Faith in the Personal God
DAILY READINGS
We are to consider this week the Christian faith that God is personal.
Before, however, we deal with the arguments which may confirm our
confidence in such a faith, or even with the explanations that may
clarify our conception of its meaning, let us, in the daily readings,
consider _some of the familiar attitudes in every normal human life,
that require God's personality for their fulfilment_. Men have
believed in a personal God because their own nature demanded it.
Third Week, First Day
Men have believed in a personal God because of a _deep desire to think
of creation as friendly_. F. W. Myers, when asked what question he
would put to the Sphinx, if he were given only one chance, replied
that he would ask, "Is the universe friendly?" Some have tried to
think of creation as an enemy which we must fight, as though in
Greenland we strove to make verdure grow, although the soil and
climate were antagonistic. Some have tried to think creation neutral,
an impersonal system of laws and forces, which we must impose our will
upon as best we can, although in the end the system is sure to outlast
all our efforts and to bring our gains to naught. But at the heart of
man is an irresistible desire to think creation a friend, with whose
good purposes our wills can be aligned, and whose power can carry our
efforts to victorious ends. Says Gilbert Murray, of Oxford University,
"As I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven
belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot,
except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same
assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the
spell of a very old ineradicable instinct." _But friends are always
persons, and if creation is friendly then God is in some sense
personal._ This faith is the radiant center of the Gospel.
=But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and
having shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret, and thy
Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee. And in praying use
not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they
shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not therefore like unto
them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye
ask him. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father who art in
heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as
in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive
us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring us not
into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if ye forgive
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive
you.--Matt. 6:6-14.=
_O Lord, we would rest in Thee, for in Thee alone is true rest to be
found. We would forget our disappointed hopes, our fruitless efforts,
our trivial aims, and lean on Thee, our Comfort and our Strength.
When the order of this world bears cruelly upon us; when Nature seems
to us an awful machine, grinding out life and death, without a reason
or a purpose; when our hopes perish in the grave where we lay to rest
our loved dead: O what can we do but turn to Thee, whose law
underlieth all, and whose love, we trust, is the end of all? Thou
fillest all things with Thy presence, and dost press close to our
souls. Still every passion, rebuke every doubt, strengthen every
element of good within us, that nothing may hinder the outflow of Thy
life and power. In Thee, let the weak be full of might, and let the
strong renew their strength. In Thee, let the tempted find succor,
the sorrowing consolation, and the lonely and the neglected their
Supreme Friend, their faithful Companion._
_O Lord, we are weary of our old, barren selves. Separate us from our
spiritual past, and quicken within us the seeds of a new future.
Transform us by the breath of Thy regenerating power, that life may
seem supremely beautiful and duty our highest privilege, and the only
real evil a guilty conscience. Let us be no longer sad, or downcast,
or miserable, or despairing, vexed by remorse, or depressed by our
failures. Take from us the old self. Give us a new self, beautiful,
vigorous, and joyous. Let old things pass away and let all things
become new. Kindle within us a flame of heavenly devotion, so that to
us work for Thee shall become a happiness, and rest in Thee shall
become an energy, unchecked by fears within and foes without. Give us
love, and then we shall have more than all we need, for Thou art
Love, Thyself the Giver and the Gift. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
Third Week, Second Day
=Bless Jehovah, O my soul;
And all that is within me, bless his holy name.
Bless Jehovah, O my soul,
And forget not all his benefits:
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction;
Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;
Who satisfieth thy desire with good things,
So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle.=
=--Psalm 103:1-5.=
Such an attitude of thankfulness as this psalm represents is native to
man's heart. When he is glad he feels grateful: he has an irrepressible
impulse to thank somebody. As between a boastful Nebuchadnezzar--"This
great Babylon which I have built ... by the might of my power and for
the glory of my majesty" (Dan. 4:30)--and the Master, grateful for the
dawning success of his cause--"I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven
and earth" (Matt. 11:25)--we can have no doubt which is the nobler
attitude. Man at his best always looks upon his blessings as gifts,
his powers as entrustments, his service as a debt which he owes, and
his success as an occasion of gratitude rather than pride. _But we
cannot be really thankful to impersonal power._ Little children blame
chairs for their falls and thank apple trees for their apples, but
maturity outgrows the folly of accusing or blessing impersonal things.
Thankfulness, in any worthy interpretation of the term, can never be
felt except toward friendly persons who _intended the blessing_ for
which we are glad. A thoughtful man, therefore, cannot be grateful to
a godless world-machine, even though it has treated him well, for the
world-machine never purposed to treat him well and his happiness is a
lucky accident, with no good will to thank for it. Haeckel says that
there is no God--only "mobile, cosmic ether." Imagine a congregation
of people, under Haeckel's leadership, rising to pray, "O Mobile
Cosmic Ether, blessed be thy name!" It is absurd. _Unless God is
personal, the deepest meanings of gratitude in human hearts for life
and its benedictions have no proper place in the universe._
_O God above all, yet in all; holy beyond all imagination, yet friend
of sinners; who inhabitest the realms of unfading light, yet leadest
us through the shadows of mortal life; how solemn and uplifting it is
even to think upon Thee! Like sight of sea to wearied eyes, like a
walled-in garden to the troubled mind, like home to wanderer, like a
strong tower to a soul pursued; so to us is the sound of Thy name._
_But greater still to feel Thee in our heart; like a river glorious,
cleansing, healing, bringing life; like a song victorious, comforting
our sadness, banishing our care; like a voice calling us to battle,
urging us beyond ourselves._
_But greater far to know Thee as our Father, as dear as Thou art
near; and ourselves begotten of Thy love, made in Thy image, cared
for through all our days, never beyond Thy sight, never out of Thy
thought._
_To think of Thee is rest; to know Thee is eternal life; to see Thee
is the end of all desire; to serve Thee is perfect freedom and
everlasting joy. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Third Week, Third Day
=Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
According to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my
transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions;
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
And done that which is evil in thy sight.=
=--Psalm 51:1-4.=
Penitence is one of the profoundest impulses in man's heart. And man
at his deepest always feels about his sin as the Psalmist did: he has
wronged not only this individual or that, but he has sinned against
the whole structure of life, against whatever Power and Purpose may be
behind life, and his penitence is not complete until he cries to the
Highest, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned." While men,
therefore, have always asked each other for forgiveness, they have as
well asked God for it. _But such an attitude is utterly irrational if
God is not personal._ Persons alone care what we do, have purposes
that our sins thwart, have love that our evil grieves, have compassion
to forgive the penitent; and to confess sin to a world-machine--careless,
purposeless, loveless, and without compassion--is folly. Yesterday we
saw how impossible it was really to feel grateful to a materialist's
god; today imagine congregations of people addressing to the Cosmic
Ether any such penitent confessions as Christians by multitudes
continually address to their Father: "We have erred and strayed from
Thy ways like lost sheep." _Plainly in a world where creative power is
impersonal the deepest meanings of penitence have no place._ Read over
the prayer that follows, considering the futility of addressing such a
penitent aspiration to anything impersonal; and then really pray it to
the God whom Christ revealed:
_We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favor, folk of many
families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof,
weak men and women subsisting under the covert of thy patience. Be
patient still; suffer us yet awhile longer--with our broken purposes
of good, with our idle endeavors against evil, suffer us awhile
longer to endure and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us
our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken,
brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends, be
with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to
them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to
us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with
morning hearts--eager to labor--eager to be happy, if happiness shall
be our portion--and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure
it._
_We thank Thee and praise Thee; and in the words of him to whom this
day is sacred, close our oblation. Amen._--Robert Louis Stevenson.[2]
Third Week, Fourth Day
=Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
that ye may abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit.--Rom.
15:13.=
=For in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for
who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that which we
see not, then do we with patience wait for it.--Rom. 8:24, 25.=
Hope is no fringe on the garment of human life; it is part of the
solid texture of our experience; without it men may exist, but they
cannot live. Now some minds live by hope about tomorrow, or at the
most, the day after tomorrow, and do not take long looks ahead. But as
men grow mature in thoughtfulness, such small horizons no longer can
content their minds; they seek a basis for hope about the far issue of
man's struggle and aspiration. They cannot bear to think that creation
lacks a "far-off divine event"; they cannot tolerate a universe that
in the end turns out to be
"An eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain."
_But it is obvious that if God is not in control of creation, with
personal purpose of good will, directing its course, there is no solid
basis for hope._ If the universe is in the hands of physical
forces, then a long look ahead reveals a world collapsing about a cold
sun, and humanity annihilated in the wreck. Some such finale is the
inevitable end of a godless world. As another pictures it, mankind,
like a polar bear on an ice floe that is drifting into warmer zones,
will watch in growling impotence the steady dwindling of his home,
until he sinks in the abyss. All optimistic philosophies of life have
been founded on faith in a personal God, who purposes good to his
children, and without such faith no hope, with large horizons, is
reasonable. Paul is fair to the facts when he says, "Having no hope
and without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12). When one asks why men have
believed in a personal God, this clearly is part of the answer: only a
personal God can be "the God of hope."
_O God of heaven above and earth beneath! Thou art the constant hope
of every age--the reliance of them that seek Thee with
thoughtfulness and love. We own Thee as the guardian of our
pilgrimage; and when our steps are weary we turn to Thee, the mystic
companion of our way, whose mercy will uphold us lest we fall. Thou
layest on us the burden of labor throughout our days; but in this
sacred hour Thou dost lift off our load, and make us partakers of Thy
rest. Thou ever faithful God, our guide by cloud and fire! without
this blest repose our life were but a desert path; here we abide by
the refreshing spring, and pitch our tents with joy around Thy holy
hill. Yet when we seek to draw nigh to Thee, Thou art still above us,
like the heavens. O Thou that remainest in the height, and coverest
Thyself with the cloud thereof! behold, we stand around the mountain
where Thou art; and if Thou wilt commune with us, the thunder from
Thy voice of love shall not make us afraid. Call up a spirit from our
midst to serve Thy will; and take away the veil from all our hearts,
that with the eye of purity we may look on the bright and holy
countenance of life. And when we go hence to resume our way, may it
be with nobler spirits, with more faithful courage, and more generous
will. For life and death we trust ourselves to Thee as disciples of
Jesus Christ. Amen._--James Martineau.
Third Week, Fifth Day
=Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup:
Thou maintainest my lot.
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
Yea, I have a goodly heritage.
I will bless Jehovah, who hath given me counsel;
Yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons.
I have set Jehovah always before me:
Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth:
My flesh also shall dwell in safety.
For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol;
Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption.
Thou wilt show me the path of life:
In thy presence is fulness of joy;
In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.=
=--Psalm 16:5-11.=
Many things in human life bring joy. From the sense of a healthy body
and the exhilaration of a sunshiny day to the deep satisfactions of
home and friends--there are numberless sources of happiness. But man
has always been athirst to find joy in thinking about the total
meaning of life. Lacking that, the details of life lose radiance, for,
in spite of himself, man
"Hath among least things
An undersense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole."
If when he thinks about God, he can, like this psalmist, rejoice in
the love behind life, the good purpose through it, the glorious future
ahead of it, then all his other blessings are illumined. Not only are
there happy things _in life_, but _life itself_ is fundamentally
blessed. But if when he raises his thought to the Eternal, he has no
joyful thoughts about it, sees no love or purpose there, then a pall
falls on even his ordinary happiness. Alas for that man who does not
like to think about life's origin and destiny and meaning, because he
has no joyful faith about God! Some men have what Epictetus called
"paralysis of the soul" every time they think of creation, for to them
it is a huge physical machine crashing on without reason or good will.
But some men have such a joyful faith in the divine that their
gladness about the whole of life redeems their sorrow about its
details. So Samuel Rutherford in prison said, "Jesus Christ came into
my room last night and every stone flashed like a ruby." For the
thought of God in terms of friendly personality is the most joyful
idea of him that man has ever had. Man's thirst for joy is one of the
sources of his faith in a personal God. He has wanted what Paul called
"joy and peace in believing" (Rom. 15:13).
_We rejoice, O Lord our God, not in ourselves nor in the firm earth
on which we tread, nor in the household, nor in the church, nor in
all the procession of things where mankind moves with power and
glory. We rejoice in the Lord. We rejoice in Thy strength. A strange
joy it is. Day by day we find ourselves breaking out into gladness
through the ministration of the senses, and by the play of inward
thought; but Thou art never beheld by us.... Thou never speakest to
us, nor do we feel Thy hand, nor do we discern Thy face of love and
glory and power. We break away from all other experiences, and look
up into the emptiness, as it seems to us, which yet is full of life;
into that which seems cold and void, but wherein moves eternal power;
into the voiceless and inscrutable realm where Thou dwellest, God
over all, blessed forever.... O Lord our God, how near Thou art to
us! and we do not know it. How near is the other life! and we do not
feel it. It clothes us as with a garment. It feeds us. It shines down
upon us. It rejoices over us.... Thither, out of narrow and
anguishful ways, out of sorrows, out of regrets, out of bereavements,
we look; and already we are rested before we reach it._
_Grant unto us, today, we beseech Thee, this beatific vision.
Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
Third Week, Sixth Day
=For when one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are
ye not men? What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through
whom ye believed; and each as the Lord gave to him. I planted,
Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he
that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth
the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: but
each shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we
are God's fellow-workers: ye are God's husbandry, God's building.--I
Cor. 3:4-9.=
One of the profoundest motives that can grip man's heart is the
conviction that he is a fellow-worker with the Divine. To feel that
there is a great Cause, on behalf of which God himself is concerned,
and in the furtherance of which we can be God's instruments and
confederates, is the most exhilarating outlook on life conceivable.
Even people who deny God try to get this motive for themselves. One
such man hopes for the success of his favorite causes in "the tendency
of the universe"; another talks about "the nature of things taking
sides." _But nothing save personality has moral tendencies, and only
persons take sides in moral issues._ If the guidance of the world is
personal, then, and then only, can we rejoice with confidence in a
great Ally, who has moral purposes and who has committed to us part of
his work. This was the Master's motive when he said, "My Father
worketh even until now, and I work" (John 5:17). But one clearly sees
that such an inspiring consciousness of cooperation with the Eternal
depended on the certainty with which the Master called the Eternal by
a personal name--Father. When men like Livingstone have gone out in
sacrificial adventure for the saving of men they have not banked on
the "tendency of the universe," nor trusted in any abstract "nature of
things taking sides"; they have been servants of a personal God, under
orders from him, and they have counted on personal guidance in the
service of a cause whose issue was safe in God's hands.
_O God, we pray Thee for those who come after us, for our children,
and the children of our friends, and for all the young lives that are
marching up from the gates of birth, pure and eager, with the morning
sunshine on their faces. We remember with a pang that these will live
in the world we are making for them. We are wasting the resources of
the earth in our headlong greed, and they will suffer want. We are
building sunless houses and joyless cities for our profit, and they
must dwell therein. We are making the burden heavy and the pace of
work pitiless, and they will fall wan and sobbing by the wayside. We
are poisoning the air of our land by our lies and our uncleanness,
and they will breathe it._
_O God, Thou knowest how we have cried out in agony when the sins of
our fathers have been visited upon us, and how we have struggled
vainly against the inexorable fate that coursed in our blood or bound
us in a prison-house of life. Save us from maiming the innocent ones
who come after us by the added cruelty of our sins. Help us to break
the ancient force of evil by a holy and steadfast will and to endow
our children with purer blood and nobler thoughts. Grant us grace to
leave the earth fairer than we found it; to build upon it cities of
God in which the cry of needless pain shall cease; and to put the
yoke of Christ upon our business life that it may serve and not
destroy. Lift the veil of the future and show us the generation to
come as it will be if blighted by our guilt, that our lust may be
cooled and we may walk in the fear of the Eternal. Grant us a vision
of the far-off years as they may be if redeemed by the sons of God,
that we may take heart and do battle for Thy children and ours.
Amen._--Walter Rauschenbusch.
Third Week, Seventh Day
=I will extol thee, my God, O King;
And I will bless thy name for ever and ever.
Every day will I bless thee;
And I will praise thy name for ever and ever.
Great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised;
And his greatness is unsearchable.
One generation shall laud thy works to another,
And shall declare thy mighty acts.
Of the glorious majesty of thine honor,
And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate.
And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts;
And I will declare thy greatness.
They shall utter the memory of thy great goodness,
And shall sing of thy righteousness.
Jehovah is gracious, and merciful;
Slow to anger, and of great lovingkindness.
Jehovah is good to all;
And his tender mercies are over all his works.
All thy works shall give thanks unto thee, O Jehovah;
And thy saints shall bless thee.=
=--Psalm 145:1-10.=
Adoration springs from the deeps of man's spirit. We never can be
content with looking down on things beneath us, nor with looking out
on things that find our level. We always must look up to things above
us. As a mediæval saint said, "_The soul can never rest in things
that are beneath itself._" Worship, therefore, is an undeniable
impulse in man's heart. Poets worship Beauty; scientists worship
Truth; every man of honor worships Right. That is, the good, true, and
beautiful stand above us calling out our adoration, and all the best
in us springs from our worshipful response to their appeal. But this
impulse to adore is never fulfilled until we gather up all life into
spiritual unity and bow down in awe and joy before God. That is
adoration glorified, worship crowned and consummated. And the only God
whom man can adore with awe and joy is personal. No impersonal thing
is worshipful; however great a _thing_ may be it still lies beneath
our soul. No abstract Idea is worshipful; we still are greater than
any _idea_ that we can hold. Only God, thought of in personal terms
but known to be greater than any terms which human life can use, is
adorable. _Men have believed in Him because worship is man's holiest
impulse._
Such are the experiences of man, with which faith in a personal God is
inseparably interwoven. Our demand for a friendly creation, our
deepest impulses to thanksgiving, penitence, hope, joy, cooperation
with the Eternal, and adoration of the highest--all require
personality in God. As Professor William James said, "The universe is
no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_ if we are religious."
_O Lord our God, Thy greatness is unsearchable, and the glory of Thy
presence has overwhelmed us. Thou art hidden in excess of light; and
if we were to behold Thee in the great sphere in which Thou art
living, none of us would dare to draw near to Thee. Our
imperfections, our transgressions, our secret thoughts, our wild
impulses, that at times come surging in upon us, are such that we
should be ashamed to stand before the All-searching Eye. Our lives
are before Thee, open as a book, and Thou readest every word and
every letter thereof. Blessed be Thy name, Thou hast taught us to
come to Thee through the Lord Jesus Christ as through a friend, and
thou hast taught us to draw near to Thee in person through the
familiar way of Fatherhood; from our childhood we have said, Our
Father, and in this way we are not afraid; in this way we come
familiarly and boldly: not irreverently, but with the familiarity
which love gives. Thou hast poured the light of Thy love upon the
path which we tread, and Thou hast taught us to come rejoicing before
Thee.... Open Thy hand and Thy heart, and say to every one of us,
Peace be unto you! Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
We have been using freely the most momentous word in human speech as
though we clearly understood its meaning. We have been speaking of God
as though the import of the term were plain. But most of us, asked to
state precisely what we mean by "God," would welcome such a refuge
from our confusion as Joubert sought. "It is not hard to know God,"
said he, "provided one will not force oneself to define him." Many
people who stoutly claim to believe in God live in perpetual
vacillation as to what they mean by him. Writes one: "God to my mind
is an impersonal being, but whether for convenience or through sheer
impotence I pray to him as a personal being.... I know I talk on both
sides of the fence, but that is just where I am."
At times, indeed, some question whether there is any need to think or
say what "God" may signify. They call him by vague names--the All, the
Infinite. In moods of exalted feeling, impatient of definition, they
wish to be left alone with their experience of the Eternal; they
resent the intrusion of theology, as a poet, lost in wonder at a
landscape, might resent the coming of surveyors with their clanking
chains. So Walt Whitman wanted to see the stars rather than hear the
astronomer, and after listening to the learned lecture, with its
charts and diagrams, he says,
"I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars."
But, for all that, we well may be thankful for astronomers. At times
the "mystical, moist night air" is absent; we do not wish to "look up
in perfect silence at the stars"; and, even though we know in advance
that they are bound to be inadequate, we do want as clear and worthy
ideas as possible about the universe. Moreover, when such ideas are
ours, looking up in perfect silence at the stars is more impressive
than it ever was before. No more can men content themselves with a
vague consciousness of God. Spirits like Wordsworth have raptures of
which they sing,
"In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not--in enjoyment it expired."
In communion with nature, in love for family, in fellowship with God,
such hours may come, but nature, family, and God must also be the
objects of understanding thought. Days of vital need, if not of mental
doubt, inevitably come when it is impossible any longer to use a term
like "God" without knowing what we mean.
The special urgency of this is felt by most of us because as children
we were taught to picture the Divine in terms of personality. The God
of the Bible is personal. Little that persons do, save sinning, is
omitted from the catalogue of God's activities as he is pictured for
us in the Scripture. He knows, loves, purposes, warns, rebukes,
allures, rewards, and punishes, as only persons can. And all our
relationships with him are clearly personal. When we pray we say "Our
Father"; when we seek our duty we ask, "What wilt thou have me to do?"
God is _He_ and _Thou_, not _It_, and friendship is the ideal relation
of all souls with him.
Moreover, in our maturity we are not likely to be interested in a God
who is not personal. Whoever curiously asks why he believes in God,
will find not simply _reasons_ but _causes_ for his faith,
and will perceive that the causes of faith lie back of the reasons for
it. Vital need always precedes the arguments by which we justify its
satisfaction. A man eats one thing and shuns another on principles of
dietetics that can be defended before his intelligence; but behind all
such sophisticated reasons stands the vital cause of eating--hunger.
So back of intellectual arguments for belief in God lies the initial
cause of faith: _men are hungry_. Men believe in God because they
hunger for a world that is not chance and chaos, but that is guided by
a Purpose. They believe in God, because in their struggles after
righteousness they hunger for a Divine Ally in whom righteousness has
its origin, its ground and destiny. They believe in God because they
hunger for confidence that Someone cares about our race in its
conflicts and defeats and because in their individual experience they
want a friend. Without such faith man feels himself to be, in Goethe's
phrase, "a troubled wanderer upon a darkened earth." Plainly this
elemental human hunger for purpose, righteousness, and friendship
calls for something akin to personality in God. _Only persons have
purpose, character, and friendliness._ The vital motives which lead
men to seek God's comfort, forgiveness, guidance, and cooperation
plainly imply his personality. Things do not forgive us, love us, nor
purpose good concerning us, nor can any thing be imagined so subtle
and so powerful as to satisfy the needs on account of which men come
to God. If God is not personal, he can feel no concern for human life
and a God of no concern is of no consequence.
The philosophers of India, with a well-reasoned pantheistic system and
centuries to make their philosophy effective, have failed to quell
this deathless thirst for a God who counts. Every wayside shrine of
Hinduism incarnates the old faith in gods conceived as friends, not
things; and Buddha, who taught impersonal deity, is now himself adored
as the Personal Lord of Love and Blessedness. Wherever one finds vital
religion one finds that God is no dry impersonal abstraction, but
man's friend. Boscamen, speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and
of the Chaldean Tablets, says: "Six thousand years ago in Egypt and
Chaldea--it is not dread, but the grateful love of a child to his
father, of friend to friend, that meets us in the oldest books of the
world." And when one turns from the oldest to the newest books this
inner demand of man's religious life has not ceased; it has been
refined and confirmed. "The All would not be the All unless it
contained a Personality," said Victor Hugo. "That Personality is God."
Biography is lavish in illustrations of this need in man's religious
life. The biographer of Theodore Parker, the freelance preacher of
Boston, remarks: "In his _theology_ God was neither personal nor
impersonal, but a reality transcending these distinctions. In his
_devotions_ God was as personal as his own father or mother, and he
prayed to him as such, daringly indifferent to the anthropomorphisms
of his unfettered speech." When one passes from speculation to
religion, he always comes into a realm where only a personal God will
do. On this point even confessed unbelievers furnish confirmation. One
who calls himself an agnostic writes: "At times in the silence of the
night and in rare lonely moments, I experience a sort of communion of
myself with Something Great that is not myself. Then the Universal
Scheme of things has on me the effect of a sympathetic Person, and my
communion therewith takes on a quality of fearless worship. These
moments happen, and they are to me the supreme fact in my religious
life." Always for the purposes of vital religion, God must have on us
the "effect of a sympathetic Person."
II
When one, however, subjects this need of his religious life to
searching thought, what difficulty he encounters! Multitudes, if they
were candid, would confess what a college senior wrote: "When I am
just thinking about God in a speculative or philosophical way, I
generally think of him as impersonal, but for practical purposes I
think of him as personal." Many folks feel thus distraught; at the
heart of their religious life is the paralyzing doubt, that in a
universe like this to think of God as personal is absurd. If a train
moving a mile a minute should leave the earth, it must travel
40,000,000 years before it would reach the nearest star. The Creator
of such a world is not readily reduced to the similitude of human
life. Once men lived on a flat earth, small in compass and cosily
tucked beneath the sky's coverlet, but now the world's vastness
beggars imagination. As an astronomer remarked, coming from a session
with his telescope, "This does away with a six-foot god; you cannot
shake hands with the Creator of _this_." Men used to suppose that
Arcturus was a single star, but now new telescopes reveal Arcturus as
a galaxy of stars, thousands in number, with interstellar spaces so
immense that thought breaks down in spanning them and imagination even
cannot make the leap. Is the God of such a universe to be conceived in
terms of a magnified man?
So to picture deity seems at first sight a survival of mere
childishness. Professor John Fiske, of Harvard, has told us that when
he was a boy God always conjured up in his imagination the figure of a
venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high
desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske. How many of us can
recall such early crude and childish thoughts of God! A mother asked
her young daughter what she was drawing. "A picture of God," was the
answer. "But no one knows what God looks like," the mother said. "They
will," came the rejoinder, "when I get through." We all began with
some such primitive idea of deity. Indeed, these early conceptions
long persist in many minds, as the following statements, written by
college students, indicate: "I think of God as real, actual skin and
blood and bones, something we shall see with our eyes some day, no
matter what lives we lead on earth." "It may be a remnant of youth,
but anyhow, every time I think of God there appears a vague image of a
man, with all members of the body, just enormously large." "I have
always pictured him according to a description in _Paradise Lost_ as
seated upon a throne, while around are angels playing on harps and
singing hymns." "I think of God as having bodily form and being much
larger than the average man. He has a radiant countenance beaming
with love and compassion. He is erect and upright, fearless and
brave."[3]
No one of us may be contemptuous of such crude ideas; we all possessed
them once. Indeed the loss of them, with their picture of deity, clear
in feature and distinct in outline, has been to some a shock from
which faith has not recovered. When increasing knowledge discredited
our immature theology, and our world immeasurably widened, the very
human God of our first imaginations was lost among the stars. We
learned that this is a universe where the light that falls upon our
eyes tonight left the far heavens when Abraham was shepherding on
Syrian hills. The Christian Gospel of the personal Father which once
was good news became a serious problem. We still may cling to the old
meanings of our religious faith; still we may pray in hours of need as
though our childhood's God were really there; but at times we suspect
that we are clinging to the beauty of an early memory while
reluctantly we lose conviction of its truth. Many modern men and women
can understand the plight of the famous Dr. Jowett of Oxford, who, so
runs the tradition, inserted "used to" in a muffled voice, when he
recited the creed: "I _used to_ believe in God the Father Almighty."
With such misgivings, whether as habitual disturbers of our faith or
as occasional moods of unbelief that come and go, most of us must be
familiar. What Charles Darwin is reported to have said about himself,
many if they spoke frankly would say too: "Sometimes I feel a warm
sense of a personal God, and then"--with a shake of his head--"it goes
away."
III
Whatever may be our theology, the fact is plain that the denial of a
personal God solves no problem. For if we may not think of God in
terms of personality, the query still remains, which was there
before--_in what terms shall we conceive of the Eternal_? In a
discussion on the nature of the sky, one boy, denying the idea of a
solid canopy, exclaimed, "There ain't any sky." Said the other, seeing
how little this negation solved the problem, "Well, what _is_ it that
ain't?" Some such inquiry one must put to his doubts about God's
personality. Though we may deny a personal God, nevertheless in the
place where he once stood, creator and sustainer of all existence, is
Something that we do think of somehow. We may have but little of
Carlyle's sublime imagination; may not easily transport ourselves to
stand with him on the far northern cliff, "behind him all Europe and
Africa fast asleep, except the watchmen, and before him the silent
Immensity and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but the
porch-lamp." Yet who of us, regarding the illimitable universe, on the
far outskirts of which our little earth is whirling, so minute that
through the strongest telescope from the nearest star its conflagration
would be quite invisible, has escaped the sense of a Universal Power?
And the human mind cannot so keep itself at home in little tasks and
pleasures as to evade the question: How shall we think of the Power
that made the universe? In what terms? By what analogies? Hours of
revelation come in every serious life when no desire compares in
urgency with the desire to know the character of the Eternal. It does
make a prodigious difference what hands hold the leash of the
universe.
This second fact is also clear, that if we are to think of the Eternal
at all, we must think in terms of something drawn from our experience.
When we sing of Paradise we speak of golden streets and gates of
pearl, and Thoreau remarks that, arriving in heaven, he expects to
find pine trees there. Such words we do not take literally, but such
words we cannot utterly avoid, for if we are to speak at all of the
unknown glory, we must use pictures from the known. So we think of God
in human symbols. We cannot catch him in an abstract definition as
though a boy with a butterfly net should capture the sun at noon. Our
minds are not fitted for such enterprise. Of necessity we take
something homely, familiar, close at hand, and lifting it up as far as
we can reach, say _God is most like that_. No one who thinks at
all of the Eternal escapes this necessity.
By this method the _materialist_ reaches his philosophy. Haeckel
laughs to scorn the opening clause of the "Apostles' Creed." "I
believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth"--for
such faith no words are contemptuous enough. This denial does not mean
however that Haeckel has no faith; he deliberately offers a creedal
substitute which runs in part: I believe in a "chemical substance of a
viscous character, having albuminous matter and water as its chief
constituents." In such terms does Haeckel think of the Eternal. A
professor of medicine has remarked that such a theory reduces all
reality to "phosphorus and glue." When some Psalmist cries, "Bless the
Lord, O my soul," nothing substantial is speaking or is being spoken
to save phosphorus and glue! When an Italian patriot cries, "The time
for dying comes to all, but the time for dishonoring oneself ought
never to come," nothing is real and causal save phosphorus and glue!
And every gracious and redeeming deed in history from the love of
mothers to the cross of Christ has been a complicated working out of
phosphorus and glue! In whatever labored phrases he may state his
case, the materialist's method there is obvious; he has taken physical
energy, of whose presence in his own body he is first assured, and
whose reality he has then read out into the world, and this homely and
familiar experience he has lifted up as far as he can reach to say,
the Eternal is most like that.
So far as method is concerned, the _theist_ of necessity travels
the same road; only he insists on a nobler symbol than physical energy
in terms of which to think of God. He takes _mind_. He says in
effect: There may be wide stretches of the universe where our
intellects meet no answer and find no meaning. But in much of the
universe we do see meaning; and how can intelligence find sense where
intelligence has not put sense? A few scratches on a cliff's face in
Assyria, after centuries of neglect, rendered up their meaning to the
mind of Rawlinson. They were themselves the work of intelligence, and
intelligence could read them. So, the theist continues, the universe
is in part at least intelligible. Our minds fit into it and are
answered by it. We can trace its laws and predict its movements. Man
first worked out the nature of the ellipse in theoretical geometry,
and then telescopes later showed the gigantic ellipses of planetary
orbits in the heavens. Can it be that this intelligible world,
readable by mind, is itself essentially mindless? As easily believe
that the notes of Wagner's operas were accidentally blown together by
a whirlwind and yet are playable by man! Therefore the theist believes
the universe to be rational; he takes mind as he has known it in
himself, and lifting it as high as he can reach, cries, God is most
like that.
So far as the general method of approach is concerned, the Christian
travels the same road to his idea of God. Only he cannot believe that
the best he knows is too good or too great to be a symbol in terms of
which to think of the Eternal. Therefore he will not take a byproduct
of experience such as physical energy, nor a section of personality
such as mind; he takes the full orb of personality, _self-conscious
being that knows and purposes and loves_, and he affirms that God is
most like this. Such in its simplest form is the Christian assertion
of God's personality.
In one of his noblest passages Martineau has put into classic form
this necessity, which we have been discussing, of thinking about God
in terms of human experience: "God, being infinite, can never be fully
comprehended by our minds; whatever thought of him be there, his real
nature must still transcend: there will yet be deep after deep beyond,
within that light ineffable; and what we see, compared with what we do
not see, will be as the raindrop to the firmament. Our conception of
him can never _correspond with the reality_, so as to be without
omission, disproportion, or aberration; but can only _represent the
reality_, and _stand for God_ within our souls, till nobler
thoughts arise and reveal themselves as his interpreters. And this is
precisely what we mean by a symbolical idea. The devotee who
prostrates himself before a black stone,--the Egyptian who in his
prayers was haunted by the ideal form of the graceful ibis or the
monstrous sphinx--the Theist who bends beneath the starry porch that
midnight opens to the temple of the universe--the Christian who sees
in heaven a spirit akin to that which divinely lived in Galilee, and
with glorious pity died on Calvary--all alike assume a representation
of him whose immeasurable nature they can neither compass nor escape.
And the only question is, whether the conception they portray upon the
wall of their ideal temple is an abominable idol, or a true and
sanctifying mediatorial thought."
IV
In their endeavor thus to think of God in terms of personality, some
are perplexed because in their imagination a person is inseparable
from flesh. "I think of God as a personal being," writes a college
student. "A personal being would have a form that you could see or
touch." But this would be true only if the grossest materialism were
accepted, and the spiritual life declared to be the product of brain
as digestive fluids are of salivary glands. On any other basis,
personality is not indissolubly bound to body nor by it necessarily
delimited. A man cannot hear without his ear, but he is not his ear;
he cannot hear without the auditory nerve, but he is not the auditory
nerve; he cannot hear without the temporal lobe of the brain, but he
is not the brain nor any portion of it. These may be the instruments
which he uses; he is free when they are well, hampered when they are
broken, and at last he is separable from them all. John Quincy Adams
at the age of eighty met a friend upon a Boston street. "Good
morning," said the friend, "and how is John Quincy Adams today?"
"Thank you," was the ex-president's reply, "John Quincy Adams himself
is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at
present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation.
Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well
worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every
wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable and I think
John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is
quite well, quite well." Such a conception of man as _being_ a
permanent personality and _having_ a temporary body is essential to
any worthy meaning when we use personal terms about God.
With such an elevated thought, however, of what personality does mean,
it soon is evident that no other reality with which we deal is so
worthy to be the symbol of an Eternal Spirit. Is one perplexed that
God, who is invisible, should be pictured in the similitude of human
persons? But _we_ are invisible. The outward husks and fleshly
garment of our friends we indeed have seen, but upon the friend
himself--consciousness, love, purpose, ideal, and character--no eye
has looked. No mirror ever has been strong enough to show us to
ourselves. In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is
wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture
to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of
the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God.
Indeed, personality is essentially the most unlimited reality with
which we deal; in comparison a solar system is a little thing.
Consider _memory_, by which we can retrace our youthful days, build
our shanties once again at brooksides, replay our games, and
recapitulate the struggles and the joys of the first days at school.
Nothing in all the universe can remember except persons. Were we not
so familiar with this element in human greatness, we would more often
pause to exclaim, as did Augustine, fifteen centuries ago, "Great is
the power of memory. Amazement overcomes me when I think of it. And
yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains, the broad rivers, the
wide ocean, the courses of the stars, and pass themselves, the
crowning wonder, by!" Consider _imagination_, by which, sitting still
in body we can project ourselves around the world, can walk down
Princes Street in Edinburgh, or stand in mingled awe and condemnation
before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, or rise uncovered before the
majesty of the Matterhorn. Nothing in all the universe can do that
except persons. Were full power to act wherever we can _think_ added
to our gifts, we should come so near to incipient omnipresence as to
be in dread of our responsibility. Consider _love_, by which we live
not so much where our bodies are as where our friends and family may
be. Love expands the individual until his real life is independent of
geography. Says one lover to another:
"The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double."
Many a mother in America has _lived_ in the trenches of France;
many a man has found that what might happen to him where his body was
could not be compared with what might happen to him where his
friendships were; and as we grow in love and loyalty we find ourselves
scattered all over creation. How far such an expansion of life may go
our Lord revealed when he said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
these, my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." (Matt.
25:40.) Nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath can so extend
itself in love save persons.
Finally, consider _creative power_ by which human beings project
themselves into the future, and, with masterful ideals in mind, lay
hold on circumstance and bend it to their will. As if he shared
creative power with the Eternal, an engineer summons nature's forces
to his bidding and lays his will upon them, until where nothing was a
structure stands that mankind may use for centuries. Nothing in all
the universe can so create except persons. In that essentially
creative act where deathless ideas and harmonies are given being by
poets and musicians, so that something out of nothing is brought to
pass by personality, man faces a mystery as abysmal as God's making of
the world. "Paradise Lost" is wonderful; but not half as wonderful as
the creative personality itself who years before projected it. "An
inward prompting," Milton says, "which now grew daily upon me, that by
labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature,
I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they
should not willingly let it die." Nothing can so create save
personality.
Personality is not so limited that we should be ashamed to think of
God in terms of it. Rather, of all realities with which we deal,
personality alone, invisible, reaching back in memory, reaching out in
imagination, expanding itself in love, and laying hold upon the future
with creative power, is a worthy symbol of the Eternal Spirit.
Even when the meaning of personality has been so enlarged and
elevated, we should not leave our statement of belief in God as though
our experience of personality were a mould into which our thought of
him is poured and so delimited. We are not presumptuous Lilliputians,
running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall,
majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exultation
round our capture. We know better than that. We understand how
insufficient is every human name for God. We know that when we have
said our best--"How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past
tracing out!" (Rom. 11:33).
Nothing more has marred the Christian message and discredited the
Christian faith than the unwise presumption that has forced its
definitions into the secrets of the Infinite. "It is enough to say,"
exclaims Leslie Stephen, "that they defined the nature of God Almighty
with an accuracy from which modest naturalists would shrink in
describing the genesis of a black beetle." The antidote to such vain
pride of theology is found in the wholesome modesty of the Bible.
There man enquires, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou
find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what
canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know?" (Job 11:7).
There God replies: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts"
(Isa. 55:9). Scripture bears abundant testimony to the symbolic nature
of our human terms for God. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so
Jehovah pitieth them that fear him" (Psalm 103:13). "As one whom his
mother comforteth, so will I comfort you" (Isa. 66:13). "I will
betroth thee unto me" (Hos. 2:20). "Return, ... saith Jehovah, for I
am a husband unto you" (Jer. 3:14). "The Lord spake unto Moses ... as
a man speaketh unto his friend" (Ex. 33:11). Father, Mother,
Bridegroom, Husband, Friend--these are symbols of God. Men,
endeavoring to frame some worthy thought of the Eternal, lift up their
best in phrases such as these, and in them enshrine their noblest
concepts of the divine. They have no better, truer thing to say of
God, no wiser way in which to say it. But when they think of the
Eternal as he must be, and of their human words, infinitesimal in
comparison, they know that all their best names for God are like small
measures of water dipped from an immeasurable sea. For all that, so
much of God as they can grasp and understand is the most important
truth that mankind knows. Let even a tea-cup of water be taken to a
laboratory and it will tell the truth about the sea; _that one tea-cup
will reveal the quality of the whole ocean_. Yet it will not reveal
all the truth about the ocean. When one considers the reach of the sea
over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can
pierce, the distances that no mind can imagine; remembers the currents
that sweep through the sea, the tides that rise there, and the storms
that beat it to its nether wells, he dare not try to put _these_ into
a tea-cup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At
once so true and so inadequate are all our words for him.
So we might speak to one who incredulously looks upon our faith, but
for one who whole-heartedly approaches God as Christianity suggests,
no negative and cautionary word is adequate. The Christian method of
conceiving God brings the most exhilarating thought of him that man
has ever had. It says in brief: Take your _best_ and think of God as
most truly symbolized in that. As to what our best is, not even the
agnostics doubt. The physical universe belittles us on one side only;
it makes a pigmy of the body. In our spirits we still tower above the
physical; we are greater than the world we know. Our supreme good, the
divinest reality with which we deal, is personality. Then lift that
up, says Christianity; it is your best, and you dare not think of God
in terms of less; you have Christ's example in arguing from the human
best to the divine: "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, _how much more_ ... your Father." (Matt. 7:11.)
The Christian faith asserts that when a man thus thinks of God in
terms of the best he knows he is on the road toward truth. How many
billion spiritual miles he may have to travel to the end, no man can
tell. Only he will never need to stop, retrace his steps, and start
upon a lower path than personality, a road that lies beneath
righteousness and love. The road leads on and up beyond our
imagination, but it is the same road and not another. _God is
personality plus, or else he alone is completely personal and we are
but in embryo._
If God so is personal, then all the deep meanings of religious life
and faith that the saints, our spiritual sires, have known are open to
us modern men and women. Forms of thought indeed have changed, but if
God is thus our Father and our Friend, the essentials of Christian
experience are waiting for us all. Life then is not purposeless; all
creation is bound into spiritual unity by personal Will; and in
sacrificial labor we are serving one who is able to guard that which
we "have committed unto him against that day" (II Tim. 1:12). Old
hymns of confidence in time of trial, we too can sing:
"Still will we trust, though earth seem dark and dreary,
And the heart faint beneath His chastening rod;
Though steep and hard our pathway, worn and weary,
Still will we trust in God."
And we can pray, not indeed with clamorous beggary as though the grace
of God were a wayside stall where every greedy hand can pluck what
passing whim may wish, but we can commune with God as the real saints
have always prayed with humility and gratitude and confident desire
for good. Most of all, that priceless privilege is open to us which is
the center and sun of Christian thought and life. For if among all
realities in our experience, we have dared take the best, personality,
as a symbol in terms of which to think of God, how should we not,
among all personalities, take the best we know as the highroad of
approach to him. Therefore our real symbol of God shall be no man
among us, frail and sinful, but our Lord himself "fairest among ten
thousand"--"the one altogether beautiful." We shall think of God in
terms of him. We shall see "the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6.)
[2] Copyright, 1914, Charles Scribner's Sons. Used by permission.
[3] From a questionnaire, "Belief in God and Immortality," by Prof.
James H. Leuba.