Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

Object thus postulated by the religious nature must be regarded as personal.

There are phases of religious sentiment, or at least of sentiment closely akin to the religious, which are satisfied without the idea of personality; for instance, the feelings which arise when we contemplate the infinite, the sublime, the mysterious, the beautiful. I am not indeed sure that even these feelings do not betoken personality, and that mere size and form and colour could not waken them unless there were at least an undefined consciousness of a spiritual presence manifested through them all. There are, however, men who cherish what they regard as religious sentiment, and think it of great importance, and nevertheless have no acknowledged belief in a personal God. Such is the case, for example, with the Positivists. Nothing is gained by denying the name of religion to this position. Whether it be religion or not is a question of words; and we may see in it a strong testimony to the ineradicable presence of the religious element, and its demand for at least a minimum of faith. Feelings dwarfed by intellectual doubt, or denied their legitimate expression, will in time assert their power, unfold their contents, and find their genuine satisfaction in theistic belief.

But if we grant that there are religious sentiments which stop short of a personal object, there are others more distinctly and certainly religious which have no meaning apart from the personal Spirit in whom they rest. Trust, love, worship, cannot rest in anything beneath personality, and in their supreme form have no satisfaction till they find it in their Source, the personal God who is in communion with the soul. An ideal of humanity which is only the abstract notion of departed virtue; an unconscious reason (if that phrase has any real meaning); a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness,' but is only a natural law or stream of tendency-never command the absolute devotion of the heart, or nourish the devoutest life of Christian saints.

[ocr errors]

Christ's faith in the Father was given in the very constitution of his own spirit.

[ocr errors]

The personality of God, however, is sometimes denied on the plea, not that he is infra-personal, but that he is suprapersonal. In judging of this contention we must be very careful in the use of our terms. The word 'personal' is often used to denote that which is peculiar to some particular person, as when we speak of a personal bias or personal taste. Personality' sometimes describes that which is special to a given individual. To'personate' is to pretend to be some one else. And the word person itself is employed to point out an individual separated from others by certain characteristics, as in the common phrases, the persons of a drama,' or 'having respect of persons.' Thus an idea of limitation comes to be attached to the term; and it would be possible to apply it to God in such a way as to signify only that he was a kind of magnified man, the greatest among many. But no theologian would thus apply it. When we attribute personality to God, we mean that he has in unlimited perfection that which distinguishes a person from a thing or from a mere animal. This distinctive mark we may analyze into self-consciousness, reason, and will. It is these that make us persons; and however limited they may be in us, and however dependent on limiting conditions for their development, they do not in themselves involve any limitation in the being to whom they belong. In speaking of these as attributes of God we do not mean that they have the imperfections which necessarily characterize them in finite beings, but rather that dwelling in us, as they do, in finite measure, they are real, though inadequate, revelations. of the supreme perfection. They are the highest that we know; and if God is supra-personal in such a sense as to exclude these, we must adopt the agnostic position, and all supposed communion between the human mind and God must be regarded as delusion. It is for this reason that it seems important to insist on the personality of God. Apart

from it the deepest life of man becomes a riddle, and the grandest utterances of Psalmists and Prophets a jingle of unmeaning words.

The objection is indeed raised, from the side of agnosticism, that in ascribing our highest and distinctively personal attributes to God we are as irrational as an oyster would be which ascribed to him sensation. Such a metaphysical oyster would hardly belong to that lowly fraternity; but we may accept the illustration. We do not attribute sensation to God, because it has its origin in a physical body; and therefore our speculative oyster is supposed to be clearly wrong. But sensation, in spite of its origin, is a form of consciousness; and as, by the hypothesis, it is the only form known to the disputants, I believe that the oyster which asserted it would be far nearer the truth than the oyster which denied it. We are capable of abstractions which are impossible to an oyster; and so we can say that the high attributes which constitute our personality are revelations, or representative forms of that which is above all our thinking, but is not on that account less real. They are our participation in the Divine nature; and while we know them in their finite action, we cannot know them in their infinite range or their eternal self-subsistence. A spark may give us a very imperfect, but still a true idea of the solar radiance. The warning, however, is valuable when theologians presume to announce the eternal economy of the Divine consciousness from the limiting conditions and methods which affect the consciousness of man.

Nevertheless it is necessary to subjoin a caution. If we speak of God as a person, we thereby place him in a class, as one of many individuals composing it; and he becomes, in our thought, extraneous to us, as a being like ourselves, only on a vaster scale, and entering into moral relations with us, as a king or a judge might do who himself was bound by the same superlative law. But we cannot thus conceive of the Self-existent. God is a genus by himself, the underived

source of all being; not one person among many, but the one only complete and absolute personality, through whose creative and inflowing life we, by participation, become persons. As Augustine says, 'He is what he has' (id est quod habet). He is not one of many rational or righteous beings, as though reason and the moral law were eternal principles outside of and above him; but he is himself the perfect sum and inexhaustible Source of reason, righteousness, and love, and from that infinite sea we draw our tiny measures. 'In him we live and move and have our being."

But how God creates, and communicates of himself, and gives to his children to have life in themselves, so that they are moral and responsible persons, we cannot understand. Theology has laid it down that God is incomprehensible; and he is most incomprehensible when we contemplate him from the highest peaks of faith, when we look into his eternity and infinity, within which all times, all worlds, are but as a passing dream. Yet on these things we may at least think and speculate, though we cannot comprehend; but we cannot doubt that far beyond the confines of our thought stretches the limitless unknown, and a new spiritual sense would bring before us unimagined visions. As Cyril of Jerusalem expresses it, 'In things relating to God the confession of ignorance is great knowledge,'2 or, in the words of

1 For a philosophical defence of the personality of God see an article by J. B. Dalgairns, in the Contemporary Review,' Vol. XXIV. pp. 321 sqq. Consult also Lotze, Microcosmus, trans. by E. Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones, Book IX, Chap. iv.; and more briefly in Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, ed. by F. C. Conybeare, pp. 57 sqq. It is a satisfaction that my conclusion, reached independently, has the support of this distinguished thinker. He sums up, 'Perfect Personality is in God only, to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy thereof; the finiteness of the finite is not a producing condition of this Personality but a limit and a hindrance of its development.' Vol. II, p. 688. I may refer also to Illingworth's Bampton Lectures, on Personality Human and Divine, which present the whole argument very clearly.

2 Ἐν τοῖς περὶ Θεοῦ μεγάλη γνῶσις, τὸ τὴν ἀγνωσίαν ὁμολογεῖν. Cat. vi. 2.

our own Hooker, 'Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of his name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as indeed he is, neither can know him and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confess without confession, that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach. He is above, and we upon earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few.'1 This is a valuable caution, which may save us from perplexing ourselves about many problems that lie beyond the horizon of our thought, and enable us to wait with trustful patience for the fuller light of an enlarged spiritual existence. Especially may we remember the closing sentence when we are plunged into the teeming definitions and subtle inquisitiveness of ecclesiastical dogma. But we are not, because our knowledge is limited, to adopt the position of the agnostic. We know enough for religion and for life. His will concerning us is revealed in the conscience, his love towards us in the heart, when he has turned towards himself those organs of spiritual discernment, and opened the blind eyes of the soul. It is one of the mysteries why this light does not shine equally upon all, and why it varies so much in its clearness in those whom it has visited. But we cannot on this account deny what we have seen and known in the most sacred moments of our lives, and what is proved by the wide experience of holy men to be no delusion of our own, but a part of that light which lights mankind.

1 Ecclesiastical Polity, I. ii. 2. I may quote also a passage from Bossuet : 'Comme il faut s'élever au-dessus de tout ce qui semble indigne de sa grandeur, à la fois il faut s'élever au-dessus de tout ce qu'on croit le plus digne, de sorte qu'on n'ose plus, en un certain sens, ni rien dire, ni rien penser de ce premier étre, ni le nommer en soi-même, parce qu'on ne peut pas même expliquer combien il est ineffable, ni comprendre combien il est incompréhensible.' Quoted by Alfred Loisy, Autour d'un petit livre, 1903, p. 203.

« PoprzedniaDalej »