THE IDEA OF GOD.

GENTLEMEN:

God and Life in the world are final facts. Between the two, as between a dark dome of skies above, pierced with palpitating points of vivid light, and below, an ocean fathomless, inscrutable, sails that conscious entity we call the soul. The soul frames no syllogism to prove that sea and sky exist: not with the assertion "God is," does the Bible begin. Of the existence of God it spreads out no formal proofs, ontological, psychological, cosmological, or teleological. God is. This the Holy Writings assume as the foundation of all else. The starting-point of Revelation is the infinite and eternal I AM. Before Revelation is He who reveals.

I. 1. Not with the Idea of God to acquire does humanity begin life in the sphere of time.

"Dwelt no power divine within us,
How could God's divineness win us?" 1

1 Wär' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken?

Wär' nicht in uns des Göttes eigne Kraft,

Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?

GOETHE.

By nature man is possessed of the Idea of God, by intuition and observation it is developed; for man is in the image of God. We sons of few days are not forced by searching to find out God. Not with the lens, not with problem, must we needs go up to the heights of the flaming suns and whirling stars, nor with deep-sea dredgings and with inspection of eozoic strata, down to the deep places of the earth, neither need we cross the ocean of Time and Space to some primeval truth unveiled for a brief season in the dawn of the years, somewhere in the mystic morning-land. The word is very nigh unto us, even in our heart and in our mouth.

The Idea of God is innate.1 Not an abstract generalisation of the perfections of the world, for we have no notions of partial perfection, save as we derive them from an absolute Perfection; not a concept of what is contrary to the evil existence, for the contrary of that which is must be that which is not. If the Idea of God be ours by immediate perception or by intuition, why is not it unvarying and invariable like mathematical actions? This question does

not follow. My life is to me a matter of immediate perception, and yet I cannot express it by, say,

1 Bishop Beveridge, Sermon, Omnipresence of God the Best Safeguard against Sin. Works, V. 89. Were there not danger of misconstruction I should boldly state after Thomassin, Dogmatum Theologicorum, de Deo, I. 1, 1, that this innate idea is really God Himself immanent in the soul and present to consciousness.

cos a=cos b cos c+sin b sin c cos A. The idea is variant because it is a thought form, which is filled in, informed, and develops by means of observation, intuition, personal righteousness, and revelation. Truth flourishes out of the earth, and righteousness looks down from Heaven. The pure in heart, said Jesus, are in Heaven and behold God. The growth or evolution of the Idea of God is conditioned by the revelation of God, the receptiveness of man.

"Man knows partly, but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid, he may grasp and use,
Finds progress."

2. I begin what I have to say with some words about the Idea of God, because that Idea is the keynote of all Theology. To begin with Sin, or with the Church, or with the Incarnation, or with the Atonement, or with the Eucharist, is to pull out a strand from the middle, and to tangle the skein of theologic order. Not without significance do Bible with God Who is the Origin and

and Creed begin Beginning of all. The Idea of God, in its content, is absolutely the article by which the Church stands or falls, because in that Idea is all Theology implied, and by it the explicit doctrines are shaped and coloured.

3. In order to account for some singular religious notions that alloy the teachings of Christ, as they are

sometimes delivered in the temples and market-places in this nineteenth century of salvation, I ask you to turn your attention to divergent developments of the universal Idea of God.

a. In a primitive state, man feels that the world is alive. He may be able, it is true, to distinguish between his own life and that of tree and horse, but in fact he does not always do so. For him there is present in all things a mysterious living force, impersonal, perhaps, but sentient. For the more part he suspects that the river, the tree, and the sun have life as he has, a soul like his own, claiming of his dim intelligence some sort of recognition and service. His

"Untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds or hears Him in the wind."

With the spirit of the water-flood and of the oak tree he shares what most he values, food and drink, clothing and fire. He sets a calabash of wine at the foot of the tree, and oil and maize he sprinkles on the surface of the river. From this stage of thought to the vow of Jeptha and the sacrifice of Iphigenia by the seaside, the way is long, but the idea which developed is one. To primitive man it seems that if he should shoot an arrow up into the sky,

1 I pass over the theory of the concept of luck as the precedent of the concept of the supernal. This notion has after a fashion been worked out in The Supernatural, Its Origin, Nature, and Evolution, by John S. King, 2 vols., 1892.

some drops of blood would fall; if he tear up by the root a mandragora, or any other plant, it will groan in pain. Should he, like Midas, whisper his secret to the river, the reeds will blab. The Kaffir and the North American Indian understand the language of birds and beasts,1 but other less fortunate folk must drink the blood of a Fafnir, or possess Solomon's pentagraph seal. With St. Francis of Assisi, the child-man loves his "Sir brother, the sun," Messer lo frate sole, and praises God for "his sister the moon," and is wont to preach to the beasts, birds, and fishes. Like the Wandering Jew in Doré's famous pictures, the world about him is alive, sentient, intelligent, and sympathetic or antipathetic, look where he will, on rock, tree, and grass blades. Every plant is a sensitive plant. This sentiment revives in some of our best poetry, Wordsworth's Rhyme of Peter Bell, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Shelley's Sensitive Plant, and Swinburne's Forsaken Garden. The idea is pretty in poetry, but makes mischief in Theology. This stage of God-consciousness has been called Animism.

At this point of the growth of the Idea of God, man does not yet dream of the great Spirit as able to exist apart from the world, or without food and drink. The great Spirit is never absent, being, so to say, adscriptus glebæ, but, as the soul of the world, he may,

1 Kaffir Folk Lore, by G. M. Thel, passim; Reports U. S. Bureau of Ethnology.