God is _not_ as we are, and yet He _is_ as we are. God is not made in
the image of man, but man is made in the image of God. It is through
human goodness and human purity and human love that we attain our best
conceptions of the Divine Goodness and Purity and Love. 'If ye being
evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will
your Heavenly Father {83} give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?'
Picture to yourself what is highest and best in the human relationship
of father and child: be sure that the Heavenly Father will not fall
below, but will infinitely transcend, that standard. All the justice
and goodness which we have seen on earth are the feebler reflection of
His. It is by learning that the utmost height of human goodness is but
a little way towards Him that we learn to think of Him at all aright.
But the justice and the love by which he acts are different only in
degree, and not in kind, from ours. When we think of God as altogether
such as we are, we degrade Him, we have before us the image of the
imperfect; when we try to think of Him under no image and to discard
all figures, He vanishes into unreality and nothingness, but when we
see Him in Christ, we have before us that which we can grasp and
understand, and that in which there is no imperfection.
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If there is no God but the universe, we have a universe without a God.
Worship is meaningless, Faith is a mockery, Hope is a delusion. If the
universe is God, all things in the universe are of necessity Divine.
The distinction between right and wrong is broken down. In a sense
very different from that in which the phrase was originally employed,
'Whatever is, is right.' Nothing can legitimately be stigmatised as
wrong, for there is nothing which is not God. 'If all that is is God,
then truth and error are equally manifestations of God. If God is all
that is, then we hear His voice as much in the promptings to sin as in
the solemn imperatives of Conscience. This is the inexorable logic of
Pantheism, however disguised.'[12] 'I know,' says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, 'what is meant by the Power and Goodness of an Almighty
Creator. I know what is meant by the genius and patience {85} and
sympathy of man. But what is the All, or the Good, or the True, or the
Beautiful? ... The "All" is not good nor beautiful: it is full of
horror and ruin.... There lies this original blot on every form of
philosophic Pantheism when tried as the basis of a religion or as the
root-idea of our lives, that it jumbles up the moral, the unmoral, the
non-human and the anti-human world, the animated and the inanimate,
cruelty, filth, horror, waste, death, virtue and vice, suffering and
victory, sympathy and insensibility.'[13] Where these distinctions are
lost, where this confusion exists, what logically must be the
consequence? Honesty and dishonesty, truth and falsehood, purity and
impurity, kindness and brutality, are put upon a level, are alike
manifestations of the One or the All.
It is said that in our day the sense of sin has grown weak, that men
are not troubled {86} by it as once they were. There is a morbid,
scrupulous remorsefulness for wrong-doing, a desponding conviction that
repentance and restoration are impossible, which may well be put away.
But that sin should be no longer held to be sin, that evil should be
wrought and the worker experience no pang of shame, would surely
indicate moral declension and decay. Were the time to come when,
universally, mankind should commit those actions and cherish those
passions which, through all ages in all lands, have gone by the name of
sin, should become so heedless to the voice of conscience, that
conscience should cease to speak, the time would have come when men,
being past feeling, would devote themselves with greediness to anything
that was vile, so long as it was pleasant, the bonds of society would
be loosened and destruction would be at hand. The Religion of the
Universe ignores the facts of life, the sorrow, the struggle, {87} the
depravity, the need of redemption. Fortunately, human beings in
general are still inclined to mourn because of imperfection or of
baseness: still they are inclined at times to cry out, 'Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?' and still they have the
opportunity of joyfully or humbly saying, 'I thank God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.'
'And now at this day,' listen to the ungrudging admission of perhaps
the most earnest English apostle of Pantheism, Mr. Allanson Picton: 'We
of all schools, whether orthodox or heterodox so-called, whether
believers or unbelievers in supernatural revelation, all who seek the
revival of religion, the exaltation of morality, the redemption of man,
draw, most of us, our direct impulse, and all of us, directly or
indirectly, our ideals from the speaking vision of the Christ. Such a
claim is justified, not merely by the spiritual power still remaining
in the Church, {88} but almost as much by the tributes paid, and the
uses of the Gospel teaching made in the writings of the most
distinguished among rationalists.... Such writers have felt that
somehow Jesus still holds, and ought to hold, the heart of humanity
under His beneficial sway. Excluding the partial, imperfect and
temporary ideas of Nature, spirits, hell, and heaven, which the
Galilean held with singular lightness for a man of His time, they have
acquiesced in and even echoed His invitation to the weary and heavy
laden, to take His yoke upon them and learn of Him. And that means to
live up to His Gospel of the nothingness of self, and of unreserved
sacrifice to the Eternal All in All.'[14] If such is the conclusion of
Rationalism and of Pantheism, how much more ought it to be the
conclusion of Christianity. The imagination of a God confined to times
and places, visiting the world only occasionally, {89} manifesting
Himself in the past and not in the present, ought to be as foreign to
the Christian Church as to any Rationalist or Pantheist. Be it ours to
show that we believe in God Who filleth all things with His presence,
Who is from Everlasting to Everlasting, that to us there is but one God
the Father, by Whom are all things and we in Him, and one Lord, Jesus
Christ, by Whom are all things and we by Him, that God has identified
Himself with us in Jesus Christ, His Son. Be it ours to lose ourselves
in Him. For, after all our questionings as to the government of the
world, as to abounding misery and degradation, as to what lies beyond
the veil for ourselves and for others, this is our hope and our
confidence: 'God hath concluded all in unbelief that He might have
mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past
finding out. For who hath {90} known the mind of the Lord? or who hath
been His counsellor? or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be
recompensed unto Him again? For of Him and through Him and to Him are
all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.'
[1] _Riddle of the Universe_.
[2] Appendix XI.
[3] _First Principles_.
[4] _Confession of Faith of a Man of Science_.
[5] _Riddle of the Universe_.
[6] Appendix XII.
[7] Schleiermacher.
[8] _St. Andrews Addresses_.
[9] Appendix XIII.
[10] Martineau, _Hours of Thought_, ii. p. 110.
[11] Martineau, _Hours of Thought_, ii. p. 114.
[12] _Faith of a Christian_.
[13] _Creed of a Layman_, p. 203.
[14] _Religion of the Universe_.
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