It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy andscience with which we are specially concerned. But it is impossible to pass by the objection to theology which comes as it wereab intrafrom the side of religion. For if it is valid, then Christianity may as well give up at once any idea of being the religion of man. Yet people say, 'Why have a theology? Human reason cannot search out "the deep things of God;" it will only put new difficulties in a brother's way; why not rest content with the words of Holy Scripture, with simple truths like "God is love," and simple duties like "Love one another," and leave theology alone?' Now without denying what George Eliot calls 'the right of the individual to general haziness,' or asserting that every Christian must be a theologian, we may surely say that Christianity is bound to have a theology. And even individual Christians, if they ever grow into the manhood of reason, must have a theology, or cease to be religious. The protest against theology from the side of religion looks modest and charitable enough till we remember that religious haziness is generally, if not always, the outcome of moral laziness; that it implies the neglect of a duty and the neglect of a gift;—the duty of realizing to the reason the revelation of Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us to do it. More than this, the protest against theology in the interests of religion is irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking man that he need not interpret to his reason what religion tells him of God, is like saying to him, 'Be religious if you will, but you need not let your religion influence your conduct.' If Christianity had been content to be a moral religion, if it had abandoned its claim to rationality and had left Greek speculation alone, it must have accepted either the Gnostic division of territory, or recognised an internecine conflict between religion and philosophy. And it did neither; but, under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian theology arose and claimed the reason of the ancient world.
Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality for God, so Christianity goes further and claims to hold the key to the intellectual problems of the world. So far as the nature of God is concerned, Christianity met the intellectualdifficulties of the first centuries by theDoctrine of the Trinity.
From time to time people make the discovery that the doctrine of the Trinity is older than Christianity. If the discoverer is a Christian apologist, he usually explains that God has given anticipatory revelations to men of old, and points out how they fall short of the revelation of Christianity. If he is an opponent of Christianity, he triumphantly claims to have unmasked the doctrine and tracked it down to a purely natural origin. 'People think,' says Hegel, 'that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they haveipso factobanished it from Christianity[109].' Men have found the doctrine, or something like it, not only in the Old Testament but in Plato and Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite Gnostics, in the Chinese Tao-Té-Ching and the 'Three Holy Ones' of Bouddhism, in the Tri-mûrti of Hinduism and elsewhere. Why not? Revelation never advances for itself the claim which its apologists sometimes make for it, the claim to be something absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is never a truth out of relation with previous thought. He leads men to feel their moral and intellectual needs before He satisfies either. There was a preparation for Hebrew monotheism, as there was a preparation for the Gospel of Christ. There was an intellectual preparation for the doctrine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation for the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is distinguished from theavatarsof Hinduism, and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative moral force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less distinguished from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and its modern developments by the fact that for eighteen centuries it has been the safeguard of a pure Monotheism against everything which menaces the life of religion.
But Christian theology is not 'a philosophy without assumptions.' It does not attempt to provesola rationethe doctrine of the Trinity, but to shew how that which reason demands is met and satisfied by the Christian doctrine of God.Starting with the inheritance of faith, the belief in the Divinity of Christ, and trusting in the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, it throws itself boldly into the rational problem, fights its way through every form of Unitarianism, and interprets its faith to itself and to the world at large in the doctrine of the Triune God. Its charter is the formula of Baptism, where the 'treasures of immediate faith are gathered up into a sentence, though not yet formulated into a doctrine[110].'
To the Greek mind two things had become clear before Christianity came into the world, and it would be easy to trace the steps by which the conclusions were reached. First, Reason, as relation-giving, seeks for unity in the manifoldness of which it is conscious, and will be satisfied with nothing less. But Eleaticism had convincingly proved that an abstract unity can explain nothing. Quite apart from questions of religion and morals, the Eleatic unity was metaphysically a failure. Plato had seen this, and yet the 'dead hand' of Eleaticism rested on Platonism, and the dialogueParmenidesshewed how powerless the Doctrine of Ideas was to evade the difficulty. Thus the Greeks more than 2000 years ago had realized, what is nowadays proclaimed, as if it were a new discovery, that an absolute unit is unthinkable, because, as Plato puts it in thePhilebus, the union of the one and the many is 'an everlasting quality in thought itself which never grows old in us.' The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had their 'schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.' They had not solved, but they had felt, the rational difficulty; as the Jews had felt, but had not overcome, except through the Messianic hope, the separation of man from God. But as the Trinitarian doctrine took shape, Christian teachers realized how the Christian, as opposed to the Jewish, idea of God, not only held the truth of the Divine Unity as against all polytheistic religions, but claimed reason on its side against all Unitarian theories. They did not, however, argue that it was true because it satisfied reason, but that it satisfied reason because it was true.
They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to be solved, but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of theResurrection, and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity of Him who rose. And starting from that basis of fact revealed in Christ, they found themselves in possession of an answer to difficulties which at first they had not felt, and thus their belief was justified and verified in the speculative region.
The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined in their sacred writings, was that 'the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.' But the Fathers do not treat this doctrine merely as a revealed mystery, still less as something which complicates the simple teaching of Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally holding the Unity of God. 'The Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self,' says Tertullian, 'so far from being destroyed, is actually supported by it[111].' 'We cannot otherwise think of One God,' says Hippolytus, 'but by truly believing in Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost[112].' 'The supreme and only God,' says Lactantius, 'cannot be worshipped except through the Son. He who thinks that he worships the Father only, in that he does not worship the Son also, does not worship the Father[113]. 'Without the Son the Father is not,' says Clement of Alexandria, 'for in that He is a Father He is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the true teacher about the Father[114].' So Origen argues,—If God had ever existed alone in simple unity and solitary grandeur, apart from some object upon which from all eternity to pour forth His love, He could not have been always God. His love, His Fatherhood, His very omnipotence would have been added in time, and there would then have been a time when He was imperfect. 'The Fatherhood of God must be coeval with His omnipotence; for it is through the Son that the Father is Almighty[115].' This was the line of argument afterwards developed by S. Athanasius when he contended against the Arians that the Son was the reality or truth[116]of the Father, without whom the Father could not exist; and by S. Augustine, when he argues that love implies one who loves and one who is loved,and love to bind them together[117]. Even one so unphilosophically minded as Irenaeus[118], cannot but see in the Christian doctrine of the relation of the Father and the Son, the solution of the difficulty about the infinity of God: 'Immensus Pater in Filio mensuratus; mensura Patris Filius.' While philosophy with increasing hopelessness was asking, How can we have a real unity which shall be not a barren and dead unity, but shall include differences? Christianity, with its doctrine of God, was arguing that that which was an unsolved contradiction for non-Christian thought, was a necessary corollary of the Christian Faith[119].
The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the immanence of reason in nature and in man. When Anaxagoras first declared that the universe was the work of intelligence, we are told that he seemed 'like a sober man amongst random talkers.' But both Plato and Aristotle accuse him of losing the truth which he had gained because he made intelligence appear only on occasions in the world, dragged in, like a stage-god, when naturalistic explanations failed[120]. The conception of creation out of nothing was of course unknown to Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the arranger of materials already given in a chaotic condition. With Aristotle too it is reason which makes everything what it is. But the reason is in things, not outside them. Nature is rational from end to end. In spite of failures and mistakes, due to her materials, nature does the best she can and always aims at a good end[121]. She works like an artist with an ideal in view[122]. Only there is this marked difference,—Nature has the principle of growth within herself, while the artist is external to his materials[123]. Here we have a clear and consistent statement of the doctrine of immanent reason as against the Anaxagorean doctrine of a transcendent intelligence. If we translate both into the theological language of our own day, we should call the latter the deistic, the formerthe pantheistic, view; or, adopting a distinction of supreme importance in the history of science, we might say that we have here, face to face, the mechanical and the organic view of nature. Both were teleological, but to the one, reason was an extra-mundane cause, to the other, an internal principle. It was the contrast between external and inner design, as we know it in Kant and Hegel; between the teleology of Paley and the 'wider teleology' of Darwin and Huxley and Fiske; between the transcendent and immanent views of God, when so held as to be mutually exclusive.
It is these two one-sided views which the Christian doctrine of God brings together. Religion demands as the very condition of its existence a God who transcends the universe; philosophy as imperiously requires His immanence in nature. If either Religion denies God's immanence, or Philosophy denies that He transcends the universe, there is an absolute antagonism between the two, which can only be ended by the abandonment of one or the other. But what we find is that though Philosophy (meaning by that the exercise of the speculative reason in abstraction from morals and religion) the more fully it realizes the immanence of God, the more it tends to deny the transcendence, religion not only has no quarrel with the doctrine of immanence, but the higher the religion the more unreservedly it asserts this immanence as a truth dear to religion itself. The religious equivalent for 'immanence' is 'omnipresence,' and the omnipresence of God is a corollary of a true monotheism. As long as any remains of dualism exist, there is a region, however small, impervious to the Divine power. But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by excluding dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the omnipresence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies the doctrine of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence. Hence we find the Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural processes immediately to God. They know nothing of second causes. The main outlines of natural science, the facts of generation and growth, are familiar enough to them, yet every fact is ascribed immediately to the action of God. He makes the grass to grow upon the mountains; He fashionsthe child in the womb; He feeds the young ravens; He provides fodder for the cattle; He gives to all their meat in due season; when He lets His breath go forth they are made; when He takes away their breath they die and return to dust.
This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by religion, had however yet to be fused with the philosophical doctrine of immanence. And here again the fusion was effected by the Christian doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The earlier Apologists concern themselves first with the vindication of the Divine attributes. God's separateness from the world as against Greek Pantheism, His omnipresence in it as against a Judaising deism. But the union of God's transcendence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity[124]. The dying words of Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are said to have been,—'I am striving to bring the God which is within into harmony with the God which is in the universe.' And the unsolved problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the unsolved problem of non-Christian philosophy in our day, is met by the Christian doctrine of God. All and more than all that philosophy and science can demand, as to the immanence of reason in the universe, and the rational coherence of all its parts, is included in the Christian teaching: nothing which religion requires as to God's separateness from the world, which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar Greek term ΛΟΓΟΣ which, from the days of Heracleitus, had meant to the Greek the rational unity and balance of the world, is taken up by S. John, by S. Clement, by S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which those who started from the Philonian position never reached. It is the personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, who is one in the Holy Spirit with the Father. 'The Word was God.' 'By Him all things were made.' 'He the All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father spreads His power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself.Nothing is left empty of His presence, but to all things and through all, severally and collectively, He is the giver and sustainer of life.... He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe like a lute, and keeps all things in earth and air and heaven in tune together. He it is Who binding all with each, and ordering all things by His will and pleasure, produces the perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious reign of law. While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet moves all things by His own appointment according to the Father's will[125].' The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the abstract motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so powerless to explain the metaphysical problems of Greece. It is the living Omnipresent Word, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, and the philosophical truth becomes an integral part of that Christian doctrine of God, which, while it safeguarded religion and satisfied reason, had won its first and greatest victories in the field of morals.
VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen morality and heathen speculation neither by unreasoning protest nor by unreal compromise, but by taking up into itself all that was highest and truest in both. Why then is this Christian idea of God challenged in our day? Have we outgrown the Christian idea of God, so that it cannot claim and absorb the new truths of our scientific age? If not, with the lessons of the past in our mind, we may confidently ask,—What fuller unfolding of the revelation of Himself has God in store for us, to be won, as in the past, through struggle and seeming antagonism?
The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly challenged by reason is obvious enough. It almost seems as if, in our intellectual life, we were passing through a transition analogous to that which, in the moral region, issued in the Reformation. Even amongst those who believe that Christian morality is true, there are to be found those who have convinced themselves that we have intellectually outgrown the Christian Faith. 'The only God,' we have been told lately[126], 'whom Western Europeans, with aChristian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; or rather, of S. Paul, S. Augustine and S. Bernard, and of the innumerable "blessed saints," canonized or not, who peopled the ages of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract God, an Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in no human or intelligible relation.' 'God, as God,' says Feuerbach[127], 'the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding, has no more significance in religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special science; it is merely the ultimate point of support, as it were, the mathematical point of religion.' Yet it is assumed that this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the following dilemma,—'An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought finds it increasingly difficult to believe in[128].'
In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn to pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and philosophy, and even claim, for the unity of the world, the venerable name and associations of God. But the remarkable thing is that in the numberless attempts to attack, or defend, or find a substitute for Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian, teaching about God rarely appears upon the scene. Devout Christians have come to think of the doctrine of the Trinity, if not exactly as a distinct revelation, yet as a doctrine necessary for holding the divinity of Christ, without sacrificing the unity of God. Ordinary people take it for granted that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Christian faith, and that the battle must really be fought out on the Unitarian basis. If Unitarian theism can be defended, it will then be possible to go farther and accept the doctrine of the Trinity. It is natural that when Christians take this ground, those who have ceased to be Christian suppose that, though Christianity is no longer tenable, they may still cling to 'Theism,' and even perhaps, under cover of that nebulous term, make an alliance not only with Jews and Mahommedans,but with at least the more religious representatives of pantheism. It is only our languid interest in speculation or a philistine dislike of metaphysics, that makes such an unintelligent view possible. Unitarianism said its last word in the pre-Christian and early Christian period, and it failed, as it fails now, to save religion except at the cost of reason. So far from the doctrine of the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate phrase, 'the scaffolding of a purer theism,' non-Christian monotheism was the 'scaffolding' through which already the outlines of the future building might be seen. For the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains as the only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic belief[129].
It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which the Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into itself, had but littlepoint d'appuiin the unmetaphysical western world. It bore theimprimaturof the Church; it was easily deducible from the words of Holy Scripture; it was seen to be essential to the holding of the divinity of Christ. But men forgot that the doctrine was 'addressed to the reason[130];' and so its metaphysical meaning and value were gradually lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesiastical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of God, that it almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the interests of reverence and intellectual modesty. With the Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy Scripture,and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, theology. The only scientific theology of the Reformation period was the awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously deduced from a one-sided truth.
Then came the age of physical science. The break up of the mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an atomism, which, if it had been more perfectly consistent with itself, would have been fatal alike to knowledge and society. Translated into science it appeared as mechanism in the Baconian and Cartesian physics: translated into politics it appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge was a crude empiricism; its theology unrelieved deism. God was 'throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of the universe,' and a machinery of 'second causes' had practically taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic age, whether God's delegation of His power was not so absolute as to make it impossible for Him to 'interfere' with the laws of nature. The question of miracles became the burning question of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe. Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the 'higher pantheism,' which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true philosophy, fell into the background.
Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been undermined. The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science had pushed the deist's God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here and not there. He cannot delegate His power to demigods called 'second causes[131].' In nature everything must be His work or nothing. We must franklyreturn to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence of God, the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature. And it comes to us almost like a new truth, which we cannot at once fit it in with the old.
Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for our age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting point of the religious and philosophic view of God is shewing itself in the most thoughtful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought are becoming increasingly Greek, and the flood, which in our day is surging up against the traditional Christian view of God, is prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The pantheism is not less pronounced because it comes as the last word of a science of nature, for the wall which once separated physics from metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is not the paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place, preparatory to a new departure. We are not surprised then, that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that 'the infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other than the living God,' and who vindicates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that 'the Sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intellectual confusion,' should instinctively feel his kinship with Athanasianism, and vigorously contend against the view that any part of the universe is 'Godless[132].'
Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of God's immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the side of a scientific theory, which was violently assailed by the official guardians of the Faith, has resulted for many in the throwing aside of the counter and conditioning truth, which saves religion from pantheism. It seemed as if traditional Christianity were bound up with the view that God iswholly separate from the world and not immanent in it. And Professor Fiske has been misled[133]into the belief that S. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is almost incredible to anyone, who has read any of S. Augustine's writings, that, according to this view, he has to play therôleof the unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who thinks of God as 'a crudely anthropomorphic Being, far removed from the universe and accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized church[134].' And not only is S. Augustine represented as a deist, but S. Athanasius is made a pantheist, and the supposed conflict between science and religion is, we are told, really the conflict between Athanasian and Augustinian ideas of God[135]. Yet, as a matter of fact, S. Athanasius and S. Augustine both alike held the truths which deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction of religion. If S. Athanasius says, 'The Word of God is not contained by anything, but Himself contains all things.... He was in everything and was outside all beings, and was at rest in the Father alone[136]:' S. Augustine says, 'The same God is wholly everywhere, contained by no space, bound by no bonds, divisible into no parts, mutable in no part of His being, filling heaven and earth by the presence of His power. Though nothing can exist without Him, yet nothing is what He is[137].'
The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days, triumphed where Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the challenge of Greek thought, it recognised the demands of the speculative reason, and found in itself the answer which, before the collision with Hellenism, it unconsciously possessed. It is challenged again by the metaphysics of our day. We may be wrong to speculate at all on the nature of God, but it is not less true now than in the first centuries of Christianity, that, for those who do speculate, a Unitarian, or Arian, or Sabellian theory is as impossible as polytheism. If God is to be Personal, as religion requires, metaphysicsdemands still a distinction in the Unity which unitarianism is compelled to deny. But, further, the Christian doctrine of God is challenged by the science of nature. Science, imperiously and with increasing confidence, demands a unity in nature which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality and coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the universal reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature unitarian theism cannot give, save at the price of losing itself in pantheism. Deistic it might be, as it was in the last century; deistic it can be no longer, unless it defiantly rejects the truth which science is giving us, and the claims which the scientific reason makes.
It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth and meet the new demands by a fearless reassertion of its doctrine of God. It has to bring forth out of its treasury things new and old,—the old almost forgotten truth of the immanence of the Word, the belief in God as 'creation's secret force,' illuminated and confirmed as that is by the advance of science, till it comes to us with all the power of a new discovery. Slowly and under the shock of controversy Christianity is recovering its buried truths, and realizing the greatness of its rational heritage. It teaches still that God is the eternally existent One, the Being on Whom we depend, and in Whom we live, the source of all reality and the goal to which creation moves, the Object alike of religion and philosophy, the eternal Energy of the natural world, and the immanent reason of the universe. It teaches that He is the eternally Righteous One, and therefore the Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, leading the world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimulating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness, of the speculative reason for truth. When men had wearied themselves in the search for a remedy for that which separates men from God, the revelation is given of Him Who 'shall save His people from their sins.' And when reason had wandered long, seeking for that which should be Real and yetOne, a God Who should satisfy alike the demands of religion and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded. It was the gradual revelation of God answering to the growing needs and capacity of man.
VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the foregoing essay that there can be no proofs, in the strict sense of the word, of the existence of God. Reason has for its subject-matter, the problem of essence, not of existence, the question, 'What is God?' not 'Is there a God? Proof can only mean verificationà posterioriof a truth already held. We approach the problem with an unreasoned consciousness of dependence on a Being or Beings who are to us invisible. This we interpret crudely, or leave uninterpreted. The belief may express itself in ancestor-worship, or nature-worship, or what not. But as our moral and intellectual nature develops, its light is turned back upon this primitive undefined belief. Conscience demands that God shall be moral, and with the belief that He is, there comes confidence and trust, deepening into faith and hope and love: the speculative reason demands that God shall be One, the immanent unity of all that is. And the doctrine of God, which is best able to satisfy each and all of these demands, persists as the permanent truth of religion. But neither conscience nor the speculative reason can demonstrate[138]God's existence. And it is always possible for men to carry their distrust of that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is always false because they have found that it is not always true. Reason cannot prove existence. The so-called proof,a contingentia(which underlies H. Spencer's argument for the existence of the Unknowable), is an appeal to that very consciousness of dependence which some people consider a weakness, and a thing to educate themselves out of. The appeal to theconsensus gentiumcan establish only the generality, not the strict universality, of religion. It will always be possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to the generalrule; while as for what is known as theontologicalargument, which on principles of reason would justify the instinctive belief, it requires a metaphysical training to understand it or at least to feel its force. There remain, however, the two great arguments from conscience and from nature, which are so frequently discussed in the present day.
With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in God will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the conscience. Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of 'righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come' had a strange and terrifying coherence. There is that much of truth in the statement that religion is founded in 'fear.' But the argument from conscience has been weakened by being overstated. Conscience, as we know it, has won, not indeed its existence, but the delicacy of its moral touch, and the strength of its 'categorical imperative,' from the assured belief in a real relationship between man and a holy and loving God. When that belief has ceased to exist, conscience still survives, and it is possible and justifiable to appeal to it as a fact which can be explained by religion, but without religion must be explained away. But it is a mistake to suppose that we can take the untrained and undeveloped conscience, and argue direct from it to a righteous God. Thelumen naturale, in its lowest development, gives but a faint and flickering gleam. We cannot argue back from it to a God of love, or even a God of righteousness, unless we interpret it in the fuller light of the conscience which has been trained and perfected under the growing influence of the belief. The idea of 'duty,' which is so hard to explain on utilitarian grounds, is not to be found, as we know it, in Greek ethics. For it implies a fusion of morals with religion, as we can trace it in the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian ethics. If it is impossible to explain duty as the result of association between the ideas of public and private advantage, it is no less impossible to make it an independent premise for a conclusion which is presupposed in it.
The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard for those, whose lives have been moulded on the belief inGod, the Maker of heaven and earth, to understand the inconclusiveness of the argument to those who have abandoned that belief, and start, as it were, from outside. Consequently it has been made to bear more than it can carry. No doubt the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view which it superseded. And Christianity can take up the new as it did the old, and find in it a confirmation of its own belief. But it is a confirmation not a proof, and taken by itself is incomplete. It is a great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, even when it cannot hazard a conjecture as to what the reason is. But apart from the belief of our moral nature, that in the long run everything must make for righteousness, that the world must be moral as well as rational, and that the dramatic tendency in the evolution of the whole would be irrational if it had not a moral goal, the science of nature is powerless to carry us on to a Personal God. But the strength of a rope is greater than the strength of its separate strands. The arguments for the existence of God are, it has been said, 'sufficient not resistless, convincing not compelling[139].' We can never demonstrate the existence of God either from conscience or from nature. But our belief in Him is attested and confirmed by both.
In this matter, the belief in God stands on the same level with the belief in objective reality. Both have been explained away by philosophers. Neither can be proved but by a circular argument. Both persist in the consciousness of mankind. Both have been purified and rationalized by the growth of knowledge. But the moment reason attempts to start without assumptions, and claims exclusive sovereignty over man, a paralysis of thought results. There have been, before now, philosophers who professed to begin at the beginning, and accept nothing till it was proved, and the result was a pure Pyrrhonism. They could not prove the existence of an external world. They believed it, even if they did not, like Hume, exult in the fact that belief triumphed overdemonstration, but there was no sure ground for believing that the world was not a mere cerebral phenomenon, except the curiously rational coherence of its visions. Even Prof. Huxley, in his ultra-sceptical moods, admits this. He says[140]that 'for any demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the "collection of perceptions," which makes up our consciousness, may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness.' But no one, least of all a man of science, believes this to be so. He takes reality for granted, and only tries to interpret it aright, i.e. in such a way as to make a rational unity of the facts perceived. Tell a scientific specialist,—'I am not going to let you beg the question. You must first prove that nature exists, and then I will hear about the science of nature,' and he will say 'That is metaphysics,' which to him is probably a synonym for an intellectual waste of time. 'Look at nature,' he will say, 'what more do you want? If nature had been merely a phantasmagoria there would have been no science of nature. Of course you must make your "act of faith[141]." You must believe not only that nature exists, but that it is a cosmos which can be interpreted, if you can only find the key. The proof that nature is interpretable is that we have, at least in part, been able to interpret her. There were people in John Locke's day who professed to doubt their own existence, and he was content to answer them according to their folly. "If anyone," he says[142], "pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible) let him, for me, enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger, or some other pain, convince him to the contrary."' We do not call a scientific man unreasonable if he answers thus, though he is justifying his premisses by his conclusion. We know that he that would study naturemust believe that it is, and that it is a rational whole which reason can interpret. And 'he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of such as diligently seek Him.' We feel our kinship with both before the instinctive consciousness is justified by reason.
And there is a remarkable parallelism in the process of verification. The counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature and the reign of law. But that belief, though implicit in the simplest operation of reason[143], is not consciously attained till late in the history of science. And even when it is reached, it is not at once grasped in all its wealth and fulness. It is thought of as mere uniformity, a dull mechanical repetition of events, which is powerless to explain or include the rich variety of nature and the phenomena of life and growth. It is to meet this difficulty that J. S. Mill naively assures us that 'the course of nature is not only uniform, it is also infinitely various[144].' But soon the truth is grasped, that the reign of law is a unity which is higher than mere uniformity, because it is living and not dead, and includes and transcends difference. It is the analogue in science to that higher and fuller view of God in which He is revealed as Trinity in Unity.
But as these parallel processes of verification go on, the truth is forced upon the world that religion and philosophy must either be in internecine conflict, or recognise the oneness of their Object. 'We and the philosophers,' says S. Clement, 'know the same God, but not in the same way[145].' Philosophy and religion have both been enriched by wider knowledge, and as their knowledge has become deeper and fuller, the adjustment of their claims has become more imperatively necessary. Few in our day would willingly abandon either, or deliberately sacrifice one to the other. Many would be ready to assent to the words of a Christian Father; 'when philosophy and the worship of the gods are so widely separated, that the professors of wisdom cannot bring usnear to the gods, and the priests of religion cannot give us wisdom; it is manifest that the one is not true wisdom, and the other is not true religion. Therefore neither is philosophy able to conceive the truth, nor is religion able to justify itself. But where philosophy is joined by an inseparable connection with religion, both must necessarily be true, because in our religion we ought to be wise, that is, to know the true Object and mode of worship, and in our wisdom to worship, that is, to realize in action what we know[146].'
It is sometimes argued,—You have let in more than the thin end of the wedge. You admit that 'it is the province of reason to judge of the morality of the Scripture[147].' You profess no antagonism to historical and literary criticism. Under the criticism of reason, Fetichism has given way to Polytheism, Polytheism to Monotheism, even Monotheism has become progressively less anthropomorphic. Why object to the last step in the process, and cling to the belief in a Personal God? Simply because it would make the difference between a religion purified and a religion destroyed. The difference between the 30,000 gods of Hesiod, and the One God of Christianity, is a measurable difference: the difference between a Personal God and an impersonal reason is, so far as religion is concerned, infinite. For the transition from Monotheism to Pantheism is made only by the surrender of religion, though the term 'theism' may be used to blur the line of separation, and make the transition easy.
Religion has, before all things, to guard the heritage of truth, the moral revelation of God in Christ, to 'contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints,' and to trust to the promised guidance of the Spirit of Truth. And reason interprets religion to itself, and by interpreting verifies and confirms. Religion therefore claims as its own the new light which metaphysics and science are in our day throwing upon the truth of the immanence of God: it protests only against those imperfect, because premature, syntheses, which in theinterests of abstract speculation, would destroy religion. It dares to maintain that 'the Fountain of wisdom and religion alike is God: and if these two streams shall turn aside from Him, both must assuredly run dry.' For human nature craves to be both religious and rational. And the life which is not both is neither.