[ p. 18 ]
FAITH in the reliability of experience is indispensable as a condition to arriving at truth. We exercise it at one point: then why not at another? If God is only a “probability,” then we have no right to claim absolute certainty of any other fact. On the other hand, if certainty on the ground of experience is a possibility at all, there is no proper reason for excluding religious experience as yielding certainty. Experiences differ because realities differ. The nature of the experience is congruous with the nature of the reality. The experience of God is a real experience, but it is unique in kind because God is himself a unique form of reality. The truth of the experience does not necessarily involve the truth of all the deductions that have been drawn from it, but it is selfsufficing for those who have it, and it has empiric support in the fact of all else that it may bring to pass. The God who is only a “probability” to philosophy therefore becomes a “certainty” to religious faith. Skepticism may continue to offer its objections as serious as they are for reason as for faith but though the objections may be difficult to answer, the man who has met God in experience can always say, “I have known.”
[ p. 19 ]
CERTAINTY concerning God is our human right, but the entrance upon the right is not an easy matter. It is by much tribulation that we enter the Kingdom. There is, of course, the short and direct path to God offered by religious faith. But while such a faith yields its own kind of certainty, it necessarily involves many other considerations which it becomes the province of reason to explore. Faith and reason must work together if the mind is to have complete satisfaction, and if its convictions concerning God are to be placed beyond the reach of successful assault. Reason can always question faith, but faith can always supplement reason. Reason can create a probability, but faith can transform the probability into moral certainty. When Brightman says that belief in God is at most “a rational working hypothesis,” and when he supports his position on the ground that “there is an element of faith and of logical completeness in all human knowledge,” the second statement although it is apparently not intended to do so takes all the sting out of the first statement. [1]If the most we can get anywhere is “probability,” as Brightman, following Carneades and Butler, is quite willing to concede, then the fact that we can get only probability concerning God is not in the least surprising. But we may very easily concede too much. Great names to the contrary notwithstanding, probability is not the final resting-place of the human mind, [ p. 20 ] for it does not represent the limit of its achievement. The man who says there can be no certainty because the mind arrives at its goal by the help of faith and takes steps beyond the power of pure logic either to follow or to support, introduces a fatal and quite unnecessary skepticism into the very heart of existence. He says, in effect, that there is always a possible question mark after the loyalty of his best friend; that every human deed, by whomever performed, may have a different significance from that which it is claimed to have ; and that the experiences which have given him the deepest satisfaction may always be supposed to rest on false assumptions. Anyone who has made only the most elementary study of the process of human experience can see that theoretically we all ought to be skeptics, just as theoretically we all ought to be “solipsists” that is, ought to believe not even that “we have only each other,” but that “I have only myself.” No man can “prove” the existence of anybody else: for that matter, he cannot prove his own. To whom would you prove your own existence? To another? But you cannot prove Mm. To yourself ? But to prove your existence to yourself you have to assume the very self you seek to prove. The circle is simply unbreakable in strict logic. But who really worries about that ? Who does not realize that these theoretical difficulties are dispensed with for all practical purposes by the actual business of life itself ? Who says that you are not you, and that he is not he, and that stars are not stars, and that prayers are not prayers, just because the philosopher can come along with his “metaphysics” and his “epistemology” and propound a lot [ p. 21 ] of unanswerable riddles? I “probably” exist. You “probably” exist. This is “probably” a book. You are “probably” reading it. You are “probably” wondering what it is all about. This all sounds very silly. If experience yields us no certainties, why waste our time in canvassing experience? If we cannot believe or know or act until we have answered satisfactorily every question the philosopher or psychologist can think to ask us about the proposed belief or knowledge or action, why bother trying to believe or know or act at all ? The business is altogether too complicated. And then to think that for all our pains we get only a question mark ! [2]
There is no intention here to deny the large place that probability must necessarily hold in human life. All that is being claimed is that there are degrees of probability, and that in innumerable cases the probability is enough of a certainty that we can live by it without the least uneasiness, without any disturbance, without any fear that we may turn out to be mistaken. It would be an interesting spectacle to watch a thoroughgoing skeptic (except that there is no such creature) and an individual who makes the ordinary presuppositions about experience, sit down together at a well-spread table say at the annual banquet of a philosophical society. The skeptic is determined to take no chances. He looks first at one dish and then at another. How does he know that this is not tainted, or even that that has not been deliberately poisoned by some unkind “experimental empiricist” who is unwilling to accept any “truth” on the ground of mere tradition, but will find out for himself ? Since he does not know, and since “probability” [ p. 22 ] is not sufficient as “a guide to life,” the skeptic turns sadly away from the table, while his neighbor, entirely disregardful of such theoretical scruples, satisfies his hunger and lives to return to his classroom. The second man treats the probable as the certain, and the event supports him. There may be occasions when this will not be so. Life is full of hazards. But this does not mean that we have no right ever to be certain. We do have that right. We exercise it continually. We could not live on any other condition. We do not live by mere postulates, and hypotheses, and hopes. We do not live even by probabilities. We live by certainties, and the evidence that they are certainties is just in the fact that we do live by them. Again and again we say, “I know.” And if we be asked by the theorist, “How do you know that you know ?” we are justified in replying with some impatience, “How do you know that I don’t know?” 3
It is not being suggested that the case for God is as simple as the case for the most casual of objects or facts. If the case were as simple as that, the value that God has for life would largely disappear. That is worth the most for which we have to fight the hardest, but it does not follow that that for which we have to fight the hardest remains therefore the most uncertain. “Hardly ourselves we fought through.” But that only means that there were difficulties to be overcome. Does the prize decrease in value according as the contest increases in severity ? “Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease ?” If God is the most real of all facts as he is then there may be most said against him, for the more a truth increases [ p. 23 ] in its range the more the considerations it must take account of. God is the Last Fact : therefore all other facts exist relatively to him. God is the Ultimate Truth: therefore all other truths derive their truth from him. To explore God is, therefore, to explore everything. To be certain of him is, therefore, to be certain of much else besides him. And if- we dare say it yet to be certain of just one fact or of just one truth is to have taken the first step toward certainty respecting that great Fact and that great Truth which are God. The mind that can know a little can know much. The mind that can believe one thing can believe many things. Certainty respecting God is a rational possibility. But it involves the use of all of our powers “mind and heart according well.” Man rises to his height when he affirms God and knows what kind of God he affirms and why he affirms him. The affirmation is his consummation, his “Everlasting Yea.” 4
There is reality and there are realities. Reality is the sum-total of realities. Realities differ in their character, and the process of experiencing them likewise differs. We do not come at all things in the same way. There are diversities of experiences because there are diversities in their causes. We find one thing in one way, another thing in another way. But the certainty can be equal even although the route be different. The certainty that fire burns is not arrived at by the same method as the certainty that the arithmetical total equals the parts, or the certainty that the colors are beautiful, or the certainty that the sounds are melodious. When it is said that in each case the method is experience, that is allowed, [ p. 24 ] but it will be added that experience involves interpretation. The mind has to pass judgment on the meaning of the experience. One experience is held to witness to one set of facts, another experience to a set of facts of a different kind. If we say with Kant that all that we are sure of is the experience itself, and that its causes forever remain hidden, well and good. Only, the consideration applies to experience of every type as much to the experience of the objects on the table as to religious and aesthetic experience. Or if we take the much sounder position of Lotze, and regard the nature of the cause as revealed in our very experience of its effects, then we shall say that different types of experience call for different causes more exactly, for different kinds of reality. [3]Is there a type of experience of which the correlative is that reality we call God? It is on that question that the issue finally hangs. If we eliminate the experience, then it becomes true enough that “God is only a hypothesis,” and, as a matter of fact, philosophy as well as science has shown itself very well able to get along without the hypothesis. It is true that philosophical and even scientific reasoning may be advanced in behalf of the hypothesis, as will be shown later, but reasoning of this kind can never get farther than the offering of two alternatives. The counter-argument can never be entirely done away. Or if it is done away, it will be because of the testimony of a type of experience that falls outside the province of philosophy and science. One who never gets beyond the “hypothetical” [4]God never gets beyond the philosophical realm. One who says that he “declines to be forced into the position of finding [ p. 25 ] either a God whose existence is completely certain or no God at all,” [5]is, in effect, saying that he declines to give full weight to the testimony of religious experience. Either there is a God or there is not. That there may 6e a God can be shown by reasons that would be called good respecting any other fact: we therefore get our “probability.” That there is a God is the testimony of religious experience, the experience being held to require a correlative in reality just as much as any other type of normal experience: we therefore get our “certainty.” The philosophical hypothesis becomes the religious reality when the conditions for the transformation are met.
Lippmann is therefore right when he says that a religion that is not completely certain is in process of disintegration. [4:1]Brightman takes issue with him, but not successfully, because of his entirely wrong assumption that complete certainty requires complete proof. All that complete certainty requires is suffi- t dent proof; proof comes by experience; and while, as was said before, experience requires interpretation, the interpretation may be as fully warranted in the case of religious experience as in the case of any other. We shall see later that many things have been held to be “proved by religious experience” which were very far from that. Statements made about God are not to be put on the same level as the indubitable certainty of the fact of God as yielded by the process of religious experience. A man may be certain that he loves his wife and just as certain that she loves him, and yet be quite unable to pass an examination in “the physiology of love,” while another man may pass the examination and still know nothing what [ p. 26 ] ever of what it means to love or to be loved. Love brings its own certainties, and love is an experience involving and justifying its own interpretation. The blindness of the lover to the imperfections of his beloved does not invalidate his love. We may smile at his rhapsodies, but we cannot deny his experience nor its correlate in reality. God is as he is. We may be guilty of all kind of error in our attempt to characterize him, at the same time that we may be abso! lutely certain of the fact we are trying to characterize. Men of religious faith, therefore, need to be wary of taking too seriously the attacks on the reality of God made by those who admittedly have not that faith. It is true that many earnest-minded thinkers to-day are endeavoring to keep some semblance of faith “faith in value” and some semblance of religion “the religion of humanity” while yet utterly repudiating the fact of God in any adequate sense. [6]But these men, on their own showing, do not find in such faith and religion “complete consolation” to use Lippmann’s phrase. Anyone who reads Krutch, Russell, Holmes, Huxley, Sellars, Barnes, Otto, and Haydon, and many others who write in similar vein, cannot fail to detect the note of poignancy in their utterances. .It is with them exactly as Lippmann says. But why should those who have come to religious certainty have to surrender their certainty at the behest of those who not only do not have it themselves, but calmly assert that it is impossible ? “I know until you ask me.” Is there anything wrong about that ? We are repeatedly certain beyond the range of our * power to state to another the reasons for our certainty which would be as reasons convincing to him. Be [ p. 27 ] cause we cannot convince him does not prove that we t are wrong. Instead of our being disturbed in our certainty by his uncertainty we ought to see to it that he is disturbed in his uncertainty by our certainty. The positive always has an advantage over the negative. The very fact that there can be a man who declares himself to be “very sure of God,” and whose assurance is evidenced in his whole demeanor, so that instead of prating about “building on a foundation of unyielding despair” he builds upon a foundation of buoyant confidence the very fact of even one such man ought to suffice to give pause to the unwilling unbelievers, in spite of their numbers. They at least might inquire especially since they are so scientific whether he does not actually have something that they have not found. It is not fair to dismiss the case with a gesture, the more so when it is not simply one man, but great hosts of men who are so sure of God. For we have evidence. The evidence may be of a peculiar character. It may have about it an esoteric quality which the hard-headed regard with suspicion. But there are some places in life where man must stand alone. There are some experiences which must be immediate if they are to be known at all. One inner fort there is, wrote Francis Thompson, whose key only God holds, whose gates open only to his nod, whose floor he alone can tread. [7]When God takes possession of that inner fort, the soul knows it, and there is nothing more to be said.
"Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound, nor doubt him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I, ^
[ p. 28 ]
"Rather the earth shall doubt when her retrieving
Pours in the rain, and rushes from the sod,
Rather than he for whom the great conceiving Stirs in his soul to quicken unto God.
"Ay, though then thou shouldst strike him from his glory,
Blind and tormented, maddened and alone,
Even on the Cross would he maintain his story,
Yea, and in hell would whisper, 'I have known/ " 10
God merely a working hypothesis ? For philosophy yes. For religious faith no. God a complete certainty? For philosophy no. For religious faith yes. “The God who answers, let him be God.”
Nothing that has so far been said is intended as a reflection on the philosophic temper and purpose. Far from it. In what is to follow, the fullest use will be made of what help philosophy can give. Indeed, the very reason for the insistence on religious certainty is that philosophy may be compelled to attend to a fact that is too often overlooked. The philosophy that cannot find God should treat fairly the religious faith that can. If we follow Plato in describing the philosopher as not merely “a lover of wisdom,” but also as “a spectator of all time and existence,” then the philosopher who ignores the testimony of reli/ gion and fails to consider its significance is less philosophical than he claims to be. Philosophy is inclined to treat rather lightly the religious view of things on the ground of its being credulous and dogmatic. Religion has had its share of credulity, but it has hardly monopolized it. The most astounding single claim the modern world has been asked to accepts that human intelligence has emerged as the [ p. 29 ] final issue of a process which becomes less intelligent the farther back it reaches, until eventually it is lost in a chaos where there is neither life nor feeling nor thought. This may be acceptable enough as a mere description of the surface facts: it is as far as we have a right to expect science to go. But what shall we say of the philosophy that takes it as a sufficient account? Hobhouse is mild when he says that regarding such a description as a final explanation is “due to an imperfect development of critical method.” [8]What many men dp not seem to appreciate is that the descriptive statement simply cannot be true unless much else is true as well. And yet they will believe without apparent effort the statement which, standing alone, is so utterly incredible, and stigmatize as mere credulities the other statements especially those concerning a creative and purposive God which are necessary to save their own belief from being the most complete nawete. For certainly there can be no more serious indictment of human intelligence than that it should be satisfied to explain itself in terms of the unintelligent ! [9]
There are, fortunately, an increasing number of thinking men who are coming to realize that an interpretation is not adequate which consists simply in refunding what is admittedly higher back into what is admittedly lower. The scientific materialism of a past generation was less worthy of the mind of man than the crude supernaturalism against which to some extent it was directed. For the supernaturalist did at least believe that a man was bigger than the world in which he found himself: to quote a famous description from a somewhat similar connection, he [ p. 30 ] was “a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away.” [10]Anything even approaching such a dignified conception of man’s ultimate significance was quite beyond the materialist. Popular thinking always lags behind the scientific, so that while there are many encouraging signs that contemporary science is coming over to the side of the angels, or at least is beginning to recognize that there may be such a side, the popular mind is still very largely under the influence of the older scientific point of view. Others sowed the wind, and we are reaping the whirlwind. It is useless to blink the fact that we live in a time when a cheap view of human life prevails. Not necessarily a cheap view of life as an economic or political or biological entity, but a cheap view concerning its ultimate reference. [11]The arriving at an adequate view of this ultimate reference is a philosophical undertaking. The man of religious faith, indeed, may come upon it as an intuition; but even then, the intuition itself will still need some validating if it is to be used as a clew to a larger interpretation. Our age has no greater need than for the wider dissemination and acceptance of that philosophy which, taking note of all time and existence, offers an interpretation of the whole according to its highest discoverable term, and finds that term in the human person conceived as a rational and ethical being and the possible subject of religious experience. Such [ p. 31 ] an interpretation leads to God, himself rational and ethical, as clearly as that may ever be done by pure thought. [12]Is God the proper implicate of man? Is the life-process at one and the same time human upreach and divine down-reach ? Are there moments of mutual discovery as between God and man moments when God has the man and the man has God? These, surely, are questions of far-reaching import, and there are still those who are prepared to answer them affirmatively. Such affirmations do not necessarily mean mere dogmatism. They do not mean that the difficulties have not been considered. The theist knows where the question marks may be put just as well as the atheist or agnostic or humanist does. “The specters of the mind” do not appear only to doubters and unbelievers. It may very well be that the man who has gone the highest in these matters has also gone the lowest. “In that he went up, what is it but that he first of all went down?” To lead captivity captive requires that you shall yourself have been a captive. The price of an anabasis (ascent) is a Jcatabasis (descent). [13]It has more than once been said that the atheist is led by his reason and the theist is not. Not only is that not the entire truth, but it overlooks the fact that many a man has at last, after much tribulation of mind and heart, come to the belief in God because he could see no other way of saving the rationality of the universe. In that case, God is a conclusion arrived at by ordered thought. Alone, that may not be enough, as we have already shown, but it at least gives “probability .” For some men it gives more than even probability: they are as sure as they can be of anything that the rationality [ p. 32 ] of the universe and the fact of God stand or fall together. Thus the much-discussed statement of so keen a contemporary thinker as W. E. Hocking, that “the ontological argument is the only proof of God,” the only argument which is “wholly true to the history, the anthropology, of religion.” [14]Explanation involves a reference to something other than what is being explained. The reason for any “this” is in a “that,” and the “that” must always be adequate to the “this.”. The principle involves finally the selfexplanatory and hence the self-existent. It is, of course, often urged that while the idea of necessary existence is inescapable, the universe in its entirety is such an existence : in its parts it is contingent, as a whole it is absolute. [15]The reply to this can be drawn from scientific thought itself. For are we not being told to-day that the characteristic of the universe is change? Nothing “stays put.” The Heraclitean flux meets us everywhere. Change in the parts means a changing whole, and a changing whole changes with reference to something not itself. Stated simply, a changing universe is a dependent universe, and therefore cannot be an absolute. Yet an absolute we must have In order to be able to give an intelligent account of things. That absolute is God who, himself selfexistent, self -sufficient, and, as Spinoza would say, “self -caused” (sui causa) , maintains all else. Knowing no law but the law of his own being, he gives the law to all else. Himself the utterly independent, on Mm all else depends. He knows no change. A changing *God would be a dependent God, and a dependent God would not be God. Something apart from his will would control himsome Fate, some necessity, [ p. 33 ] some “eternal givenness,” as Brightman puts it, which at once irritates and limits him and such a God is not only philosophically unsatisfying, but he cannot be the object of man’s absolute trust and devotion. [16]There are eternal laws of reason because there is an Eternal Mind. There are eternal laws of right because all-knowing Eternal Mind is also all-holy Eternal Will. The words of Antigone expressed a great truth:
“. . . The infallible unwritten laws of Heaven, Not now or yesterday they have their being, But everlastingly, and none can tell The hour that saw their, birth.” [17]
Separate these laws from God, as was attempted by even so great a Christian thinker as R. W. Dale, who makes God “the first Subject” of eternal law, in whom “the eternal law of righteousness” in particular is “made alive,” and the result of the false abstraction is a quite unnecessary confusion. [18] There would be no eternal laws if there were no eternal God, no unchanging laws if there were no unchanging God, no absolute laws if there were no absolute God. The first great Pact is God : all else is commentary. We follow Lotze: God is the universal Lawgiver, hence must “transcend” the law that he gives at the same time that he must be its unchanging and inexhaustible source. [19]
In all this we are but anticipating what will be said later at greater length. Its immediate reference is to the claim that God can be nothing more than “a rational working hypothesis.” Thought and faith combine to affirm that God is Fact. The religious [ p. 34 ] faith that does not go that far does not go to the full length of religious possibility. One would not wish to he unkind, hut it is difficult to understand why men who neither believe in a Beyond nor believe in the possibility of conscious commerce with it should still claim to have a practical interest in religion. “A Religion of Humanity” is a contradiction in terms, if “humanity” is used as excluding all reference to or belief in “Deity” [20]Modern nontheistic humanism is either not a religion at all or it includes more than simply humanistic elements. One suspects that the humanistic head lags behind the humanistic heartwhich isi a fault one finds it not difficult to forgive, even in men who make a fetish of being “rational.” Better an error of the understanding than an error of the fundamental purpose. Loving men, serving men, living “the good life,” is not the same as being religious, although a religion that does not include all these is sadly deficient. Religion means God : we shall speak later of the so-called nontheistic religions. [21]Certainly, the higher ranges of religious life and experience are impossible where there is ignorance as to God or uncertainty about Mm. Prayer, trust, submission, service, worship, communion these are of the very essence of religion, and they all proceed with reference to a Reality shall we now say a Personal Reality an “Other.” You can hardly pray to a hypothesis, worship a postulate, confide in a process, serve an abstraction, and hold fellowship with a law. Or at least, if the time should come when you suspect that this is what you are really doing, you will at once cease doing it. Religion is nothing if not sincere. “A man cannot cheat about faith,” says Lippmann, [ p. 35 ] with characteristic incisiveness and unanswerable finality. [22]This insistence on the relation of religion to life and reality is not made because of any supposition that men will surrender all their idealisms if they should cease to believe in God. The supposition would be as untrue as unkind. Many of the normal fruits of religion may grow from other than religious roots. “Grafting” is not confined to the greenhouse and orchard. What was originally nourished by religion may enter into the social heritage and be accepted by those who ignore the origin or even repudiate it. Nevertheless, many of the most precious fruits of religion must cease to flourish when God is surrenderedGod, that is, in the sense of a Reality upon which man may lay hold and which may lay hold upon him. The proof of the statement is in the present condition of affairs in religion, and in the confessions which one meets on every hand concerning the real religious loss arising from allowing uncertainty to take the place of certainty.
The modern religious teacher needs nothing so much as to recover the note of assurance. There is . a deadly menace to the very thing he is presumably seeking in the apologetic note that too often creeps into his utterance. He can hardly expect to convince others when he himself exhibits a manifest uncertainty. Nothing is quite so pathetic or quite so futile as a man recommending a cause in which he does not himself wholeheartedly believe. “He that doubteth is damned” to ineptitude. When the blind follow the blind, the ditch awaits them both, and to-day the ditches are full. Nobody cares to be in a ditch not even the ditch-digger himself. The position [ p. 36 ] limits the activities and restricts the horizons. Besides, after a time ditches become putrid. “Much offal of a foul world comes their way.” It takes little acquaintance with contemporary life and thought to convince one that men are becoming weary of the ditches. They will follow those who will show them a way out. The much-acclaimed indifference to religion covers a deep wistf ulness. When one reads such typical books as those which profess to glorify “the modern temper,” or to give instructions to those who would engage in either “the quest of the ages” or “the quest for certainty,” or to point out how we may have “religion without revelation” or “religion without God,” or to assure us that “the gods” have come to their “twilight” “and after that the dark,” or books which profess to tell us that religion has at last “come of age” and what “the next step” is to be, and how “the free man” may still “worship” and how the disillusioned may still engage in “the conquest of happiness” while momentarily threatened by “omnipotent matter” when one reads such books as these, one is not impressed that they will do very much to help the fallen out of the ditch. And when one adds to these such assertions, coming from the same general sources, as that “God is evolution,” and that “God is process,” and that “God is the principle of concretion,” and that God is compact of “space and time,” and that “God is the social consciousness universalized,” and that “God is a problem to himself” as much as he is to us or as we are to ourselves, and that “God is a struggling Prometheus,” and that “God is the upthrust in nature,” and so on ad infinitum when one considers assertions such as these -one is [ p. 37 ] still more convinced that not this way lies man’s hope. The modern wistfulness finds no great encouragement here. “Put our feet on the highway, restore to us our sight, give us sandals and a staff for the journey, show us the clear-shining goal !” this is the cry that one hears arising from every side. Who will respond to the cry successfully ? Only those who themselves have found the confidence which others seek confidence as to God.
Deep-seated human need is on the side of the man who speaks for God with the note of certainty. Even the most “modern” of men has moods when he realizes that the ancient questions still stand, and that the so-called new answers are not only not new, but are not really answers at all. For death is not the answer to life, the material is not the answer to the spiritual, the counsel to build manfully on despair is not a counsel promising much success. Not that the case cannot be presented with a certain impressive plausibility. If one were looking for an easy task, one would certainly defend atheism rather than theism before an unthinking audience. The greatest brilliancy goes with the superficial: mere brilliancy becomes less and less possible the deeper you go. Some of the cleverest contemporary minds are rehabilitating “the theistic disproofs” if there can really be such. The religious teacher indeed, every other man. to whom God is real has to take account of that fact. It takes less brains to point out difficulties than it does to deal with them, when the difficulties concern such facts as creative purpose, providential control, and the supernatural generally. These difficulties have always been known to exist; [ p. 38 ] they are as ancient as the faith itself. They have been expressed in one form or another from the beginning, of reflective thought. Skepticism, cynicism, agnosticism, atheism, the lower naturalism call it what you will can never again be original. It has all been said. Let him who doubts that turn again to his Lucretius, his Celsus, his Lucian, [23]his Omar Khayyam. But not only has it all been said : it has also all been answered. All that can ever be said by men on the earth against God or for God has been said already, times without number. And still men want God let the religious teacher remember that. No scientific advance can adduce a single new fact which can strengthen the case for unbelief. Even if J. B. S. Haldane’s fantastic prediction should become true, and the human children of a hundred years hence be produced by “ectogenesis” (that is, independently of the mother’s body), [24] an ultimate creative source could still not be dispensed with. A God who was able to survive a heliocentric universe and the theory of evolution will be able if we may take our place among the prophets with Saul and Haldane to survive even ectogenetic babies, for while they may not have woman for their mother they will still have God for their Father. Nothing that we can discover within the universe or that we can learn about the universe can change the character of its final testimony. The snug little universe of our fathers needed a God : is ours so big that it does not need one? That were strange logic. From one point of view, we know more about ourselves than our fathers knew about themselves, but no study of himself by man can change human nature, or the order of human experience, or [ p. 39 ] his insatiable curiosity concerning his origin and Ms destiny; it cannot take out of man the power to discriminate between the is and the ought; it cannot make him sufficient unto himself. The vast symbolism inscribed on the unfolding scroll of time and space will still continue to challenge him, and he will still continue to spell out its reference as being to something “numinous,” to something that is awful, to something ineffably great. Philosophy is born of wonder, and because man cannot cease to wonder, he cannot cease asking questions and trying to answer them. But even although we say this, and even although we believe that man carries within himself the guarantee of his own final discovery of God, we still have to confess that there is no lack of popular skepticism. There is a feeling abroad that the bases of religious faith have been rendered intellectually useless. This is the challenge of the age to the religious teacher, but it is the teacher’s opportunity as well because the heart of man still cries out for God, and he who speaks for God, knowing whereof he speaks, will find a response.
But will the word be spoken. W. R. Matthews believes that the main question before the world to-day is “whether or not the majority of men shall continue to believe in God.” [25] If they are so to continue, it will be by the help of the testimony of those other men who can say, “I know.” The most convincing man is the man who is himself most convinced. Men will follow a confident leader as the soldiers of Italy once followed Garibaldi. Are there still 'a few men w^o are as certain of the fact of God as they are of the fact of themselves, who know why they are certain, [ p. 40 ] and who can tell others so? Then let them speak. “The spirit of the Lord is upon them, because he hath anointed them to preach good tidings.” They will need that divine endowment, for theirs is no easy task. Where they are so certain, others are uncertain, and they have not only to vindicate their own certainty, but they have to make it contagious. They have not only to affirm the fact of God, but they have also to show what the fact must mean for life if it be accepted. They will have to risk the criticism of the unbelieving. They will have to remember that the one Man who was most sure of God paid for his certainty with a cross, and was still sure of God of his love, of his wisdom, of his power even when for a brief moment he could not find him near, and cried out that he was forsaken. They will have to affirm that there is no human interest on which the reality of God does not bear, no questions for which that reality does not have its own implications. The man who is sure of God, and who is set in the world to help others find a similar assurance, will claim the right to scrutinize all philosophy, all science, all art, all education, all morals. The one thing he cannot do is to treat his belief as though it made no practical difference. Again and again his belief will compel him to command men, “Go not that way ; go rather this way.” He will oppose a philosophy that leaves no room for God saying quietly, but finally, even dogmatically, “It is wrong” He will oppose a science that so far forgets itself as to declare that man is wholly of the earth. He will oppose all art, whether it be of painting, of sculpture, of music, of drama, of literature, that offers an interpretation of life which [ p. 41 ] degrades or discounts Goodness. He will oppose an education, whether in theory or in practice, which claims to be adequate while yet nowhere making provision for the spiritual interests. [26] He will oppose a morality which sees in a man only a biological specimen, or only a social nexus, or only a political entity. He will not offer this opposition in the name of a set of dogmas, man-made as they are, and temporal as they therefore must be. He will offer it in the name of the God who has spoken to him by the sign of the burning bush, and who by such a sign commissions his messenger to go to whatsoever tyrant keeps God’s people in chains, and cry, “Let God’s people go!” And if it be charged that the claim thus to speak for God and interpret his will is still dogmatism, let it be so. What else than dogmatic can that man be in whose soul the voice of the Eternal “I Am That I Am” has been heard? He will be as dogmatic as atheism, as dogmatic as materialism, as dogmatic as naturalism, as dogmatic as nontheistic humanism, as dogmatic as any of the numerous contemporary voices which are being raised in behalf of the degradation of man. Only, he will be dogmatic with greater right than any of these. He has a better case. He has the support of more facts. He drops a deeper plummet and he flies a higher kite. He ventures farther and he takes greater risks; and because he ventures farther he has more to say, and because he takes greater risks he comes back with greater gains to share with less venturous souls.
Such a religious teacher as has been described will be challenged, and properly so, to vindicate his stand. The severest intellectual effort will be none too good [ p. 42 ] for this. In the pages that follow more will be said as to how this vindication may proceed. But through it all, let it not be forgotten that intellectual effort alone will not yield the certainty of God. The certainty must come if it come through an indubitable experience of God himself. Without it, the religious teacher is handicapped : he is weak at the point where he most needs to be strong, and no strength elsewhere will make up for this weakness. But if he have this certainty for himself, then, indeed, does he have something to present and something to defend. He will speak as one having authority, and not as the scribes ; and he will bring forth out of his treasuries treasuries of the mind which “hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain,” treasuries of the heart “whos f e beating blood is running song” he will bring from such treasuries “things new and old.” 30
Yes! as to God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, we have the right to be certain.
[ p. 43 ]
The Problem of God, pp. 25-26. ↩︎
See the philosophical writings of A. J. Balfour, A Defense of Philosophic Doubt, The Foundations of Belief, and Theism and Humanism, for a clear statement of this predicament. The danger of forcing it, however, is very clearly shown in A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of- God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, pp. 59-65. ↩︎
Microcosmus, Eng. trans., vol. i, bk. v, pp. 552-553. “For however unknown, yea, unknowable, we may pronounce the quality of anything to be, if the name ‘quality’ is not to be a quite meaningless arbitrary designation of the essential content of things, but to denote it (at least formally) with precision and significance, the unknown quality of beings must possess the characteristics peculiar to every quality as such. But we know only the qualities of sensation; from 'them alone is the universal notion abstracted. . . . We form our conception of supersensible qualities entirely on the model of the sensible ones with which we are familiar.” ↩︎
Brightman, op. cit., p. 25. ↩︎
Cf. Joad, The Present and Future of Religion. Joad retains the term “God” but empties it of all definite content, equating it vaguely enough with “values which are divine” (pp. 277ff.). See also his Matter, Life, and Value, pp. 353-368. How much may be embraced under the magic [ p. 44 ] term “value” is shown in pointed fashion in Ward, Philosophy of Value, chaps, ii and iii. See the section on “Is God Value?” (pp. 199-212), for Ward’s strong constructive conclusion. Schmidt, in The Coming Religion, doubts if theism can continue, and in his description of “The Beligion of the Future” (pp. 250-259, and cf. below, pp. 216-221, etc.) he says not one word as to God; yet the book contains a moving appeal for the preservation and deepening of all those “values” which in the past men have generally supposed required the fact of God. Cf. Hoffding, Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., closing words of paragraph 89, where God is defined as “the principle of the conservation of value within existence,” and where the conclusion is drawn that in that case any man who works to maintain value is “a child of God.” ↩︎
The Fallen Yew. ↩︎
Development and Purpose, first edit., p. 244. Haeckel stated and defended the view a generation ago in The Riddle of the Universe, but it was characteristic of what passed in the nineteenth century for scientific naturalism or materialism. Its roots are in the Greek Atomists (see A. History of Science, by Dampier-Whetham, pp. 2328), and among the ancients Democritus gave it classic expression in De natura rerum (see introduction to Eng. trans. Iby Cyril Bailey Oxford Press). Many contemporary scientists are raising their voices against the view, for example, Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, chaps, i and vi (cf. Overstreet, The Enduring Quest, chaps, i-viii), but that there are many who still accept it may be inferred from the whole temper of such a book as that of Krutch, op. cit. ↩︎
See Lynn Harold Hough, Personality and Science, espec. chap, ii, for a brilliant criticism of this paradox. ↩︎
Macaulay, Essay on Milton, the section describing the Puritan. [ p. 45 ] ↩︎
Cf. the remark of Krutch, op. cit., that human nature must continue to exist precariously and upon sufferance “in a universe not made for it” (p. 82). ↩︎
See Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, for the best study we have of the history of this claim in philosophic thought. ↩︎
For a striking contemporary illustration of this, see O. A. Raven, A Wanderer’s Way. The caliber of Canon Raven’s mind in other respects is revealed in his Creator Spirit. See also Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican, but cf. W. M. Horton, The Philosophy of the Able Bautain, the chapter entitled “The Odyssey of an Ardent Soul.” ↩︎
The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 307. Cf . what is said on the same page about the movement of the mind to God consisting in “some leap from idea to reality.” ↩︎
Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, discusses this question. See Works, A. and C. Black edit., Edinburgh, vol. iv, pp. 489ff. Hoffding, op. cit., defends the thesis that it is impossible for human thought to close the series of concepts or causes. The causal series may as well be infinite as not (see pars. 5-10). The curious work of W. H. Gillespie, The Necessary Existence of God, is an argument based on the infinity of space and duration as conceptions which we cannot escape but yet which are unintelligible without an Infinite Being, God. See espec. part xi. . ↩︎
Op cit., pp. 126-138. Cf. Knudson, Doctrine of God, pp. 272-275. ↩︎
Sophocles, Antigone, lines 450-458. Eng. trans, by Lewis Campbell. ↩︎
The Atonement, lect. ix. ↩︎
Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 377-382. ↩︎
The great religions that conceive the Beyond impersonally, and the Neo-Platonists and medieval mystics who refused to attach to the Beyond any specific determinations, do not fall under this stricture. The Beyond is [ p. 46 ] for them simply too great to be defined in human terms. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 16, seems to overlook this. ↩︎
See below, pp. 216-221. ↩︎
Op. cit., p. 49. ↩︎
For a well-informed discussion of the Dialogues of Lucian of Samosata (2nd cent., A. D.), Lynn Harold Hough, The Artist and the Critic, lect. iii. ↩︎
See Doedalus, pp. 65-68. ↩︎
God in, Christian Experience, p. xi. ↩︎
Cf . H. H. Horne, This New Education. Home argues cogently that an education which does not include religion is deficient and gives an incomplete life. “We conclude that we have religion in education because it belongs there, and it belongs there because it belongs in life” (p. 204). ↩︎