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THE NATURE, CONDITIONS, AND LIMITS OF THEISTIC PROOF

I

If we believe that there is one God – the Creator, Preserver, and Ruler of all finite beings – we ought to have reasons or grounds for this belief. We can have no right to believe it simply because we wish or will to believe it. The grounds or reasons which we have for our belief must be to us proofs of God's existence. Those who affirm that God exists, and yet deny that His existence can be proved, must either maintain a position obviously erroneous, or use the term proof in some extraordinary sense, fitted only to perplex and mislead. True and weighty, therefore, seem to me these words of one of the most distinguished of living German philosophers: "The proofs for the existence of God, after having long played a great part in philosophy and theology, have in recent times, especially since Kant's famous critique, fallen into disrepute. Since then, the opinion has been widely spread, both among believers and unbelievers, that the existence of God does not admit of being proved. Even theologians readily assent to this opinion, deride the vain attempts, and imagine that in so doing they are serving the faith which they preach. But the proofs for the existence of God coincide with the grounds for the belief in God; they are simply the real grounds of the belief established and expounded in a scientific manner. If there be no such proofs, there are also no such grounds; and a belief which has no ground, if possible at all, can be no proper belief, but an arbitrary, self-made, subjective opinion. Yes, religious belief must sink to the level of the mere illusion or fixed idea of a mind which is insane, if contradicted by all reality, all facts scientifically established, and the theory of the universe which such facts support and justify."11

The proofs of God's existence must be, in fact, simply His own manifestations; the ways in which He makes Himself known; the phenomena on which His power and character are imprinted. They can neither be, properly speaking, our reasonings, nor our analyses of the principles involved in our reasonings. Our reasonings are worth nothing except in so far as they are expositions of God's modes of manifestation; and even when our reasonings are correct, our analyses of them, supposing we attempt to analyse them, may be erroneous. The facts, – the works and ways of God – which are the real evidences of His existence and the true indications of His character, – may raise countless minds to God which can give no general description of the process by which they are thus elevated, and are still less capable of resolving it into its principles. It is late in the history both of the individual mind and of the collective mind before they can so reflect on their own acts, so distinguish them one from another, and so discern the characteristics of each, as to be able even to give a clear and correct account of them; and it is much later before they can detect their conditions and laws. The minds of multitudes may therefore readily be supposed to rise legitimately from perception of the visible universe to apprehension of the invisible personal Creator, although either wholly unconscious or only dimly and inaccurately aware of the nature of the transition, and although, if called on to indicate the conclusion at which they had arrived, they would employ far weaker reasons in words than those by which they were actually convinced in thought. The principles of the theistic inference may be very badly determined, and yet the theistic inference itself may be perfectly valid.

If the real proofs of God's existence are all those facts which cannot be reasonably conceived of as other than the manifestations of God – His glory in the heavens, His handiwork on the earth, His operations in the soul, His ways among the nations – and if the task of the theist is to trace out these facts, and to show that they cannot reasonably be denied to be marks or impressions of Divine agency, then must a theist, when seeking or expounding the reasons for his belief, feel that his mind is conversant not with mere thoughts of his own, but with the manifested thoughts or acts of God Himself. He must carry into his inquiry the consciousness that he is not simply engaged in an intellectual process, but is trying to apprehend and actually apprehending the Divine Being. To him, therefore, the inquiry as to the ultimate source and reason of things must be an essentially solemn and awe-inspired one. To the atheist it must, of course, be much less so; but even he ought to feel it to be not only a most important inquiry, but one which carries him into the presence of a vast, eternal, and mysterious power – a power in darkness shrouded, yet on which hang all life and death, all joy and woe.

According to the view just stated, the evidences or proofs of God's existence are countless. They are to be found in all the forces, laws, and arrangements of nature – in every material object, every organism, every intellect and heart. At the same time, they concur and coalesce into a single all-comprehensive argument, which is just the sum of the indications of God given by the physical universe, the minds of men, and human history. Nothing short of that is the full proof. There may be points in space and instants in time where creative and sustaining power appear to our narrow and superficial intellects to have been strangely limited, but surely we ought not so to concentrate our attention on any such points or instants as to be unable to take in a general impression of the immeasurable power displayed throughout the realms of space and the ages of time. It may be possible to show that many things which have been regarded as evidences of intelligence or wisdom are not really so, and yet the universe may teem with the manifestations of these attributes. Faith in the righteousness and moral government of God must be able to look over and to look beyond many things calculated to produce doubt and disbelief. No man can judge fairly as to whether or not there is a God, who makes the question turn on what is the significance of a few particular facts, who is incapable of gathering up into one general finding the results of innumerable indications. A true religious view of the world must be a wide, a comprehensive view of it, such as demands an eye for the whole and not merely for a part – the faculties which harmonise and unify, and not merely those which divide and analyse. A part, a point, the eye of an insect, the seed of a fruit, may indeed be looked at religiously, but it must be in the light of the universe as a whole, in the light of eternity and infinity.

In another respect the theistic proof is exceedingly complex and comprehensive. It takes up into itself, as it were, the entire wealth of human nature. The mind can only rise to the apprehension of God by a process which involves all that is most essential in its own constitution. Thus the will is presupposed. Theistic inference clearly involves the principle of causality. God can only be thought of in the properly theistic sense as the cause of which the universe is the effect. But to think of God as a cause – to apprehend the universe as an effect, – we must have some immediate and direct experience of causation. And such experience we have only in the consciousness of volition. When the soul wills, it knows itself as an agent, as a cause. This is the first knowledge of causation which the mind requires, and the most perfect knowledge thereof which it ever requires. It is a knowledge which sheds light over all the regions of experience subsequently brought under the principle of causality, which accompanies the reason in its upward search until it rests in the cognition of an ultimate cause, and which enables us to think of that cause as the primary, all-originating will. If we did not know ourselves as causes, we could not know God as a cause; and we know ourselves as causes only in so far as we know ourselves as wills.

But the principle of causality alone or by itself is quite insufficient to lead the mind up to the apprehension of Deity; and an immediate and direct consciousness of far more within us than will is required to make that apprehension possible. The evidences of intelligence must be combined with the evidences of power before we can be warranted to infer more from the facts of the universe than the existence of an ultimate force; and no mere force, however great or wonderful, is worthy to be called God. God is not only the ultimate Cause, but the Supreme Intelligence; and as it is only in virtue of the direct consciousness of our volitions that we can think of God as a cause, so is it only in virtue of the direct consciousness of our intellectual operations that we can think of Him as an intelligence. It is not from the mere occurrence of a change, or the mere existence of a derivative phenomenon, that we infer the change or phenomenon to be due to an intelligent cause, but from the mode of the occurrence or the character of the phenomenon being such that any cause but an intelligent cause must be deemed an insufficient cause. The inference supposes, however, that we already have some knowledge of what an intelligent cause is – that we have enough of knowledge of the nature of intelligence to convince us that it alone can fully account for order, law, and adjustment. Whence do we get this knowledge? We have not far to seek it; it is inherent in self-consciousness. We know ourselves as intelligences, as beings that foresee and contrive, that can discover and apply principles, that can originate order and adjustment. It is only through this knowledge of the nature of intelligence that we can infer our fellow-men to be intelligent beings; and not less is it an indispensable condition of our inferring God to be an intelligence.

Then, causality and design, and the will and intelligence within us through which they are interpreted, cannot, even when combined, enable us to think of the Creative Reason as righteous; although obviously, until so thought of, that reason is by no means to be identified with God. The greatest conceivable power and intelligence, if united with hatred of righteousness and love of wickedness, can yield us only the idea of a devil; and if separated from all moral principle and character, good or bad, only that of a being far lower than man, which might have reason for worshipping man, but which man cannot worship without degrading himself. The existence, however, of a moral principle within us, of a conscience which witnesses against sin and on behalf of holiness, is of itself evidence that God must be a moral being, one who hates sin and loves holiness; and the light of this, "the candle of the Lord," in the soul, enables us to discover many other reasons for the same conclusion in the constitution of society and the course of history. But if we had no moral perceptions on the contemplation of our own voluntary acts, we certainly would not, and could not, invest the Divine Being with moral perfections because of His acts.

There is still another step to be taken in order to obtain an apprehension of God; and it is one where the outward universe fails us, where we are thrown entirely, or nearly so, on our internal resources. The universe, interpreted by the human mind in the manner which has been indicated, may warrant belief in a Being whose power is immense, whose wisdom is inexpressibly wonderful, and whose righteousness is to be held in profoundest admiration and reverence, notwithstanding all the clouds and darkness which may in part conceal it from our view; but not in a Being whose existence is absolute, whose power is infinite, whose wisdom and goodness are perfect. We cannot infer that the author of a universe which is finite, imperfect, and relative, and all the phenomena of which are finite, imperfect, and relative, must be, in the true and strict sense of the terms, infinite, perfect, and absolute. We cannot deduce the infinite from the finite, the perfect from the imperfect, the absolute from the relative. And yet it is only in the recognition of an absolute Being of infinite power, who works with perfect wisdom towards the accomplishment of perfectly holy ends, that we reach a true knowledge of God, or, which is much the same thing, a knowledge of the true God. Is there, then, any warrant in our own nature for thinking of God as infinite, absolute, and perfect, since there seems to be little or none in outward nature? Yes, there are within us necessary conditions of thought and feeling and ineradicable aspirations which force on us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will neither permit us to deny these perfections to God nor to ascribe them to any other being.

Thus the mental process in virtue of which we have the idea of God 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

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

III

When man apprehends God as powerful, wise, and good – as possessed of will, reason, and righteousness – obviously he thinks of Him as bearing some likeness to himself, as having in an infinite or perfect measure qualities which human creatures have in a finite and imperfect measure. This can be no stumbling-block to any one who believes that God made man in His image, after His likeness. If man be in some respects like God, God must, of course, be in some respects like man. Power and freedom, knowledge and wisdom, love, goodness, and justice, are, according to this view, finitely in man, because they are infinitely in God. But it is a view which excites in certain minds deep aversion. There are men who protest, in the name of religion, in the name of God, against this anthropomorphic theism, as they call it. According to them, to attribute to God any human qualities, even the highest and best, is to limit and degrade Him – is contrary to reason and contrary to piety – is idolatrous and profane. The Psalmist represents the Lord as reproaching the wicked for supposing that He was like them in their wickedness – "altogether such an one as themselves;" but the modern philosophers to whom I am referring are horrified at the thought that the most righteous man, even in his righteousness, has any likeness to God. According to them, to think of God as wise is to dishonour Him, and to declare Him holy is to calumniate Him. To think of Him as foolish, and to pronounce Him wicked, are, in their eyes, only a little more irreverent and no more irrational.

"We must not fall down and worship," writes one of these philosophers, "as the source of our life and virtue, the image which our own minds have set up. Why is such idolatry any better than that of the old wood and stone? If we worship the creations of our minds, why not also those of our hands? The one is, indeed, a more refined self-adoration than the other; but the radical error remains the same in both. The old idolaters were wrong, not because they worshipped themselves, but because they worshipped their creation as if it were their creator; and how can any anthropomorphic theory 'escape the same condemnation'?"14 The writer does not see that God can only be thought of as wise and righteous and free because the mind of man is His creation, so that His being thus thought of can be no proof that He is its creation. The fact that we can think of God as wise and righteous and free is no evidence that He is an image which our own minds have set up. The man who draws such an inference from such a premiss can be no dispassionate reasoner. And certainly the fact that we can think of God as possessed of intellectual and moral perfections is no reason for our not falling down and worshipping Him, and no evidence that our doing so is idolatry. To fall down and worship any being whom we do not know to possess these characteristics is what would clearly be idolatry. And this idolatry is what the philosophers to whom I refer are manifestly chargeable with encouraging. When they have rejected the living, personal, righteous, loving God, in whom humanity has so long trusted, they can only suggest as a substitute for Him a mysterious Power which is wholly unknown, and even unknowable. Great is their simplicity if they fancy that they can persuade men to receive any such god as that, or if they fancy that men would be any better for a faith so vague and empty. To believe in we know not what, is directly contrary to reason; to worship it would be "an idolatry no better than that of the old wood and stone." What we know is often not the creation of our minds: the unknowable is in itself nothing at all to us, and, as a thought, is always the mere creation of our minds; it is different for each creature, each mind; it is the mere result and reflection of our finiteness. There can be no unknown or unknowable to an infinite mind. To worship what is unknowable would be, therefore, simply to worship our own ignorance – one of the creations of our minds least worthy, perhaps, of being worshipped. There is, at least, no kind of worship less entitled "to escape condemnation," even as anthropomorphic idolatry, than the worship of the Unknowable, – the god proposed to us by some as the alone true God, belief in whom – perhaps I should rather say, belief in which – is to be the final and perfect reconciliation of science and religion.

All true theism implies a certain likeness between God and man. It holds that God is not merely an all-pervading and all-sustaining Power, but an omniscient Mind and perfectly holy Will. It refuses to think of Him merely according to the analogies of the physical world, as if human reason and human love were less worthy expressions of His perfections than mechanical or brute force. It refers to Him not only "all the majesty of nature, but all the humanity of man." This truth – that there is a likeness between God and man – must, however, be combined with two other truths, otherwise it will lead to the gravest errors.

The first is, that while God and man are both like each other, in that both possess certain excellences, they are utterly unlike, in that God possesses these excellences in all their perfection and in an infinite measure, while man possesses them in a very small degree and violated with many flaws and faults. The highest glory which a man can hope for is, that he should be made wholly into the image of God; but never can God be rightly thought of as mainly, and still less as merely, in the image of man. It was the great error of classic heathendom that it thus conceived of the Divine. "Men," says Heraclitus, "are mortal gods, and the gods immortal men." And the gods of Greece, as represented by her poets and adored by her people, were simply magnified and immortal men – a race closely akin to their worshippers in weaknesses and vices no less than in powers and virtues. They were supposed to be born as men are, to have voice and figure, parts and passions, and even at times to cheat and rail and lie. They reflected all the tendencies of the Greek mind, both good and evil.

Worshippers of the one God can scarcely fall into the same extravagance of error in this respect as the Greeks and Romans did, as all polytheists do; but they can, and often do, fall into the error, and think of God as subject to limits and defects, which are only in themselves. For instance, what is called deism, as distinguished from theism, rests wholly on the conception that the presence and power of God are limited, and that He acts in the manner to which man as a finite creature is restricted. The deist thinks of God as outside of and away from the universe; he thinks of the universe as a mechanism which God has contrived, and which He has endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which it is able to sustain itself in existence, and to perform its work so as to save God, as it were, all further trouble and labour concerning it. It is a great gain for us to have a machine doing what we desire without our needing to pay any attention to it or even to be present where it is, because we cannot give our attention to more than one object at one and the same instant of time, and cannot be present at the same time in more places than one; but those who liken God to man in this respect, divest Him of His omnipresence and omnipotence, and represent Him as characterised in some measure by their own impotency. There is a truth which Pantheism often claims as peculiarly and distinctively its own, – the truth that in God we and all things live, and move, and have our being – that of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things, – but which theism must sincerely and fully appropriate as one of its simplest and most certain elements, otherwise the charge against it of being a false and presumptuous likening of God to man will be warranted. We must not think of Him as "an absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of His universe, and 'seeing it go'" – as a God at hand but not afar off, or afar off but not at hand – as here, not there, or there, not here; but we must think of Him as everywhere present, everywhere active – as at once the source of all order, the spring of all life, and the ground of all affection and thought.

We need to be still more on our guard against limiting His wisdom or righteousness or love, as it is what we are still more prone to do. These attributes of God are often thought of in the meanest and most unworthy ways; and doubtless it has to a large extent been horror at the consequent degradation of the idea of God which has made some men refuse to assign to Him any of the properties of humanity, saying, with Xenophanes, that if the animals could think, they would imagine the Deity to be in their likeness – and with Spinoza, that if a circle could think, it would suppose His essence to be circularity. But this is to flee from one extreme to another extreme, from one error to a still more terrible error, through utterly failing to distinguish between perfection and imperfection, between what ought and what ought not to be ascribed to God. Circularity, animal forms and dispositions, human limitations – these are imperfections, and we must not refer them to God; but intelligence, righteousness, love – these are so little in their own nature imperfections that an intelligent being, however feeble, would be more excellent than an omnipotent and omnipresent being destitute of intelligence; and righteousness and love are as much superior to mere intelligence as it is to mere power and magnitude. To ascribe these to God, if we only ascribe them to Him in infinite perfection, is no presumption, no error; not to ascribe them to Him is the greatest presumption, the most lamentable error.

The second truth necessary to be borne in mind, whenever we affirm the likeness of God to man, is, that in whatever measure and to whatever extent God may be known, our knowledge of Him is, and always must be, very inadequate. In these latter days of science we are proud of our knowledge of the universe; and yet, although we do know a little of far-away stars and systems, what is this, after all, but, as Carlyle says, the knowledge which a minnow in its native creek has of the outlying ocean? And our knowledge of God must fall unspeakably farther short of being coextensive with its object. To illustrate the disproportion there, no comparison can be appropriate. "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 hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." Our idea of God may contain nothing which is not true of God, and may omit nothing which it is essential for our spiritual welfare that we should know regarding Him; but it is impossible that it should be a complete and exhaustive idea of Him. We have scarcely a complete and exhaustive idea of anything, and least of all can we have such an idea of the infinite and inexhaustible source of all being. God alone can have a complete and exhaustive idea of Himself. There must be infinitely more in God than we have any idea of. There must be many qualities, powers, excellences, in Divine nature, which are wholly unknown to men, or even wholly unknowable by them, owing to their want of any faculties for their apprehension. And even as to what we do know of God, our knowledge is but partial and inadequate. We know that God knows, that He feels, that He acts; but as to how He knows, feels, and acts, as to what is distinctive and characteristic of His knowing, feeling, and acting, we have little or no notion. We can apprehend certain attributes of God, but we can comprehend, or fully grasp, or definitely image, not one of them. If we could find out God unto perfection in any respect, then, either we must be infinite or God must be finite in that respect. The finite mind can never stretch itself out in any direction until it is coextensive with the Infinite Mind. Man is made in the image of God, but he is not the measure of God.