brings together. Religion demands as the very condition of its
existence a God who transcends the universe; philosophy as imperiously
requires His immanence in nature. If either Religion denies God's
immanence, or Philosophy denies that He transcends the universe, there
is an absolute antagonism between the two, which can only be ended by
the abandonment of one or the other. But what we find is that though
Philosophy (meaning by that the exercise of the speculative reason in
abstraction from morals and religion) the more fully it realizes the
immanence of God, the more it tends to deny the transcendence,
religion not only has no quarrel with the doctrine of immanence, but
the higher the religion the more unreservedly it asserts this
immanence as a truth dear to religion itself. The religious equivalent
for 'immanence' is 'omnipresence,' and the omnipresence of God is a
corollary of a true monotheism. As long as any remains of dualism
exist, there is a region, however small, impervious to the Divine
power. But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by excluding
dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the
omnipresence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies the doctrine
of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence. Hence we find the
Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural processes immediately to God.
They know nothing of second causes. The main outlines of natural
science, the facts of generation and growth, are familiar enough to
them, yet every fact is ascribed immediately to the action of God. He
makes the grass to grow upon the mountains; He fashions the child in
the womb; He feeds the young ravens; He provides fodder for the
cattle; He gives to all their meat in due season; when He lets His
breath go forth they are made; when He takes away their breath they
die and return to dust.
This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by religion,
had however yet to be fused with the philosophical doctrine of
immanence. And here again the fusion was effected by the Christian
doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The earlier Apologists concern
themselves first with the vindication of the Divine attributes. God's
separateness from the world as against Greek Pantheism, His
omnipresence in it as against a Judaising deism. But the union of
God's transcendence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the
religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously
completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity[124]. The dying words of
Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are said to
have been,--'I am striving to bring the God which is within into
harmony with the God which is in the universe.' And the unsolved
problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the unsolved problem of
non-Christian philosophy in our day, is met by the Christian doctrine
of God. All and more than all that philosophy and science can demand,
as to the immanence of reason in the universe, and the rational
coherence of all its parts, is included in the Christian teaching:
nothing which religion requires as to God's separateness from the
world, which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar Greek
term ΛΟΓΟΣ which, from the days of Heracleitus, had meant to the
Greek the rational unity and balance of the world, is taken up by
S. John, by S. Clement, by S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which
those who started from the Philonian position never reached. It is the
personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, who is one
in the Holy Spirit with the Father. 'The Word was God.' 'By Him all
things were made.' 'He the All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father
spreads His power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen
and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself. Nothing is
left empty of His presence, but to all things and through all,
severally and collectively, He is the giver and sustainer of life....
He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe like a lute, and keeps all
things in earth and air and heaven in tune together. He it is Who
binding all with each, and ordering all things by His will and
pleasure, produces the perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious
reign of law. While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet
moves all things by His own appointment according to the Father's
will[125].' The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the abstract
motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so powerless to explain
the metaphysical problems of Greece. It is the living Omnipresent
Word, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, and the
philosophical truth becomes an integral part of that Christian
doctrine of God, which, while it safeguarded religion and satisfied
reason, had won its first and greatest victories in the field of
morals.
VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen morality and
heathen speculation neither by unreasoning protest nor by unreal
compromise, but by taking up into itself all that was highest and
truest in both. Why then is this Christian idea of God challenged in
our day? Have we outgrown the Christian idea of God, so that it cannot
claim and absorb the new truths of our scientific age? If not, with
the lessons of the past in our mind, we may confidently ask,--What
fuller unfolding of the revelation of Himself has God in store for us,
to be won, as in the past, through struggle and seeming antagonism?
The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly challenged by
reason is obvious enough. It almost seems as if, in our intellectual
life, we were passing through a transition analogous to that which, in
the moral region, issued in the Reformation. Even amongst those who
believe that Christian morality is true, there are to be found those
who have convinced themselves that we have intellectually outgrown the
Christian Faith. 'The only God,' we have been told lately[126], 'whom
Western Europeans, with a Christian ancestry of a thousand years
behind them, can worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; or
rather, of S. Paul, S. Augustine and S. Bernard, and of the
innumerable "blessed saints," canonized or not, who peopled the ages
of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract God, an
Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in no human or
intelligible relation.' 'God, as God,' says Feuerbach[127], 'the
infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding,
has no more significance in religion than a fundamental general
principle has for a special science; it is merely the ultimate point
of support, as it were, the mathematical point of religion.' Yet it is
assumed that this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the
following dilemma,--'An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom men
can worship, and also the God whom modern thought finds it
increasingly difficult to believe in[128].'
In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn to
pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and philosophy,
and even claim, for the unity of the world, the venerable name and
associations of God. But the remarkable thing is that in the
numberless attempts to attack, or defend, or find a substitute for
Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian, teaching about God rarely
appears upon the scene. Devout Christians have come to think of the
doctrine of the Trinity, if not exactly as a distinct revelation, yet
as a doctrine necessary for holding the divinity of Christ, without
sacrificing the unity of God. Ordinary people take it for granted that
Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Christian faith, and
that the battle must really be fought out on the Unitarian basis. If
Unitarian theism can be defended, it will then be possible to go
farther and accept the doctrine of the Trinity. It is natural that
when Christians take this ground, those who have ceased to be
Christian suppose that, though Christianity is no longer tenable, they
may still cling to 'Theism,' and even perhaps, under cover of that
nebulous term, make an alliance not only with Jews and Mahommedans,
but with at least the more religious representatives of pantheism. It
is only our languid interest in speculation or a philistine dislike of
metaphysics, that makes such an unintelligent view possible.
Unitarianism said its last word in the pre-Christian and early
Christian period, and it failed, as it fails now, to save religion
except at the cost of reason. So far from the doctrine of the Trinity
being, in Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate phrase, 'the scaffolding of a
purer theism,' non-Christian monotheism was the 'scaffolding' through
which already the outlines of the future building might be seen. For
the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains as the only
safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic belief[129].
It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more
generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which the
Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into itself, had but
little _point d'appui_ in the unmetaphysical western world. It bore
the _imprimatur_ of the Church; it was easily deducible from the words
of Holy Scripture; it was seen to be essential to the holding of the
divinity of Christ. But men forgot that the doctrine was 'addressed to
the reason[130];' and so its metaphysical meaning and value were
gradually lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy,
ecclesiastical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and
Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of God, that it
almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the interests of reverence
and intellectual modesty. With the Reformation came the appeal to the
letter of Holy Scripture, and the age of biblical, as contrasted with
scientific, theology. The only scientific theology of the Reformation
period was the awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously
deduced from a one-sided truth.
Then came the age of physical science. The break up of the mediaeval
system of thought and life resulted in an atomism, which, if it had
been more perfectly consistent with itself, would have been fatal
alike to knowledge and society. Translated into science it appeared as
mechanism in the Baconian and Cartesian physics: translated into
politics it appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by
Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge was a crude
empiricism; its theology unrelieved deism. God was 'throned in
magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of the universe,' and a
machinery of 'second causes' had practically taken His place. It was
even doubted, in the deistic age, whether God's delegation of His
power was not so absolute as to make it impossible for Him to
'interfere' with the laws of nature. The question of miracles became
the burning question of the day, and the very existence of God was
staked on His power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe.
Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the 'higher pantheism,' which is a
truth essential to true religion, as it is to true philosophy, fell
into the background.
Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been undermined. The
one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is
that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science had pushed
the deist's God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it
seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared,
and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has
conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by
shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is
everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here and
not there. He cannot delegate His power to demigods called 'second
causes[131].' In nature everything must be His work or nothing. We
must frankly return to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the
immanence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the belief in a
God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must
banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence of God, the
mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways
of thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which
is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a
philosophical view of nature. And it comes to us almost like a new
truth, which we cannot at once fit it in with the old.
Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for our age, as
for the Athanasian age, the meeting point of the religious and
philosophic view of God is shewing itself in the most thoughtful minds
on both sides. Our modes of thought are becoming increasingly Greek,
and the flood, which in our day is surging up against the traditional
Christian view of God, is prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The
pantheism is not less pronounced because it comes as the last word of
a science of nature, for the wall which once separated physics from
metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is not the
paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place, preparatory to
a new departure. We are not surprised then, that one who, like
Professor Fiske, holds that 'the infinite and eternal Power that is
manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other than the
living God,' and who vindicates the belief in a final cause because he
cannot believe that 'the Sustainer of the universe will put us to
permanent intellectual confusion,' should instinctively feel his
kinship with Athanasianism, and vigorously contend against the view
that any part of the universe is 'Godless[132].'
Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of God's
immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the side of a
scientific theory, which was violently assailed by the official
guardians of the Faith, has resulted for many in the throwing aside of
the counter and conditioning truth, which saves religion from
pantheism. It seemed as if traditional Christianity were bound up with
the view that God is wholly separate from the world and not immanent
in it. And Professor Fiske has been misled[133] into the belief that
S. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is almost
incredible to anyone, who has read any of S. Augustine's writings,
that, according to this view, he has to play the _rôle_ of the
unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who thinks of God as 'a
crudely anthropomorphic Being, far removed from the universe and
accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized
church[134].' And not only is S. Augustine represented as a deist, but
S. Athanasius is made a pantheist, and the supposed conflict between
science and religion is, we are told, really the conflict between
Athanasian and Augustinian ideas of God[135]. Yet, as a matter of
fact, S. Athanasius and S. Augustine both alike held the truths which
deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction of religion. If
S. Athanasius says, 'The Word of God is not contained by anything, but
Himself contains all things.... He was in everything and was outside
all beings, and was at rest in the Father alone[136]:' S. Augustine
says, 'The same God is wholly everywhere, contained by no space, bound
by no bonds, divisible into no parts, mutable in no part of His being,
filling heaven and earth by the presence of His power. Though nothing
can exist without Him, yet nothing is what He is[137].'
The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days, triumphed where
Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the challenge of Greek thought,
it recognised the demands of the speculative reason, and found in
itself the answer which, before the collision with Hellenism, it
unconsciously possessed. It is challenged again by the metaphysics of
our day. We may be wrong to speculate at all on the nature of God, but
it is not less true now than in the first centuries of Christianity,
that, for those who do speculate, a Unitarian, or Arian, or Sabellian
theory is as impossible as polytheism. If God is to be Personal, as
religion requires, metaphysics demands still a distinction in the
Unity which unitarianism is compelled to deny. But, further, the
Christian doctrine of God is challenged by the science of nature.
Science, imperiously and with increasing confidence, demands a unity
in nature which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality
and coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the
universal reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature unitarian
theism cannot give, save at the price of losing itself in pantheism.
Deistic it might be, as it was in the last century; deistic it can be
no longer, unless it defiantly rejects the truth which science is
giving us, and the claims which the scientific reason makes.
It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth and meet the
new demands by a fearless reassertion of its doctrine of God. It has
to bring forth out of its treasury things new and old,--the old almost
forgotten truth of the immanence of the Word, the belief in God as
'creation's secret force,' illuminated and confirmed as that is by the
advance of science, till it comes to us with all the power of a new
discovery. Slowly and under the shock of controversy Christianity is
recovering its buried truths, and realizing the greatness of its
rational heritage. It teaches still that God is the eternally existent
One, the Being on Whom we depend, and in Whom we live, the source of
all reality and the goal to which creation moves, the Object alike of
religion and philosophy, the eternal Energy of the natural world, and
the immanent reason of the universe. It teaches that He is the
eternally Righteous One, and therefore the Judge of all, irrevocably
on the side of right, leading the world by a progressive preparation
for the revelation of Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of
the Word, stimulating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the
yearning of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness,
of the speculative reason for truth. When men had wearied themselves
in the search for a remedy for that which separates men from God, the
revelation is given of Him Who 'shall save His people from their
sins.' And when reason had wandered long, seeking for that which
should be Real and yet One, a God Who should satisfy alike the demands
of religion and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded. It
was the gradual revelation of God answering to the growing needs and
capacity of man.
VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the foregoing essay
that there can be no proofs, in the strict sense of the word, of the
existence of God. Reason has for its subject-matter, the problem of
essence, not of existence, the question, 'What is God?' not 'Is there
a God? Proof can only mean verification _à posteriori_ of a truth
already held. We approach the problem with an unreasoned consciousness
of dependence on a Being or Beings who are to us invisible. This we
interpret crudely, or leave uninterpreted. The belief may express
itself in ancestor-worship, or nature-worship, or what not. But as our
moral and intellectual nature develops, its light is turned back upon
this primitive undefined belief. Conscience demands that God shall be
moral, and with the belief that He is, there comes confidence and
trust, deepening into faith and hope and love: the speculative reason
demands that God shall be One, the immanent unity of all that is. And
the doctrine of God, which is best able to satisfy each and all of
these demands, persists as the permanent truth of religion. But
neither conscience nor the speculative reason can demonstrate[138]
God's existence. And it is always possible for men to carry their
distrust of that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is
always false because they have found that it is not always true.
Reason cannot prove existence. The so-called proof, _a contingentia_
(which underlies H. Spencer's argument for the existence of the
Unknowable), is an appeal to that very consciousness of dependence
which some people consider a weakness, and a thing to educate
themselves out of. The appeal to the _consensus gentium_ can establish
only the generality, not the strict universality, of religion. It will
always be possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to the
general rule; while as for what is known as the _ontological_
argument, which on principles of reason would justify the instinctive
belief, it requires a metaphysical training to understand it or at
least to feel its force. There remain, however, the two great
arguments from conscience and from nature, which are so frequently
discussed in the present day.
With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in God
will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the conscience.
Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of 'righteousness, temperance,
and judgment to come' had a strange and terrifying coherence. There is
that much of truth in the statement that religion is founded in
'fear.' But the argument from conscience has been weakened by being
overstated. Conscience, as we know it, has won, not indeed its
existence, but the delicacy of its moral touch, and the strength of
its 'categorical imperative,' from the assured belief in a real
relationship between man and a holy and loving God. When that belief
has ceased to exist, conscience still survives, and it is possible and
justifiable to appeal to it as a fact which can be explained by
religion, but without religion must be explained away. But it is a
mistake to suppose that we can take the untrained and undeveloped
conscience, and argue direct from it to a righteous God. The _lumen
naturale_, in its lowest development, gives but a faint and flickering
gleam. We cannot argue back from it to a God of love, or even a God of
righteousness, unless we interpret it in the fuller light of the
conscience which has been trained and perfected under the growing
influence of the belief. The idea of 'duty,' which is so hard to
explain on utilitarian grounds, is not to be found, as we know it, in
Greek ethics. For it implies a fusion of morals with religion, as we
can trace it in the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian
ethics. If it is impossible to explain duty as the result of
association between the ideas of public and private advantage, it is
no less impossible to make it an independent premise for a conclusion
which is presupposed in it.
The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard for those,
whose lives have been moulded on the belief in God, the Maker of
heaven and earth, to understand the inconclusiveness of the argument
to those who have abandoned that belief, and start, as it were, from
outside. Consequently it has been made to bear more than it can carry.
No doubt the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed
teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than the view
which it superseded. And Christianity can take up the new as it did
the old, and find in it a confirmation of its own belief. But it is a
confirmation not a proof, and taken by itself is incomplete. It is a
great gain to have eliminated chance, to find science declaring that
there must be a reason for everything, even when it cannot hazard a
conjecture as to what the reason is. But apart from the belief of our
moral nature, that in the long run everything must make for
righteousness, that the world must be moral as well as rational, and
that the dramatic tendency in the evolution of the whole would be
irrational if it had not a moral goal, the science of nature is
powerless to carry us on to a Personal God. But the strength of a rope
is greater than the strength of its separate strands. The arguments
for the existence of God are, it has been said, 'sufficient not
resistless, convincing not compelling[139].' We can never demonstrate
the existence of God either from conscience or from nature. But our
belief in Him is attested and confirmed by both.