comprehends and concentrates all that is most essential in human
nature. It is through bearing the image of God that we are alone able
to apprehend God. Take any essential feature of that image out of a
human soul, and to apprehend God is made thereby impossible to it. All
that is divine in us meets, unites, co-operates, to lay hold of what is
divine without us. Hence the fuller and clearer the divine image is in
any man, the fuller and clearer will be his perception of the divine
original. Hence what is more or less true everywhere, is especially
and emphatically true in religion, that "the eye sees only what it
brings with it the power of seeing." Where the will, for example, is
without energy--where rest is longed for as the highest good, and
labour deemed the greatest evil--where extinction is preferred to
exertion,--the mind of a nation may be highly cultured, and subtle
and profound in speculation, and yet may manifest a marked inability
to think of God as a cause or will, with a consequently inveterate
tendency to pantheism. The Hindu mind, and the systems of religion
and philosophy to which it has given birth, may serve as illustration
and proof. Where the animal nature of man is strong, and his moral
and spiritual nature still undeveloped, as is the case among all rude
and undisciplined races, he worships not the pure and perfect supreme
Spirit, whose goodness, truth, and righteousness are as infinite as
His power and knowledge, but gods endowed in his imagination chiefly
with physical and animal qualities. "Recognition of Nature," says Mr
Carlyle, "one finds to be the chief element of Paganism; recognition of
Man and his Moral Duty--though this, too, is not wanting--comes to be
the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a
great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the
religious development of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation
with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till
a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand
point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of _Thou shalt, and
thou shalt not_." The explanation of the historical truth thus stated
by Mr Carlyle is just that man is vividly alive to the wants and claims
of his body and merely natural life during long ages in which he is
almost dead to the wants and claims of his spirit or true self and the
moral life. So the ordinary mind is prone, even at present, in the most
civilised countries of the world, to think of God after the likeness
of man, or, in other words, as a vastly magnified man. Why? Because
the ordinary mind is always very feebly and dimly conscious of those
principles of reason which demand in God the existence of attributes
neither to be found in the physical universe nor in itself. Some
exercise in speculation, some training in philosophy, is needed to make
us reflect on them; and until we reflect on them we cannot be expected
to do them justice in the formation of our religious convictions.
Those who have never thought on what infinite and unconditioned
mean, and who have never in their lives grappled with a metaphysical
problem, will infer quite as readily as if they had spent their days in
philosophical speculation that all the power and order in the universe,
and all the wisdom and goodness in humanity, are the reflections of
a far higher power, wisdom, and goodness in their source--the Divine
Mind; but they must realise much less correctly in what respects
God cannot be imaged in His works: they may do equal or even fuller
justice to what is true in anthropomorphism, but they cannot perceive
as distinctly where anthropomorphism is false. It is only through the
activity of the speculative reason that religion is prevented from
becoming a degrading anthropomorphism, that the mind is compelled
to think of God not merely as a Father, King, and Judge, but as the
Absolute and Infinite Being. This is, perhaps, the chief service which
philosophy renders to religion; and it ought not to be undervalued,
notwithstanding that philosophy has often, in checking one error,
fallen into another as great, or even greater, denying that there is
any likeness between God and man.
While the mental process which has been described--the theistic
inference--is capable of analysis, it is in itself synthetic. The
principles on which it depends are so connected that the mind can
embrace them all in a single act, and must include and apply them all
in the apprehension of God. Will, intelligence, conscience, reason,
and the ideas which they supply; cause, design, goodness, infinity,
with the arguments which rest on these ideas,--all coalesce into this
one grand issue. The inferences are as inseparable as the principles
from which they spring. A very large number of the objections to theism
arise wholly from inattention to this truth. Men argue as if each
principle involved in the knowledge of God were to be kept strictly by
itself, as if each argument brought forward as leading to a theistic
conclusion were to be jealously isolated; and then, if the last result
of the principle, the conclusion of the argument, be not an adequate
knowledge of God, they pronounce the principle altogether inapplicable,
and the argument altogether fallacious. It is strange that this
procedure should not be universally seen to be sophistical in the
extreme--a kind of reasoning which, if generally adopted, would at once
arrest all science and all business; but obviously anti-theists think
differently, for they habitually have recourse to it. If you argue,
for example, that the universe is an event or effect which must have
an adequate cause, they will question your right to refer to the order
which is in the universe as a proof that it is an event or effect,
because order implies another principle, and is the ground of another
argument. They overlook that you are not making an abstract use of
the principle of causality, and that you are not arguing from the mere
terms universe and event, but from the universe itself; and that in
order to know whether it be an event or not--an effect or not--you
must study it as it is, and take everything into account which bears
on the question. They reason as if they supposed that a cause and an
intelligence must be two different things, and that a cause cannot be
an intelligence, nor an intelligence a cause. Similarly, the arguments
from the power, order, and goodness displayed in nature have often been
objected to altogether, have often been pronounced worthless, because
they do not in themselves prove God to be _infinitely_ powerful, wise,
and good. They are brought forward to show that the Author of the
universe must have the power, wisdom, and goodness required to create
and govern it; and forthwith many oppose them by declaring that they do
not show Him to be infinite. Now, no man who did not imagine nature to
be infinite ever adduced them to prove God infinite. Their not proving
that, is therefore no reason for denying them to prove what they
profess to prove. No argument can stand if we may reject it because it
does not prove more than it undertakes to prove.
It is clear that the evidences of design, instead of being wholly
distinct from the evidences of power, and independent of the principle
of causality, are evidences of a kind of power and manifestations of a
kind of causality--intelligent power and causality. In like manner the
evidences of goodness are also evidences of design, for goodness is a
form of design--morally, beneficent design. Although causality does
not involve design, nor design goodness, design involves causality,
and goodness both causality and design. The proofs of intelligence
are also proofs of power; the proofs of goodness are proofs both of
intelligence and power. The principles of reason which compel us to
think of the Supreme Moral Intelligence as a self-existent, eternal,
infinite, and unchangeable Being, supplement the proofs from other
sources, and give self-consistency and completeness to the doctrine of
theism. The various theistic arguments are, in a word, but stages in a
single rational process, but parts of one comprehensive argument. They
are naturally, and, as it were, organically related--they support and
strengthen one another. It is therefore an arbitrary and illegitimate
procedure to separate them any farther than may be necessary for the
purpose of clear and orderly exposition. It is sophistry to attempt to
destroy them separately by assailing each as if it had no connection
with the other, and as if each isolated fragmentary argument were bound
to yield as large a conclusion as all the arguments combined. A man
quite unable to break a bundle of rods firmly bound together may be
strong enough to break each rod separately. But before proceeding to
deal with the bundle in that way, he may be required to establish his
right to untie it, and to decline putting forth his strength upon it as
it is presented to him.[12]
[12] See Appendix IX.
II.
The theistic inference, although a complex process, is not a difficult
one. It looks, indeed, long and formidable when analysed in books
of evidences, and elaborated with perverse ingenuity into series of
syllogisms. But numerous processes, very simple and easy in themselves,
are toilsome and troublesome to analyse, or describe, or comprehend.
Vision and digestion are, in general, not difficult bodily functions,
but they have been the subjects of a great many very large treatises;
and doubtless physiologists have not even yet found out all that is
to be known about them. As a rule, the theistic process is as simple
and easy an operation for the mind as vision or digestion for the
body. The multitude of books which have been written in explanation
and illustration of it, and the subtle and abstruse character of the
researches and speculations contained in many of these books, are not
the slightest indications of its being other than simple and natural
in itself. The inferences which it involves are, in fact, like those
which Weber, Helmholtz, and Zöllner have shown to be implied in the
perceptions of sense, involuntary and unconscious. If not perfectly
instantaneous, they are so rapid and spontaneous as to have seemed to
many intuitive. And in a loose sense, perhaps, they may be considered
so. Not, however, strictly and properly, since the idea of Deity is no
simple idea, but the most complex of ideas, comprehending all that is
great and good in nature and man, along with perfections which belong
to neither nature nor man; and since the presence of Deity is not seen
without the intervention of any media--face to face, eye to eye--but
only as "through a glass darkly." The contemplation of nature, and
mind, and history is an indispensable stage towards the knowledge of
Him. Physical and mental facts and laws are the materials or data of
reason in its quest of religious truth. There is a rational transition
from the natural to the supernatural, wherever the latter is reached.
Our knowledge of God is obtained as simply and naturally as our
knowledge of our fellow-men. It is obtained, in fact, mainly in the
same way. In both cases we refer certain manifestations of will,
intelligence, and goodness--qualities which are known to us by
consciousness--to these qualities as their causes. We have no direct
or immediate knowledge--no intuitive or _a priori_ knowledge--of
the intelligence of our fellow-creatures, any more than we have
of the intelligence of our Creator; but we have a direct personal
consciousness of intelligence in ourselves which enables us confidently
to infer that the works both of God and of men can only have originated
in intelligences. We grow up into knowledge of the mind of God as we
grow in acquaintance with the minds of men through familiarity with
their acts. The Father in heaven is known just as a father on earth
is known. The latter is as unseen as the former. No human being has
really ever seen another. No sense has will, or wisdom, or goodness
for its object. Man must infer the existence of his fellow-men, for
he can have no immediate perception of it; he must become acquainted
with their characters through the use of his intelligence, because
character cannot be heard with the ear, or looked upon with the eye,
or touched with the finger. Yet a child is not long in learning to
know that a spirit is near it. As soon as it knows itself, it easily
detects a spirit like its own, yet other than itself, when the signs of
a spirit's activity are presented to it. The process of inference by
which it ascends from the works of man to the spirit which originates
them is not more legitimate, more simple, or more natural, than that
by which it rises from nature to nature's God.
In saying this, I refer merely to the process of inference in itself.
That is identical in the two cases. In other respects there are obvious
differences, of which one important consequence is, that while the
scepticism which denies the existence of God is not unfrequently to
be met with, a scepticism which denies the existence of human beings
is unknown. The facts which prove that there are men, are grouped
together within limits of space and of time which allow of their
being so easily surveyed, and they are in themselves so simple and
familiar, that all sane minds draw from them their natural inference.
The facts which prove that there is a God need, in order to be rightly
interpreted, more attention and reflection, more comprehensiveness,
impartiality, and elevation of mind. Countless as they are, they can be
overlooked, and often have been overlooked. Clear and conspicuous as
they are, worldliness and prejudice and sin may blind the soul to their
significance. True, the existence and possibility of atheism have often
been denied, but the testimony of history to the reality of atheism
cannot be set aside. Although many have been called atheists unjustly
and calumniously, and although a few who have professed themselves to
be atheists may have really possessed a religious belief which they
overlooked or were averse to acknowledge, we cannot reasonably refuse
to take at their own word the majority of those who have inculcated
a naked and undisguised atheism, and claimed and gloried in the name
of atheist. Incredible as it may seem that any intelligent being,
conscious of human wants and weaknesses, should be able to look upon
the wonders of the heavens and of the earth, of the soul within him and
of society around him, and yet say that there is no God, men have done
so, and we have no alternative but to accept the fact as we find it.
It is a fact which involves nothing inconsistent with the truth that
the process by which the mind attains to a belief in God is of the same
natural and direct, yet inferential, character as the process by which
it attains to belief in the existence of finite minds closely akin to
itself.
Our entire spiritual being is constituted for the apprehension of
God in and through His works. All the essential principles of mental
action, when applied to the meditative consideration of finite things,
lead up from them to Infinite Creative Wisdom. The whole of nature
external to us is a revelation of God; the whole nature within us has
been made for the reception and interpretation of that revelation. What
more would we have? Strange as it may seem, there are many theists at
the present day who represent it as insufficient, or as even worthless,
and who join with atheists in denying that God's existence can be
proved, and in affirming that all the arguments for His existence are
inconclusive and sophistical. I confess I deem this a most erroneous
and dangerous procedure. Such theists seem to me not only the best
allies of atheists, but even more effective labourers in the cause of
unbelief than atheists themselves. They shake men's confidence to a far
greater extent in the reasonable grounds of faith in God's existence,
and substitute for these grounds others as weak and arbitrary as any
atheist could possibly wish. They pronounce illegitimate and invalid
the arguments from effect to cause, from order and arrangement to
intelligence, from history to providence, from conscience to a moral
governor,--an assertion which, if true, infallibly implies that the
heavens do not declare the glory of God, and that the earth does not
show forth His handiworks--that the course of human events discloses no
trace of His wisdom, goodness, or justice--and that the moral nature
of man is wholly dissociated from a Divine law and a Divine lawgiver.
Then, in place of a universe revealing God, and a soul made in His
image, and a humanity overruled and guided by Him, they present to
us as something stronger and surer--an intuition or a feeling or an
exercise of mere faith. For it is a noticeable and certainly not a
promising circumstance, that there is no general agreement as to what
that state of mind is on which the weight of the entire edifice of
theism is proposed to be rested even among those who profess to possess
it. An intuition, a feeling, and a belief are very different things;
and not much dependence is to be put on the psychology which is unable
to distinguish between them.
Man, say some, knows God by immediate intuition; he needs no argument
for His existence, because he perceives Him directly--face to
face--without any medium. It is easy to assert this, but obviously
the assertion is the merest dogmatism. Not one man in a thousand
who understands what he is affirming will dare to claim to have an
immediate vision of God, and nothing can be more likely than that the
man who makes such a claim is self-deluded. It is not difficult to see
how he may be deluded. There is so much that is intuitive involved in
the apprehension of God that the apprehension itself may readily be
imagined to be intuitive. The intuitive nature of the conditions which
it implies may arrest the attention, and the fact that they are simply
conditions may be overlooked. The possibility, however, of analysing
the apprehension into simpler elements--of showing that it is a complex
act, and presupposes conditions that can be indicated--is a conclusive
proof that it is no intuition, that our idea of God is no more or
otherwise intuitive than our idea of a fellow-man. Besides, what seem
intuitions are often really inferences, and not unfrequently erroneous
inferences; what seem the immediate dictates of pure reason, or the
direct and unclouded perceptions of a special spiritual faculty, may
be the conceits of fancy or the products of habit and association,
or the reflections of strong feeling. A man must prove to himself,
and he must prove to others, that what he takes to be an intuition
is an intuition. Is that proof in this case likely to be easier or
more conclusive than the proof of the Divine existence? The so-called
immediate perception of God must be shown to be a perception and to be
immediate; it must be vindicated and verified: and how this is to be
done, especially if there be no other reasons for believing in God than
itself, it is difficult to conceive. The history of religion, which is
what ought to yield the clearest confirmation of the alleged intuition,
appears to be from beginning to end a conspicuous contradiction of
it. If all men have the spiritual power of directly beholding their
Creator--have an immediate vision of God--how happens it that whole
nations believe in the most absurd and monstrous gods? that millions
of men are ignorant whether there be one god or thousands? that even
a people like the Greeks could suppose the highest of their deities
to have been born, to have a body, and to have committed the vilest
actions? A true power of intuition is little susceptible of growth,
and its testimonies vary within narrow limits; any development of
which it admits is only slightly due to external conditions, and
mainly the necessary consequence of internal activity, of inherent
expansibility. It is thus, for example, with the senses of sight and
hearing, in so far as they are intuitive. But it is manifestly very
different with the religious nature. Its growth is mainly dependent,
not on the organic evolution of a particular faculty, but on the
general state of the soul, on the one hand; and on the influence of
external circumstances--education, example, law, &c.--on the other
hand. It is this difference in the character of their development
which explains why the deliverances of the senses are so uniform and
nearly infallible, while the most cursory survey of the religious
world shows us the greatest want of uniformity and truthfulness in
religious judgments. The various phases of polytheism and pantheism
are inexplicable, if an intuition of God be universally inherent in
human nature. Theism is perfectly explicable without intuition, as the
evidences for it are numerous, obvious, and strong.
The opinion that man has an intuition or immediate perception of God
is untenable; the opinion that he has an immediate feeling of God
is absurd. A man feels only in so far as he perceives and knows.
Feeling is in consciousness essentially dependent on, and necessarily
subsequent to, knowing. Mere feeling--feeling without knowing--is an
utterly inconceivable and impossible experience. Admit, however, not
only that there may be a mere feeling, but that there is a mere feeling
of God. What worth can it have? By supposition--by definition--no
knowledge of God underlies and explains it. But in that case, how can
any man pretend to get a knowledge of God out of it? What right can
any one have to represent it as a source of knowledge of God? I am not
aware that these questions have ever been answered except by the merest
verbal jugglery. The very men who tell us that we cannot know God, but
that we feel Him, tell us also that the feeling of Him is an immediate
consciousness of Him, and that immediate consciousness is its own
self-evidence, is absolute certainty, or, in other words, the highest
and surest knowledge. We do not know God, but we feel Him; however, to
feel Him is to know Him,--such is their answer more or less distinctly
expressed, or, I should rather say, more or less skilfully concealed.
It is at once a Yes and a No, the affirmation of what is denied and
the denial of what is affirmed. And it is this because it cannot be
anything else--because mere feeling is an impossible experience--and
because feeling, so far as it is uncaused and unenlightened by
knowledge, testifies only to the folly or insanity of the being which
feels. If theism have no other basis than feeling, it is a house
which foolish men have built upon the sand. The first storm will cast
it down, and no wise man will regret its fall. Whatever is founded on
mere emotion--on emotion which is not itself explained and justified by
reason--stands but by sufferance; has no right to stand; ought to be
cast down and swept from the earth. But the storms which have already
in the course of the ages spent their force against theism with no
other effect than to make its strength more conspicuous, and to carry
away what would have weakened or deformed it, are sufficient to show
us that it has been built on eternal truth by the finite human reasons
which have been enlightened by Infinite and Divine Reason.
The strangest of all theories as to the foundation of our belief in
God is, that it has no foundation at all--that it is a belief which
rests upon itself, an act of faith which is its own warrant. We are
told that we can neither know that God is nor what God is, but that
we can nevertheless believe in God, and ought to believe in Him, and
can and ought to act as if we knew His existence and character. But
surely belief without a reason must be arbitrary belief, and either to
believe or act as if we knew what we do not know, can never be conduct
to be justified, much less commended. Faith which is not rational is
faith which ought to be rejected. We cannot believe what we do not
know or think that we know. We have no right to believe more than we
know. I know, for example, that the grass grows, and consequently I
believe, and am justified in believing, that it grows. I do not know
how the grass grows, and I do not believe how it grows; I can justify
my believing about its growth nothing beyond what I know to be true.
This law of belief is as binding for the highest as for the lowliest
objects. If I have no reason for believing that there is a God, I have
no right to believe that there is a God. If I do not know that God is
infinite, I am bound not to believe that He is infinite. Belief is
inseparable from knowledge, and ought to be precisely coextensive with
knowledge. Those who deny this fundamental truth will always be found
employing the words knowledge and belief in a capricious and misleading
way.[13]
[13] See Appendix X.
III.