hath seen, nor can see.' "Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord He is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath : there is none else."+ "Thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else.”‡ "The Lord is the true God, He is the living God, and an everlasting King."§ "Trust ye in the Lord for ever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength."|| These are among the testimonies of God's own word to His unseen existence; and upon such our faith and our Creeds are based; and they are sufficient for an exposition of what the Christian Church has received and taught. But for those to whom revelation has not come, or has come without conviction, the word itself bids us appeal to other evidence; it bids us read the Great Artificer in the works of His own hands, it teaches us to adopt the language of natural theology, and the argument which ascends from the chain of effects and causes up to an intelligent First Cause. 66 Christianity (as we are told by a great thinker ¶) is a republication of natural (or essential) religion and, which is very material, it teaches natural religion in its genuine simplicity." Thus we find St. Paul, when confronted by a crowd of heathens, * 1 Tim. vi. 15, 16. † Deut. iv. 39. Isa. xlv. 18. § Jer. x. 10. || Isa. xxvi. 4. ¶ Butler, Analogy, Pt. ii., c. 1. pointing their thoughts "from nature up to nature's God": He preached to them to "turn to the living God, Who made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things" who "left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons." ."* Again, at Athens, he bade his hearers learn from their own literature that God is giver "of life, and breath, and all things," that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” † In these two passages the Christian preacher urged the authority of reason, not of revelation; arguing that creation implies a Creator, and its systematic benefits His care for mankind, and His claim on their regard. He returns to the topic in his epistles, affirming that God manifested to men at large in their very nature and constitution a positive knowledge of Himself. "That which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse : because that, knowing God, they glorified Him not as God."+ Job uses a like argument: "Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: or speak to the earth, and it *Acts xiv. 15, 17. † Acts xvii. 25, 28. Rom. i. 19-21 R. V., which here is on the whole more clear and correct; except perhaps in the substitution of "since" for "from the creation." See note in Sp. Comm. shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? in Whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind."* The Book of Revelation then does not exclude the conclusions of reason; it appeals to them while it adds a sanction and illumination peculiarly its own. The natural faculties of man are sufficient to discover and observe proofs of design in the construction and course of the world; and design implies an intelligent Designer: the chemistry of nature which provides sustenance for all living creatures, which promotes the growth of plants and ensures their continuance, furnishes proof of a real Creator and Preserver. So, among the Fathers, Athanasius argues: † "Since throughout the universe there is arrangement not derangement, regularity not irregularity, order not disorder, and in this order an all-harmonious combination of parts; the conception is forced upon us of a Lord and Master who designed and compacted all this, and Who is sustaining its harmonious working. For though He be invisible, yet from the arrangement and harmonious adjustment of opposite forces we *Job xii. 7 sqq. † Athanas., ad Gentes, 35. So, very forcibly and fully, Clemens Rom. ad Corinth., i. 20, which, as well as the above extract, is given in the Appendix of Canon Norris's Rudiments of Theology. Other parallel passages are referred to in Wordsworth's note on Romans i. 20. See, too, the remarkable dialogue in Xenoph., Memorab, iv. 3, between Socrates and Euthydemus. may well form an idea of Him who is the Supreme Governor and Lord of all." But there is another argument to which the Bible points, and of which reason can judge, viz., the action and impulse of thought, a "mind naturally conscious of God." * Men "show the work of the law (i.e. its moral power and principle) written in their hearts, their own conscience bearing witness therewith." This obligatory influence of conscience, this sense of right and wrong, of responsibility, is it not in its measure the image, and therefore a proof, of the Divine mind? ‡ St. Augustin combines in a striking passage both proofs, the inward movement of the soul and the induction from the external facts of things created. He says: "With an undoubting and certain consciousness I love thee, Lord. Thou hast smitten my heart by Thy Word, and I have learned to love Thee." The words are as it were an echo of St. Paul and *"Testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ. Tertullian, in Apologet. See Norris, pp. 12 and 243. † Rom. ii. 15. Compare Cicero's definition of the moral law as "recta ratio naturæ congruens diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna." De Repub., iii. 32. Compare Coleridge, The Friend, vol. iii. Ess. 2-"Is not the true efficient conviction of a moral truth, is not the creating of a new heart, which collects the energies of a man's whole being in the focus of the conscience, the one essential miracle, the same end of the same evidence to the ignorant and to the learned which no superior skill can counterfeit, human or demoniacal; is it not emphatically that leading of the Father, without which no man can come to Christ? St. John. * He passes on to the proof supplied by the outward world. "What is God? I asked the earth, and it replied, 'I am not He,' and whatever is therein made the same confession. I asked the sea and the abysses and the creeping things therein and they answered, 'We are not thy God, seek Him higher.' I asked the breezy air, and the whole sky with its denizens replied, 'Anaximenes is wrong, I am not God.' I asked the heaven, sun, moon, stars: 'Nor yet are we the God whom thou seekest,' they made answer. Then I spake to all the things that crowd around the doors of my bodily sense: 'You have told me concerning my God that you are not He, tell me now what you can of Him.' And they exclaimed with a loud voice, 'He created us. '"+ To the assertion of the existence, must necessarily be added that of the unity, of God. For the very idea of two First Causes, self-existent and supreme, involves a manifest contradiction; and though the unity is not expressly stated in this Creed, as it is in the Nicene and other Eastern Creeds, it is equally implied; and to believe in God, therefore, must be understood affirmatively as a renunciation of atheism, and also exclusively as a rejection of polytheism and idolatry. The unity of the Godhead is constantly and expressly affirmed in Scripture; the history of the Israelites was made the evidence of it to them: "Unto thee it was showed, that thou mightest know that the Lord He is God; there is none else beside * 2 Cor. iv. 6; v. 5; Gal. ii. 20; 1 John iv. 7; v. 10. |