CHAPTER II.

THE BEING AND CHARACTER OF GOD.

ONE who has grasped the thought of necessary existence can never come to the consideration of the existence of God without a feeling of exultation that we may know so much about it. The popular impression, it is true, is that we can know nothing about it—that it is all a matter of guess, or "faith," as scientific men are contemptuously willing to allow theologians to call it. But faith is not credulity, nor intellectual levity.* There is mystery here, but it is the mystery of light, not of darkness; not that we cannot see to penetrate the region in which God dwells, but that penetrating it, we find light more and brighter pouring itself in upon us, till we stop in awe at seeing that full of impenetrable brightness and depth which we had fancied to be dull and limited. We find there is knowledge of God which is joyfully plain and gloriously necessary, the

* Although it has a tendency to degenerate into these, as Celsus noted in his time in criticizing the κουφότης τῶν Χριστιανῶν.

certainty of which seems bound up with that of our own existence.*

The subject of the being and character of God is one around which from the earliest times controversies have raged, and around which they are still raging. Into such controversies these Studies are for the most part forbidden, by the necessity of brevity, from entering. Their aim must be merely to give results. If they assume or ignore weighty points still at issue, I can but hope this will be ascribed not altogether to the serene confidence of ignorance nor to the assertiveness of narrow dogmatism, but to the limitations inevitable in an attempt to state great thoughts briefly.

We recognize that every starting-point is disputed. And yet, as we wish to make a start from somewhere, we will assume that I, the individual, exist, and that what is necessary to my existence, to my intellectual sanity, to my understanding of myself, has also a real existence. We will assume that two and two not merely seem to

* "One of the many superstitions which, in our science, are practised with the idea of the infinite, owing to its importance being very much overestimated, is the notion that the infinitude of God makes any adequate idea of Him impossible. But is it not a matter of indifference to the mathematician, in his idea of the line, whether the length of that line is limited or whether it stretches on into the infinite?"-RICHARD ROTHE," Still Hours," P. 99.

me four, but that they really are four-no more and no less. And if any one says there may be a world somewhere where they make three or five, we will grant that we cannot demonstrate the contrary; only we cannot conceive it; and in order to avoid intellectual suicide we are compelled to assume that this thought which is necessary for me has an absolute, real existence.

It

But the fourness of two and two is true not only for me, but for you and for every human being. It is true not only here, but in the remotest corner of the world, of the universe. is not only true now, but it was true at the beginning of creation and before, and it will continue to be true to the end of time and after. It is not a material thing; it is thought, omnipresent and eternal. But what is thought? It does not exist of itself. It inevitably implies a thinking mind. And just as a book through every page and letter implies an author, so we must believe that the thought which is in every part of the universe, and independent of time, implies a Mind that is omnipresent and eternal.

If mathematics, then, involves thought that is universal, we seem through it to catch a glimpse of a universal Mind. And it is not number only that contains this fruitful, prophetic germ. All those fundamental ideas which constitute what we may call the bones of thought prophesy also

of their divine Original. The ideas of likeness, of identity, possibility, negation, causation-we might have started with any of these and have arrived at this same conclusion, of the existence of a universal Mind as necessary to explain universal thought; or, to express it differently, the ultimate unity of Thought and Being. Existence involves thought; not your or my particular thought, but a universal and absolute Thought. All thought involves existence; not that my present thought has necessarily an objective reality, but that underlying it are elements of universal Thought which necessarily imply an absolute Mind.

If a thing may prophesy authentically of what is beyond itself through what is implied in itself, there should be many instances of this; it should be the case not only in regard to the existence of God. And so we look around in the world at large for indications of this law; and we see that there is no railroad without a station, no fence without a field beyond. There cannot be an under side without an upper side; no part without a whole. Every arc implies a complete circle, just as a shadow implies the light, sin holiness, the world of evil the kingdom of heaven, the finite thought the infinite Mind.

Assuming, then, that this universal Mind exists, it will be eternal and omnipresent—that is, inde

pendent of time and space, for such is the nature of necessary thought; and it will be self-conscious and intelligent, for such is the nature of mind. It will also be the conditio sine qua non of all things; since, as thought is involved in all existence, everything must depend for its existence upon this ultimate Thought.

Students of physical science are endeavoring to establish the law that motion, heat, light, sound, matter itself, are all forms of force; that they can be converted into one another or into the ultimate force lying behind them all. But this force must be either material or personal; that is, it must be caused by something other than itself, or it must be itself its own cause. If it has a cause outside itself and, like itself, physical, then this in turn must have a cause, and so on in endless retrogression. To hold that physical force accounts for all in the world one must hold to an infinite series of worlds, one before the other; a series without beginning or end. Is such a series conceivable? I can conceive of change that is selforiginated. I see it every time I raise my hand or think a thought. And if all the changes in the world were such as this, the universe would become intelligible, for then the underlying force would be the cause of all change and would be also the cause of itself; the universe would be