Christian doctrine a series of discourses

Front matter

igs poe ee

Princeton Cheologiral Seminary

Christian doctrine

II

The chief difficulty in answering this question arises from the fact which I have already stated—that we are so made that we come to believe that Godis. We reach the knowledge—few of us can tell how—not by deliberate search, but as the result of contact with the visible universe, with human society, with the manifestations of the power and grace of God in Christ and in the Christian redemption. The process by which we pass from a mere belief in the existence of God to a certain knowledge of it is, in the case of most men, so gradual that it does not attract their attention while it is going on; nor can they recall its history afterwards. There was a time when they only believed that God exists—now they know it: how they came to know it they cannot explain, any more than the blind man whose story is told in the Gospel of John could tell how his sight was given to him: like him they would say ‘whereas I was blind, now I See.

Nor is the process of transition from belief to knowledge the same in every case. There is a certain original relation between ourselves and God which renders a knowledge of God possible to us, just as our original relation to the universe renders a knowledge of the universe possible to us; the eternal life is ‘the light of men’—and the light ‘lighteth every man;’ but with different men the action of the light varies. I shall attempt to give an account of a few typical and representative forms of human experience by which men who once only believed that God is came to know it.

(I.) Some years ago a man, who was at that time a member of this congregation, told me the story of the beginning of his own religious life; I wish that I could tell it with the vividness and force with which he told it himself; but I cannot. He said in substance, ‘I was living in a small town in one of

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (L.) II the southern counties of England, and one Sunday afternoon I went out into the country for a stroll. It was summer, and after walking for a few miles I lay down on the side of a hill. I saw, stretching to the distant horizon, meadows and orchards and cornfields; the cloudless skies were gloriously blue, and the sun was flooding earth and heaven with splendour. The wonderful beauty filled me with excitement and delight. And then suddenly, through all that I saw, there came the very glory of God. I knew that He was there. His presence, His power and His goodness took possession of me and held me for hours.’ Had my friend known his Wordsworth well, he might have quoted, as describing his own experience, the well-known passage from the lines composed near Tintern Abbey :— ‘1 have felt

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.’

And the effect upon him of the great revelation might have been described in lines taken from the ‘Excursion :’—

‘In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,

His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power

That made him; it was blessedness and love !’

Before that great experience my friend might have said ‘I delzeve that God is ;’ afterwards he could say ‘I know that God is. God came to him in the loveliness and splendour of that summer afternoon.

It is possible that what seemed a sudden and instantaneous discovery was only the last and most striking term in a succession of experiences which had not drawn to themselves any serious attention. For weeks, for months, for years, movements of thought and life which my friend had disregarded may have been preparing him for that supreme moment. But however this may have been, the final experience was a discovery—not an inference. The discovery was valid for himself, but for himself only. If another man to whom he told it chose to say that it was an illusion, I do not know what reply he could have given, except that great numbers of men, sane men, cultivated men, men of different countries, different races, different ages, have had the same experience. But whatever the validity of his discovery might be for other men, to himself it was an absolute certainty. He was so made—and, perhaps, we ought to add— he had passed through such a history, that on that afternoon the visible world was lost in the glory of invisible and eternal power and goodness. God

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (2.) ig came to him; God found him; he knew it; he could say no more.

This experience has been the experience of multitudes of men. Within and behind all visible and transitory things they have discovered—they have felt—the power of an unseen and eternal Presence. They can give no account of how they became conscious that the august Presence was ¢here; but they knew it.

That they are unable to explain how they knew it does not invalidate the trustworthiness of the experience. There are other and more common experiences of which no explanation seems to be possible. We are so made, and the Universe is so made—and there are such relations between ourselves on the one hand, and heaven and earth on the other — that we see mountains and rivers and woods and cornfields and clouds and sky and ocean and sun and stars; we are sure that they are ¢here; how we see all these wonders we cannot tell; but we see them. And there are such relations between ourselves on the one hand, and God on the other, that in hours of vision we discover behind and within the greatness and glory of the material universe a diviner greatness and a diviner glory. How the discovery is made we cannot tell; but its reality is absolutely certain. We are in the immediate presence of the Eternal. Our faith stands ‘not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.’

(II.) A less vivid and less impassioned experience is described in a passage quoted by Cicero, from a lost treatise of Aristotle. ‘If? says Aristotle, ‘there were men who had always lived under ground in pleasant houses, filled with light, adorned with statues and paintings, and furnished with all those things which are possessed by the wealthy ; but who, though they had never found their way into the common world, had heard of the existence and authority and power of the gods; and, if after a time, the earth opened, and they were able to escape from those secret dwelling-places and ascend into the regions which we inhabit—z/enx, when, without expecting it, they saw the earth and the seas and the sky; when they discovered the vastness of the clouds and the force of the winds, gazed on the sun, his grandeur and beauty, and came to know his power which creates the day by the diffusion of his light through the whole heaven ; and when after night had darkened the earth, they saw the heavens glittering and adorned with stars, and the changing splendour of the crescent and the waning moon, the rising and the setting of all these luminaries and their fixed and eternal orbits,— when, I say, they saw all these things they would assuredly declare that there are gods and that these are the works of gods.’

To Wordsworth in hours of ‘clear vision, to my friend on that memorable summer afternoon when his religious life, if it did not absolutely begin, suddenly passed to new heights of power, the visible universe

1 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book ii. cap. 37.

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (Z.) 15 was but the transient vehicle or channel of the divine glory. Its splendours vanished and were forgotten in God. But in the experience described by Aristotle the earth and the ocean, the sky and the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, remain; their greatness and their majesty fill the mind with awe and with delight. They are not lost in God; but the power of God is revealed in them. The more wonderful they are the more wonderful is the power which they illustrate and reveal. Aristotle implies that we fail to find God in the visible universe because we are so familiar with it; and that if, when we were full-grown men, we saw the heavens and the earth for the first time, ‘we should assuredly declare that there are gods, and that these are the works of gods.’ Whether this familiarity is the real cause of the dulness of our vision it is unnecessary to inquire; but I suppose that there are large numbers of men who can recall hours in which they would say that they saw the visible universe as if they had never seen it before,— as if it had just come from the hands of God, or as if they themselves had just received some new inward sense to which all things became new. They saw the power and glory of God in the things which God has Pree elihey did not 7z7er> His existence: and ereatness from the existence and greatness of the universe ; what they came to know was not the result of a process of reasoning but of immediate perception. As Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans, since the creation of the world the unseen perfections of God

‘are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity.’ They are not reached by logical deduction: they are seen, they are perceived, by the organs of the mind; how, we cannot tell, any more than we can tell how material things are seen and perceived by the organs of sense; but to the man who has the vision and the perception, ‘the eternal power and divinity’ of God are just as real as the srowing wheat, or the granite rocks, or the stars in the belt of Orion.

(III.) There is another kind of experience by which we come to know that God is. We find an intelligible order in the universe. By this I do not mean that we can discover in the order of Nature what have been described as ‘marks of Design.’ It may, or it may not, be true that we have a right to argue that as the mechanism of a piano indicates that it had a maker who designed it as an instrument for producing sounds of different pitch and different power, so the structure of the ear indicates that it had a Maker who designed it as an organ for perceiving such sounds,— but that is a question which I am not raising. I am not speaking of ‘Design, but of an intelligible Order. And when I say that we find an intelligible order in the universe, I mean, that its various parts are so related and adjusted to each other as to constitute a system. Even the unscientific man_perceives that rain and dew and the qualities of the soil

4 Romans i. 20.

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (L.) 17

“and the heat of the sun are confederate in drawing out the life of the seed and ripening the wheat harvest. He also perceives that when he is in perfect health and vigour, heart and brain and lungs, nerves and muscles, work harmoniously together like the parts of a well-constructed machine. He perceives, too, that there are very wonderful adjustments between himself and large provinces of the material world ; he lives by the air which he breathes and by the food which is supplied by the soil, the rivers, and the sea; there are wonderful relations between the eye and the powers of light, and between the ear and the powers of sound. He may have a very limited comprehension of the structure and laws either of the world in general or of his own physical organisation ; he may be unable to give any clear account of their mutual relations ; but he sees enough to know that his own body is most curiously organised, and that in the universe there are indications of a settled order.

In this country and in our own times, the man most ignorant of natural science is aware that many of those aspects of nature which to himself are as unmeaning as a page of Chinese are clearly intelligible to large numbers of other men; that phenomena in which he can discover no order have been shown to illustrate definite laws. And, further, he has heard that men who have given their time and strength to the mastery of the history and structure of the material universe, are confident that it is

B really a universe—one immense and organised system; that every part of it is related to every other part; that nowhere is there chance or confusion; and that to an intellect with adequate powers, adequate means of observation and experiment, and adequate time, every part of it would become intelligible.

But, as I have said, there are parts of the universe in which even a man who knows nothing of physical science finds an intelligible order, just as a man who is ignorant of the science of engineering finds an intelligible order in certain parts of a steam-engine. The visitor who goes into an engine-room for the first time sees that there are ordered relations between the furnace and the boiler, between the boiler and the cylinder, between the cylinder and the piston, between some of the rods and some of the wheels; the relations of many of the parts of the complicated machine to other parts he may not be able to discover; and he may be ignorant of the precise nature of the different kinds of work which the whole machine is intended to do; but he sees enough of intelligible order in the engine to know that its order has been intelligently determined. He does not reach this conclusion by laborious reasoning; it is a direct perception.

When I read Tennyson’s Jz Memoriam, no reasoning is necessary to make me certain that there is an intellect—like my own but immensely greater— behind the noble and pathetic verses; in the verses this intellect reaches me and acts upon me; it comes into immediate contact with me; I feel and submit to its power. And so, when a man perceives intellectually the nice adjustments in a steam-engine and the ordered relations between its different parts, the intellect which determined the adjustments and relations reaches and acts upon him; comes into immediate contact with him; its action and power are known by direct perception—not by inference merely.

Nor do I by mere inference discover a Mind of transcendent greatness behind the intelligible order of nature. Through that order the Mind which determined it reaches me and acts upon me, as the mind of the poet reaches me and acts upon me through his verses, and the mind of the engineer through his machine. There are parts of the universe which— like some parts of a poem—may be wholly unintelligible to me; but through the parts which are intelligible the Mind which is behind it makes itself known to me. My knowledge is too limited to allow me to speak with any confidence of the ends which the universe, as a whole, is destined to achieve, just as when I am in an engine-room my knowledge may be too limited to allow me to speak with any confidence of all the work which the engine was built to perform; but the mind which is behind the engine reaches me, acts upon me, through those parts of it which, as I perceive, are mutually and intelligibly adjusted to each other, and the Mind which is behind the universe reaches me, acts upon me, through those parts of it where I perceive an intelligible order. ‘ This is the glory,—that in all conceived, Or felt or known, I recognise a mind

Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy,— Making all things for me and me for Him.’!

It is contended that the theory of Evolution has, finally and for ever, broken down the whole argument for the existence of God derived from evidences of what has been called Design in the visible creation ; that we ought not to say that birds have wings in order that they may fly, but that they fly because they have wings ; that we ought not to say that the human eye was designed by the wisdom and power of God in order that man might be able to see, but that he sees because, as the result of long ages of development and the survival of the fittest, he is so fortunate as to have eyes.2, For my immediate purpose, as I have already said, it is quite unnecessary to discuss what measure of truth there is in this contention—whether it is effective against the substance of the argument from Design, or only against the form in which that argument has been commonly stated. I have said nothing about Design: but I have said that in the intelligible order of the universe the Intelligence which is behind the universe reaches us just as in the intelligible language of a poem the intelligence that is behind the poem reaches us, and

THE EXISTENCE OF. GOD (ZL) 21 just as in the intelligible adjustments of parts of a steam-engine the intelligence that is behind the steam-engine reaches us.

It is to no purpose to say that the curious and wonderful organisation of all living things can be shown to have come from processes of development extending over countless milleniums—processes which have been always going on according to fixed laws and have never been interrupted by the interference of the Mind of the Creator ; it may be so; but it still remains true that where I find intelligible order I am in immediate contact with the action of the Intelligence which ordered it. I am so made that when there is intelligible order I perceive the Intelligence which ordered it.

If it could be shown to me that a printed book containing an elaborate account of the anatomy of the human body was the result of the action of forces working through countless millenniums under fixed and unvarying laws, I should still be certain that the book which was intelligible to my mind had its origin in a mind which, in some respects at least, was like my own; and I should find in the forces which formed the book, with its several chapters, that, taken together, covered the whole subject of which it treated—with its regular sentences, each one with a clear and intelligible sense—and with its illustrative diagrams—I say that I should find in the forces which formed the book—through whatever immense cycles they had been acting, and however rigid the laws which determined their action— I should find in those forces the action of a Mind— with powers similar to my own, though infinitely greater. And if in a book which gives an intelligible account of the curious and wonderful structure of the human body I find the signs of the action of Intelligence, I also find the signs of the action of Intelligence in that curious and wonderful structure itself.

There are other and, to myself, more impressive forms of experience by which a traditional belief in God’s existence passes into immediate knowledge of Him; but the illustration of these must be reserved for another sermon.

The main point on which I have insisted this morning is that God’s existence is made certain to us—not by reasoning—but by experience. God is perceived and known by the organs of the mind just as the material world is perceived and known by the organs of sense.

The World, Self, God—these are the ultimate realities; each must be known by experience if known at all. If it is declared—as it has been declared—that we have no immediate knowledge of Self, but only of the innumerable thoughts, emotions, desires, volitions of which we are successively conscious, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of Self If, again, the existence of Self is declared to be the only object of immediate knowledge, the intellect can construct no bridge by which we can pass to the

(HEV XISILENCE: OF GOD (7.) 23 existence of the World, and, as many of you know, we shall be compelled to accept a theory of pure idealism. If Self and the World are declared to be the only objects of immediate knowledge, the intellect can construct no bridge by which we can pass to the existence of God. If, finally, Self and God are declared to be the only objects of immediate knowledge we shall be separated by impassable gulfs from the World ; it will be a dream, without substance and reality.

But we are so made, and are placed under such conditions, that these great realities—the World, Self, and God—enter into our experience, are known, not by inference, but by immediate knowledge.

Il THE EXISTENCE OF GOD—II.

‘That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.’—1 Cor. ii. 5.

THE forms of experience of which I gave some account in the discourse which I have already delivered on this text, have great and enduring value. But there are, I believe, some Christian people—excellent Christian people—to whom God has never been revealed in the immensity and glory of the visible universe, in its unchanging order, in its splendour and beauty, or in its sternness, its terror, and its majesty. They Jdeleve that God created it, for they have inherited the tradition that He is the Creator of all things; but they do not Lxow—by any immediate knowledge—that He created it. If, when they are present at public worship, a hymn is sung or a psalm chanted celebrating the greatness of God as manifested in sun and moon and stars of light, in fire and hail, snow and vapour, and stormy winds fulfilling His word, in orchards and cornfields and the cattle on a thousand hills, they sing it coldly, with no delight, and no passion; to them the hymn, the chant, is not 24 p TAL EXISTENCE OF GOD UZ.) 25 really an act of worship; for they have never seen for themselves the glory of God either in the heavens above or the earth beneath.

But where the manifestations of God’s ‘everlasting power and divinity’ in ‘the things which are made’ are not discovered, or are regarded with indifference, there is always loss and peril to the spiritual life. For in the revelation of God which comes to us through the immensity of the universe, through its vast duration, and through the steadfastness of its laws, there is something to subdue presumption, to remind us of the limitations of our powers, to impress us with the contrast between God’s infinite and eternal greatness and our own frailty. It rebukes and represses an irreverent familiarity with the Eternal; it adds to the steadiness and sobriety of the religious life; and deepens its awe and its fear. And further, those who fail to find God in the material creation, and who think of Him as active only in the spiritual world, will not be likely to find Him in their common life, in which they are constantly dealing with material things. They will cultivate an artificial and pernicious form of spirituality. They will think of religion as consisting exclusively in prayer and worship and meditation on things unseen. Commerce and the pursuits of industry will be withdrawn from God’s control. Their morals will not be Christian morals. Ifthe farmer is to make his ploughing and sowing and reaping part of the service which he renders to God, he must find God in the material world; he cannot work with God in his farming, unless he sees that God is working with him in the life of the seed, and in the gracious powers of the soil, of the sun’s heat, and of the rain.

I do not, therefore, depreciate the worth of that knowledge of God which is given to us through the visible creation. But this morning I shall endeavour to show how we may come to know Him in other and higher forms of His activity.

I.

(I.) There is a great contrast between moral and physical laws. In the visible creation we find an order which is fixed and invariable. This is the assumption of all the natural sciences, and this alone renders them possible. For example, Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundations of modern physical astronomy by the discovery of the law that ‘every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force directly proportioned to the mass of the attracting particles and inversely to the square of the distance between them. He did not say that every particle of matter ought to exert this force of attraction on every other particle, but that it actually exerts this force ; if, in any case—even a single case —it were demonstrated that the force was not exerted, the law would cease to be a law. Or, to take another and more homely illustration, water boils at a temperature of 212° when the barometer stands at 30° or

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (IZ) 27 just under, showing an atmospheric pressure of 15 lbs. on the square inch. Ascend a mountain, and, if the atmospheric conditions remain the same, the pressure will diminish as you ascend; and as the pressure of the atmosphere is diminished less heat will be required to bring water to the boiling point. If at the foot of the mountain the barometer stands at 30°, it will have sunk below 29° when you have ascended rather more than a thousand feet, and then water will boil at a temperature of 210° instead of 212°. When we say that this is a law, we do not mean that water ought to boil at a lower temperature high up a mountain than in the valley beneath, but that it actually boils at a lower temperature the higher you ascend; if in any case it did not—and there were no accidental conditions to account for the irregularity—the law would be a law no longer.

When we pass into human life we come into the presence of laws of quite another kind—so different, indeed, that confusion arises from calling them by Miemsame flame. ‘Let me attempt) to explain the difference between them.

That within certain limits we are morally free— free to yield or to refuse to yield to the interior impulses or the external inducements to follow particular lines of conduct, is a fact to which the consciousness of the race bears definite witness. Of this we are certain, if we are certain of nothing else. We do not merely believe it—we know it. If an old friend has suffered great misfortunes, and we are rich enough to give him effective assistance, we are free to determine whether we will keep our money or whether we will relieve our friend. If we have the opportunity of inflicting serious injury on a man who has wronged us, we are free to determine whether we will avenge the wrong or refuse to avenge it.

But while we are thus vividly conscious of our freedom, we are also vividly conscious that there are laws which claim to determine how the freedom should be exercised. They exert no compulsion; | but they speak with authority. They cannot compel obedience, for the obedience they demand is a moral obedience, and if the obedience were compelled, it would cease to be moral. They may therefore be disobeyed. But no amount of disobedience can make them cease to be laws. In this they stand in the most striking contrast with mere physical laws. If— to use one of the illustrations which I used just now -——if it could be proved that with the barometer at 30°, and no disturbing causes, distilled water had refused to boil when raised to a temperature of 212° —if it had refused in a single case—the physical law which determines the boiling-point of water would cease to bea law. But the moral law which asserts the obligation of truthfulness would be a law still, even if it could be proved that half the population of England were liars. A physical law declares what actually zs—what actually happens ; a moral law declares what ought to be—what ought to happen.

This mysterious authority is always present with us and present with us everywhere, at home and in foreign lands, in solitude, when we are with friends, and when we are among strangers, in our business and in our pleasures, in our private and in our public life. I do not mean that we are born with a set of laws impressed upon our minds for the government of conduct,—laws which we can express in definite words and embody in a complete code covering all the details of human duty; nor do I mean that we can ever, as the result of experience, construct such a code even for ourselves, much less for other men. But as we can distinguish by a natural faculty between Light and Darkness and between different degrees of Light and Darkness, so we can distinguish by a natural faculty between Right and Wrong and between different degrees of moral worth and moral baseness. We are so made, and the original powers of our nature are, by the constitution of society and of the order of the universe, so developed, that, as occasions arise, we see for ourselves that of two alternative courses one is morally better than the other, and ought to be followed,—or, to use more common language, that one is right and the other wrong ; and then we feel the pressure of the invisible and supreme authority, requiring us at all costs to choose the right and to refuse the wrong.