_The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God_
The general effect of this intellectual movement has been to discredit
more than ever before the Latin idea of God as a power outside of the
course of nature and occasionally interfering with it. In all directions
the process of evolution has been discovered, working after similar
methods, and this has forced upon us the belief in the Unity of Nature.
We are thus driven to the Greek conception of God as the power working
in and through nature, without interference or infraction of law. The
element of chance, which some atheists formerly admitted into their
scheme of things, is expelled. Nobody would now waste his time in
theorizing about a fortuitous concourse of atoms. We have so far spelled
out the history of creation as to see that all has been done in strict
accordance with law. The method has been the method of evolution, and
the more we study it the more do we discern in it intelligible
coherence. One part of the story never gives the lie to another part.
So beautiful is all this orderly coherence, so satisfying to some of our
intellectual needs, that many minds are inclined to doubt if anything
more can be said of the universe than that it is a Reign of Law, an
endless aggregate of coexistences and sequences. When we say that one
star attracts another star, we do not really know that there is any
pulling in the case; all we know is that a piece of cosmical matter in
the presence of another piece of matter alters its space-relations in a
certain specified way. Among the coexistences and sequences there is an
order which we can detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to maintain
that this is the whole story. Such a state of mind, which rests
satisfied with the mere content of observed facts, without seeking to
trace their ultimate implications, is the characteristic of what Auguste
Comte called Positivism. It is a more refined phase of atheism than that
of the guests at Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are few; for the
impetus of modern scientific thought tends with overwhelming force
towards the conception of a single First Cause, or Prime Mover,
perpetually manifested from moment to moment in all the Protean changes
that make up the universe. As I have elsewhere sought to show, this is
practically identical with the Athanasian conception of the immanent
Deity.[3] Modern men of science often call this view of things Monism,
but if questioned narrowly concerning the immanent First Cause, they
reply with a general disclaimer of knowledge, and thus entitle
themselves to be called by Huxley's term "Agnostics." Thirty-five years
ago Spencer, taking a hint from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase
"The Unknowable" as an equivalent for the immanent Deity considered _per
se_; but I always avoid that phrase, for in practice it invariably leads
to wrong conceptions, and naturally, since it only expresses one side of
the truth. If on the one hand it is impossible for the finite Mind to
fathom the Infinite, on the other hand it is practically misleading to
apply the term Unknowable to the Deity that is revealed in every
pulsation of the wondrously rich and beautiful life of the Universe. For
most persons no amount of explanation will prevent the use of the word
Unknowable from seeming to remove Deity to an unapproachable distance,
whereas the Deity revealed in the process of evolution is the
ever-present God without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and
whose voice is heard in each whisper of conscience, even while his
splendour dwells in the white ray from yonder star that began its
earthward flight while Abraham's shepherds watched their flocks. It is
clear that many persons have derived from Spencer's use of the word
Unknowable an impression that he intends by means of metaphysics to
refine God away into nothing; whereas he no more cherishes any such
intention than did St. Paul, when he asked, "Who hath known the mind of
the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?"--no more than Isaiah did
when he declared that even as the heavens are higher than the earth, so
are Jehovah's ways higher than our ways and his thoughts than our
thoughts.