Page images
PDF
EPUB

Piety the Crown of Intellect.

25

different; and, having this knowledge of the Supreme, marvels and miracles are rightly regarded as special messages and impressive signs. Without repugnance, therefore, we admit the Divine element in religion, only weaklings refuse it; and we hold that, beyond controversy, Divinity is the very life and soul of Nature. Those apologetic commentaries, or excusing expositions, which were formerly accepted, do not satisfy our nicer feelings; nor will our surer confidence try to evade intelligent inquiry. We have a firm, rational hold of historic evidence, and due knowledge of physics and philosophy, attesting the origin and continuance of Revelation. We disregard the petulant outcries of irreligious persons, who denounce all who know and believe more than themselves, and dare to say they know. After due inquiry, it is not so much that we consent to retain our faith in Holy Scripture, as that Scripture retains us. The inquiry, renewed again and again in different ages of the world and periods of life, affords a consecutive accordance of innumerable affirmations. Book after book, chapter after chapter, verse after verse, and word after word, have their own history, their own criticism, with pleadings for and against. There remains no softening to save our pride; it is not we who hold the Bible, the Bible holds us, consecrates our affections, and crowns our intellect. "The purer the light in the human heart, the more it will have an expression of itself in the mind of Christ; the greater the knowledge of the development of man, the truer will be the insight gained into the increasing purpose of Revelation." Intellect is not divorced from Piety; Piety is the crown of Intelligence.

[ocr errors]

STUDY II.

THE SUPERNATURAL.

"A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion, and a Spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.

WE are apt to forget, in listening to denials of the Supernatural, that they enter a region of thought where absolute demonstration, in a scientific sense, is impossible. When told by Renan that, not from one process of reasoning, but from the mass of all modern sciences, we have proof that there is no Supernatural,' the violence of the assertion carries us away for a moment from the fact that there neither is nor can be scientific proof of that which is so confidently affirmed.

The origin and continuance of the Bible cannot be accounted for by purely human forces, nor can all events be explained by mechanical adjustment. All history and all experience prove that love and belief of the Divine flourish in heathen, Christian and scientific minds; that, indeed, the conviction of the existence and omnipresent operation of "the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise," is the universal thought of humanity-adapting itself alike to the history, the poetry, the speculation and the science of every age. We may advance to the proof step by step.

1 "Ce n'est pas d'un raisonnement, mais de tout l'ensemble des sciences modernes que soit cet immense résultat-il n'y a pas de surnaturel." Renan, "Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse," p. 206.

[ocr errors]

-of

[ocr errors]

God in without necessary relations to the world. in, we're free is out on not.

Denial of the Supreme.

The First Cause.

27

If a man who had searched the universe in every part were to say, "There is no God," his statement would not be worthy of credit; from such a search God might hide Himself. Atheism is, therefore, as to proof, impossible. The Absolute, indeed, cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing. That is to say, the essence of God is inaccessible and incomprehensible. None but God can understand what God is in Himself, or the nature of the bond which binds the Divine attributes in mysterious unity, consequently no rational being can properly deny the existence of that concerning which, essentially, he knows nothing.

Denial of the Supreme, as founded on the fact of "not knowing," is irrational and unworthy of credit. In like manner the assertions,-"Matter alone is eternal and divine;" "There is no agency in the world other than physical agency;" "Nothing exists that is super-material, or supernatural,” are sought to be justified by the unknowableness of the things denied. Thus, strange to say, ignorance, which has nothing, gives nothing, concerning those things, presumes to deny their existence. We cannot accept the denial. Knowledge reveals that every cause of phenomena as it is investigated leads from the known to that which is utterly unknown; all accountable and natural facts are unaccountable in their essence, and unknowable in their ultimate genesis. The great master fact is the unknown.

Reverse the argument. The existence of matter or of energy from eternity is incomprehensible, even as is the existence of God from eternity. Knowledge of either is impossible; nevertheless, despite the impossibility, we cannot enter any inquiry concerning causation without eventually postulating some First Cause. We are forced to do this from sheer inability to follow out an infinite series of causes. This First Cause is infinite, for if not, we must think of a region beyond its limits and uncaused, which would be, virtually, to abandon causation. The First Cause must likewise be indecisi pendent, have no necessary relation to any other being; for if

[ocr errors]

the presence of anything else is necessary for completeness, it is dependent and not the First Cause, therefore the First Cause is infinite, is independent, that is, supernatural.

The position is unassailable and opponents beat a retreat. "The consciousness of an inscrutable Power manifested to us through all phenomena has been growing ever clearer, and must eventually be freed from its imperfections. The certainty that, on the one hand, such a Power exists, while, on the other hand, its nature transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination, is the certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing. To this conclusion science inevitably arrives as it reaches its confines; while, to this conclusion, Religion is irresistibly driven by criticism. And, satisfying as it does the demands of the most rigorous logic at the same time that it gives the religious sentiment the widest possible sphere of action, is the conclusion we are bound to accept, without reserve or qualification." If we apply to this, the Inscrutable Something, Anselm's definition of God," That than which nothing greater can be thought "2 -we have, in the latest result of science, an acknowledgement of the first great truth of Scripture, that God is the mighty inscrutable Power who transcends all our understanding.

1

This Power, of which every phenomenon is a manifestation, acts through all bodies, animate and inanimate. If a stone is thrown into the air, or falls on the ground, it is according to definite laws; if a crystal is formed in a solution of salt, if plants grow and flower, if animals are propagated, if there are perception and formation of thought in man, all these, though Omnipresence is "unthinkable," are the sensible manifestations of a Divine Power immanent in the Cosmos-are proof of the omnipresence of mystery.

This inscrutable Power, the ultimate Cause of all things, can only be thought of as possessing specific attributes. The forms of our consciousness are such that the Absolute cannot in any manner or degree be brought within them. We are unable to form any idea of eternity, infinity, omnipotence, omnipresence; we must get notions by means of duration, 1 "First Principles," p. 108: Herbert Spencer, "Proslogium, cap. 2, 3, 4."

x the cannot comprehend, but was can them. We know that which

བཀ པ་ན་

apprehend

can touch with

of 0г.

scoughts - We do not fully widerstand any

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

expansion, acts of power, and of pervading presence like that of gravity. It is a matter of necessity to think of these things in this manner; so, for definiteness, we must conceive of God as personal, infinite, all-wise, mighty, and everywhere present.

Against the doctrine of a personal God, it is asserted—the existence of evil proves that such personal God is not infinitely good; or, if infinitely good, He is lamentably deficient in power, or in intelligence; otherwise, evil would not x be allowed. The assertion loses all weight from the fact that we cannot conceive of free beings existing without a possibility of evil; their freedom forbids the exercise of omnipotence to avert it, but not the drawing out of a greater good by its permission. We are also told that which we know of intelligence implies a circumscribed and limited kind of being, adapting its internal processes to other processes which are external. Really, to talk in this way is to play fast and loose with things, for we can just as well think of Infinite Intelligence as we can of Infinite Power. We are assured-"A personal God is a limited deity; personality and infinity are terms expressive of ideas naturally incompatible." This again is mere play upon words. Can these men, who so talk about God, explain what they mean by infinite extension, as applied to the Supreme? Is infinite extension more correct, or more easily comprehended than is infinite intelligence? We must take phenomenal conceptions such as can be framed, we know that they are inadequate to represent the Ineffable Reality; but, seeing that He is a reality, we consider that mental conceptions are of a higher order than physical. To call Personality, Goodness, Intelligence, anthropomorphic in their nature is, indeed, to give them their right title; but, to forsake these and adopt energy or motion, mechanical in place of intellectual terms, is not less anthropomorphic, and forsakes the higher for the lower, Personality as much transcending material conceptions as Humanity transcends the crystal or the sea-weed.

It is possible that there may be a mode of being as greatly transcending intelligence and will as these exceed mechanical motion, but our minds are utterly incompetent to form even

« PreviousContinue »