Section II.—Preservation.

Section II.—Preservation.I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

Section II.—Preservation.I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

Section II.—Preservation.I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

Section II.—Preservation.I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

Section II.—Preservation.I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

I. Definition of Preservation.Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.In explanation we remark:(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”

Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is[pg 411]our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.

In explanation we remark:

(a) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.

(b) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.

(c) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God's will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.

Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”

Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... Therestof God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”Nor is God“the soul of the universe.”This phrase is pantheistic, and implies that God is the only agent.

It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute. The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as the most violent muscular exertion.”

Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate influence.”

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

1. From Scripture.In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.

In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its[pg 412]powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.

Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.

Nehemiah 9:6—“Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all”;Job 7:20—“O thou watcher[marg.“preserver”]of men!”;Ps. 36:6—“thou preservest man and beast”;104:29, 30—“Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground.”See Perowne onPs. 104—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.”Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.”Acts 17:28—“in him we live, and move, and have our being”;Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist”;Heb. 1:2, 3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compareGen. 2:2—“on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.”God is the upholder of physical life; seePs. 66:8, 9—“O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life.”God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see1 Tim. 6:13—“I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive”(ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course.Mat. 4:4—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. InPs. 104:26—“There go the ships,”Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man's works but to God's, as the parallelism:“There is leviathan”would indicate, and that by“ships”are meant“floaters”like the nautilus, which is a“little ship.”The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.

2. From Reason.We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:

(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre:“Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.

(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.

For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”

For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.”It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.

We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows:“This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it[pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.”We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.

From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes,i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.”Dorner:“If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.”But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).

Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of“a kind of wholesale willing.”Augustine:“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn:“Nature is spirit.”Tennyson, The Ancient Sage:“Force is from the heights.”Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”

(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.

James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's willwouldbe pantheistic onlyifwe turned the proposition round and identified God withno morethan the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's willismore than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which isother than himself, and he parts withother use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”

Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.”A. R. Wallace:“The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actuallyis, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.”This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.

All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing[pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.

God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.”It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.”On the persistency of force,super cuncta,subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

1. Deism.This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”[pg 415]We object to this view that:(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.

This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”

Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His bookDe Veritatewas published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls“particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He“asked for a sign,”and was answered by a“loud though gentle noise from the heavens.”He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder:“Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.”God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of“An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.”Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.

“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world”(Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma,“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”

We object to this view that:

(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.

Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.

Deism regards the universe as a“perpetual motion.”Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.”Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.

(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.

The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say:“There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.

(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.

Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.

Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.”Ruskin:“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.”See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.

2. Continuous Creation.This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.[pg 416]Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”To this we object, upon the following grounds:(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.

Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”

Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance:“God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.”Edwards himself says:“God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not.“This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot”(A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation“is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.”2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries:‘Whence came evil?’and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.”God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was:“Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.”See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.

The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force isdivinewill, and divine will indirectexercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that“ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently:“What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?”Professor Fitzgerald:“All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.”Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891:“The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”

To this we object, upon the following grounds:

(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.

Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”

Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows:“The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.”The words of the poet would then be literally true:“Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.”Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte,“the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.”A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”

Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation[pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What isnature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what isspirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.”William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”

(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.

Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.

Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.

It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature”(see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.”It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the“Exercise-system”of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.

(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force[pg 418]from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.

Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

Lotze tries to escape frommaterialcauses and yet hold tosecondcauses, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.”Dorner well remarks that“Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.”On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.

Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).

Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism).1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”;cf.Eph. 1:23—the church,“which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”God's action is noactio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words“wherein is the seed thereof”(Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words“his seed abideth in him”(1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).

(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.

In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”;Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?”James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.”Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold;“so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf”(Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his[pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

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