintain
that both space and time are nothing more than sub
jective conceptions of the mind, forms or relations
imposed on objects by the thinking subject, but
without objective existence or truth. This doctrine
is a mixture of truth and error. Its truth consists
in its correction of the naive belief, in which prior
to philosophical inquiry we all share, that time and
space exist in themselves, apart from material ob
jects or spiritual beings. The ordinary mind, and
not without the countenance of some philosophers,
holds that, were all sensible existence and all think
ing mind to be annihilated, space and time would
still remain. It endows them with independent
and real, albeit intangible, existence. But this is
an error. Space and time, as we know them, have
no existence except as relations of things. Space
is the relation or form in which things outside of
self coexist, side by side, at the same time ; time,
that in which primarily things within the self
(thoughts, feelings, perceptions), and, secondarily,
things without the self, exist successively, one after

120 THE BEING OF GOD
another. Space and time are not realities, entities,
material or immaterial. Abstract these from real
existences, and they are nothing. They are univer
sal forms of existence, as fluidity and solidity are
special forms. But it does not follow that they are
mere creations of the mind, and have no objective
truth, — nothing answering to them in real things.
The circle and the triangle are also conceptions of
mere relations or forms between sides and angles,
circumference and centre ; and yet it is by reason
ing from these relations that we can predict cosmic
events, eclipses, transits, conjunctions and opposi
tions, which are verified to the fraction of a min
ute. What does that prove ? Manifestly, that our
ideas of time and space, although without objective
reality, are nevertheless objectively true. It proves
that the forms under which the mind apprehends
things correspond to the forms under which they
exist in relation to each other.
At this point we might be tempted to escape
from our difficulty by declaring that neither space
nor time has anything to do with God. But, with
out proper qualification, that would only lead to
others equally pressing. No doubt it is true that
space and time, as we empirically know them, be
ing forms of finite things, exist only in and through
finite things. Before the creation of the universe
they were not ; for there was nothing of which they

SPACE IN RELATION TO GOD 121
could be the forms, or between which the relations
they denote could subsist. Like all the sensible
creation, they then existed only in the thought and
purpose of God. They sprang into being, at the
creative fiat, with the things of which they are the
forms. That follows, not only from the definition
of them we have found, but from the impossibility
of conceiving them as previously existing conditions
of the Unconditioned. Nor is this conception of
space and time as created, at variance with the fact
that we cannot conceive them otherwise than as in
finite and therefore eternal.1 For if we regard
creation, not necessarily our solar system, but any
part of the vast whole of which we know so little,
as eternal, — for which much may be said, — all
appearance of discrepancy vanishes. In that case
we conceive as eternal, forms which have in fact
eternally existed. If, on the other hand, creation
had a beginning, we may interpret the notion of
eternity, which is inseparable from our ideas of
space and time, as expressing the universality and
necessity of space and time as forms of all possible
created existence. In other words, the ideas of
time and space, if we abstract from them the notion
of eternity, give us the forms in which things actu-
1 The infinity of space is primarily infinity of extension ; but in
seeking to follow extension in any direction, the mind insensibly
converts it into duration.

122 THE BEING OF GOD
ally are. But the notion of eternity that clings to
them adds the further determination that no created
thing can exist except in these forms, and that
therefore there must be in the Creator himself a
necessity to create what he creates in these forms.
This necessity is not imposed on him from without ;
it is a principle of his own perfect being. As it is
necessary for him, if he create, to create that which
is good, so, by the same internal necessity, he must
create it in the forms of space and time. Nor does
this reduce or limit the possible field of creative
activity open to him consistently with the mainte
nance of himself as the Unconditioned. The only
species of creature he cannot create is one that like
himself shall be independent of space and time.
We can now see that the contradictions in
which we involved ourselves at the outset resulted
from defective conceptions of space. We virtually
viewed it as something existing independently of
God. We made an application to the Infinite Be
ing of a finite relation. Nay, more strangely still,
we defined omnipresence as meaning that the whole
fullness of the divine being was contained in that
which has no independent reality. When we said,
God's essence fills all space, we connected totally
heterogeneous ideas. We made an affirmation
which became thinkable only when we surrepti
tiously made the divine essence an extended some-

SPACE IN RELATION TO GOD 123
thing of which space could be a relation. No cau
tion not to do this, though repeated a thousand
times, could prevent it, or ever will prevent it.
The moment it is said, God fills all space, there
is given objective and separate reality to space,
and extension to God, i. e. he is made finite, and
subject to what, though a creature of his own, is
assumed to exist independently of him. And this
is done in supposed compliance with the conception
of God as the Infinite, because his infinity itself
is misapprehended. The Infinite is the Uncondi
tioned. Hence, when we speak of God as omni
present, we mean or should mean that he is uncon
ditioned as to his presence ; that he is absolutely
independent of space, and can be and is personally
nigh to all his creatures wherever they are. We
make no statement as to the nature or locale of
his essence. What we affirm is simply this : that
whereas man, being subject to the space-relation
that connects and yet severs all finite things, can
be in contact with external objects only under the
conditions of that relation, God as the Infinite is
free of the relation and its conditions, and is pres
ent with all the works of his hands. The omne, in
omnipresence, has no more reference to empty space
than the same word has in omnipotence. It looks
only to the whole of creation, and says that from
no part or being in it is God absent. Of such a

124 THE BEING OF GOD
being and such a presence we can form no mental
image. The moment we undertake that, we begin
to anthropomorphize in a manner which destroys
the idea of God ; but the thought is logically
deduced from the only tenable and self-attesting
conception of God that can be formed, and is
therefore true.
There are a number of other points usually
discussed in connection with this topic. Is God
present in creation essentially or potentially, per
sonally or merely operatively ? Some of the ear
lier Socinian divines, in order to get rid of the con
tradictions involved in the notion of God's essence
filling all space, taught that as to his essence God
is in heaven, and that he is omnipresent poten
tially, i. e. in power and action. To this it is re
plied, and I think correctly, that direct action with
out personal presence is something inconceivable.
We may influence another at a distance by means
of messages, letters, or books, and we can act on
distant objects through intermediate causes by
which we transmit our energy; but if applied to
God, this mode of acting would imply distance be
tween him and the world, and thus reintroduce the
space-relation in our conception of him. More
over, indirect action is not personal presence with
the thing acted on ; yet presence is not presence
unless it be personal. Now as person and essence

FINAL RESULT 125
are inseparable, it follows that God's presence
must be essential, and not merely potential. The
exclusion of God's personal presence from the
world is but a single remove from deism with all
its benumbing consequences and barrenness. On
the other hand, it may be retorted that the doc
trine of the personal immanence of God in the
world, and with all his creatures, opens the way to
pantheistic aberrations. It may do so, but only
when the idea of personality is not duly empha
sized. Let there be vigorous Christian theism,
and no such result can follow. If first we say with
St. Paul, " The God that made the world and all
things therein, the Lord of heaven and earth, is
not far from each one of us," — i. e. assert the
personality, — then we may fearlessly add, " for in
him we live and move and have our being." There
can be neither deism nor pantheism where these
two forms of thought are closely conjoined.
If now you ask how far this lengthy discussion
has advanced us to the understanding of omnipres
ence, I answer, we have learned how to avoid en
tangling ourselves in contradictions when we speak
or think of this divine perfection, in that we have
ascertained the error in which they originate. We
have not reached a clear and positive construc
tion in thought of the idea of omnipresence, but
we have learned why we cannot reach it. We can

126 THE BEING OF GOD
know that omnipresence must be, and what it must
be, but not how it is. Thinking under the rela
tions of the finite, we have not been able to con
strue to our thought the infinite as existing out of
those relations. We have had a demonstration of
" the limits of religious thought," but also a fresh
illustration of the fact that the reason may demon
strate the truth of that which it cannot compre
hend. And it may not be amiss to add that the
subject incidentally suggests the great difference
there is between limitations and contradictions.
The limitations of the understanding are in
surmountable, but quite compatible with partial
knowledge and practically full logical certainty.
Contradictions spring from a faulty use of the
understanding, not from its necessary incapacity,
nor from anything in the things on which it busies
itself. Contradictions can never be believed, or
taken on faith, as some would persuade us ; but
they may be removed by more accurate thinking.
In no case can two contraries be legitimately de
rived from the same truth, no matter how different
its several phases may be ; for God is true, and all
his thoughts are true.
The Eternity of God is that quality of his nature
that makes him unconditioned by time, as omni
presence denotes his independence of space. He

TIME IN RELATION TO GOD 127
neither began to be, nor shall he cease to be.
His existence, whether we try to trace it from this
moment backward or forward, is endless, and at
no point under the dominion of time and its
changes. Thus we see the intimate coherence of
this attribute with the divine immutability. He is
immutable because ho is eternal. His eternity ex
cludes all such changes as growth and decay, in
crease in any perfection, or decrease, all second
thoughts or changes of purpose, in short anything
that could infer imperfection at any point of his
existence. But, as Dr. Hodge observes, the idea
of immutability easily degenerates into that of im
mobility. He cites Quenstedt, a Lutheran theo
logian of the seventeenth century, as saying that
the immutability of God " is the perpetual identity
of the divine essence and all its perfections, and
wholly excludes every movement, whether physical
or ethical." The explanation of such an almost
horrifying sentence is found in the tendency, insep
arable apparently from scholastic and speculative
divinity, ancient or modern, to analyze words rather
than the thoughts for which they stand.
There are two points strongly insisted on by the
old theologians, and by no means obsolete to-day.
One is that for God eternity knows neither past
nor future, but is an everlasting now. It is sup
posed to be a necessary deduction from God's eter-

128 THE BEING OF GOD
nai unchangeableness. In eternity, the scholastics
were wont to say, there is but one single instant,
always present, always persisting. And why?
Because what has been is vanished ; the future has
no existence except in thought ; the now alone is ;
consequently, unless eternity is compressed into
one present now, God is not in possession of either
past or future, and is therefore imperfect. There
is force in this reasoning, as you will see if you re
call to mind a peculiar species of experience with
which we are all more or less familiar. I refer to
the feeling of regret that arises in the mind when
memory reproduces some pleasant scene or event of
the past. We think, Would that that happy expe
rience were permanent, — that it could at will be
gone through again under all the same conditions !
that I could again enjoy the same scene, enjoy the
same companionship, be part of the same satisfying
activities, in precisely the same physical and spir
itual setting ! We heave a sigh at the irrevocable
past. That is, we feel that our inability to make the
whole of life, so far as it is attractive, a present pos
session and experience, is a very great imperfec
tion, — that the limitations of time press heavily
upon us. In this state of mind we are quite ready
to believe that for God there must be but an eter
nal now.
But let us ask what an eternal now implies.

TIME IN RELATION TO GOD 129
What is now f The infinitesimal part of time oc
cupied by a single thought or emotion. The in
stant that thought is succeeded by another, another
now has come, and the former has joined the past.
In other words, now is fleeting in. proportion to the
number and rapidity of thoughts, feelings, percep
tions, that succeed each other and produce changes
in my consciousness. If I am in a stupid, sluggish
condition, my thoughts are few, and my nows are
long. If I had but one impression made on my
consciousness in the course of an hour, I should
have a now of an hour's duration. If I had all the
thoughts and feelings of my whole life crowded
upon my consciousness in one hour, that hour
would have in it more nows than I could, count in a
decade of years. " Now " is measured by but one
single thought or mental impression. The applica
tion of this, if it be lawful to reason analogically to
God, is plain. If for God there is but one eternal
now, then he has but one eternal thought, — but
one never-ending, unchanging consciousness, if con
sciousness it can be called. We have saved his
absolute immutability, but we have lost the ever-
springing fountain of life, thought, and action
which make him the Infinite Spirit and the Infinite
Good. We cannot conceive the perfect mind to be
destitute of movement and succession, which in the
finite mind are the sine qua non of conscious exist-

130 THE BEING OF GOD
ence and conscious identity with the self of other
nows. If there be no succession of thoughts in
the Infinite, how can he be conceived to pass from
creating to preserving and sustaining ?
But how conoeive of changes of self-conscious
ness in God without making him subject to time ?
For changing thoughts are characteristic of the
time-form. I know that this moment differs from
that which preceded it, because my thought has
changed. The question brings us back to the na
ture of time and space. It can only be answered
by reference to what we have already found. True,
it might seem as if it could be met by saying that
in God all thoughts and activities are simultane
ous, — that is, God's now contains, not one single
thought, but all the infinite number of his thoughts.
And God's thoughts are not fused in one solid
mass, so to speak, but stand forth, each in its own
integrity. The relation between our thoughts is
one of time ; between God's thoughts it can only
be conceived of as one of space, for all are simulta
neous. In this way we should save the idea of an
eternal now from the reproach of poverty as to con
tents, but not from the charge of presenting us
with a lifeless God. For the explanation excludes
movement, which furnishes the prime element in
our conception of life. God's mind is full of
thoughts, but the thoughts are stationary. We

GOD'S RELATION TO TIME 131
might compare the condition of the divine mind,
suggested by this view, to an ocean whose surface
is broken into billowy peaks and intervening val
leys, and whose profoundest depths are stirred, but
which has been suddenly congealed by frost into
immobility, perpetually fixed and made quiescent,
in the form and semblance of the highest activity.
The billows are there, and the hidden currents of
the depths are there, but all as in a marine paint
ing, still and motionless.
From so dismal a conception we are delivered
by a truer idea of time. We have already found
that time, like space, considered as the form of
finite existence, is the product of creative power.
But as such it must have some substratum in God.
There must be in God that out of which it can
spring. In a word, we may boldly say, with
Pfleiderer, that for God also, as he is in himself and
apart from his relations to the world, time exists.
But observe, time, not as we empirically know it,
a conditioning- and hampering element of finite
existence, but time in its archetypal form, of which
the finite relation which we know is an adaptation
to finite existence. In God it is a relation of him
self to himself.
Supposing, then, that God has in himself a divine
time-relation to himself, and that there is succes
sion in his thoughts and states of self-consciousness,

132 THE BEING OF GOD
does it follow that he suffers from that sense of the
irrevocableness of the past, and the distance of the
future, which we experience ? And if that cannot
be, because it would constitute an imperfection,
how are we to conceive him to have both past and fu
ture in present possession ? Conceive it, so as to
comprehend it, we cannot. But we have in memory
the means of a proximate comprehension. We can
not in actual physical deed relive the past, but
through memory we can do it mentally and mor
ally. We can reproduce the long past thrill of hap
piness or the burning blush of shame, not merely as
memories, but as present experiences. We can feel
again the exultation of success, or the pain of fail
ure, that were experienced years since. There is no
doubt great difference between memories in this re-
spect, and also in the vividness and ready respon
siveness of our imaginations and emotions ; but we
all have this power of making the past present in
some degree. There is reason to believe that mem
ory may be equal to the reproduction of a long life
in full detail in a moment, so that the soul lives the
whole over again in an instant. Who shall say that
hereafter that power, which now manifests itself only,
so far as I know, in persons on the verge of disso
lution, may not come into constant exercise? — that
we, too, shall not be freed from the limitations that
now make the past a lost possession ? In some analo-

TIME-RELATION OF GOD TO UNIVERSE 133
gous way, we may conceive God to have not only
the past, but through his unlimited knowledge the
future also, forever in present possession. And
not merely as a memory, but as action. Even we
live the past in all that pertains to the immaterial
self. The physical acts and enjoyments are mere
memories. But in God the physical does not ex
ist. All is spiritual, and therefore capable of end
less persistence.
The other point to which I alluded, as insisted on
by the old theology, is the correlate of that now
considered. That dealt with the idea of time in
relation to God as he exists in himself ; this deals
with it in connection with his relations to the finite
universe. That said, God stands outside of time ;
this says, and by consequence he sees even things
in time without reference to time and its succes
sion, as present. This consequence, however, does
not follow. God might be without even the ana
logue of what we know as time in himself, and yet,
as he treats the world under the space-relation in
which he placed it, so he might treat the world
under the conditions of time which he himself im
posed. Although God be timeless, he cannot but
know whatever there is in time to be known, see-
in°- he himself is time's creator. Therefore he is
able to see the world in time ; and it cannot be
that he sees or treats it otherwise. If he thought

134 THE BEIN'G OF GOD
of the world to-day not only as it is, but also as
being what it was in the paleozoic time, and as it
shall be one thousand years hence, he would not
think the truth of it. He would think of condi
tions that do not exist, as existing. His thinking
would not be true. When as yet the universe had
no existence, he could not think of it as already
created. He could only think of it as existing in
his own purposes. He cannot look upon the inno
cent infant of to-day as forty years hence he must
look upon the crime-stained man ; nor can he re
gard the home-returned prodigal as he regarded
him when in the far-off land he wasted his sub
stance in riotous living. God is indeed omnipres
ent and omniscient ; sees all things and knows all
things at once ; but he is also the eternal Truth,
who must see and know things as they are, not the
past as now present, nor the future as already in
real existence, but everything in those time-rela
tions which he imposed upon them. The divine
immutability — -this is the positive outcome of our
investigation — must be defined so as not to con
flict with the divine life and truth. What it af
firms is, that God in his being and character is
unchangeable, — the same to-day, yesterday, and
forever. It attributes to God absolute identity in
all his perfections, — unchanging life, unchanging
purposes, unchanging goodness.

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF GOD 135
Let us. now direct our attention briefly to the
Omnipotence of God. As the Infinite Life, God is
necessarily conceived to be omnipotent. By this
we mean that his power is unlimited, unobstructed
either through its own insufficiency, or through
any form of existence outside of him, or any ab
stract necessity over him. Whatever necessity
there is for him is grounded in his nature, as the
necessary being ; whatever limitations there are
for him are self-imposed. They are so far from
being imperfections that they are the expression of
his perfections. The subject is closely connected
with the freedom, the unrestrained self-determina
tion, of the divine will, which, however, I must
simply take for granted. Any consideration of
it would carry us much too far for our time.
The commonest mode of translating the word
" omnipotence " is to say that God can do what
ever he wills to do. And this is very right ; only
we need to be on our guard against separating the
power of God from his other perfections, — against
setting it up on a throne of its own, as it were,
and making a new God of it. It is doing this that
has so often led to absurd questions and disputes as
to whether God can do this or that. Can God do
evil? Can he leave two points where they are,
and yet shorten the straight line that connects
them ? Can he make a man who shall be able to

130 THE BEING OF UVL)
live and work in two places at once? Can he
make that undone which has been done? Ques
tions like these sometimes perplex the well-mean
ing but untrained mind, and they frequently con
stitute a large part of the popular infidel's stock in
trade. But even in the Schools similar questions
were once debated, — e. g. there was once quite a
prolonged, learned, and serious discussion of the
question, Whether God can do the impossible ? Is
not the impossible included in the omne? God
can do whatever he wills, why not this ? The an
swer is, The question is absurd. No one even can
will to do what on the face of it is nothing but
a logical contradiction. Suppose the impossible
done, would not that show that the impossible was
still not done ? Certainly that which was done
was not impossible, for it has been done. Such
questions are mere verbal quibbles, in which no
real thought is expressed. It is different with
such a question as whether God can do evil.
The answer must be, No. Not, however, because
he has not the power, but because he has not the
will. The impossibility is not physical but moral.
It is only generalizing this answer to say that God
cannot will to do anything at variance with his ab
solute perfection. He cannot will that which his
reason, his wisdom, or his goodness do not approve,
and therefore he cannot do it. His will is not ar-

THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF TRUTH 137
bitrary, as ours too often is, bent on an object with
out regard to anything but the gratification of a
desire or a whim. His whole nature is perfectly at
one with itself, not, as ours, divided against itself,
— conscience and the understanding on one side,
the passions on the other, and the stronger force
determining the will. Every divine volition is the
expression of the whole harmonious divine nature.
It is not a question of power, but of truth, — truth
to himself, to his work, to the laws he has im
pressed on nature.
But this suggests the question, whether God
himself is not the author and creator of truth, and,
if he be, what there is to prevent him from making
that true and good which now is false and bad.
His power as absolute power, it is thought, must
involve this. God, said Descartes, did not will the
three angles of a triangle to be , equal to two right
angles because he knew that it could not be other
wise, but it cannot be otherwise and is true because
he so willed it. Theologians have in the same
way made God the creator of moral law. God,
they said with Abelard, does not will or do any
thing because it is right, but it is right because he
wills or does it. Worse still, so devout a man as
Stier takes the ground that right depends on the
will of God, and that therefore those actions re
corded in the Old Testament which, judged by or-

138 THE BJS1NG UJb' GOD
dinary standards, are immoral, were right. In this
way God's omnipotence was made, not the creator
only, but the arbitrary creator, of whatever is right
and true. If that view were right, the absurd
questions of which I spoke a moment since would
be legitimate.
A distorted truth underlies these speculations of
Descartes and Stier and others. And they are not
answered by those who maintain that all truth,
physical, mathematical, moral, exists apart from
God. Where or in what could it exist ? Truth is
not an entity that can be conceived to have a being
of its own. To say that it exists in the nature of
things solves nothing. It does exist in the nature
of things ; but where did the things come from,
and who gave them their nature, or marshaled
them in relationship to each other? Truth can
have no other source than God. That is the truth
in the speculations adverted to. From God comes
all that is, and, sin excepted, as it is. But truth
is not an arbitrary creation of the Almighty's fiat.
It is not a scheme thought out by God, and then
impressed on finite things. Truth, all truth, is
the reflection of the divine nature, equally eternal
and unchangeable as that nature. God could not
make the triangle other than it is, because it con
forms to the necessary thinking of his own mind
in the region of abstract mathematics. He could

THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF TRUTH 139
not have made that right which now is wrong, be
cause it would have made his own work abhorrent
to his moral nature. He did not, and to finite
creatures in a finite world could not, impart all
truth; but what he did impart is true forever.
And it is this necessity of his nature, to be true to
himself, that constitutes the only limit to the free
dom of his will. His self-determination is none the
less complete that it cannot determine anything
against itself.

LECTURE VI.
THE OMNISCIENCE, HOLINESS, AND LOVE OF GOD.
The attribute of Omniscience, the last of those
that present serious difficulties, is perhaps the most
difficult of all.
Omniscience is God's perfect knowledge of all
that is or can be, however related to time and
sfpace. It is, as we shall see, closely related to his
perfect wisdom. Both are embraced in the divine
intelligence : knowledge is the apprehension of
things as they are in themselves and in their mu
tual relations ; wisdom is the faculty which adapts
means to ends.
God's omniscience is a necessary deduction from
his perfect self-knowledge, on the one hand, and,
on the other, from the fact that all that is or can
be has its source in him, and is thus an object of
his self-knowledge. God knows himself perfectly,
because his personality is perfect. In the know
ledge of himself, i. e. of his nature, he knows all
necessary, eternal truth, as distinguished from what
ever is the offspring of his creative will. The ori
gin of necessary truth has already been glanced at

THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD 141
in connection with omnipotence. Mathematical
and moral truth, and whatever truth lies at the
foundations of all physical relations, such as those
of mechanics and chemistry, do not, and never did,
exist independently of God ; but neither were they
created by the will of God. They exist in the na
ture of God, as principles, relations, modes of ac
tion, which God himself can no more change than
he can change his nature. They are eternal and
necessary, because they are determinative elements
in the nature of the eternal and necessary being.
All these truths God knows through his self-con
sciousness, which is not like ours partial and often
dim, but absolutely perfect, embracing his whole
self with all it contains. Now knowledge, properly
so called, is not merely knowledge of separate, un
related facts, such as a person would have of geology
if he could recognize and name every specimen of
rock in a cabinet, but know nothing of their com
position or the processes of rock-formation. If
one knew all the facts in the world, but knew
them only in that way, his mind would be no more
than a scrap-bag of knowledge. God's knowledge
is science, in the perfect sense in which we can
never apply that word to any knowledge of ours.
He knows every particular thing in its relation to
the principle from which it springs, and he knows
the principle with all that is contained in it. His

142 THE BEING OF GOD
knowledge is an organic whole in which unity is
seen simultaneously with all the possible multipli
city of divisions and combinations in which it man
ifests itself. Hence God knows not only what
actually is in himself, but all that could possibly
be produced by himself. For everything he pro
duces must, in proportion to its likeness to himself,
have more or less of his own characteristics in it.
Of all the creatures we know, man has most of
these, both in number and in variety and intricacy
of combination ; and what we call inorganic matter
has least. No created thing, however, can be en
tirely destitute of them, or indeed be anything else
than a compound of them, so to speak ; for even
God cannot impart that which he has not in him
self. Matter, therefore, if it be created, must have
derived its constituent elements from God himself.
What those elements are, we do not know ; but we
do know that the properties of matter conform to
mathematical, chemical, or other forms of eternal
truth. Therefore, since everything God could
make must be the outcome of what there is in him
self, and since he knows all there is in himself and
all its possible creative results, it follows that he
knows not only that which is, has been, or shall be,
but all that possibly could be, even that which he
will never will to be. This knowledge theologians
designate as God's necessary knowledge, because it

THE OMNISCIENCE OF GOD 143
is independent of creation. He had it when as yet
he had created nothing. Before the foundations
of the world were laid, he knew all the infinite pos
sibilities contained in himself, and all their conse
quences. It was then a knowledge of what we may
call world-ideas or world-plans, not one of which
had objective existence. When out of the infinite
number of possible worlds or universes one was cre
ated, and brought into actual existence, then the
knowledge of that one became objective. God did
not cease to know its idea or plan as idea, for his
knowledge cannot perish ; but he thenceforth also
knew it as realized and objectively existing. The
notion that God, as eternal and immutable, does
not know things as past, present, or future, has
already been considered, and needs not to be gone
over again. God may be said to have a double
knowledge of the universe : First, as eternally ex
isting in his mind as an idea, and secondly, as exist
ing in time and space. But not to enlarge on this,
let me enunciate the conclusion to which the pre
ceding reasoning leads. It is this : If God through
his self-consciousness necessarily knows all the in
finite possibilities included in his creative might,
and knows them in full detail, from their first
beginnings to their last results, then he knows all
he actually did create with equal comprehensive
ness. Not a lily blooms, not a sparrow hungers,

144 THE BEING OF GOD
not a hair falls from human head, but he knows it.
The whole course of history, and all its results, lay
open before him previously to creation, and lie open
before him now.
But here we encounter what is one of the hardest
problems in theology. It is not difficult to under
stand how God can know, not merely as a matter
of present reality, but of eternal prevision, the
whole working of the physical universe as physical.
He knows its constitution, and the precise working
of its forces under laws inherent in them, or im
pressed upon them through their mutual relations.
Although the mode of his knowledge, as eternal,
and its infinite extent, be incomprehensible, yet of
its possibility we can form a sufficiently clear idea.
We ourselves reason from causes to effects, with
entire confidence that results will be such as we ex
pect. But the universe contains not only physical
existences, not only organic and animal life, but
free agents, personal beings, with power to deter
mine their own course of action, and even by inter
ference to divert the mechanical energies of the
world from their natural courses, and direct them
to ends of their own. How could God know what
they would do, and what the result of their doing
would be, both on themselves and on physical
nature ? We are certain indeed that he knew all
the possible alternatives open to their choice ; for

OMNISCIENCE AND THE CONTINGENT 145
they, too, are his creatures, the products of his
power, constructed on those same eternal, neces
sary principles that are inherent in his own nature.
But could he also know which, of all the possibili
ties that would lie open to each free being, that
being would select and pursue ? Pursue, I said ;
as if persistence in a course once selected were
certain, which it was not. Man's will, we know
but too well, is often sheer arbitrariness, — mere
unreasonable caprice. This fact augments the dif
ficulty. It implies that there were not only unnum
bered possibilities of reasonable courses, steadfastly
maintained during life, but that these might have
to be multiplied by equally innumerable capricious
actions possible to each individual. In short, we
have reached a point where it seems that we must
either limit divine foreknowledge or deny the free
dom of intelligent beings.
To deny the freedom of the will would plunge
us into a sea of troubles, each one practically more
serious than that now pressing on us. If our wills
be not free, if they have not the power of willing
the contrary, then for us all responsibility is at an
end. Our freedom is a mere delusion. Our ac
tions, the bad as well as the good, can only be im
puted to the power that directly or indirectly con
trols our volitions, be it God or fate or matter.
We need not deny that human freedom is in many

146 THE BEING OF GOD
instances terribly weighted by inherited predisposi
tions, or by the destructive effects of habitual evil-
doing. It is not in any one of us what it would
be in a being sinless himself and sprung from sin
less ancestors. But all this, though it makes right-
doing difficult, does not destroy the consciousness
that we are free, or the conviction that right-doing
is possible. The alternate means of escaping the contradic
tion, that of assuming that with regard to future
actions of free agents the divine omniscience is
limited, is adopted not only by Aristotle, and many
of the Socinian and Arminian divines, but also by
Martensen, Rothe, and some other modern theolo
gians. But can that be regarded as a satisfactory
conclusion ? Let us see what it does and does not
imply. It does not seem necessarily to imply that
creation was a species of divine experiment, the
final result of which was not certainly known to
God ; so that we should have to conceive of him
as now watching the working of the universe, as
the chemist watches the result of a hitherto untried
combination of elements. That God was from
eternity absolutely certain of attaining the final
end he proposed to himself in creation is as firmly
held by the theologians to whom I have alluded as
by other Christians. They believe, too, that abso
lute, infallible Wisdom so planned creation as to

OMNISCIENCE AND THE CONTINGENT 147
adjust every part, relation, and force to the final
end to be attained. Nor was the freedom of free
intelligences, and the possibilities therein involved,
overlooked in the plan. On the contrary, it is evi
dent, even to our understanding, that the education
and development of beings endowed with freedom
is the central thought in the ultimate end and pur
pose of the whole universe. So far from being un
considered, they and their freedom must have been
the all-controlling element in the planning of di
vine wisdom. But does it necessarily follow from
this that all their future volitions and actions were
foreseen ? In one sense, yes ; in another, no. It
does follow that God must have eternally known
all the possibilities of finite free will and actions ;
and not only the possibilities of all free intelligence
en masse, but of each individual in particular.
He must have known the precise bounds of all
those free actions, and have provided for their con
tingent effects on the working of nature and the
realization of his ultimate purpose, by compen
sating, counterbalancing, and overruling agencies.
This much unquestionably follows from the abso
lute certainty that divine plans are perfect and
infallible. But it does not necessarily follow that
God must have foreseen the free decisions of each
and every free being. The certain realization of
the divine purpose is sufficiently guaranteed by his

148 THE BEING OF GOD
knowledge of the limits of the contingencies in
volved in free actions ; and it might be argued
that the glory of his infinite wisdom is more en
hanced by the presence of contingencies than he
could add to that of his knowledge by piercing
through to their secrets.
The two ways of solving the problem, usually re
sorted to, seem to me to rest on an entire misappre
hension of its origin. God's foreknowledge, we
are told, has no causative effect on the determina
tions of the created will, so that, e. g., his foreknow
ledge of Iscariot's treachery caused him to commit
it. Of course not. That result would follow, to
be sure, from the doctrine that in God there are
no real distinctions between his being and his attri
butes. If that were true, his knowledge and will
would be identical, and to know a thing would be
to will and produce it. But that position we have
already rejected as untenable. I may foresee that
A B will decline the bishopric of X, to which he
has been called ; but does that leave him less
free to accept it ? And though my knowledge
were absolutely certain, it would affect A B's free
will no more than if it were a mere conjecture.
God's foreknowledge, as such, absolutely certain
though it be, is in no way incompatible with hu
man freedom.
The other solution commonly proposed is that

SOURCE OF GOD'S KNOWLEDGE 149
in God there is, properly speaking, no foreknow
ledge. His knowledge is timeless — eternally pres
ent. He knows and sees all that has been, is, and
shall be, in one ever-present now. From all eter
nity he sees every volition of every free agent as
actually present and bringing forth its results.
The difficulty of conceiving how he could foresee
the contingent volitious of free beings is one of
our own making. It has no ground but our ina
bility to conceive of God's activities otherwise than
under the form of time. But this endeavor touches
the real difficulty no more than the other did.
That which gives rise to the difficulty is the
fact that we are compelled to find the source of
God's eternal knowledge in his self-consciousness.
All his knowledge must be knowledge of himself.
When as yet the earth was not, nor the heavens,
nor any created thing or spirit whatsoever, what
was there for God to know ? His own infinite full
ness, — himself, what he had in himself, and all
that might possibly become through himself. Ex
ternal existence there was none. He was the All,
— the Only ; the Ego without an external non-
Ego. As absolute Spirit, he had not even a body
which he could contemplate as in some sense objec
tive to himself. All his knowledge, being self-
knowledge, came not, like ours, through eye and
ear, or any analogous channels, but through self-

150 THE BEING OF GOD
inspection or self-contemplation. Now, we can
see with sufficient clearness that in this way he
could know everything except how free wills would
decide. The external universe, if free agents be
left out of the account, is the incorporation in ma
terial and physical forms of his own thought and
will. It is not self-deter mining, but moves in un
failing conformity to laws which are characteristics
of his own nature. He knows exactly what every
energy he has put into it can do, because it is his
own energy ; he knows exactly what it will do, be
cause it is still subject to his own will. But his
relation to the free agents of the universe is in
one respect essentially different. They, too, are
embodiments of his thought and will. The power
they possess is his ; they live, and move, and act,
because he furnishes them with life and strength.
So far they, like all other parts of the whole uni
verse, are still contained within the divine self-con
sciousness. To know what they can or will do, the
Maker has but to turn his thought in upon himself.
But by making them free, self-determining beings,
he enabled them to turn their power and activity
into whatever direction open to finite beings they
please. His own mental and moral characteristics
are in them, just as his mental characteristics are
in physical nature, but under conditions of free
dom. Just here our problem emerges. God could

AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM? 151
know all physical nature, physical man included,
by seif-inspection. He could know man as spirit,
offspring of his own Spirit, in the same way. He
could know all there is in him, and all that could
possibly come from him. But how could he know
what actually would come from him ? How could
he know what would be the volitions of the free
will in any particular instance ? Is not the will,
by its freedom, lifted out of the range of the di
vine prevision? This is the problem. And you
see it is not solved by saying that God's know
ledge is not foreknowledge, but knowledge of all
things as ever present in an eternal now. We
have already found that when the Infinite deals
with the finite, he must take it as finite, under the
forms of time and space. If the knowledge of an
act not yet performed is not foreknowledge, what
is it? But, not to insist on that, to have any
bearing on the question, the offered solution must
mean that God eternally knew every decision of
every free being, because he eternally beheld the
very making of those decisions; but in that case
he derived his knowledge, not from himself, but
from the objective act eternally present to him.
If God's knowledge is and always was knowledge
not derived from the observation of any external
object, but from his own self-consciousness, how
could he know that which his plan necessarily left
indeterminate ?

l&X THE BEING OF GOD
I do not see how the problem can ever be solved.
Let no one, however, misinterpret its consequences.
It does not impair the absolute independence of
God because, admitting that his foreknowledge
was and is limited by the exclusion from it of the
free volitions of intelligent beings, the limitation
was self-imposed. It results from the exercise of
creative omnipotence. Nor does it tend to shut
God out from the world if foreknowledge of con
tingent, free actions be denied him. If we have
gained nothing more by our inquiries, we have at
all events obtained a firm foundation for the doc
trine of the divine immanence in the universe.
Deism, in removing God to heaven, or in some
way locally separating him from creation, must
conceive of him as deriving his knowledge of the
world as it is by observation of it as something
wholly outside of himself. It must endow him
with something analogous to our perceptive facul
ties. And it cannot conceive of any divine influ
ence on the mechanical course of the world with
out interference in the manner called supernatural.
But in finding in the divine self-consciousness the
source of all divine knowledge, because all things
are and ever must be created emanations from him
self, we have found a rational conception of the
mode in which the creator and the creature are
connected. We have found that, as Sir Isaac New-

AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM? 153
ton expressed it, God is the sensorium of the uni
verse, i. e. the conscious centre of the whole crea
tion, where everything thought, felt, or done is
immediately perceived. To put it in other words,
God's self-consciousness is at the same time world-
consciousness. He is the immanent Spirit, the
truly omnipresent and omuiactive in all life and
existence. We have at last reached the full mean
ing of the words, " In him we live, and move, and
have our being." And this result stands steadfast,
even though we feel ourselves constrained to reject
the denial of divine foreknowledge of yet unmade
decisions of free agents.
So far as the problem is concerned, I think a
satisfactory solution unattainable. But though I
am not disposed to overrate the consequences in
volved in the conclusion to which it seems to lead,
I cannot bring myself to accept it. To suppose the
acts of free agents unknown to God before they
are performed seems to carry with it the necessity
of regarding all that part of the eternal plan which
relates to the spiritual history of mankind, their
education and redemption, as hypothetical. It pre
cludes the possibility of God's choosing individual
men for special service. How could Abraham,
Moses, David, Isaiah, be appointed leaders and
teachers of the world, when their moral self-deter
minations could not be foreseen ? Yet the Scrip-

154 THE BEING VJ!' UUl)
tures are full of such pre-appointments, and it is
impossible to see how the spiritual training of the
world could be carried on without them. How such
foreknowledge can coexist with freedom we can
not know. That it does coexist is testified to by
the universal God-consciousness of mankind. The
religious consciousness finds its own experiences
expressed by the psalmist when he says : —
" O Lord, thou searches); and knowest me.
Thou knowest my downsitting and uprising ;
Thou notest my thoughts before they are.
My doing and my resting thou dost sift,
And all my ways are open to thee.
For there is not a word on my tongue
But, lo ! thou Lord knowest it wholly.
Thou compassest me before and behind,
And holdest thy hand over me.
Too wonderful for me is such knowledge ;
It is high : I cannot attain unto it."
We have now finished the discussion of those
attributes into which our conceptions of time and
space on the one hand, and the relations of God to
the physical universe on the other, enter so largely.
There remain those in which his moral characteris
tics, and their relations to moral being, manifest
themselves. A full consideration of these would
be of extreme interest to me, and I doubt not to
you also. They carry us out of the rarefied atmo
sphere of difficult metaphysics into the more genial

GOD'S MORAL ATTRIBUTES 155
air of immediately practical relations. They fur
nish the basis of ethics, and of the doctrine of the
divine self-manifestation in providence, history, and
redemption. But, as this fact sufficiently shows,
they cover ground much too broad to be trav
ersed in the time at my command. I must, per
force, content myself with a bare outline, such as
the few remaining moments of this hour will per
mit, of their relations to God, to each other, and
to moral beings.
As leading attributes, I named Holiness and
Love, containing in themselves many others usu
ally separately enumerated. But these two are the
fundamental notes of God as a moral being.
First, then, let us briefly consider Holiness. It
belongs to God as the perfect moral being. We
have seen that moral truth, while not the creation
of God's will, is a determinative element of his
nature. He is moral truth. Now, when we at
tribute holiness to him, we mean that God, in the
absolute freedom of his will, is in perfect harmony
with himself, — that there is not the shadow of a
schism in his being; that all he thinks and wills
and does is in perfect yet free and unconstrained
conformity with the moral elements of his nature.
He is righteous, just, and true, — in one word, holy.
Being holy, as just defined, it follows that he
must maintain, and guard with unsleeping care, the

156 THE BEING OF GOD
ultimate moral purpose he had in view in the cre
ation of the world. What that purpose was, we
have already found. It was the production of a
class of finite, morally perfected beings, — the erec
tion of a kingdom of righteous personalities, not
merely created in his own image, but permanently
and wholly conformed to it. It is true, we inferred
this purpose only from our own world ; but we are
not thereby obliged to limit our conclusion to this
world. If other worlds exist, and other classes of
intelligent beings in them, the ultimate purpose of
their creation cannot be at variance with that we
found for this. There may be diversity, but there
must be unity throughout the universe. The ulti
mate kingdom may have varieties of moral beings,
but it must be one kingdom of righteousness, as its
King is one and holy. But in either case, whether
there be moral beings other than man or not, the
whole universe must have one single final end ; and
that end God, the holy one, must maintain and
guard. Hence it follows, further, that whatever free
agent sets himself against the moral order of the
universe, — the witness of which he has in his own
conscience, and the knowledge of which is con
stantly imparted to him, in social life, and by
God's messengers, prophets, apostles, preachers, and
teachers, — and thus, to the extent of his wrong-

GOD'S MORAL ATTRIBUTES 157
doing, impedes and endangers the realization of the
final end for which he and all things exist, must be
an object of divine disapprobation and punishment.
Thus we get that attribute which is commonly
spoken of as punitive justice, i. e. the divine right
eousness in relation to sin. Its counterpart is
righteousness in relation to well-doing ; and both
together mark God as just in all his dealings with
all his creatures.
One word concerning Love. Love is the queen
of all God's moral attributes. It includes them
all, and pervades them all. That striking dictum
of St. John, which in three words expresses what
all the wisdom of mankind had never found, " God
is Love," is true in every sense in which it can be
taken. There is no one attribute, such as infinity
or eternity, from which we logically derive the con
ception of God as love. It can be found in no
thought less comprehensive than the idea of the
absolutely perfect moral being. The only defini
tion of which in all its forms and manifestations
it admits is that of self-impartation. There is in
God an ever-active eagerness to go out of himself,
to give of his fullness to others ; and that is love.
In the sphere of man's physical life, divine love
manifests itself as kindness, benevolence, paternal
solicitude. Its higher revelations fall within the
sphere of the spiritual life, and, since man is sin-

158 THE BEING OF GOD
ful and miserable, especially in the sphere of re
demption. From this it is evident that, as the
world never knew that God is love until the com
ing of Christ, so this love, as a divine attribute,
cannot be properly considered apart from Christ
and his work as the highest form of the divine
self-impartation. Longsuffering, mercy, grace, all
that St. Paul includes in the " unsearchable riches
of Christ," are contained in it.

LECTURE VII.
THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO
THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRDttTY.
When in the first part of the creed, God is des
ignated as the Father, the relation thereby intended
is that which he sustains to the Son, named in the
second part. This is evident from the description
of the Son as the " onfo/-begotten Son," by which
every other species of sonship than that which
belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord is excluded.
Moreover, the third part of the creed, occupied
with the Holy Ghost and the sphere of his activity,
clearly implies that the several terms Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost are used in their mutually corre
lated sense. The sum of Christian belief is here
grouped about the three names of the baptismal
formula, which must be understood as there used.
Our next topic, therefore, must be the doctrine of
the Trinity.
Now it would be comparatively easy for me to
give an exposition of the doctrine, and the argu
ments usually advanced in support of it. But if
I am not very much mistaken, that is not all you

160 THE BEING OF GOD
need or would wish. You do not wish me to take
this grandest problem that can be presented to
human thought, and work it out before you accord
ing to the methods of ordinary theological text
books, without first pointing out, to the best of
my ability, the postulates that lie at the base of
the demonstration, if I may so call it. You do not
merely want to know what the church believes,
but how to vitalize that belief as a personal convic
tion. You wish to know how the church itself
came to believe it, and that in the face of deter
mined, prolonged, and frequently renewed opposi
tion from within and without. A belief so tri
umphantly battle-strong must have had a basis of
absolute certainty. What was that basis ?
It cannot have been furnished by the reason,
through any apriori methods of demonstrating the
Trinity. It is undoubtedly true that the philoso
phical effort to construct the doctrine of God de
rives welcome aid and relief from the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity. But it is one thing to per
ceive the rationality of a doctrine once formulated,
and a very different thing to discover and estab
lish it. Besides, it must not be forgotten that the
belief of the church, so far as it is the belief of
the whole church, is the belief, not of her great
minds and trained intellects alone, but also of the
simple, uneducated, and ignorant. And in these

GROUND OF PERSONAL FAITH 161
true belief, personal conviction, can never rest on
the mere assurance of the others that such a thing
is true. He who professes faith in the Triune
God for no other reason than that the catechism
has taught him, and that his teachers once a year
at least renew the assurance, that God is Triune,
does not really believe it. It simply lies in him as
a sort of deposit, which he may indeed faithfully
preserve even at the price of his life, while yet it
is never a living, active force within him. It stirs
neither his thoughts nor his emotions. It is a
treasure of the value of which he has no concep
tion. It is an item of the faith he must profess in
order to be saved, or, what in these days is per
haps as likely to be his feeling, in order to be a
" good Churchman." But if the doctrine had had
no other confessors, it and the church that teaches
it would have perished long since.
The doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a di
vinely revealed doctrine. And now some are per
haps ready to conclude that the basis for personal
conviction of which we are in search must be found
in the Scriptures. To that also I must say, No.
Do not charge me with disloyalty to the Book di
vine before I have placed my whole thought before
you. I say, No. He who professes faith in the
Trinity, for no other reason than that he finds
it taught in Scripture, does not really believe it.

lOSS THE BEING UF UUV
It is in him as much a dead deposit as though he
derived it from the catechism or his teacher. And
in proof of that position I cite the facility with
which a large proportion of a nominally Trinita
rian population, here in New England, abandoned
the doctrine and became Unitarians at the close of
the last and the beginning of the present century.
As soon as a breeze of new doctrine sprang up,
it blew away the Trinitarian belief, even while it
left the infallibility of the Scriptures unimpugned.
People merely said, We have misunderstood the
Scriptures. Besides, when I say that the doctrine of the
Trinity is a revealed doctrine, I do not mean that
it is revealed by the Scriptures. Revelation pre
cedes Scripture. God did not reveal the truth by
moving holy men to write it with pen and ink on
paper ; he first revealed it in historical facts, and
then holy men were moved to write the facts from
which the doctrine springs. The doctrine itself,
in the form in which the church holds it, is not to
be found in the Scriptures. It took four centuries
to formulate it. Not even the Council of Nicaea,
but that of Constantinople, held in A. D. 381, gave
it the form in which we recite it. God in history
made the revelation ; God in Scripture, through
evangelists and apostles, recorded the great facts ;
and God in the church, through the divinely illu-

THE TRINITY -HOW REVEALED 163
minated intellects of the Christian fathers, inter
preted the facts, placed the principles contained in
them into correlation with the divine nature or be
ing, and expressed the result in terms of intellec
tual conceptions. If, therefore, the basis of per
sonal conviction is to be found in testimony, it
must be sought, not only in the Scriptures of the
first century, but also in the writings of the second,
third, and fourth centuries. And if inspiration
of testifiers can turn their testimony into immedi
ate living certainty for him who hears it, without
other aid, that quality belongs to the fathers of the
church, technically so called, as Well as to apostles
and evangelists ; for both belong to the one church
of the living God, whieh is the " house of God,"
" the pillar and ground of the truth," because in
it the God of truth by his Spirit dwells and works.
Do not think that in this I am enunciating any
thing like the Roman Catholic or Cyprianic con
ceptions of the church ; far from it. I am only
expressing my belief in the immanence of God in
his church. However, on this I cannot dwell just
now. The conclusion at which I aim is simply
this : If inspiration is to be the last basis of per
sonal Christian conviction, we must for the doc
trine of the Trinity rely on the fathers who com
pleted it as well as on the apostles who began
it ; but that inspiration, the inspiration of another,

164 THE BEING OF GOD
cannot in and of itself produce the certainty of a
full and reasonable conviction in any human mind.
If it can, how do you account for the fact that the
most moving pictures of divine love, and the most
terrifying exhibitions of sin and its results, may
be presented to a congregation of self-confessed
sinners, with all the authority of Holy Writ, and
yet leave the greater part cold and unmoved ?
How great the distance is between truth enter
tained by the mind on the guaranty of external
authority, and truth held on the certainty produced
by immediate personal conviction, has been felt all
through the history of the church. In Clement
of Alexandria it manifests itself in the division of
Christians into believers and gnostics, the knowers.
Augustine, strongly as he insists on unquestioning
submission to the divine authority of revelation in
the Scriptures and in the church, nevertheless ac
knowledges the unsatisfactory character of beliefs
thus grounded, by saying : " Faith [i. e. belief on
authority, a very different thing from the " faith " of
the New Testament] precedes knowledge : believe
in order that you may understand." Another say
ing of Augustine's is : " Faith seeks — the intellect
finds." Evidently faith in the sense of belief on
authority is, according to Augustine, defective in
the certainty of knowledge, yet leads to it. But
how it leads to it, what there is to bridge the

THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 165
chasm between these, he fails to indicate. This
omission, however, is supplied by a striking apho
rism of Anselm, in his book "On the Trinity
against the Blasphemies of Roscelin," although
he made no practical use of it in his discussions.
The aphorism is this : " If you do not believe, you
cannot experience ; if you do not experience, you
cannot understand." Experience, then, is the basis
of personal conviction ! That is to say, the father
of mediaeval scholasticism anticipates the doctrine
of modern theology that the Christian faith has
its living basis in the Christian consciousness.
The words differ, — consciousness and experience,
— the thing is identical. That which makes us
certain of the doctrine of the Trinity, and of all
other doctrines peculiar to Christianity, is, in the
last analysis, not rational demonstration, nor reli
ance on the infallibility of the Scriptures or of the
church, but on that immediate consciousness which
results from personal experience.
The vital importance of this conclusion, and the
fact that it is still far from universal recognition
in the theology of this country, make a fuller ex
position of it necessary. It is not anything new.
Luther and the old Protestant dogmatic theolo
gians found a similar principle in the words of St.
Paul : " The Spirit himself beareth witness with
our spirit that we are the sons of God." J But the
1 Cf . Hagenbach, Hist, of Doctrines, ii. 245, n. 6.

166 THE BEING OF GOD
later theology, and not least the American theol
ogy, departed from this principle, — probably be
cause it feared to detract from the supremacy of
Scripture, with which it has nothing to do, — and
constructed its whole system of certitude in reli
gious matters on what are essentially deistical lines.
We believe, it said, because God has spoken in the
Bible ; and we believe that God has spoken in the
Bible, because we can prove it by long and intri
cate courses of reasoning. But what under this
plan becomes of the untutored multitude, upon
whom all this reasoning, be it never so convincing
to him who can follow it, is lost ? Can they never
attain to the rest and peace of certainty? Must
they forever be a sort of plebeian caste in the com
monwealth of religion ? If the Scriptures had not
a tenfold stronger support in the consciousness of
the Christian people than they have in the books
of theologians on the " Evidences of Christianity,"
their practical power would be small indeed.
But let us proceed to study this Christian con
sciousness more directly. How does it arise ?
What brings it into action ? If it be conscious
ness, what is it conscious of ? With regard to the
term " consciousness," it is not in all respects per
fectly adequate to the use made of it. We ordi
narily employ it to denote knowledge of our own
mental acts, conditions, and feelings, — self-con-

THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 167
sciousness, i. e. consciousness of what is or occurs
in the self. But this does not cover all we mean by
it in the phrase " Christian consciousness." There
we use the term also in its widest etymological
sense of knowledge shared with another or others.
Being thus warned of the elasticity of the word,
we shall find no serious difficulty in the use of it.
The Christian, or rather the religious consciousness,
— for what I am now to speak of is characteristic
of man as a religious being, — is, first of all,
communion, consisting in mutual knowing, — con
sciousness, — between the human personality and
the divine. God manifests (reveals) himself, and
man apprehends the revelation, i. e. apprehends
God as being, and as being such as he manifests
himself, e. g. the omnipotent, the omnipresent, the
omniscient, the moral. Man becomes cognizant on
the one hand of God as knowing, and knowing him,
— man ; and on the other, of himself as knowing
God so far forth as he manifests himself. In this
earliest form, the religious consciousness belongs to
what is usually called the stage of natural religion.
It marks man as a God-conscious being. It gives
rise to various perceptions and feelings, — predomi
nantly to the perception of God's infinite greatness
and to the sense of fear. For, knowing himself a
sinner against eternal moral truth, and God as spot
less purity and guardian of moral right, he is con-

108 THE BM1NG UJf GUI)
scious of ill-desert, and knows that God must judge
him as he judges himself. Hence the feeling not
merely of awful reverence, — such as even innocence
must experience in the presence of so great a God,
and which is essentially elevating and quickening,
— but of prostrating fear and apprehension, the
vain impulse to flee from the omnipresent and to
hide from the omniscient. This is by -no means the
only content of the sinful, natural, religious con
sciousness, but its most marked feature in practical
experience. And it is manifest that it must inter
pose a barrier to free intercommunion between
God and man. Man has lost the absolutely fear
less, glad, self-yielding trustfulness, the wholly
blissful sense of dependence on God, which consti
tute the ideal relation between him and God. He
wanders like an outcast from his father's house
and home, unhappy, full of distrust, and, what is
worse than all, with his perverted selfhood assert
ing itself in obstinacy and rebellion. A broken
human friendship may help to illustrate the sit
uation. What breach is more irreparable and in
surmountable than that which is opened by a dis
rupted, more than brotherly unity ? "A brother
offended is harder to be won than a strong city,
and their contentions are like the bars of a castle."
The perfection of the mutual adaptation and previ
ous oneness becomes the strongest difficulty in the

NEED OF A REMEDIAL REVELATION 169
way of reconciliation. Similar to this is the rela
tion of sinful man to God; only, the disruption
and the difficulties in the way of its removal are
all of his own making, and derive their evil power
from him alone.
This brief statement of the religious conscious
ness and its contents contains three points : —
First. That there is in man a natural capacity
for communion with God. It is to this that God
addresses himself in all his revelations, of whatso
ever form. It includes, of course, man's ability to
recognize the revelation as divine by immediate
intuition, and to respond to it.
Secondly. That since man is a sinner, the divine
revelation must assume a predominantly remedial,
reconciling, restoring character. God must, in
some way, reconcile the world unto himself. There
must be a disclosure of divine qualities not dis
closed in nature, — qualities of which sinless be
ings might have remained forever ignorant, such
as compassion, mercy, unchanging, self-sacrificing
love, all of them eternally present in God, yet
truly knowable to finite beings only through their
active exhibition. And yet, as the knowledge of
them, and the reproduction of them by finite crea
tures in themselves, was necessary to their realiz
ing the divine ideal of perfect finite moral beings,
we have here incidentally come across what may

170 THE BEING OF GOD
be regarded as the reason why God permitted sin
to come into existence.
Finally. While sin brought with it the neces
sity for a reconciling revelation, the results of sin,
the alienation of man from God, and the interposi
tion by him of obstacles in the way of that im
mediate heart to heart and mind to mind commu
nion with God, of which by nature he is capable,
made it necessary that this reconciling revelation
should open for itself a new way to the mind and
heart of man ; that God should break through
time and space, present himself to man in human
form, under all the limitations of the finite nature,
but with all the unimpaired fullness of divine life
and love, as the compassionate, the merciful, the
Father, Friend, and Saviour. That must come to
pass which St. Paul says did come to pass, " God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself."
In other words, revelation, considered only as re
medial, must be historical. It could not be mere
instruction through the medium of language. Lan
guage could convey to him little beyond what he
already found given in creation and his own na
ture. It could never give him anything like ade
quate conceptions of divine compassion and love.
Even the imperfect ideas entertained of these by
Old Testament writers came through the partial
exhibitions of them in the Old Testament history.

HISTORICAL REVELATION DEFINED 171
And most assuredly no mere instructing revelation
could infuse new spiritual life and power into the
shattered soul. That can only be effected by a
real impartation of creative power. Hence the
effect of the Christian revelation is recognized and
spoken of as a new creation, and the restored soul
as a " new creature." There has been, and there
is constantly going on, an outflow of divine life
every whit as real and literally true as that of
which man's first creation was the result. The
historical character of the Christian revelation is
manifest from the New Testament itself. Half of
the book is simply historical narrative, and the
other half is so full of the facts related in the first
that it would be meaningless without them.
The question now is, How is the religious con
sciousness affected by the historical self-revelation
of God of which Christ is the centre ? How does
it reach the individual, — how does it touch, not
merely his outward senses, but his inner self ?
How does it transform him, — make a new creature
of him ?
The first step evidently is that he be informed of
the facts of the revelation, so far as they took place
once for all. This suggests a closer definition of
what constitutes an historical revelation. It is a
revelation the essential element in which is that
God manifests himself in acts; that he does not

172 THE BEING OF GOD
merely communicate thoughts to man, but works
among men, on men, and in men. Part of these
acts, the historical in the narrower, more usual
sense of the term, took place once for all, such as
the birth of the Incarnate Logos, the works of be
neficence he wrought, the discourses he delivered,
his passion, death, resurrection, ascension, — all
that belongs to the Saviour's earthly work and
life. These may be classed as externally historical
and general. The other part, the internally histor
ical and individual part as it may be called, is of
perpetual recurrence. It consists of acts wrought
by the Divine Spirit directly on the human spirit.
What they are will come out in the sequel. Re
turning now to the question proposed, I say that
the first step in bringing the revealing God and
the religious consciousness of the sinner into con
tact is to inform the latter of the facts of the ex
ternally historical revelation. Here the Scriptures
find their proper place. They not only contain a
record of the facts, but they interpret them, and
place them in their relations to each other and to
God's eternal purpose. And yet, with all their di
vine excellences, they cannot tell their story to the
best advantage and with the most effective power,
without the living voice and heart of one who him
self has experienced the power of the divine acts,
— in whom Christ's words and works again take

METHOD OF PERSONAL REVELATION 173
on flesh and blood. St. Paul tells how the facts
must be presented when, writing to the Galatians,
he says that Christ had been depicted before their
very eyes as the Crucified. Thus vividly let the
whole history of God's acts in Christ, and of the
words of him who spoke as never man spake, be
reproduced, not as to external form only, but as to
their innermost life and spirit, and what will be
the effect on the hearer ? That will depend on his
spiritual condition. If he has not yet felt the mis
ery of his estate, if he is still busy wasting his Fa
ther's goods in riotous living, has not yet been re
duced to the swine's food, is not yet aware of the
utter spiritual bankruptcy that is upon him, he
will be left as he was found. The preparatory dis
pensation of law, captivity, and suffering, for him
is not yet ended. The fullness of time, in which
the Incarnate Word can appear, is for him not yet
come. But on the poor in spirit, on him who is
aware of all his inward emptiness, whose prideful
self-assertion has broken down under the galling
consciousness of captivity to the powers of sin and
death, who feels the horror of having lifted his
hand against the final ends of Infinite Truth and
Goodness, who would gladly be the least of all
God's creatures if he might but feel himself in free
and peaceful accord with all that is true and good,
— what will be the effect on him ? Is it not al
ways that expressed by the well-known hymn ? —

1|<± JilJV HJ!jUy\jr \JJ! \i\JU
" Thy love unknown
Has broken every barrier down ;
Now to be thine, yea, thine alone,
0 Lamb of God, I come ! "
The new disclosures of the Father's qualities in
and through the Son, the pity that knows no lim
its, the leve that did not hesitate to send the Son
in search of the lost, to divest itself in that Son of
the awful form of Deity, ay, to descend to death
and the grave, — this love, brought home to the
religious consciousness, draws from it the joyous
response, I come, and thereby opens once more the
long-closed avenues of immediate communion be
tween the Father and the sinful but repentant
spirit. That cry, " I come," is the birth-cry of
faith, the first expression of restored trust and
confidence. Thus the external general revelation has pro
duced its effect. It has restored communion be
tween the Infinite and the finite ; and let us also
note that it has begun the change of the religious
consciousness common to all men into the specific
form of the Christian consciousness. But the his
torical revelation is not yet complete. There now
follow that class of divine manifestations which I
have named the internal individual revelation, —
the operations of grace, as the theologians often
say. As they enter into the life of the individual,

METHOD OF PERSONAL REVELATION 175
they are necessarily repeated for each individual.
It is not easy to enumerate or describe them. We
can know them only through their effects. For
the same reason, it is not possible to know whether
they be, so to speak, separate visitations of divine
power, or should rather be conceived as results of
the abiding presence of the Divine Spirit in and
with the human spirit. The latter seems to be the
Scriptural view, and agrees best with the divine
omnipresence. To speak in the language of St.
Paul, when the penitent turns to Him in faith,
God sends into his soul the Spirit of his Son,
whereby he cries Abba Father. That act of power
is the divine answer to the sinner's faith. Its re
sult is the consciousness of forgiveness and restora
tion to divine favor which by sin was felt to be lost
and forfeited. The indwelling Spirit replaces the
old fear of God by active love for God, and joins,
according to the apostle's representation, with the
soul itself in affirming its sonship to God (Rom. v.
5 ; viii. 16). And that this sonship may be real,
and not merely titular, the creative touch of the
Almighty renovates the decayed powers of the
spiritual nature, restores the right balance between
the spiritual and physical, the reason and the ap
petites, and reinstates the higher in authority over
the lower. Hence St. Paul says, " We are God's
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good

176 THE BEING OF GOD
works." The fruits of the Spirit, he says again,
are love, joy, peace, — general Christian habits of
mind, as Lightfoot explains ; longsuffering, kind
ness, beneficence, — virtues that come out in social
life ; faithfulness, meekness, temperance, — princi
ples of all-sided application to conduct.
Now it cannot be questioned that all these re
sults are such as must affect the consciousness of
the subject. They are matters of experience, and
therefore verifiable. They cannot be figments of
the imagination, born of apostolic enthusiasm, and
reproduced now and then in mystically inclined in
dividuals. If that were the case, all faith in their
reality must have perished centuries ere now. Nor
are they of such a nature that the individual sub
ject of them can easily mistake them. He has the
same criterion by which to judge of their reality
which the man in the gospel applied who said :
" One thing I know, — that whereas I was blind, I
now see." The Christian can bring his experiences
to a similar test. And when he does, can there be
doubt what its effect will be on his certainty con
cerning the doctrines involved in them? When
he reflects that God, whom he once dreaded as
the infinitely righteous, has now become to his
thought the God of infinite compassion and bound
less love, — a conception never reached by man ;
that he himself, once a wretched wanderer, with-

THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 177
out God and without hope in the world, has been
lifted into the glorious liberty of the children of
God, — can he doubt that the Christ whose works
and words produced this change, and gave him, the
captive of sin and death, the power to become a
son of God, is indeed the eternal Son, the express
image of the Father, who in him was reconciling
the world to himself? When he contrasts his
former moral impotence, the feebleness of his will
to resist temptation, which forced him to exclaim,
" Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me
from the body of this death ! " with the new spirit
ual energies that now pervade his being, so that he
spends his days in joyous service to God and God's
creatures, and feels "I can do all things through
Christ who strengtheneth me," can he hesitate to
accept the apostolic teaching concerning the new
creation by the Holy Spirit ? Manifestly, the
Christian consciousness is not certain of its own
experiences only, but also of the facts by which
those experiences are produced, and consequently
of the doctrines which state those facts.
True, it is possible to conceive of the facts as
truly apprehended and truly described in single dis
jointed propositions, and yet entertain misgivings
as to the validity and certainty of the combina
tion of these elements in larger dogmatic state
ments. The facts that show the divine power of

178 THE BEING OF GOD
Christ may be incontestable, and the deduction
made from them that Christ is God Incarnate may
also be true. So the results produced by the Holy
Ghost may be rightly held to infer the Deity of
the Holy Ghost ; but can we also repose confidently
on the further inference that he is a personal
agent? And if we can, what reason have we to
rely upon the further reasoning that Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost are so related in one Triunity as
the church teaches ? Does not the attesting function
of the Christian consciousness cease to have any
value here? Well, suppose it did? No one, I
believe, is in perishing need of absolute certainty
on all points of dogma. With the great practical
verities of the Christian faith secure, uncertainty as
to our modes of combining them in intellectual ap
prehensions is of no great practical moment. But
the extent of this uncertainty is by no means so
unlimited as we sometimes think. When you com
pare dogmatic system with dogmatic system, — tak
ing, of course, the systems, not of isolated or eccen
tric individuals, but of persons who, like Dr. Hodge,
for instance, stand forth as classic representatives
of the theological consciousness of large communi
ties of Christians, — you find great variety in form
and method, and no little divergence on points of
remoter bearing, but, after all, substantial unity in
the apprehension of the grand outlines of Christian

THE COMMON CONSCIOUSNESS 179
truth. And here, too, the Christian consciousness
comes into play. It has one phase which I have
not yet brought out. It is, as already observed, fel
lowship in knowledge, — fellowship, first with God,
but secondly with men of like Christian spirit.
The Christian community realizes the promise of
the Redeemer to send the Spirit of Truth to guide
his people into truth. That condition is brought
about in the living church of the living God to
which the prophet looked forward when he prom
ised Jerusalem, — then in the dust of humiliation,
— "All thy children shall be taught of God."
The church, — and, mind you, I use this term in no
narrow, artificially restricted sense, — the church is
not a human society, held together by a constitu
tion and by-laws ; it is, so far as it really exists,
the sphere in which the Holy Ghost dwells and
works. Under his efficacious power, thinking as
well as living — I should say thinking as a promi
nent element in living — is guided no less than the
will and the affections. How could it be otherwise ?
If the new creation of the soul by divine power be
real, how can it fail to reach the mind as well as
the spirit ? Not to add to the natural endowment,
but to aid and develop it. It sets it free from the
disturbing influence of sin, which previously con
fused and darkened it, and made it uncongenial
with spiritual truth, — and with that alone are we

180 THE BEING OF GOD
here concerned. St. Paul, whose profound personal
experience, if nothing else, gives authority to his
words, declares that " the natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are
foolishness unto him," — yes, foolishness, just as
music is foolishness to the man who has no ear ;
" neither can he know them, because they are spir
itually discerned." The Saviour expresses the
same truth when he says, " If any man be willing
to do the will of God, he shall know of the doc
trine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak
of myself." Turn the natural man into the spirit
ual, make him willing to do the will of God, — the
very work accomplished in the renewal by the Holy
Ghost, — and you open all his latent powers of
spiritual insight and intuition. His natural abili
ties are quickened, he is made confident and eager,
yet reverent and docile, because his judgment is
sobered. Place such a person in society with like-
minded fellows, and there arises an externally inde
terminable, perhaps, but none the less real, organic
body, of which the Holy Ghost is the all-animating
soul, who uses each member according to his con
nate aptitudes for service to the whole. There are
diversities of operations : to one is given the word
of wisdom, — the power of unfolding and enforcing
truth for immediately practical uses ; to another,
the word of knowledge, — the deeper speculative

THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 181
apprehension of truth in its manifold relations;
but it is the Spirit of God that worketh all in all.
This doctrine, so characteristic of St. Paul's whole
conception of Christianity, and so far-reaching in
its results, is but the unavoidable corollary of the
fundamental experience that through faith man is
not only justified, but new-created, brought back to
his normal self and to his normal relations of inter
communion with God and his fellow-men. Do we,
then, make the church infallible? By no means.
Infallibility would imply the destruction by the
Spirit of the freedom and personality of the indi
vidual or congregation in whom he dwells. The
Holy Ghost is not a despotic ruler, but a gentle,
patient teacher. But he is ever-present ; and as
surely as the Church of God has never ceased to be,
so surely does he exercise in it his teaching, guid
ing function.
The bearing of this conception of the church as
a God-taught body, on the results of its dogma-
building function, is obvious. It does not make
creeds, and articles of faith, or systems of theology
infallible, but it does insure, beyond peradventure,
that nothing can become part and parcel of the
church's living, permanent conviction that has not
its roots deep down in the experience of the Chris
tian soul. Teachers may err, one here, another
there ; but the free interchange of thought, carried

182 THE BEING OF GOD
on in the spirit of Christ, eliminates the error and
makes the truth more evident and clear. And on
the other hand, nothing that is so rooted in the
Christian consciousness can be permanently sur
rendered or misapprehended. It may for a time
drop out of sight, yea, be discarded as ancient
error. For the church, like the waiting virgins of
the parable, may fall asleep. The divine life is
in human vessels. Sleep may even be necessary
under these finite conditions. But the Divine
Spirit neither sleeps nor slumbers. He but awaits
the favorable conjunction, the time and season ap
pointed of the Father, to invigorate the old con
sciousness and restore the old truth to its rightful
place and efficacy.
It has doubtless occurred to some of you, as an
objection to what has been advanced, that the
Christian experience of most of us, who have been
brought up in the Christian community, lacks the
vividness, the overwhelming intensity, which char
acterized that of the early church. That is true.
The age of the apostles and Christian fathers was
one of mighty, creative energy. It produced in the
individual and in society changes of revolutionary
violence. It called forth embittered intellectual
combats and physical persecutions, that raised the
Christian consciousness to the highest pitch of self-
assertion. It was that that conquered the wisdom

TYPES OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 183
of the heathen world and overthrew its gods, and
illumined the martyr's face with a sheen of glory
brighter than the flames that enwrapped his body.
The experience of most Christians of later days is
undoubtedly of a different type.
But though of a different type, it is not less real.
Most of us can probably make less direct applica
tion of the contrast between the prodigal herding
swine and the prodigal reinstated in his father's
home. If we have a consciousness of an irreligious
part of life, — and who has not ? for the part or
parts need not to cover years of time, — it brings
back to us the sense of weariness, emptiness, dis
harmony, such as underlies the query seriously
asked by some, Whether life be worth living. It
is the consciousness of an essentially negative, dead
state of the soul. Compare with that the con
sciousness of your best days or hours, which is one
of spiritual life and vigor, of ready response to the
good and true, of comfort in disappointment and
cheerful patience in affliction or adversity, and you
will find that you too have an immovable basis of
certainty within yourself. Indeed, in more than
one respect your experience is far preferable to
one of the more obtrusive type, which is more lia
ble to prove delusive and transient.
Besides, the Christian, like any other communal
consciousness, comes to its fullest and clearest de-

184 TttJS li&XJXG VV GVJJ
velopment only in the few. Nations, schools of
thought, professions even, and trade-guilds, have
peculiar forms of consciousness, growing out of
peculiar experiences. And all likewise have their
leaders and prophets, — individuals who most
clearly feel and apprehend the life of the particu
lar body, and all that that life includes. The na
tion finds them in its patriotic heroes, statesmen,
and orators ; the school, in its founders, teachers,
and authors ; the profession or trade-guild, in those
who best express by precept and example what all
feel to be the ideal of their pursuit. So in the
Christian commonwealth there are those in whom
the life of the whole manifests itself with extraor
dinary intensity and perfection. In them the
power of sin and guilt, the renovating effects of
Christ's redemption, the animating indwelling of
the Spirit, are attended by experiences equal in
force and definiteness to any impressions made on
the consciousness through the outer senses. It is
these who, in their several degrees and according
to their other endowments, in official stations or as
private members, as pastors, preachers, teachers,
hymn - writers, singers, devout worshipers, busy
workers, cheerful sufferers, — whatsoever, whereso
ever they be, — become to others the interpreters
of those phenomena of inner spirit-life which their
own consciousness presents in obscurer forms.

DOGMATIC THEOLOGY 185
Thus aided by the life and spirit of the whole
body, they, too, are able to know of the doctrine
that it is of God.
But, it may be asked, must we then conclude
that all those who dissent from the doctrine of the
Trinity, as accepted by Christendom at large, are
without the pale of the Christian family? Or, to
change from the abstract to the concrete, must we
hold that no Arian or Socinian can have the wit
ness of the Spirit that he is a child of God ? — that,
as the so-called Athanasian symbol says, not firmly
believing the Catholic faith, he cannot be saved ?
Far from it ! That creed itself shows how easily
the speculative faculty, divorcing itself from the
Christian consciousness, may either go beyond or
contravene its testimony. That is precisely what
happened in New England Unitarianism. It ig
nored the Christian consciousness of the ages, and
trusted to the speculative reason to reconstruct the
Christian doctrine. But an error of the head does
not necessarily imply an unrenovated soul. The
old theology is full of speculative errors. The
worst of all, perhaps, is that confusion of saving
faith with the acceptance of a dogmatic system,
which goes back almost to the age of the apostles,
and inspires the damnatory utterances of the Atha-
uasian creed. But faith, true faith, the trustful re
sponse of the human soul to the self-revealing love

186 THE BEING OF GOD
of God, lived notwithstanding the error. Specula
tive theology has its uses, great and valuable ; but
system may follow system, in a process of endless
upbuilding and down-tearing, without serious dam
age to anybody. It is but the intellectually reared
superstructure ; the facts and doctrines attested by
the Christian consciousness furnish the divine foun
dations. The superstructure may fall every hun
dred years ; the foundations are eternal.1
I have utterly failed of my aim in this lecture
if I have not helped some of you to a clearer ap
prehension of what is or is not involved in the ac
ceptance or rejection of any theories concerning
the inspiration and absolute infallibility of the
Scriptures. There is probably nothing that in
volves many a young student of theology in such
serious mental difficulty, not to say distress, as the
finding that the critical study of the Bible un
settles the notions concerning the sacred volume
which he previously held. It takes him a good
while to find himself in those that are offered in
their place. It seems like the subversion of his
dearest treasure, — like the extinguishment of the
1 I am glad to call attention to a book published since this lec
ture was written, — The Evidence of Christian Experience, Ely
Lectures for 1890, by Professor Stearns, of the Bangor Theolo
gical Seminary.

AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURES. 187
one light that promised to guide his feet in safety
through the labyrinth of error and darkness. But
there lies his mistake. What is taken away and
what is offered in its place are both theories, —
mere theories. It is impossible to construct an ab
solutely certain theory on the subject ; it may be
impossible to construct one that shall be even neg
atively unobjectionable, or one that will explain all
the phenomena to be explained. But no truth is
thereby endangered. Was there ever a surer,
more boldly triumphant faith than Luther's ? Yet
we all know with what freedom he read the sacred
books. Christianity is not such a tender, exotic
plant that its life depends on any theories of ours.
It is not such a mechanically built-up structure of
ideas and conceptions that it must needs rest on
the foundations of an infallible book. It is the
life of God in humanity, through its union with
the Son. Not the book bears it, but it bears the
book. And. yet the book is of enduring normative
authority. It gives the facts of the revelation of
God in the Son, together with an authentic though
incomplete interpretation of those facts by the
Christian consciousness of the creative period.
The facts no one can alter ; and every phase and
content of the Christian consciousness of later days
must legitimatize itself by its harmony with, and
direct lineal descent from, that of the apostolic age.

LECTURE VIII.
THE TRINITY: ITS HISTORICAL REVELATION.
The statement of the doctrine of the Trinity,
with which we are all most familiar, is that im
plied in the opening petitions of the Litany. We
address successively God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Ghost, as of equal power and
mercy, and then call upon " the Holy, blessed, and
glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God."
The first of the Thirty-nine Articles is of the same
tenor : beginning with the existence, attributes, and
works of " one living and true God," it goes on to
declare that in the " unity of this Godhead there be
three Persons, of one substance, power, and eter
nity ; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
The older creeds, especially the Niceno-Constanti-
nopolitan and the Athanasian, present similar state
ments in more expanded form, and seek to guard
them against misapprehension and perversion, but
neither add to their contents nor undertake to ex
plain them. We may therefore define the doctrine
which is now to occupy our attention as the doc
trine of three persons in one God ; or, better, as

DOCTRINE OF TRINITY— " PERSON" 189
the doctrine which teaches us to conceive of God
as the Triune Being. A fuller definition would be
of little service to us at present. An intelligible
definition presupposes the fullest practicable survey
of that which is to be defined. One stumbling-
block, however, already verbally removed by the
substitution of the words, "God as the Triune
Being," for the phrase, " three Persons and one
God," must detain us yet a moment. The word
" person " is not to be understood in the sense of
an individual self. That would justify the arith
metical objection : How can three be one ? It does
not imply that there are three personalities, three
different wills or egos, in the Divine Being. There
is but one person in God, in the sense in which we
now use the word ; but in the one divine person
ality there are three different modes of subsistence,
and to these the Latin fathers applied the term
persona, while the Greeks used hypostasis. It was
impossible to find a term in either language per
fectly adapted to describe a relation in the Divine
Being of which men had no experimental know
ledge. Whatever word was taken must be spe
cially defined to suit the emergency. But it may
be doubted whether the Latins would have taken
" person," if that word had had for them the same
sense it has for us. It meant originally a mask,
and then the part or character in a play repre-

XO.JH DJUXISG \J2 \jr\JJJ

sented by an actor. And though it also came to
mean an individual, it did not seize on the self
hood of the individual, so as to make that its prom
inent content. It was used, much as the uneducated
use it now, very indefinitely. You look in vain in
any lexicon of classical Latin for the word perso-
nalitas. Latin psychology had not reached the
point where the word became necessary. When,
then, we speak of three persons in the Godhead, let
it be understood that it means something very dif
ferent from tri-personality. What that something
is, we shall better be able to see hereafter.
I shall treat of the doctrine of the Trinity under
two heads: 1. The history of its revelation to
and apprehension by the Christian consciousness ;
and, 2. Its later speculative construction, i. e. the
attempts to exhibit and justify it in terms of the
reason. The history of its revelation divides again into
three periods : 1. The preparatory period ; 2. The
period of its positive revelation in history ; and, 3.
The period of interpretative revelation, the results
of which appear in the formulation of the doctrine.
With respect to the preparatory period, it is very
necessary to distinguish clearly between the divine
education of the Hebrew people for the disclosure
ultimately to be made, and pre-intimations of the
doctrine. The proposition that the actual revela-

PREPARATORY REVELATION 191
tion of the Trinity was made through the Incarna
tion of the Logos is not more true than that not
only Hebrew history, but all history, is one great
process of preparation for that central event. But
it is another question, whether the character of the
preparation, while in progress, was sufficiently un
derstood to suggest to the minds of those then liv
ing any thoughts, however vague, of those distinc
tions in the being of God which the doctrine of the
Trinity declares. There can be no doubt that the
Hebrew prophets looked for a presence of God
among men altogether unparalleled in earlier his
tory ; but were they thereby led to thoughts about
the nature and being of God that can in any sense
be considered anticipatory of the Christian doctrine
of the Trinity ? That is the point now before us.
I need not say that many Old Testament passages,
often adduced as proof-texts, have no bearing on
the subject whatever. When God is represented
as saying, " Let us make men," or, " Go to, let us
go down to confound the speech of men," the ex
planation is that God is conceived of as a king
surrounded by his ministers and counselors, with
whom he condescendingly identifies himself. The
threefold Holy, Holy, Holy, of the seraphs' hymn,
is only an emphatic repetition, like the cry of the
falsely confident people of Jerusalem, " The temple
of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of

192 THE BEING OF GOD
the Lord, is this." That the prophets did not look
for a divine Messiah, in the strict sense of the word
" divine," is now admitted by nearly all exegetes ;
but, granting that they did, there is absolutely no
thing to show that it ever, even' for a moment,
suggested the inquiry, " How can the Messiah be
God, and yet God be one ? " It may be true, as
Dorner says, that if traces of the Trinity exist in
heathen thought, their absence in the Hebrew reli
gion cannot but appear surprising. Yet, assuredly,
no such traces can be rightly found in the fact that
Jehovah, who says, " I am that I am," also says,
" I am he," thus, as Dorner says, placing him
self over against himself, and virtually asserting a
distinction in himself which he enunciates in the
same breath with his oneness. Nor can I see on
what ground Dorner finds another trace in the
words of God in Isaiah : " I blot out thy transgres
sions for my own sake." It is true that in these
words God may be said to present himself as final
end to himself as the actor who pursues that end ;
but neither this nor the other passage presents
forms of speech which men do not frequently use
of themselves.
Much has been written concerning a certain Ma
Vakh Yaweh (messenger of Jehovah) who appears
in the Old Testament. I say " a certain " MaVakh
Yaweh, because it is not every MaVakh Yaweh that

PREPARATORY REVELATION 193
appears to which I refer. In most passages the
MaVakh Yaweh is simply an angel sent by the
Almighty to communicate his will or purposes to
men. These angels are distinctly apprehended as
created intelligences, wholly separate and diverse
from God. But there is a class of passages in
which the MaVakh Yaweh appears as a self-mani
festation of God. He appears indeed in human
form, and speaks of God in the third person. But
those to whom he appears are oppressed by the con
sciousness that they have seen God and must die.
They see in him an impersonation of Deity such
as is found in no other angel. He is to their minds
not merely a messenger from God, but the revela
tion of the being of God. The Christian fathers
for the most part identify him with the Logos of
the New Testament. But there is as much reason
to adopt the opinion of many modern writers who
hold that he is Jehovah himself appearing in hu
man form, for he is explicitly addressed as Jeho
vah (Judges vi. 11-24). The question for us, how
ever, is, What was the opinion of those who heard
or read of these appearances of MaVakh Yaweh f
They separate him from God and identify him
with God in the same breath. The only satisfac
tory explanation is to be found in the Hebrew
conception of God as the infinite and transcen
dent one, who cannot enter directly into contact

194 THE BEING OF GOD
with the finite. The idea underlies the whole doc
trine of angelic mediation. On ordinary occasions,
he sends an angel with a message, or makes winds
or flaming fire his ministers. But on other, rarer
occasions, when no created messenger would suffice,
and he would draw nigh to man in his own person,
he veils his deity in human form, and thus appears
to man. There is no thought here touching any
internal distinctions within the divine being itself.
But there is the external, relative distinction be
tween God as the hidden and God as the mani
fested. There is the conception both of the need
of God's entering into personal relations with men,
and of the impossibility of his doing so without
some form of mediation. The first prerequisite
of the doctrine of the Trinity, the fundamental
thought without which it could never have found
acceptance, is here, but nothing more.
While the angel of Jehovah is found only in the
older parts of the Old Testament Scriptures, the
" Spirit of God," the " Holy Spirit," seems to take
the place of angelic ministries in the age of the
prophets. That the Spirit, although sometimes
rhetorically personified, is nevertheless conceived
as an impersonal power or influence exerted by
God, is made very evident from the repeated use
of the expression to " pour out " the Spirit. It
is true, the same expression occurs in the New

PREPARATORY REVELATION 195
Testament, but manifestly as a reminiscence of Old
Testament phraseology. Its origin can be ex
plained only upon the supposition that the Spirit
was regarded as impersonal. The same is true of
the expressions " to baptize in the Spirit " and " to
give to drink of the Spirit " (1 Cor. xii. 13 ; cf .
the Septuagist on Isa. xxix. 10).
Very striking and beautiful is the self-presenta
tion of the Divine Wisdom in the Book of Prov
erbs, chap. viii. 22 ff. : —
The Lord produced me in the beginning of his way,
Before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,
Or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth.
When there were no fountains abounding with water,
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, was I brought forth.
When he marked out the foundations of the earth
Then I was by him as a master-workman,
And I was daily his delight,
Rejoicing always before him.
It is possible to understand these lines — and
there are many more of like character — as no
thing more than literary form, intended to cele
brate the divine attribute of knowledge and insight.
But in that case the personification is carried to
an almost absurd extreme. How could a monothe-
ist conceive of God as producing, bringing forth,

196 THE BEING OF GOD
an attribute without which he would lack an essen
tial element of Deity ? We have here apparently
the same conception, already noted, of God as so
separate from finite things that he can come into
contact with them only through intermediate forms
or beings. Hence, before creation, he brings forth
Wisdom, who then, from the very inception of the
work, is his assistant, — his master-workman. She
is a species of demiurge, thrown off from God's
own being by an act of creation. Such, at all
events, is the form given to this doctrine in the
apocryphal book called the Wisdom of Solomon.
Wisdom is there represented as a " pure effluence
from the glory of the Almighty ; " she is " a reflec
tion of God, the eternal light ; " the " undimmed
mirror of his activity," an " image of his goodness "
(chap. vii. 25 f.). She is " a breath " of the divine
omnipotence, — "a holy Spirit," yea, " the Holy
Spirit of God" (chap. ix. 17). She dwells before
the throne of God. Initiated into God's own insight,
his counselor in creation, she knows all his works.
Having proceeded from God before the creation of
the world, she was present when he accomplished
it, acted then as God's organ, as now he still does
all things through her. Hence she is the genera
trix of all that is, — the highest artisan in the uni
verse of things. She is intelligent, all-seeing,
holy ; the source of all higher enlightenment and

PREPARATORY REVELATION 197
moral goodness in men. From generation to gen
eration she enters into pure souls, and makes them
friends and prophets of God.1 That this is not
mere rhetorical personification, but actual hypos-
tasizing, is indubitable. Wisdom is here an ob
jectively real existence, produced by God, or ema
nating from him, intimately connected with him,
yet distinct from him.
The book of the Wisdom of Solomon carries
us well down toward the time of Philo the Jew,
and the generation immediately preceding that of
Christ. Indeed, some have held that Philo was
the author of the book, because in some respects
its doctrine concerning wisdom and his concerning
the Logos are closely related. Philo's fundamen
tal position is that God, as the All-perfect, cannot
come in contact with matter. It would defile him,
yet God is the Author of all that is. Hence he
must work through intermediate agencies, who
shall be such as neither to defile him nor take de
filement from matter. These intermediate agen
cies are subsumed or comprehended in the Logos,
who is the Divine Reason. They are probably con
ceived by Philo as emanations from God, i. e. so
far as he conceives them as hypostases. There
lies the difficulty of the Philonic Logos and the
several separate Logoi of which he is the sum.
1 Chap. vii. 28. See Brueh, Weisheit der Hebrder, p. 340 ff.

198 THE BEING OF GOD
As creative agents, they must be in God and share
his power ; and as able to come into contact with
matter, they must be true hypostases separate from
him. The consequence is perpetual vacillation.
Now they are divine attributes, and now hypos
tases. When God fills them with his own life and
power, they must be attributes of himself ; when
they come to empty themselves into matter and
the world, they must be hypostatic subsistences.
And what is true of the several Logoi is true of
him who is the sum total of them all, — the Logos.
While the speculations of the Alexandrian Jews
were thus crystallizing about the Wisdom of God
and the Logos or Reason of God, the Palestinian
Jews were running a somewhat parallel course
with what they called the Memra of Jehovah, i. e.
the Word of God. Our knowledge of it is almost
wholly derived from the Targums, the Chaldee par
aphrases of the Old Testament books, in which
considerable of the Jewish theology of that cast is
inwoven with the translation. According to this
theology, the word by which God speaks and it is
done is not a vocable, or mere sound, but becomes,
so to speak, objectivated as it leaves the divine
lips. The conception is built up on the basis of
Isa. Iv. 11 : " As the rain cometh down, and the
snow, from heaven," etc., " so shall my word be
that goeth forth out of my mouth ; it shall not

PREPARATORY REVELATION 199
return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that
which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing
whereto I sent it." The Memra is the representa
tive of God when he works in history or enters
into personal intercourse with his people. As in
all these doctrines of mediation, it is difficult or
rather impossible, to determine the extent of the
hypostasizing process. The Memra, however, is
believed, trusted in, prayed to, treated in all re
spects as a personal being. It is he who creates
the world, who wrought in the history of the He
brew patriarchs, who redeemed the people out of
Egypt, who gave the law from Sinai, and was pres
ent in the tabernacle. And so, through all the
later history of Israel. God has wholly with
drawn into the hiding of his eternal glory, and
the Memra is on all occasions his representative.
The conclusion to which this all too imperfect
survey leads us is that in one sense there was abso
lutely no preparation in previous history for the
doctrine of the Trinity. There is nowhere even a
lisp of any eternal hypostatic distinction within
the being of God. From the MaVakh Yaweh down
to the Memra, every mediation is between God
and the world, not between God and God. And
whether it be conceived as a mere form, a conceal
ing garb, so to speak, put on by God himself, or
as a distinct and objectively real hypostasis, it is

200 THE BEING OF GOD
always created, originated by divine power. There
is no idea of eternal, coexistent hypostases in God
himself. There are only forms, phases, or media
for intercourse with finite things. In another sense,
however, there was a preparation, and one whose
importance it is not easy to overestimate. In the
first place, the Hebrew people had come to the con
viction that God as he is in his eternal perfection
cannot enter into direct personal relations with the
world and mankind. It makes no difference to us
at present to what they ascribed that impossibility,
— whether they found it inherent in God as God,
in the unsuitableness or impurity of matter, or,
where alone it really lies, in the moral degeneracy
of men. They had it ; and it grew stronger and
stronger as their conception of God became fuller
and clearer. The more they knew of God and
of themselves, the wider and more impassable be
came the gulf that separated one from the other.
If, then, God and man were ever to become truly
one in spirit, thought, and feeling, — and that this
was the real goal of man's existence they were
equally certain of, — God must of necessity come
forth out of his eternal concealment, and manifest
himself to man through some adequate personal
mediator, with whom on the one hand God, on the
other man, can enter into perfect communion. Iii
that thought, you perceive, lies latent the very idea

PREPARATORY REVELATION 201
of the Incarnation. In the second place, the vague
ness that had characterized all previous Hebrew
conceptions of the forms or media through which
God manifested himself became a useful means of
transition to the reception of the doctrine of the
Incarnation. Whether the MaVakh Yaweh of the
earlier age was, so to speak, God himself in dis
guise, or whether he was a personally distinct be
ing, filled with divine life and qualities, and if so,
how this could be; how the Wisdom, the Logds,
Memra, of later times were to be conceived in their
essential relations to the Most High, — these were
questions which they never pondered, certainly
never definitely concluded. Their conceptions of
them were in a state of permanent fluctuating
fluidity. But this defect of thought became a pos
itive practical help when the Incarnation was an
nounced to them as an accomplished fact. When
Jesus said, " The Father is in me, and I am in the
Father, — I and my Father are one," he declared
nothing at which the spiritually receptive Jew must
take offense ; for he said nothing which for sub
stance Wisdom, the Logos, or Memra had not also
said and claimed. In a word, analytical thought
interposed no obstacle ; for the Hebrew had never
analyzed his thought, or carried it to its last result.
We pass now to the positive revelation itself, —

202 THE BEING OF GOD
to contemplate it in the process of accomplishment.
But how can that be done, seeing that, as an exter
nal event that took place once for all, it belongs to
the past, and must withal, like creation, have been
of such a nature as to be apparent only in its re
sults ? Just so, — apparent only in its results ;
and it is in those results that we must study it.
Not now, however, in all its results, but in those
that followed immediately, in the age nearest the
event. The nature of the investigation may be
more clearly seen, perhaps, if I say that as the reve
lation of the Trinity is like the process of crea
tion in being cognizable only in its results, so it is
like it in another respect. We have no scientific,
authentic, written record of the process of creation.
What was done, in what order, with what intent,
in what way, is to be collected from the evidence,
the dumb, unspoken testimony, of the things that
were created. So we have no scientific record of
the various processes of God's activity in the reve
lation of the Triunity of his being. We have au
thentic information, no doubt, concerning a few
facts and outward events, more or less closely
connected with the revelation, such as the birth,
passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. But
these may be regarded as the body, the revelation
itself being the spirit. The revelation itself must
be collected from the testimony of those in whom it

THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS 203
was realized. Now these are, first, Christ, who was
at once the personal medium of the revelation, and
as true Man its first recipient ; and secondly, the
earliest body of Christian believers. In a word,
the revelation must be studied by us as it was ap
prehended by the self-consciousness of Christ, and
by the Christian consciousness of the church in the
New Testament period, both of which find expres
sion in the gospels and epistles respectively.
To make thorough work of this would require a
book, and no small one. My time permits me
only to devote a few sentences to it, — barely
enough to indicate the method of the inquiry.
And of course I must give you my exegesis of the
passages to which I shall refer, without a word in
defense of it.
First, then, the self-consciousness of Jesus. It
is most fully exhibited in the fourth gospel.1 Jesus
knows himself as the Son of God in an altogether
unique sense ; how unique, is seen in the fact that
when the unreceptive Jews charge him, on account
of it, with making himself equal with God, so far
from denying their inference, he proceeds to un
fold more fully than before the divine life-giving
1 If I were required to select two books on which exclusively
to devolve the defense of the genuineness of St. John's Gospel, I
should unhesitatingly choose Ezra AT>bot's severely critical Au
thorship of the Fourth Gospel, and E. H. Sears's genial work, The
Fourth Gospel the Heart of Christ.

204 THE BEING OF GOD
power involved in his Sonship (John v. 18 ff.)
" God," he says to the Jews, " is not your Father,
for if he were, you would love me ; for I came
forth out of him," i. e. derived my being from him
(chap. viii. 42). Again : " My Father is the living
Father, and I live on account of him," i. e. my Fa
ther is the source of life, and my life is both de
rived from him and like his (chap. vi. 57). " As
the Father has life in himself, so he gave to the Son
to have life in himself," i. e. the Son's derived life
is, like the Father's, creative and inexhaustible, so
that he can freely communicate of it to the spir
itually dead (chap. v. 27). Expressions such as
these can never be understood except as indicating
the Redeemer's clear consciousness of that relation
to the Father which the Nicene Creed afterwards
sought to determine in the words, " begotten of the
substance of the Father, God of God, Light of
Light." Accordingly, the Saviour is conscious of
having existed before his birth as man : " I have
come down," he says, " from heaven." " No one
has seen the Father, save he who is [ = came]
from God ; he hath [ = I have] seen the Father "
(chap. vi. 38, 46). Again : " I came out of the
Father, and came into the world" (chap. xvi. 28).
" And now, O Father, glorify thou me in thy pres
ence with the glory which I had with thee before
the world was." " O Father, those whom thou hast

THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS 205
given me, I will that where I am they also be with
me, that they may behold my glory which thou
hast given me, because thou didst love me before
the founding of the world " (chap. xvii. 5, 24).
Moreover, he knows himself one and equal with
the Father : " He who has seen me, has seen the
Father ; how then sayest thou, Philip, Show us the
Father ? " "I and the Father are one " (chap. xiv.
9 f. ; x. 30). " He who hates me hates also my Fa
ther " (chap. xv. 23). " He who honors not the Son,
honors not the Father ; the Father has committed
all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the
Son as they honor the Father " (chap. v. 22, 23).
That nevertheless he knows himself distinct from
the Father is equally manifest : " I seek not my
own will, but my Father's will, who sent me."
" The Father who sent me, he has borne testimony
concerning me " (chap. v. 30, 37). " My doctrine
is not mine, but his who sent me " (chap. vii. 16).
In like manner, he distinguishes between himself
and the Holy Spirit on the one hand, and the Fa
ther and the Spirit on the other : " I will ask the
Father, and he will give you another Paraclete
[Helper], to be with you forever, the Spirit of
Truth." " The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom
the Father will send in my name, he shall teach
you all things, and shall bring to your minds all
that I said to you " (chap. xiv. 16 f., 26). Again :

206 THE BEING OF GOD
" When the Paraclete shall have come, whom I
will send from the Father, the Spirit of Truth,
who proceeds from the Father, he shall bear witness
concerning me " (chap. xv. 26). " When he shall
have come, the Spirit of Truth, he shall guide you
into all the truth" (chap. xvi. 13). One or two
citations more, to show (what, indeed, has already
abundantly appeared) how clearly the Lord was
conscious of his relations to the dead and dying
world, as the only but overflowing source of life
divine : " I am the bread of life," — " the living
bread that came down from heaven ; if any eat of
this bread, he shall live forever " (chap. vi. 35, 51).
"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no
one comes to the Father but through me " (chap.
xiv. 6).
We next proceed to gather a few utterances of
the Christian consciousness of the church in the
New Testament day. Bear in mind that they are
not the sharply defined determinations of didactic
theology, but the unstudied expressions of the com
mon Christian heart and mind, designed to influ
ence the life rather than to inform the intelligence.
The only thoroughly effective way of getting at the
thought of the apostolic church on this great sub
ject is to read, think, and live one's self into the
spirit of the whole New Testament, the book to

EARLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 207
which the life of that church gave birth. The ut
terances I am about to adduce are only those
whose bearing is most immediately evident. And
as the whole life of the church is rooted in the In
carnation, I begin with that. " The Logos," says
St. John, " became flesh and tabernacled among
us." " God," says St. Paul, " sent forth his Son,
born of a woman, born under the law " (Gal.
iv. 4). To the Philippians (chap. ii. 6 ff.) he
writes of Christ Jesus, who, while " being in the
form of God, did not think the being on an equality
with God a thing to be clung to as men cling to
booty, but emptied himself, taking the form of a
servant, being made in the likeness of men." The
preexistence of the Logos, or Son of God, already
included in these citations, is affirmed in unmistak
able terms : " In the beginning was the Logos, and
through him all things were made, not one thing
excepted." " Through him and for him all things
have been created," says St. Paul of Christ, " and
he is before all things " (Col. i. 17). Concerning
his Deity, and his relations to the Father, there are
numerous utterances : " The Logos was with God,
and the Logos was God." The Epistle to the He
brews says of the Son, through whom God spake
at the end of these days, that " he is the effulgence
of the Father's glory, and the impress of his being "
(chap. i. 3). St. Paul names him " the image of

208 THE BEING OF GOD
the invisible God," and says that " in him dwells
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." St. John
says of the Incarnate Logos that " we beheld his
glory, a glory such as marks an only-begotten Son
who comes from the Father ; " and again he says,
" God no one has ever seen ; the only-begotten Son,
who is [now again] in the bosom of the Father, he
declared him" (chap. i. 18).
Concerning the Holy Spirit, the utterances of
the Christian consciousness in the New Testament
are less clear, so far as the doctrine of the Trinity
is concerned. He is constantly spoken of as the
teaching, leading, indwelling Spirit. " No man
can say that Jesus is Lord but by him," i. e. the
Spirit must pervade the inner life, effect a recon
struction of it, before there can be true and loyal
submission to Christ. This passage alone is suffi
ciently indicative of the importance of the Spirit's
work. The fact that the bodies of Christians are
temples in which the Holy Spirit dwells is urged
as a most forcible incentive to holiness of life ;
from which it follows that the Spirit is of divine
purity and nature. He is spoken of as testifying
with our spirit that we are children of God, and
as helping our infirmity by making intercession for
us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Chris
tians are warned against grieving him. But in all
this there is little to indicate whether he is consid-

EARLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 209
ered as distinct from the Father and the Son or
not. Of his divinity there is no doubt. He is the
Spirit who searcheth into the deep things of God,
even as the spirit of a man knows all there is in
the man, — which proves him divine and eternal ;
but is he conceived as really personal, and not
merely rhetorically so represented ? He is named
indifferently the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God,
the Spirit of Christ, or simply the Spirit. If either
designation predominates, it is that of the Spirit
of Christ. Indeed, Christ himself is once spoken
of by St. Paul as the Spirit: "Now the Lord
[i. e. Christ] is the Spirit " (2 Cor. iii. 17).
True, the immediately following words — " and
where the Spirit of the Lord [Christ] is, there is
Hberty " — imply a distinction between Christ and
the Spirit, showing (as Meyer says) that the pre
ceding sentence is not meant of absolute, personal
identity, but is spoken from a dynamic point of
view. The one thing evident from all these names
is, that the Spirit is divine in origin and power ;
but whether he is regarded as a personal sub
sistence, and if so what is his exact relation
to the essential being of the Father or the Son,
does not appear. It is surprising, at first sight,
that when the Saviour had so clearly enunciated
the personality of the Spirit of Truth, the earliest
Christians should show no more decided conscious-

210 THE BEING OF GOD
ness of the fact. But it may not be very difficult
to account for it. The Holy Spirit was an Old
Testament conception and experience. It was
more than possible to retain old forms of speech
and old habits of thinking about the Spirit, not
withstanding the fact that the work of the Spirit
was carried on with wholly unprecedented life and
vigor. But the Incarnation of the Son of God,
that event of surpassing import, which made all
things new, involved conceptions for which no old
forms of speech and thought existed. It must be
expressed in new phraseology. Besides, Christ
had appeared in visible, tangible human form,
whereby they were forced to make some efforts to
define to their own minds his relations to God,
or rather to think out the thought that lay in
the words Father and Son as applied to God and
Christ. But the Holy Spirit, although he came
with new life, came with no new name, and ap
peared no otherwise than he had always done.
Even though his personality, unknown to the Old
Testament, were recognized, it was possible still to
think of him habitually as divine influence or en
ergy, while also habitually personifying him as of
old. That this is what actually occurred is, I think,
a reasonable inference from all the phenomena pre
sented by the New Testament. The old phraseol
ogy obscured, if not the apprehension, certainly

EARLY CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 211
the expression, of that part of the new revelation
concerning the Holy Spirit which in its own nature
presented the greatest difficulty to monotheistic
preconceptions. The conclusions suggested by references to the
Son and the Holy Spirit separately are borne out,
I might say corroborated, by a number of passages
in which the three divine names or agents are con
joined. The baptismal formula, which doubtless
originated with the Saviour himself, cannot con
sistently with his other utterances be otherwise
understood than as indicating three persons in
such a sense as not to conflict with the unity of
God. But just what that sense is, the formula it
self does not declare, and no word from any apos
tle or other New Testament writer explains. That
is, we cannot certainly ascertain how the Trin
ity here implied was construed by the apostolic
church. The same may be said of the Pauline
benediction : " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God, and the communion of the
Holy Ghost, be with you all." The personality of
the Holy Ghost is here not necessarily implied.
I pass over Ephes. ii. 18, and 1 Pet. i. 2, as
throwing no new light on the subject. This leaves
only 1 Cor. xii. 4-6 : a " Now there are diversi-
1 The confessedly spurious words, 1 John v. 7, have been
rightly omitted in the late revision of the English version.

212 THE BEING OF GOD
ties " — or better, divisions, distributions — " of
gifts, but the same Spirit ; and there are distribu
tions of ministries, but the same Lord [i. e.
Christ] ; and there are distributions of workings,
but the same God [i. e. the Father]." Here the
three names appear in separate and distinct rela
tions to the several lines of Christian activity. The
Holy Spirit stands first, because the whole chap
ter treats of gifts, charisms, which are the result
of the indwelling Spirit operating through the
natural powers of men. The ministries or ser
vices are connected with Christ, the Head and
Ruler of his body the church, to whom as Lord all
service is rendered. " Inasmuch as ye did it unto
one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it
unto me." And finally the workings, i. e. the per
formance of deeds of power, are connected with
God the Father, as the source of all power, the
cause of all causes. It is difficult to avoid the im
pression that we have here the conception of an
economic Trinity, — that is, of a Trinity which
may be such not necessarily and eternally, but
only in manifestations, or in the apprehensions of
men, who name God differently as he manifests
himself in different works.
From this rapid review it is evident that the
fully developed church doctrine of the Trinity is
not expressed in the New Testament. There is no

SUMMARY OF RESULTS 213
clear distinction drawn between the idea of the
Trinity as eternally immanent in the being of God,
and the idea of an economic Trinity as just ex
plained. Neither one statement nor the other is so
expressed as at once to exclude the other. Indeed,
there is no indication that the distinction presented
itself at all to the consciousness of writers or
speakers. If next we ask, Which view is the natu
ral logical sequence of the New Testament utter
ances ? I reply that to my mind there is a decided
difference as to this between the sayings of Jesus
and the expressions of the apostles, except those of
the prologue to the fourth gospel. The apostles
can be so understood as that their words imply
only an economic Trinity. Not so the language
of Christ and St. John. That inevitably leads to
the idea of eternal, necessary hypostatic distinc
tions in the Divine Being. This difference is not
unnatural. The self-consciousness of the Incar
nate Son, however affected by his humanity, might
be expected to speak more clearly on the nature
of Deity than the Christian consciousness of be
lievers. The earliest church did not rise to the
same height of insight into this mystery as the
God-man. And if St. John did, it must not be for
gotten that his gospel, where alone we find the
expression of his higher ground, was written long
after the epistles of St. Paul, who is really the

214 THE BEING OF GOD
only other New Testament source of knowledge on
this subject. Fitted by nature for thought on so
profound a subject, St. John had also had time for
thought. In short, I cannot agree with those who
think that the utterances of the whole New Testa
ment are consistent with the assumption of an
economic Trinity; nor, on the other hand, with
those who hold the opposite opinion, and consider
the immanent ontological Trinity to be throughout
necessarily implied. That is true in one sense. An
economic Trinity, that is, a manifestation of God
in three forms of work, so as to suggest three per
sons, logically leads to the ontological Trinity ; for
God cannot be conceived to manifest himself at one
and the same time under different forms, unless
there are in him differences of being, correspond
ing to these forms, and giving rise to them. For
every act is the expression of his being, and can
not express it as other than it is. But the logical
consequences of a position are not necessarily pres
ent to him who holds it. What I believe is, that
most of the earliest Christians, teachers and taught,
had no clearly defined consciousness that their con
ception of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost involved
an eternal Trinity ; but that, on the other hand, the
consciousness of Jesus and the beloved disciple,
without giving them all the definitions of the later
church doctrine, assured them that these names had

SUMMARY OF RESULTS 215
their objective realities in the being of God. And
hence the Nicene doctrine, so far as it relied on
direct Scriptural authority, derived its strongest
support from the fourth gospel.
Our review has also shown us that the relation
of the several divine Persons to each other was not
apprehended in any definite form. The Father is
evidently conceived as the source of all things in
the Deity as well as outside of it ; for he is named
Father especially in his relation to the Son, and in
a less exclusive sense to believers. He is 6 0eos,
God, which term it is very doubtful whether it is
ever applied to Christ or the Holy Ghost in the
New Testament, except in the surprised outburst
of Thomas, " My Lord and my God." x Christ is
the Son — the only-begotten, St. John says. But
how that begetting is to be understood is nowhere
explained or hinted at. The Holy Ghost is sent
by the Father, and proceeds from him ; but neither
phrase appears to imply more than local proximity,
and the moral unity which that presupposes. The
Saviour says : " The Spirit of Truth " o impa. rov
irarpos kniropsverai, " who proceeds from beside the
Father," *. e. who is indeed the Spirit of Truth,
because he goes forth from the immediate presence
of the Father, the source of all truth. If the
1 In the Apostolic Fathers, on the contrary, the term "God "
is constantly used of Christ. Cf. Shedd, Hist. Doct., i. 265 ff.

Z10 THE BEING OF GUJJ
origin of the Holy Ghost is at all consciously re
ferred to in the New Testament, it is in the expres
sions " Spirit of God " and " Spirit of Christ."
To sum up the result arrived at : The church of
the New Testament was conscious of Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost as the sources of all divine life
and power. It had the Trinity practically, but
not in clearly conceived doctrinal representation.
It had the thought-elements out of which the doc
trine must inevitably be evolved, but it held them
in simple, unarticulated juxtaposition, dominated
only by the immovable conviction that God is one.
Christ was the power of God and the wisdom
of God ; the Spirit of God was the ever-present
Helper : in this there was no contradiction, and
beyond this their thoughts did not habitually ex
tend. And is not this the ordinary thought of all
Christians in all ages ? But it left two deep ques
tions unasked : First. How are the three related to
the one being ? and secondly, How are they related
to each other? It was with these questions that
the church of the succeeding ages was forced to
grapple.

LECTURE IX.
THE TRINITY : ITS INTERPRETATIVE REVELATION.
Op the three parts into which I divided the
historical revelation of the Trinity, two have been
considered. The third, the interpretative part of
the process, must now engage us. That we are
justified in viewing it as a constituent part of the
revelation is almost self-evident. Nothing is more
certain than that the doctrine of the Trinity sprang
directly from the recognition of the Incarnation of
God in Christ. The impulses to its conception
and formulation are not to be sought in the philo
sophical speculations of the church fathers, but in
their Christian consciousness. Philosophy aided in
its development, but did not originate it. First
came the assurance that God was in Christ (the
immediate result of personal spiritual experience),
and then came the endeavor to apprehend in
thought the divine relations involved in the fact
thus certified. The elaboration of the doctrine
was the intellectual side of the spiritual new crea
tion. Herein lies the guaranty of its substantial
truth. The emergence of the doctrine was not

218 THE BEING OF GOD
only historical, but historical revelation. It was
revelation in and through the thinking of men
whose whole being had been permeated with new
life and power. To say that they were not infalli
ble is only to say that the new creation in them
had not reached completeness ; but to say that,
although renovated, they were not divinely guided
in their thought — inspired — is to say that the
union of man with God through Christ affects
one part of the indivisible human personality, but
not the other. Shall we admit that, in the Old
Testament time of preparation, God made use of
chosen men, specially endowed by nature and fitted
by life-training, to lead and instruct his people,
and then doubt that he has prophets and inspired
thinkers in Christian ages? Such a doubt must
either rest on inconsequent theories, or it must
issue in a rejection of Christianity.
As to the close of the period of interpretative
revelation, I scarcely need to say that it cannot be
definitely fixed. We may be fully assured that
the results hitherto attained can never be reversed
or materially changed, without asserting that they
contain the whole truth to which nothing cau ever
be added. For our present purpose, however, we
may consider the period to be closed with the com
pletion of the two great symbols, the Nicseno-
Constantinopolitan and the so-called Athanasian.

TWO GREAT PROBLEMS 219
It is therefore with the progressive formulation
of the doctrine during the four centuries immedi
ately after the apostolic age that • we are now to
busy ourselves.
The two questions which, as I said last week,
came up for determination by the post-apostolic
church, concerned the relations of Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, respectively, to the one Divine
Being and to each other. The fundamental thought
of Christianity is, that in Christ God has become
man. As soon as men began to analyze this con
ception, the question necessarily arose : In what
sense is this to be understood ? When we say, God
became man, do we speak literally or figuratively ?
If literally, if Christ was really and truly God,
was he alone God, or did God also continue to
exist in the state of transcendence over all that
is finite ? If the latter, are we not driven to the
admission of two Gods, one incarnate and the
other transcendent and immutable ? Or, if we dis
tinguish between God and the Logos, affirming
that the latter became man, how is the Logos re
lated to the Godhead, and how to the human per
sonality of Jesus the Christ? Similar questions
were again suggested by the divinity of the Holy
Spirit. The working-out of problems of such profundity
could not be accomplished in a day. And though

220 THE BEING OF GOD
upon the whole there was constant progress, yet,
as the mind of the church is the aggregate of
many minds, absolute unanimity at any stage is not
to be expected. Although the main wave rolled
in one direction, it was crossed and chopped by
others of less volume running in other directions.
Hence those heated theological battles which the
untheological mind finds it so difficult to reconcile
with the divine character of Christianity. But
beside the difficulty of the questions involved, and
the limitations of the thinking mind, we are to
consider two other conditions that deeply affected
Christian thought on this subject, divided it, and
retarded the final conclusion. These are, first, the
unequal diffusion of the Christian consciousness
through the nominal Christian body ; and, sec
ondly, the very different conceptions of God which
prevailed among different classes of men before
they came into contact with Christianity.
Let me dwell for a moment on the effects of the
inequality of the Christian consciousness. If it be
true, as I have insisted, that the Christian con
sciousness is the final and all-sufficient guaranty of
Christian truth, how is it that this truth has been
so variously apprehended, and has in every instance
arrived at unanimity of statement only through
nevious diversity of representation? That is a
fair question, which must be fairly answered. And

INEQUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 221
the answer is suggested in St. Paul's dictum, —
" They are not all Israel who are of Israel." In
other words, the church, the Christian communion,
had in it, almost from the first, many who had no
share, or one comparatively obscure, in the Chris
tian experience. Almost ? Judas was among the
twelve, and the New Testament church, as inci
dentally depicted in the Epistles, is far from con
formed to its ideal. St. Paul was hounded from
place to place by teachers who apparently had
nothing of Christianity but the name. A new
force in the world is sure to draw to it many who
have not found what they wished in the old condi
tion. Despairing of the old, they take the new
without really becoming one with it. You may
find an illustration of this in the character of a
part of the emigration from Europe to this coun
try. Despairing of realizing their communistic
ideas in the Old World, they come here, expecting
to find them acceptable and practicable, if not
actually operative. Whatever they find here, in
the way of constitution and law, they interpret,
not as the national consciousness interprets it, but
in accordance with their own imported conceptions.
So men came to Christianity. The Jew was dis
heartened about his nation, especially after the
Romans destroyed the temple and the Holy City.
The serious-minded heathen felt that his ances-

222 THE BEING OF GOD
tral religion was dead and powerless. Meanwhile
Christianity was advancing triumphantly, a new
life-sphere in the midst of the old deadness. Nat
urally, average people who had just a spark of
thought or life in them were attracted. They who
thought more deeply, whether Jew or Gentile,
might hold themselves aloof. But the mercurial
multitude, ever ready for new things, poured into
the church, just as among us they take up the lat
est literary novelty. Not all of this class were
mere dilettanti, but very many of them never
obtained a real and deep experience of the trans
forming power of Christianity. Nevertheless they
counted among its more enlightened adherents,
and here and there no doubt influenced the think
ing of their fellows. But as the thinking so influ
enced was not dominated by the Christian con
sciousness, it failed to accord with it. Whether
the thinkers were Jews or Gentiles did not essen
tially affect the result.
But there was another class, — a class which did
experience the power of Christ, but explained it
from a false intellectual basis. This leads us to
the different conceptions of God entertained by
persons before they came into contact with Chris
tianity. Human thought about God has always
divided on what we are accustomed to call trans
cendence or immanence, — taking the former word

DIFFERENT IDEAS OF GOD 223
as the direct contrary of the latter. The Jew,
ever since the return from the captivity, had so
emphasized the transcendence as to make him un
able to conceive of God as coming into any other
than mediated contact with man. The Greek was
divided. So far as he accepted the Platonic phi
losophy or its later revivals, he took his place by
the side of the Jew. But if he had yielded to the
doctrines of the Stoics, a waning philosophy in the
early Christian centuries, it is true, but yet by no
means uninfluential ; or if, despairing of the teach
ings of the schools, he had reverted to that of the
poets, in which the genuine spirit of his race found
expression, he could not but conceive of God as
indwelling in all his works. This was what we
may call his natural, native conception. Philoso
phy might override it, or hold it in abeyance, but
could not eradicate it. And nothing was more
natural, if for any reason philosophy lost its hold
on him, than that he should feel himself attracted
by the teaching of Christ, in the profound sim
plicity, poetic beauty, and all-pervading God-con
sciousness of whose own words — unrivaled by
the noblest utterances that ever fell from apostolic
lips — the most attractive thought of his ancestral
religion seemed to meet him, purified of all error
and raised to unspeakable sublimity. The conse
quences of these mental antecedents, as regards

224 THE BEING OF GOD
the conception of the Trinity, may readily be in
ferred. The Jewish mind tended towards Ebioni-
tism, i. e. the reception of Jesus as the Christ, the
Messiah, but also as mere man. The Greek ad
herent of the Platonic idea of transcendence might
make Christ a mediator between God and men,
but could not conceive of a real Incarnation. The
natural Greek mind, on the other hand, not con
trolled by an adverse philosophy, had an innate
readiness to incarnate Deity. It may be doubted
whether the doctrine of the Trinity could ever
have taken deep root on Jewish soil. The very
vehemence of its protest against everything that
seemed to endanger monotheism unfitted the Jew
ish mind for the conception of this doctrine, or of
any idea that necessitated it. If, nevertheless, the
original data, out of which the doctrine could not
fail to grow, were given in Jewish minds, on
Jewish soil, this is strong evidence of their divine
origin. N
To trace the course taken by the development
of the doctrine is, for my purpose, neither necessary
nor possible. It is enough to indicate the main
currents of thought, and their relation to the Chris
tian consciousness. As the movement derived its
impulse from the life and work of Christ, its first
and most important concern was with his relation
to God. The doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit

EBIONITISM 225
assumed prominence at a later time. We shall do
best to observe the same order.
The age immediately after that of the apostles
was the age of simple faith and simple people.
Judging by the few writings of this time that re
main to us, it was emphatically the age in which
" not many wise men after the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble, were called." The fifty
years that followed the death of St. John seem to
have been a time of stationary repose in Christian
thought. Converts were instructed and baptized
according to New Testament formulae and prece
dents ; but there was no inquiry into the internal
relation of God to himself implied in Christian
teaching. But as soon as new sources of informa
tion present themselves, we behold an unceasing
activity of thought concentrated on the question,
" What think ye of the Christ ? whose son is he ? "
The Ebionites, a party or parties composed of
Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah, including
here and there, it may be, a few Gentile proselytes,
and having their abodes in Palestine and adjacent
regions, replied boldly and baldly : " He is man,
pure and simple, — anointed with the spirit of pro
phecy beyond other prophets, but differing from
them only in degree." This was the outcome of
their Jewish conception of God. Moreover, the
phraseology of the Jewish Scriptures, which de-

226 THE BEING OF GOD
scribe Jehovah's king over Israel as his Son, fur
nished them with a ready explanation of the term
" Son of God " applied to Christ.
Ebionitism was but a poor form of baptized Ju
daism. It had neither life nor thought. But, as
to thought at least, the case is different with sev
eral Ebionizing parties or teachers found in vari
ous parts of ancient Gentile Christendom. None
of these present the doctrine in Ebionite bareness ;
most of them seek to raise Christ to a certain
uniqueness among men, but all leave him at last
a mere man. The human alone supplies the per
sonality, the divine permeates and endows it. He
is not God incarnate in any sense which does not
also apply in varying degrees to other prophets
and elect persons. Hence, also, he is not the crea
tor of new spiritual life, but only the awakener of
what lay dormant in man. Such, with many dif
ferences in reaching and stating the final result,
was the doctrine of the Alogi, of whom we hear in
Asia Minor, the adherents of Theodotus (or rather
the two Theodoti) and Artemon at Rome, and Paul
of Samosata at Antioch in Syria. But Ebionitism
in every form was disowned as soon as it was rec
ognized. The Christ-consciousness of the ancient
church was much too vigorous and clear to find
satisfaction in it. Much as it might long for in
tellectual comprehension, it preferred the incom-

PATRIPASSIANISM 227
prehensible to that which reduced its spiritual ex
perience to relative, if not absolute, delusion.
Diametrically opposed to the Ebionizing doc
trine was that of the so-called Patripassians. This
looked upon Christ as the Incarnate God, but
would hear of no real distinction between the Fa
ther and the Son. These were only names for one
and the same being. The term Son applied only
to Jesus, the historical personage, in whom God
himself appeared clothed in the form of humanity.
The best known representatives of this doctrine
are Praxeas (who went from Asia Minor to Rome,
and taught there) ; Noetus of Smyrna, Beryl of
Bostra in Arabia (whom Origen induced to recant),
and the famous Sabellius, who gave it its high
est, most thoroughly developed form. Unlike the
Ebionitic doctrine, this form of ancient Unitarian-
ism did not come into conflict with the Christian
consciousness of the people in its simple form of
personal spiritual experience. On the contrary, it
was the crude, intellectually undigested expression
of that experience. Hence, when Praxeas appeared
at Rome, there came a speedy end to the Ebionitism
that was seeking to establish itself there.1 Indeed,
it scarcely admits of a doubt that it was not only
an old doctrine, — Justin Martyr (Trypho, ch. 128)
already alludes to it, — but widely current among
i Cf . Dorner, Person Christi, i. 522 f .

228 THE BEING OF GOD
the masses of believers. It seemed to do away
with all subordinationism, to give inconceivable
value to the work and sacrificial death of Christ,
and to present the Infinite God in the character of
immediate sympathetic participant in all the suffer
ings and temptations of life in a sinful world. Of
this the simple believer felt his need ; and to the
possession of this in Christ, his experience testified.
But the Christian consciousness is not a merely
passive subject. In the first flush of deliverance
and new life, or if awakened while the intellect is
in a state of childlike immaturity until that is
changed, it may be content to rest in its spiritual
experiences. But the time must come when it will
begin to think about its own contents, and seek
to explain and harmonize them with other truth.
Now, it was impossible, when the mind once began
to reflect on the subject, to suppose that, while
Christ through his incarnation was subject to all
the limitations of time and space, God could have
absolutely laid aside his transcendence over these,
and left the universe without its head and support.
And this conclusion of reason found its fullest
corroboration in the utterances of Christ himself.
Moreover, while the Christian consciousness can
never knowingly accept in thought that which con
travenes its experience, it may recognize elements
of truth in what as a whole it must reject, as well

IMPULSE TO DEEPER THOUGHT 229
as error in what it accepts. Hence, while it re
jected all Ebionitic conceptions of Christ as utterly
inadequate, it recognized the value of the humanity
of the Redeemer on which Ebionitism one-sidedly
insisted, and also saw that Patripassianism with
equal one-sidedness virtually excluded it, and thus
jeopardized the very treasure it sought to guard.
For the Patripassian Jesus was more or less a de
lusive phantom, not a true man. The Incarnation
was not real. The human was but a veil or gar
ment of the divine. The passion of Jesus, his hu
man sharing in suffering, and the promise of exal
tation that his brotherhood held out to men, were
all weakened and rendered doubtful, when the re
flecting mind felt itself forced to the conclusion
that the appearance of God in the semblance of
man had been a spectacle, a scenic display, not a
reality. Such a discovery would have been destruc
tion to a faith resting on anything less secure than
personal experience of redemption and renovation.
To the ancient church it merely supplied a stimu
lus to thought. It revealed the problem, and urged
to its solution. Christ was God and Christ was
man ; and the problem was not, as Nicodemus
would have put it, How can this be ? but How is
it? That was the starting-point of the long de
bate, which found not a complete but its essential
answer in the decision of the Council of Nicaea.

230 THE BEING OF GOD
The intellectual movement through which this
answer was attained is the noblest in the history of
thought. Though unmistakably marked by human
imperfections of every kind, abounding in mutual
misapprehensions, defects of reasoning, obscurity
of expression, and sadly overshadowed by its con
comitants of hatred and oppression, it discloses to
the sympathetic mind most convincing evidence of
the directing presence of the Spirit of Truth. It
is much too vast to be even barely outlined in the
time at our command. All we can do is to note
a few chief waymarks along its course. And of
those we must choose only such as bear directly on
our subject, which you must remember is the Trin
ity, not the Incarnation, which has been assigned
to another lecturer.
It was doubtless under the influence of Greek
philosophy, in which many of the earlier Christian
teachers were well versed, that the thought of the
church concentrated itself on the' name Logos
given by St. John to the Son of God. The Logos
was with God in the beginning ; the Logos was the
only-begotten Son of God ; and the Logos was
God. Here was identity and yet difference, God
head and yet Sonship. How were these relations
to be conceived consistently with the unity of God ?
Concerning the Deity of the Logos there was no
uncertainty. It may well be that the loftiest

THE DEITY OF THE SON 231
ascriptions of divine attributes to him were made
when, for the moment, the real distinction between
him and the Father, in which the whole difficulty
comes to view, was lost sight of ; but they sprang
from convictions that never wavered. The philo
sophically trained fathers took the term Logos
in the twofold sense of Reason and Word, al
though St. John used it only in the latter. Rea
son and Word, both immaterial things, connected
readily with the idea of God as the Infinite Spirit,
the pure Intelligence and Energy. The Reason
as immanent in Deity, and the Creative Word
as issuing from him, presented, so to speak, the
groundwork on which the doctrine of the Trinity
was reared. They formed nominal distinctions
which served as stepping-stones to the real, essen
tial distinctions ; but they were also liable to be
confused or unconsciously interchanged, which ac
counts for much that is obscure or contradictory in
the writings of the fathers. In both forms the
Logos is God : as Reason, immanent in God, he is
necessarily eternal, "timeless and beginningless."
But the distinction between God and the Reason
of God was too liable to be regarded as identical
with that between subject and attribute, and might
easily lead to Patripassianism. Besides, specula
tive thought, Old Testament Jewish as well as Phi-
Ionic Greek, had postulated the necessity of a real,

232 THE BEING OF GOD
objective distinction in the Divine Being in order
to the production of the universe, and the New
Testament ascribed this very work to the Logos,
the Son and " image of the invisible God, the first
born of all creation" (Col. i. 13 ff.). Hence the
Logos, the Creative Word, was defined as the im
manent Reason issuing forth from the Divine Be
ing for external action. The danger of making
him a mere attribute was thereby, if not averted,
greatly lessened, for it made it almost impossible to
conceive him otherwise than as a conscious actor.
But it also opened up a new series of questions.
What was the nature of this going forth, and
when did it take place? The first question was
answered by a variety of expressions, all of them,
however, recognized as more or less metaphorical.
Thus the Logos was said to come forward (emerge)
out of God, to be projected (thrown out) by God,
and, with special reference to New Testament
phraseology, to be uttered by Him (as Word),
and to be begotten by the Father. The important
point at issue was, whether the genesis or genera
tion of the Son, as a distinct personality, was of
the nature of emanation, i. e. derivation, from the
essence of the Father, or of creation. The latter
was seen to be utterly irreconcilable with the true
Deity of the Son, and therefore negatived. Arian-
ism, which accepted it, was thereby rejected. The

THE DEITY OF THE SON 233
other alternative, though nearer the truth, was not
without hidden elements of danger. As it made
the Son's existence a derivation from the Father's
essence, — of which more anon, — and conceived it
effected by the Father's will, it involved the sub
ordination of the Son to the Father, which again
endangered his absolute Deity, and also made it
difficult to maintain the Unity.
As to the time of the Son's generation, the
prevalent view, before Origen, placed it immedi
ately before the creation of the world. God willed
the Logos or Son, hitherto immanent in himself as
impersonal reason, into the state of personal, inde
pendent existence, and then through him created
all things. It is true, there were those who, like
Clement of Alexandria, held to the eternity of the
Logos ; but it is doubtful whether they conceived
of him as a person. But the commoner view, while
it saved the Deity of the Son as to nature and es
sence, could not explain how he could have the
attribute of eternity, and thus made him inferior to
the Father. Moreover, it came into conflict with
the immutableness of the Divine Being. These dif
ficulties were obviated by Origen's doctrine of the
eternal generation. The light, he said, cannot
but shine, — it is never without its luminous glow;
so, also, the Father cannot be thought without a
Son. There was never a time when the Son was

234 THE BEING OF GOD
not.1 That is, the generation was not a momentary
act, done once for all. It is an eternal process
within the Divine Being, by whieh God unintermit-
tently differentiates himself to himself as Father
and Son.
Such were the steps, roughly sketched and
grouped according to their logical rather than
chronological connection, by which the ancient
church elaborated the leading conceptions that
enter into the doctrine of the Trinity. We shall
soon see how the Council of Nicaea, occasioned by
the Arian controversies, combined them, and in its
creed registered the progress made down to its
time. But first I must add a word on the doctrine
concerning the Holy Spirit. The same compara
tive want of definite conceptions, which we found
to characterize the Christian consciousness of the
apostolic age on this subject, continued generally
throughout the ante-Nicene age, and for the same
reasons. The work and manifestations of the
Spirit were not so peculiar in form as to force im
mediate inquiry. The task of determining the
relations of Christ to God absorbed all powers of
thought. When, in the early Christian age, Jews
censure the Christian doctrine of God, it is always
assumed to teach two divine persons, not three.2
1 Dorner, Person Christi, i. 642.
2 Weber, Altsynag. Paldst. Theol. , p. 148.

THE TRINITY AND THE HOLY SPIRIT 235
Whatever inference this may justify can, however,
only be considered to apply to Jewish Christians.
As to the general body of believers, the evidence
is meagre, and so obscure as to admit of various
interpretations.1 That all recognized the Holy
Spirit as one of the sacred Triad cannot be
doubted. But some of the fathers speak of him
very indefinitely ; while others seem to confuse, if
not the persons, the functions, of the Logos and the
Spirit in a surprising manner. Origen seems to
have regarded the Spirit as a divine person, the
first and greatest of the " all things " that were
made by the Logos. Certain it is that both he
and others subordinated the Spirit to the Father
and the Son, as they subordinated the Son to the
Father. Of course, Arius and his followers could
not admit the true Deity of the Spirit while they
denied that of the Son. Yet the Creed of Nicaea
made but one brief statement (less explicit in fact,
though not designedly so, than the utterances of
the Apostles' Creed), viz., " We believe in the Holy
Ghost." The true explanation of this surprising
fact is doubtless that the main body of the church
was not ready to accept any intellectual interpre
tation of its spiritual experience in a region where
it received so few hints from apostolic tradition to
direct it. Wholesome fear of rash speculation,
1 Cf , Neand., Ch. Hist, i. 603 ff.

236 THE BEING OF GOD
of which there had already been but too much,
probably restrained many who would have urged
no other objections. Certainly Athanasius cannot
have been the only one at Nicaaa who had pene
trated to the deeper view. It may be that he and
they purposely and prudently refrained from im
periling the one definition of supreme importance
by combining with it another that could better
wait, and would be sure to follow.
. It is time now to give a brief outline of the for
mulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, through
the several stages represented by the creeds that
come into consideration here. The Nicene Creed
asserted the true Deity of Christ in the most va
ried terms. He is declared to be the " Son of God,
begotten from the Father an Only-begotten, that is,
of the essence of the Father, God from God, Light
from Light, True God from True God ; begotten,
not made, of the same essence (homoousion) with
the Father." That which is still lacking, namely,
the conception of the generation as out of all time
relations, is supplied by the closing condemnation
of Arian phraseology and (alas !) its defenders :
" And those who say, ' there was a time when he
was not,' and ' before he was begotten he was not,'
and ' he sprang from things that are not,' or allege
that the Son of God is of a different substance or
essence, or created, changeable or mutable, the

FORMULATION OF THE DOCTRINE 237
Catholic Church anathematizes." It would seem
difficult to express and guard more fully the con
ception of the Son as eternally coexistent and con-
substantial with the Father. Both his true Deity
and his distinction from the Father are affirmed.
But the relation of the Father and the Son to the
one Deity, the divine Monad, is not indicated, or
rather it is obscured. The Father is represented
as the " one God," -1 who out of his essence begets
the Son. The homoousion of the creed can there
fore only be taken as meaning " of the same es
sence as to quality." The sense "of the same
essence numerically " can scarcely have been up
permost when that phrase was used ; for how could
the Father give of his essence to the Son without
dividing it, unless he gave the whole and denuded
himself ? The better conception we shall find to
be that the begetting of the Son by the Father has
nothing: to do with the communication of the divine
essence, but only with the origination of the hypo
static (personal) relation of Father and Son. The
failure of the creed to bring out the relation of the
persons in the Trinity to the Unity of the Godhead
leaves the Deity of the Son (not his Sonship
merely) dependent on the Father, and therefore
subordinate to the Deity of the Father. The
1 " We believe in one God, Father Almighty, . . . and in one
Lord, Jesus Christ," etc. Cf. Gies., Ch. Hist, i. 297, n. 7.

238 THE BEING OF GOD
Council most certainly did not aim at this result ; *
but it is logically involved in their language. The
Council of Constantinople mitigated this defect,
without however removing it, by dropping the ex
pression, " begotten of the essence of the Father."
Whether it was done intentionally, or otherwise, is
not known.
The chief alterations made in the Nicene Creed
by the Council of Constantinople (a. d. 381) were
designed to extend the Nicene definitions to the
Holy Spirit, with immediate reference to the errors
of the Macedonians and other Pneumatomachians,
as they were called, who for the most part regarded
the Holy Spirit as a created being, the " servant
and attendant " of God. The Council declared
the Holy Spirit to be " the Lord [cf. 2 Cor. iii.
17], the Giver of Life [John vi. 63], who pro
ceeds from the Father [John xv. 26], who with
the Father and the Son together is worshiped and
glorified, who spake through the prophets." The
article appears to be a compromise on the basis of
Scriptural terms (the true exegesis of which is not
very carefully inquired into), but it clearly aims to
inculcate the Nicene doctrine as applied to the
Holy Spirit. It virtually includes the homoousion
without expressing it. A few years before, a Ro
man synod, under Damasus, had already declared
1 Cf . Dorner, Person Christi, i. 929 ff.

PROGRESS AFTER CONSTANTINOPLE 239
the Holy Spirit to be of one power and substance
with the Father and the Son. About the same
time an Illyrian synod had said that " the triad,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit " is homoousion.1 Al
most twenty years before Constantinople, a synod
at Alexandria, presided over by Athanasius, de
clared the same doctrine.2 A very large part of the
Council of Constantinople would undoubtedly have
accepted the term, unhesitatingly. But with or
without the homoousion, the creed exhibits in its
new form the incompleteness there was in the old.
The relation of the Three to the One is left unde
termined, as also that of the Spirit and the Son to
each other.
I cannot say that every trace of these defects was
removed, but they were greatly reduced by the
western church, chiefly under impulses from the
powerful mind of Augustine. Over and over again
this father asserts the filioque, the procession of the
Spirit from the Father and the Son, long before
the Toledan synod of A. D. 589 inserted the word
into the creed of Constantinople.3 This addition,
of no great importance in itself, effectively counter
acted the lingering subordinationism of the East.
1 Cf. Gies., Ch. Hist., i. 312, u. 35 ; Hefele, Hist, of Councils,
sect. 39 f .
2 Gieseler, i. 306.
8 Cf . Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., i. 264, u. 5.

240 THE BEING OF GOD
On the relation of the Persons to the Unity, Au
gustine is equally decided : " Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit together are not greater as to essence
than the Father alone or the Son alone ; but the
three Hypostases or Persons (if they can be so
named), taken together, are equal to each taken
separately. . . . The Trinity itself is the one God,
— the one God in the same sense that he is the one
Creator : what do they mean who say that the Son
created all things at the command of the Father,
as if the Father had not created, but had ordered
it to be done by the Son ? They fashion for them
selves, in the imagination of their hearts as it were,
two beings, mutually near, yet each occupying his
own place, — one commanding, the other obedi
ently complying. Nor do they perceive that the
command of the Father, that all things be made, is
itself nothing else than the Word of the Father
through which all things were made." J In this
language speaks a clear perception of the nature
of the personal or hypostatic distinctions in the
Trinity, and of their relations to the Unity and to
each other. It may have been as clearly appre
hended (though, so far as I know, not taught) by
Athanasius and the great Cappadocians, especially
Gregory of Nyssa. But Augustine influenced its
formulation in a creed-statement. It is the opinion
1 Gies., Ch. Hist, i. 313, n. 41.

PROGRESS AFTER CONSTANTINOPLE 241
of Neander and Hagenbach that the Athanasian
Creed originated in Augustine's own century and
country, while Gieseler puts it in the seventh cen
tury and in Spain. However that may be, the for
mula breathes the Augustinian spirit and thought.
It sedulously guards against breaking up the di
vine essence into three parts, so as to make three
Gods, who are one only in the nominal sense in
which three individuals are one family. Nor, on
the other hand, does it allow the eternally imma
nent distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
to be obliterated, or in the slightest degree ob
scured ; but, eschewing every approach to the intro
duction of notions of rank or degree within the
Deity as between the Three, it endows all alike
with equal eternity, immensity, power, and glory,
and finds the notes of the personal distinctions be
tween them in the time-honored Scriptural terms
" generation " and " procession," which, while they
explain nothing, assist the mind to keep its hold
on relations of which the imagination can form no
adequate conception. The great defect of this, and
perhaps of every creed that was ever drawn up,
is that it makes no explicit use of the Origenistic
conception of the " generation " (and, by parity of
reasoning, of the " procession " also) as an eternal
process, without end as well as without beginning.
That thought lies behind the expression " begotten

242 THE BEING OF GOD
before all ages," and all other affirmations of the
timelessness of the generation ; but only he can
find it who knows that it is there to be found. Yet
in it we have the means of approximately compre
hending what in its completeness must forever
transcend the powers of finite intelligence.
We have not, I trust, lost sight of the purpose
and bearing of the review that has engaged our
thoughts. I have not been trying to prove the doc
trine of the Trinity, by the authority of either the *
Scriptures, the church, or the reason. I have
sought to exhibit it as the deliverance of the Chris
tian consciousness, and therefore to that conscious
ness self-attesting. The whole argument is simply
this : Christian experience of spiritual redemption,
freedom, life, and strength, being an experience of
divine creative power in the soul, evokes sponta
neous recognition of the Deity (Divinity, if you
will) of Christ and the Holy Spirit, by whom the
effects are wrought. This is the universal fact of
Christianity. It was not in their experience, but
in the theories to which it gave rise, that men dif
fered in the early church. Patripassian, Sabel-
lian, Arian, Semi-Arian, Nicene, all genuine Chris
tians, had essentially the same personal experience
of the life that had come from heaven to earth.
The same is true to-day. The foundation of the

DOCTRINE OF TRINITY— SUMMING UP 243
Trinitarian doctrine, however faint or disguised, is
found in every one to whom a Christian church
is something more than a Mohammedan mosque,
Buddhist temple, or even Jewish synagogue. The
experience of the power of the Incarnation is the
foundation of all Christian dogmatic certitude. No
doctrine rooted in it can fall, and none without this
rooting can permanently stand.
My endeavor to-day has been to show that the
doctrine of the Trinity, as formulated by the church,
is the necessary outcome of the facts of Christian
experience; that it resulted from no arbitrary
system-making proclivity, but from the imperative
necessity of rejecting conceptions which involved
a denial of the Incarnation ; that no definition was
made until after the most thorough and protracted
discussion, and then only within bmits that barely
sufficed to cover the point of danger. To this I
now add that the men who led the thinking and
gave expression to its results were almost without
exception, intellectually and spiritually, the most
richly endowed of their day and generation. What
the great prophets were to ancient Israel, that the
great fathers were to the Christian church. On
the one hand, they impersonated the life of the
Christian people, its faith, love, and hope, in their
highest form ; and on the other, they were the fitly
chosen organs through whom the Spirit of Truth

244 THE BEING OF GOD
imparted enlightenment and instruction to the vast
body of the faithful. They were — why should I
hesitate to use the word ? — the inspired interpret
ers of God's historical self-revelation in the Chris
tian consciousness.
One final word of practical bearing on your fu
ture work as Christian teachers. The importance
of the doctrine cannot be overestimated. All dis
tinctively Christian truth stands or falls with it ;
for all Christian truth presupposes it, and it in turn
presupposes all Christian truth. This fact, while
it shows its importance, also indicates how it is to
be taught. It is not to be exhibited as a matter of
abstract philosophical theology. Nor is it to be
laboriously deduced from this proof-text or that, as
a doctrine which it hath pleased God to reveal,
and which must therefore be reverently believed.
Neither is it to be relegated to one Sunday in the
year. If it does not shine through all your doc
trine throughout the year, Trinity Sunday cannot
fail to be dreaded by yourself, and a weariness to
your hearers. The teaching must take the charac
ter and follow the order of the original revelation.
The sense of sin must be evoked, the mute longings
of the soul after God must be interpreted, that re
ceptivity of the spirit which is the essence of faith
must be developed, the divine Redeemer must be

DOCTRINE OF TRINITY- SUMMING UP 245
presented in the fullness of his grace and love, the
workings of the invigorating, inspiring indwelling
of the Holy Ghost must be unweariedly delineated.
And all this not in the dry form of dogmatic teach
ing, but in the warm glow of living experience.
To a congregation thus guided into the perception
of Christian truth, Trinity Sunday will bring no
new or strange message, but simply the summing
up and necessary outcome of all it has lived and
felt and thought. The doctrine of the Trinity will
have been built up in and with its spiritual life.
The intellectual side of such a living belief will
doubtless vary as mental capacity and historical
knowledge vary, but it can never be insufficient
for the practical purposes of the Christian life.
And on the other hand, no intellectual apprehen
sion, however perfect, without this basis in per
sonal spiritual fife, would be of value.

LECTURE X.
THE SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DOC
TRINE OF THE TRINITY.
We have traced the origin and development of
the doctrine until its formulation in the great sym
bols of the church. Can we now do anything to
make it more readily grasped by the mind ? Ob
serve, I do not say, Can we establish it on a se
curer basis? That, it must be admitted at once,
cannot be done. Nor is it needed. The doctrine
has its solid foundation in the life experience of
the Christian church. It is a most practical doc
trine, and continually meets with practical veri
fication from experience. To such as lack the
Christian consciousness, it might be a highly inter
esting metaphysical truth, but could scarcely be of
spiritual efficacy, although it were demonstrable
with the certainty of a proposition in geometry.
But something can be done to show that there is
no contradiction in it ; to make it more conceiv
able, more congenial, so to speak, to the mind.
And that cannot but be welcome to the most as
sured believer. Even the doubter may perhaps

"PERSON" DEFINED 247
be made to see that there is in it more that is rea
sonable and probable than he had thought.
The popular objection that three cannot be one
derives its whole force from the assumption that
the same noun is to be supplied to each numeral.
The very absurdity of what it denies ought to be
enough to warn any rational mind that it can be
of no avail against the Christian doctrine. Of
course, three persons cannot be one person, if in
each case by " person " a true, individual person
ality be understood. I have already explained that
when, for want of a better word, we speak of
three " persons," we do not use the term in the
sense of personality. Personality implies what in
philosophy is called an " ego," a self, — not mere
consciousness, but self - consciousness and self -de
termining will. We certainly do not mean that
in the Trinity there are three egos, three inde
pendent wills.1 What we do mean is that God
has in himself three centres or foci of conscious
ness, in and through each of which his one per
sonality utters itself. In each of these centres
the whole of the one and indivisible divine life
focalizes itself in all its fullness, not successively
nor alternately, now in one, now in the other, but
simultaneously and eternally. Thus each centre
is full of personality ; but it is the one personality
1 Cf. Dr. Kedney, Christ. Doct. Harmonized, i. chap. xi.

248 THE BEING OF GOD
of the one God. Moreover, each centre is to be
conceived as specially related to different lines
of divine action, — the one to works of power and
creation, the other to works of executive wisdom,
the third to works of unifying mediation. All the
divine perfections are active in each, but so as to
converge to different immediate ends. Herein we
have the ontological ground for the different forms
under which the three hypostases are apprehended
by us in history and revelation : the economic
Trinity, the Trinity of manifestation, has its neces
sary basis in eternal distinctions within the God
head. Let us now bring this into connection with the
creed statements. When the creeds speak of the
essence of God, they denote the spirit-substance of
his being, — the to us incomprehensible substratum
or vehicle of his personality. What I have called
" centres," in which the one personality of God
focalizes itself, as our personality may be said to
focalize itself in the brain, the creeds call the " per
sons " of the Trinity. They act as the organs of
personal being, and therefore the name, though
liable to misinterpretation, is not wholly inappro
priate. When the creeds say that the persons are
homoousion, of the same essence, they mean that
each has the whole essence of the one Deity as
the substratum of his own existence. The divine

THE CREED STATEMENTS 249
essence is not divided among them, so much to one,
so much to the other, but all is in each, because
each is a centre of consciousness of the one Person
ality. Of course, the fathers of the church knew
fully as well as we that God is immaterial, that we
cannot properly ascribe substance or essence to
him, except by abstracting from these terms every
thing that is cognizable by mortal sense-perception ;
but it was in this way that they sought to express
the absolute oneness of the Divine Being, and the
absolute deity of each of the hypostases or persons.
When, finally, the creeds say that the Son is begot
ten of the Father, and that the Holy Ghost pro
ceeds from the Father and the Son, they use Scrip
tural terms, the exact import of which no one ever
pretended to determine, but which in general were
understood to denote derivation of being, without,
however, involving origin in time, — all three were
conceived to be coeternal. How that may be made
more comprehensible, we shall see further on. For
the present it is enough if we have clearly pos
sessed ourselves of the Christian conception of
the Trinity, — that God has in himself three cen
tres of consciousness, in each of which his one
personality focalizes itself, and works in lines pecu
liar to each.
Physical illustrations of spiritual relations so
transcendent can illustrate nothing, although they

250 THE BEING OF GOD
may seem to do so. Nevertheless they have been
used from the days of the fathers until our own.
A few examples will show their character. There
is the analogy of the fountain, the river, and the
current ; of the fire, its light and its heat ; of the
cloud, the rain, and the mist of evaporation.
These, it may be allowed, furnish the ideas of deri
vation, diversity in form or mode of subsistence,
and movement, but they utterly break down on the
numerical homoousion, or identity of essence, the
only point that would give them value. Others
are still more unsatisfactory. Consider the exam
ples of the root, trunk, and branches of a tree ; the
form, color, and perfume of a flower ; the size,
shape, and color of any object whatever. Here
we have mere triads of parts or properties in one
object. As to some of them, we can see no ne
cessary mutual relations between them, except that
of coexistence, e. g. size, shape, color ; in others
it does not appear what ground there is for find
ing a triad rather than a quartette or any other
composite of parts, — e. g. to the roots, trunk,
branches, of a tree, why not add leaves and fruit ?
It is true, none of these or similar illustrations
were offered to prove the Trinity in Unity, but
merely to suggest some conception of how it may
be. But as they all lack the element of conscious
personal life, they at best leave the matter where

ST. AUGUSTINE'S ANALOGY 251
they found it. They may even result in darken
ing counsel by words without knowledge. The in
quiring mind, arrested by the offered analogy of
the fountain, the river, and the current, may ask,
Wherein lies the unity of these ? In the whole
body of water ? Then the three are different parts
of the unit, but not three modes under each of
which the whole appears ; for the water that is at
any moment in the fountain is not the water that
is in the river. They may be of the same nature,
but they are not numerically the same. Thus we
reach a composite God. Does the unity lie in
that body of water which is at any moment in the
fountain ? Then that which is now fountain will
anon be river and current. The unity evidently
passes through different phases. The same sub
stance is now exclusively fountain, anon river or
current, — the doctrine of Sabellianism. Is the
unity merely a matter of thought ? Fountain,
river, and current, being connected in various ways,
are they for that reason conceived as one ? Then
the unity is an abstraction ; the real thing is the
three, — Tritheism.
A much higher class of analogies, gradually ris
ing into what deserve to be called efforts to con
struct the Trinity by speculative reasoning, are
based upon the assumption that, since man was
made in the image of God, there must be in his

252 THE BEING OF GOD
spiritual nature hints and shadows, at least, of
what the divine nature is. The analogy was at
first sought in the three powers of the soul, — the in
tellect, the will, and the affections ; but Augustine,
with profounder insight into all the conditions of
the problem, endeavored to find it in the human
self-consciousness. The three words of which he
makes use in his subtlest reasonings on this subject
are memory, the intellect, and will. Instead of
" will " he also uses " love ; " for, says he, " what
else is love than will ? " x And in truth will, wish,
desire, love, readily flow into each other. By
" memory " he understands what may be called the
thought-material which lies latent in the mind,
before the intellect converts it into conscious
thought, — the unshaped thought to which the cog
nitive faculty gives form.2 Hence he also substi
tutes " the mind itself " for it. Thus, he says,
" we have a sort of image of the Trinity in the
mind itself, together with its knowledge of itself,
which is its offspring and its word concerning it
self, and thirdly love." 3 These words also indi
cate the drift of his reasoning. The mind or mem
ory is a storehouse of latent, inert knowledge. It
or any part of it may have been true, quick know-
1 De Trin., xv. 38.
2 Cf. De Trin., xv. 40, and Baur, Dreieinigkeitslehre, i. 869.
8 De Trin., ix. 18.

MELANCTHON'S ARGUMENT 253
ledge once, and have been relegated into obscurity
again (hence the term " memory ") ; but it be
comes and is true and actual knowledge only when
the intellect takes cognizance of it. Then the
mind knows objectively what until then it held in
latency. But the activity of the intellect on the
contents of the " memory " springs from an impulse
of the will (or love). Thus every act of know
ledge is the result of the interaction of these three
functions of the mind. Now, as self-consciousness
is an act of knowledge, it can only arise in the
same way. Here we reach the central nerve of
Augustine's reasoning. For if the human spirit,
fashioned after the likeness of God, reaches self-
consciousness only through the cooperation of these
three functions, is there not good reason for think
ing that the Infinite Spirit likewise realizes him
self in an analogous way ? that the trinity of hy
postases is in fact the indispensable condition of
the divine self-consciousness ? 2
This analogical argument was also employed by
Anselm and others of the Scholastics, but, so far
as I know, not materially improved. Melancthon's
version of it is of special interest, because it en
deavors to point out clearly (whether tenably, is
another question) the hitherto unindicated connec
tion between the objective thought of the divine
1 Cf. A. Dorner, Augustinus, p. 5 ff.

254 THE BEING OF GOD
intellect and the hypostatic distinction in the di
vine nature. I quote his own words : 1 " There
are two properties of the soul, — understanding
and will. The understanding begets images by
thinking ; the will possesses impulsive force, as
when the heart begets high courage, feels love,
gladness, or other affections." " Since the Son
may be called Logos, he is begotten by thinking ;
but a thought is an image of the thing thought :
the Logos is therefore called Son because the Son
is the image of the Father. But the Holy Spirit
is said to ' proceed,' because love belongs to the
will. The Father, therefore, beholding the Son,
desires and loves him ; and the Son, in turn, be
holding the Father, desires and loves him : through
this mutual love, properly an act of will, the Holy
Spirit, who is the exciter of motion, proceeds from
the Father and the Son, the coeternal image of the
Father. Therefore, as ' begetting ' is attributed to
the understanding, so we say that * procession ' is
from the will, because the will is the seat of love
and motion. Now in us there is no transfusion
of our essence into any images, or into any love or
impulse, even though our nature be vehemently
carried away by love or gladness, and transports
1 See Twesten, Dogmatik, ii. 208. Twesten's instructive discus
sion of the Trinity may be found translated in the Bibliotheca
Sacra for 1846.

MELANCTHON'S ARGUMENT 255
itself, so to speak, into the beloved object. But
the image of the eternal Father, which is the Son,
is of the substance of the eternal Father, and the
essence of the Father and the Son is communicated
to the Holy Spirit."
In the last two sentences of the foregoing, Me-
lancthon meets the objection which inevitably pre
sents itself, that the image which we project is one
of pure thought, evanescent and without real exist
ence, by asserting a transfusion or communication
of the divine essence by the Father, which, if ad
mitted, would certainly reintroduce the subordina
tionism of which Augustine freed the doctrine.1
Whether a better way of perfecting the analogy
can be suggested, will be considered anon. At
this point, it is more to the purpose to note another
defect. You have observed that the analogy, as
proposed by both Augustine and Melancthon, sets
out with an analysis of the human self-conscious
ness, — that is, it views the mind as turned in upon
itself, and in thought constructing an image or pic
ture of itself ; that done, it abandons the self-con
sciousness, and introduces the will, or love, to fur
nish the third side needed. But thereby it leaves
the analogy incomplete, and gives up whatever
demonstrative value it might have had. For it is
evident that will or love (that is, in this case, self-
1 Cf . above, p. 239, and Dorner's Augustinus, p. 28 ff.

256 THE BEING OF GOD
love), being an utterance of already established
self-consciousness, cannot be invoked for its origi
nation. It presupposes it.
These weak points discovered, many more recent
theologians have endeavored so to construct the
analogy as to avoid them. I shall endeavor to pre
sent it in the newer form as briefly and clearly as
I may. The chief difficulty of the undertaking
lies in the psychological analysis which it involves.
Let us first ask how we come to full self-con
sciousness, — to the full sense of personality, and
what that involves. And that means much more
than if I were to ask, How do we know that we are
not other persons, nor stones or trees, — that there
is something we call " self " in us, and many not-
selves outside of us ? It means, How do we come
to know what the self in us is and contains, what
it can do and feel, — in short, what its nature and
powers are ? Self-consciousness — the knowledge
of self — goes much farther than the mere con
sciousness that there is a self or me. The infant
becomes cognizant of the not-me as soon as it be
gins to notice things, and to reach out after them ;
and in that perception of the not-me there is in
cluded, as its opposite, the perception of the me
as different from the not-me. But this is by no
means true self-consciousness. It is only a first ap
proach towards it, such as brutes also have. They,

RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 257
too, perceive a difference between themselves and
things not themselves. Clear self-consciousness
requires the power of reflection, which brutes have
not, or in low degree. The child has it, and in
proportion to the use it makes of it advances
toward true self-consciousness. But even in the
brightest child the knowledge of its own personal
ity is next to nothing. It has will enough of a
kind, but it is the instinctive impulse of an animal.
Of its true self it is yet ignorant. In hosts of
men self-consciousness is never fully developed, not
even for an instant ; and in none, though possibly
reached at intervals, is it permanently and unin
terruptedly held. The finite spirit cannot realize
itself without losing the external world, on which,
in its incorporate form, it depends for existence.
Let us next trace the process by which self-con
sciousness is developed. Two steps are necessary.
The first has already been described to us by Au
gustine and Melancthon. Prior to it, the mind
must be conceived as being in a state of what we
may call nature-automatism. Its action differs in
no respect from that of the brute mind. But as
human mind it has in it, what the brute mind has
not, the power to attain personality, and the latent
impulse to enter on the road towards that attain
ment. How it is that the latent impulse starts
into action, we cannot know, but the result is mat-

258 THE BEING OF GOD
ter of experience. The mind awakes, so to speak,
to a premonition of its personality. It turns its
eye in upon itself, and views its own inner world,
— observes its powers of thought, will, and feeling ;
discovers the springs of their action and notes
their capabilities and limitations, — in short, forms
an image, a thought-photograph, of itself. Is self-
consciousness now attained ? By no means. We
have the percipient mind, and we have the per
ceived image of itself on which it gazes. But as
yet the two stand over against each other like
strangers. Something must come and tell the per
cipient mind that the image it gazes on is or de
picts its own self. And of course that something
must come from within the mind itself ; in other
words, it must be the mind itself in another rela
tion to the image than that in which it formed it.
It must be able to view both the self-inspecting
mind and the image it projects as objects, and to
pronounce upon the relation between them. Such
a diremption of the mind, mysterious as it is, is
not only necessary to explain self-consciousness,
but seems to come to light in multitudes of abnor
mal psychological phenomena, which tend to put
its possibility beyond question. Therefore, to re
state the whole process in few words, the mind, in
the first place, as subject, creates by self-inspection
an objective image of itself ; and then, by a second

ANALOGOUS PROCESS IN GOD 259
act, recognizes itself in the image, and thus arrives
at clear self-consciousness.
It is probable that most persons, not familiar
with psychological inquiries, would object that,
while not aware of any marked deficiency of self-
consciousness, they never made any such sudden
and wonderful attainment of it as I have described.
And they would be right. What I have described
as if it were a single event in the life of the soul,
is in fact the outcome of innumerable partial events
of the same nature, but not of the same intensity,
all tending to the same great result. We have
grown each of us, almost imperceptibly, into that
stage of true, self-conscious personality at which
we have arrived. Our self-consciousness, as a pres
ent, realized possession, is constantly fluctuating ;
but in the moments of its highest realization, could
we analyze it, it would be found to present the
movements pointed out.
Now, as God is the perfect self-conscious Spirit,
are we not justified in concluding that an analogous
process takes place in him ? and that, as he is ab
solutely free from the limitations of time, growth,
and imperfection of every kind, it takes place in
him eternally and uninterruptedly ? We have,
then, an analogy which tells of a ceaseless move
ment within the Divine Being by which his self-
consciousness is produced and maintained. But

260 THE BEING OF GOD
how are we to conceive of this ? In us, the image
of itself projected by the mind in thought is not
indeed pure image, mere shadow (for thought can
not be wholly devoid of the life that begets it),
but neither is it the adequate representation or
counterpart of the spirit. It is only partially com
plete. The human spirit can neither fathom itself
entirely, so as to project itself wholly into the im
age, nor can it completely separate the image from
itself, so as to give it a real existence of its own.1
Hence our self-consciousness is never absolutely
full ; and there is always in it a trace or remnant
of the impersonal nature-life which precedes it.
But no such disability attaches to God. He is In
finite Life, — Perfect Spirit. In him the process
must reach its ideal character. The objective self-
projection must be exhaustive, and the diremption
must be complete. That in which perfect deity is
to recognize itself must be perfect deity, — in fact
as well as form. Nor is it difficult to apprehend,
proximately at least, how this can be, provided we
have firmly grasped the idea that God's thinking
is not, like ours, merely descriptive of an already
existing object, but an outflow of life, giving real
ity to what it thinks.
If, then, God, as the Divine Essence (the Ens
Divinum, let us say, for the sake of clearness),
1 Cf. Dorner, Glaubenslehre, i. 407.

DIVINE SELF-DIREMPTION 261
be conceived as eternally objectifying himself in
thought, and that thought as eternally realized in
a living mode or form of the Divine Being, we have
reached the conception of God eternally generating
the Son, " the image of God," " the impress of his
substance " (2 Cor. iv. 4 ; Heb. i. 3). Observe, I
said not, God as Father, but God as the {per hy-
pothesin undifferentiated) Ens Divinum; for, in
the logical order of thought, the Father as Father
comes into being only with the Son. Father and
Son are both subsistence-forms, modes of being
(Tpairoi vTrd.p£eio<s, Seinsweisen) of the one Ens Dir
vinum. But you may ask, How can the Ens Divi
num, prior to the attainment of self-consciousness,
objectify himself in thought ? in other words, how
can he, not being self-conscious, think himself?
But the same question may be asked in the case of
every human being. How does the human spirit,
in order to reach self-consciousness, project itself
as another than itself? The only possible an
swer is that it is inherent in the nature of spirit
so to do. I might remind you that in dreams and
trances thinking goes on, as showing that thought
does not presuppose self-consciousness. But the
physical quantity comes in there, and is none the
less disturbing because it is unknown. I keep my
stand, therefore, back of the physical, and say that
as the physical cannot originate thought (however

262 THE BEING OF GOD
it may modify it), thought, or, if you please, the
thought-process, must exist prior to it, and be an
ever-active attribute of spirit as spirit. And as
the eternal Spirit is the source of all finite spirit,
whatever is in the latter must be present in the
former, this never-resting impulse to objectify it
self in thought included. Therefore in the Infi
nite Spirit this self - positing process is not only
present, but is as beginningless as the being in
whom it takes place.
What we have reached, then, is the conception
of the Ens Divinum eternally dirempting itself
into the twofold relation of thinking subject and
thought object, or, as the Christian doctrine ex
presses it, the relation of Father and Son. All
there is in the one is in the other ; for the thinker
forever thinks himself completely. And as the
thinking is effective, real, the object is pervaded
by the same life and movement as the subject.
Therefore each can contemplate the other as if
(to resort to an illustration which, however defec
tive, may be helpful) the reflection in a mirror
were endowed with life and power to contemplate
the face of which it is the reflection. But this
mutual contemplation cannot make the one find
itself in the other. In and of itself, it can only
emphasize the diversity. For subject and object
(Father and Son), as such, are two, and, in the

DIVINE SELF-RETURN 263
sense in which they are two, are not and cannot be
identical. They are distinct modes of existence
of the one Divine Being. But by another move
ment the Ens Divinum, which is in or under each
of these modes, and in both has the same qualities
and impulses, sets out simultaneously from each,
and in meeting recognizes itself in itself, and
thereby (so to speak) closes the circle and estab
lishes self-consciousness. Herewith we reach that
third mode of being in the Deity which Christian
doctrine describes as the Holy Spirit " proceeding "
from the Father and the Son.
We have thus found three relations or modes of
being in God. Neither the relations themselves
nor their number have been arbitrarily determined ;
both have been deduced from what we know of the
nature of spirit. We have found personal charac
teristics in the relations, yet (as before explained)
they are not persons in the strict and proper sense
of the word. The consciousness in each of them
is the consciousness of the one Divine Being.
Without them, however, God cannot be thought
by us as self-conscious Personality, but only as un
conscious or sub-conscious pure being, after a pan
theistic manner. Deism, the only other alterna
tive, is in the last analysis a mere refusal to think
Him at all. From the philosophical point of view,
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the doc-

264 THE BEING OF GOD
trine that the Eternal can be and is Self-conscious,
Personal Life, — Life infinite and absolute, eter
nally going forth and returning within himself ;
and therefore eternally knowing, eternally loving,
eternally blessed. The internal process, out of
which the divine self-consciousness issues, is with
out beginning and without end. There never was a
time when Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were not,
or when God was other than he is.1
The argument now finished takes its departure
from the constitution of the human mind, and rea
sons up to God. There are others, starting from
ethical principles, which it would be interesting to
pursue, did time allow. One of them only I can
not bring myself to pass unnoticed, chiefly because
it illustrates, in a striking way, the difference of
function pertaining to the distinctions within the
Trinity to which I before referred. Whether it is
wholly original with Dorner, that greatest of mod
ern theologians, I cannot say, but it is certainly
only in his work that it has arrested my attention.2
It sets out from the fact that, in seeking for the
ultimate authority of moral truth, we arrive at a
1 For another statement of what is essentially the same ar
gument as the above, see Kedney, Chris. Doct. Harmonized, i.
97-102. 2 See Glaubenslehre, i. 409 ff.

ETHICAL ARGUMENTS 265
contradiction or antinomy which nothing but the
doctrine of the Trinity resolves.
You will remember that in previous lectures the
final ground of truth was incidentally adverted to,
in connection with the moral nature of man and
the attribute of divine omnipotence.1 The diffi
culty takes its rise in connection with moral truth,
— the distinction between right and wrong. The
question is, What makes right right, and wrong
wrong ? Only two answers are possible : Right,
moral truth, is either the result of the divine will,
— a mandate, This shall be moral, that shall be
immoral, — or it is rooted and grounded in the
divine nature, and therefore necessary, eternally
unalterable even for God. There is no third alter
native ; for if you conceive of something outside of
God as the determining power, that something,
call it fate or any other name, would be, if not God,
superior to God. Now assume that moral truth is
the creature of God's will, — that right is right
because God has so willed, and that he might have
willed otherwise, — what follows ? We get a God
who, prior to this act of will, was morally unde
termined. He was all life and all power and all
knowledge, but he had no moral character. In
vain should we seek to escape from this by saying
that his will was grounded in his character; for
1 Above, pp. 64 and 137.

266 THE BEING OF GOD
that would be to abandon the assumed position,
and to imply that moral truth is necessary even
for God, — that, though he willed, his will was the
outcome of his nature, and could not be other than
it was. If right is right simply because God
willed it, it is a purely arbitrary matter, and the
whole universe is a gigantic instance of might mak
ing right !
That cannot be. Therefore we turn to the other
alternative, and say that God is and always was
morally determined, and that therefore moral
truth is what it is by a necessity inherent in God
himself. God cannot change it in the least. It is
impossible for him, even in his own actions, to
deviate from the right by a hair's-breadth, — im
possible, not morally merely, but physically. God
is, not by choice only, but by nature, incapable
of doing wrong. In this way we should secure
God's formal righteousness, no doubt, but at the
expense of his freedom. Such righteousness in
men we should refuse to acknowledge as genuine.
It would be the morality of an automaton, — the
goodness of a clock that faithfully serves its owner
by accurate time-keeping. True morality is a free
morality. That is what St. Paul meant by his
contrast between the works of the law and the
works of the Spirit of freedom. We cannot for
a moment suppose that that is wanting in God

ETHICAL ARGUMENTS 267
which it was the very end of his man-becoming in
Christ to impart to us.
Here there are two contradictories, both of which
must nevertheless be true. God must Tie unchange
ably morally determined, and he must also be per
fectly free to will or not to will that which he finds
in himself. The problem is as old as Plato, and
as fateful as human existence. It lies at the base
of all the serious dogmatic and practical life aber
rations of both mediaeval and modern days. Its
solution, if anywhere to be found, is found in the
doctrine of the Trinity. That doctrine affords at
least a hint of the direction in which we are to look
for light. For though it by no means renders the
depths of Deity transparent to finite gaze, it re
veals distinctions in God which suggest explana
tion of the coexistence in him of necessity and free
dom, while at the same time it enables us to see
why, before Christianity, not an inkling of this
solution could be obtained. The God of the old
revelation was the God of moral law, and its inex
orable guardian. Sin was transgression of exter
nal law, and righteousness unquestioning submis
sion to authority. In this the moral necessity of
the divine nature, as centred in the Father, comes
to view. But the Son of the Christian revelation
presents the converse side of perfectly free willing
of the right. Christ is the obedient, the sinless

268 THE BEING OF GOD
obedient, the free, energetically co-willing obedient.
Finally, in the Holy Spirit the Christian conscious
ness recognizes a divine power which works the
union of the two — authority and freedom — in
the human individual. Now, that which in revela
tion thus intimates the coexistence in God of moral
necessity, moral freedom, and their union, must
correspond to facts within the divine nature ; and
the eternal process in which the one God unfolds
himself into three modes of existence, or centres of
consciousness, gives us at least a dim perception
of truths so far beyond our comprehension.
Arguments similar to the preceding might be
multiplied. They are suggested by every moral
attribute of God. It is possible to overrate their
value. They are certainly not of such a nature as
to render service in popular instruction. But it
is no less easy to undervalue them. If they can
not wholly satisfy the thirst of the mind to know
what it believes, they hold out possibilities, yea
prospects, of knowledge, when that which is in part
shall have passed away, that cannot fail to animate
the Christian life. But this is not their chief
value. They all show that every question in ethics
and theology, in philosophy and psychology, leads
back to God, and that our idea of God receives its
highest perfection from the light thrown on it by

ETHICAL ARGUMENTS 269
the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine is the
priceless contribution which Christianity, consid
ered as a system of thought, has made to human
philosophy. It is the solvent of innumerable diffi
culties that present themselves to the thinker.
Without it, theism — that is, the doctrine of a liv
ing, personal, transcendent, yet immanent deity —
cannot successfully maintain itself, but must inevi
tably give way to some form of pantheism.

S1W)