THIS is a healthy, a practical, a working faith. A First, that a man's business is to do the will of God. Second, that God takes upon Himself the care of that man. Third, and therefore, that a man ought never to be afraid of anything."

George MacDonald in Robert Falconer.

"There has never been a day when so many men were seeking for firm convictions of their own. For a conviction that is really conviction, for a faith that can really be believed, our age is still ready to hazard life itself. Human nature is not so low that it can rest in pleasure and the service of self. Men are seeking some conviction as to the meaning of life. Only, it must be a real faith. And here lies the task of the Church, its old task and its new, to bring to the men of to-day a living God and eternal life."

Adolf Haenack, Reden und Aufsätze, II, 65.

Chapter I

GOD IN HIS WORLD

A Working Faith

WE are to consider in these pages "A Working Faith." A faith does not mean a system of doctrine or a philosophy. It is something vital and practical. We may define it as a conviction concerning a higher Power who can give meaning to our life, to whom we look for help and whom we obey. The faith which we shall consider here is a Christian faith, because its inspiration, its ideal, and its certainty come through Jesus Christ. We shall not go back, however, to ask what all the doctrines are that have been held by the Church or that are contained in the Bible. Our aim is rather personal and practical. We are looking for something upon which to build our life. We call it a working faith for this reason: it must meet the needs of our life and stand the test of living itself. And it must meet a second test, not only that of the world of action, but of the world of truth. We want no faith that must be walled off from the rest of our thinking. We believe with Emerson: "The Religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empire, but is not the immutable, universal law."¹

Such a faith is not a task, but a gift. It is not a burden that weighs men down, but joy and peace and strength that girds for the task. It does not come to men and say, This is the minimum that you must believe; rather it says, This is a life that you may have. Jesus did not go about talking of the "essentials," the doctrines which a man must hold to be a Christian; He proclaimed the good news, the God in whom men might trust and from whom they might have life.

It is no wonder, then, that men are turning again to faith. Such a revival is with us now. It is true that men are not simply going back to the traditions of their fathers. That would bode ill for religion, for that which lives never simply moves backward. But the temper of men has changed. Henry Van Dyke wrote fifteen years ago his "Gospel for an Age of Doubt." To-day we need "The Gospel for an Age of Desire." The spirit of desire is present where once there was at least a touch of self-sufficiency and scorn. Science is more modest to-day. She knows her limits, alike of knowledge and of power, better than two generations ago. What our present condition is will become more clear if we turn for awhile to the age from which we are emerging.

The Passing Age

The past age has been one of science. Never have the boundaries of knowledge been so rapidly extended. Molecule and atom and electron, we have probed for the last element of matter. We have searched the heavens and found infinite worlds beyond the worlds that we have seen, and we have weighed them in our balances and determined their composition. We have searched the past and compelled it to give up its secrets. No problem has been considered insoluble. Men stopped before the last and hardest, and simply said. To-morrow. That overconfidence is gone. We know to-day that the tools of science have brought us no nearer the answer to the final questions of life than we stood a hundred years ago. All our wide knowledge can give no answer to Job's ancient cry, "Oh that I knew where I might find Him!"²

It has been an age of criticism. Men were in earnest. They wanted what was real. No tradition was so hoary, no dogma so long established, as to escape the test. Men wanted all the facts, and they wanted nothing else. But the age which insisted upon the real left the most real to one side. They would deal only with what they could measure and weigh. They knew the dust on their balances, but they knew not what was in man. They asked for facts, and then shut their eyes to the great facts which make for all men, even scientists, the meaning and power of life. Love and truth, right and wrong, man and God, these were outside their ken. It was science grown unscientific. To-day we are making room for the great facts of our moral and religious nature, for the whole realm of the ideal.

It has been an age of power, of material expansion and conquests. The day of iron and steam has made a new industrial world. We have enslaved the forces of earth and sea and sky, and harnessed them to our machines. The single man at the machine can do the work of a hundred men of three generations since. And so there has been a material development for which there is no parallel in history. The world's wealth to-day is incomparably greater than in any previous age. A generation ago nations gloried in that power and boasted of their advance. We are far from confident to-day. The material development has multiplied problems for us instead of solving them. Our increased material power seems only to have made our moral weakness the more plain. With all our wealth, there was never more bitter or widespread social discontent. We have wealth that is selfish and insolent, and poverty that is the more bitter because it is needless. And disease and vice and political corruption are still with us. The age of boastful power has not had power enough to solve these questions. Nor has it served our need to add science to our wealth. Only moral and religious forces may meet these needs, and only a new age of faith can supply these forces.

The experience of the past age has not been without its fruitage, even for faith. We shall not go back to the beliefs of an earlier age. We must move on to something higher and richer, and the age of science and criticism and material development will help us. The science and criticism, as we shall see, have helped to purge out old errors and narrow views. They have driven us to a larger conception of religion. And even our material progress and social problems have helped to force religion down from the clouds of theory and sentiment and back from the dreams of another world, to face her real task of establishing a kingdom of righteousness upon earth.

Can I Believe in God

The first article of any faith is God. Because ours is a working faith, we shall not talk of the being of God in itself, but shall ask rather whether we can believe in such a God, and what He means for our life and for this world. But some one may interpose right here: "What we want is something practical, and you are falling back already into dogma. It is not a theory that this world needs, but a life."

Do we need a God for our working faith? Is it not enough to say, I believe in the good will and the kind heart? A little girl was wont to play church, and the play went something like this: "Peoples, stand up. Peoples, sing. Peoples, sit down." And the sermon that followed was always the same, "Peoples, be good." There are many sermons that are summed up in that word, but this life of ours needs far more than that. It is not enough to say, "Peoples, be good." It is not enough that we shall try to be good ourselves. Is there no power to give us victory in our own lives.'* And what of the world fight against the forces of evil, does the issue hang upon your little effort and mine.'* What is on the throne of this universe.'* Are the stars fighting in their courses against Sisera? Is our little kindness just a helpless eddy in a great world current that, cruel and resistless, sweeps us all on at last to the same oblivion.? Or is our kindness begotten of some great heart of kindness that rules this world.'*

But here is another objection that is raised. Though the self-confident unbelief of an earlier day is largely gone, the voice of doubt is not yet stilled, and it tells us that we can not believe in a God in this world. In a popular way these objections may be put in fourfold form: (1) There is no need of God for this world. The world is simply a gradual evolution to be explained by the forces that are resident in it. (2) There is no room for God in the world. The world is simply a great mechanical order, where everything happens according to law. (3) We can not know God if there be one. (4) The world is full of evil; we can not believe that a good God rules it.

There are two reasons why we may well take up these questions with care. We have already agreed that our working faith is not to be shut up in a separate compartment and kept from all disturbing facts. It must live in the whole world of our thought, and it must be strong enough to bear the burden of life's chief interest which we are placing upon it. Further, we shall find that these great questions, and the theories of science which lie back of some of them, so far from shutting us off from faith, may help to free us from casual error and drive us to deeper and larger truth. It need not be added that these great questions can not be taken up in detail. We want to face the issue fairly, but consider it only so far as it bears upon our question. The last of the problems will be considered in the next chapter. The first three, which we may call the objections of evolutionism, naturalism, and agnosticism, we will consider now.

The Objection prom Evolution

We turn, then, to the objection made in the name of evolution. The position taken is somewhat like this: "The old explanation of the world was that of creation. Now, however, we know that the world came to be gradually, by the forces of nature herself working from within, and not by a creative power from without. These inner forces and these laws explain all things. There is no need whatever to go outside and suppose a creating God."

The one point that must be made absolutely clear here is the distinction between evolution as a working theory of science and evolution as a philosophy. The task of science is simply to explain the order and nature of happenings in the world. It tells how things behave. It is not the task of science to tell what is the ultimate nature of things or their final meaning. That belongs to philosophy. Scientific evolution is the attempt to explain how the world of nature as we know it came to be. It lays down two main principles: first, the world of to-day came to be gradually instead of by great leaps or at some single moment; second, it came in some way by forces working within, not imposed from without.

In this broad sense we are all evolutionists to-day. We are all trying to understand things as they are by studying the history of how they became. We apply this to society and religion just as we do to geology and biology. Of course, even in science evolution is not a solution, but a working tool. Darwin's case affords a good illustration of the distinction. He showed men that evolution was the principle to be used for studying the development of organic forms. Scientists all use this tool which he put into their hands. But his solution of the problem, his particular theory of evolution, is still subject for difference of opinion.

It was not unnatural that men felt at first that the idea of evolution was an answer to all questions of life. Its good standing in science was used as a cloak to cover all sorts of philosophical shabbiness and emptiness. Two simple questions will show the failure of evolutionism as a philosophy. First, what is the ultimate origin of this world of life that we see? Second, what is its meaning and goal? Science does not need to answer these questions, philosophy must.

Take the question of origin. Darwin closes his "Origin of Species" with these words: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved." Tyndall declares that he must "cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in matter . . . the promise and potency of all terrestrial life."³ But these first forms of life of Darwin, or this primitive fire mist of Tyndall which has the "promise and potency" of all life, are not all that is necessary for the evolutionist. You can not have evolution without variation. Where does it come from? To call it fortuitous is to beg the question. That would be a denial of the reign of law at the beginning by those who insist upon it so strenuously later on. Here is the fact of heredity that is just as necessary to start up evolutionary housekeeping. And with these granted we might as well concede the rest. That is nothing less than this marvelous world-all itself, not as an inert and undifferentiated mass, but charged with power and informed by a marvelous complex of law and order. All this we grant freely to scientists like Darwin and Tyndall, but not to the philosopher who calls himself evolutionist. The philosopher must explain. Where does he get fire mist and forces and laws, heredity and variation and all the rest.'* Until then we can not agree that he has a sufficient explanation of the world. Until that time we will simply say that modern science with its evolution has not ruled out God, but has given us a more wonderful conception of His working.

In the same way we must say that we can not accept evolutionism as a theory of the world until it can also explain the meaning and the goal of the world. Here are questions that men asked when the world was young. They will ponder them when Laplace and Darwin shall lie as far back for human thought as Saracen science or Babylonian astronomy to-day. For the end of things claims not only our deepest interest as men, but alone reveals the true nature of being. It is not enough to study the history of the man. It is not enough to discourse about phylogenetic and ontogenetic series. We must study the man, the man at his highest, the end of the series. The real explanation of things lies at the end, not at the beginning. The key to the meaning of the world is not in nature, but in the Kingdom of God; not in fire-mist and cell, but in that

                    "far-off, divine event.

Toward which the whole creation moves."⁴

It is this last step that gives us the key by which we unlock the meaning of the first cause.

The Objection from Naturalism

The second objection is that of naturalism, of which, indeed, evolutionism is but a phase. The modern idea of nature is that of a constant development through inherent forces according to natural laws. What we have is just a great machine moving according to inexorable law. The form is ever changing, but every change is absolutely explained by what has gone before. The wheels move round. We have motion and change of position; that is all. Nothing old is lost, nothing new comes in.

Before we question this new naturalism we must understand the old supernaturalism which was the popular orthodox theory of yesterday. The old theory was dualistic. It drew a line through the world. On the one side was the natural, on the other the supernatural; on the one the sacred, on the other the profane. The supernatural was the direct action of God. The natural was the ordinary course of the world. In the beginning God made the world; that was supernatural. Then He left it to go on its regular course; that was natural. Now and then, at special times and for special purposes. He reached down into the course of events to work a miracle, to inspire a prophecy, to dictate a sacred writing, to shape the history of Israel or the founding of Christianity. Other events were natural, other history was profane. The supernatural was used where the natural explanation gave out. It was this supernatural that was used to show the being of God. The supernatural became, in a sense, the unnatural, and God was shut up to one part of His world.

We can see what happened. The growth of science extended the "natural" explanation, and every such extension seemed to cut away just so much more of the foundation of faith. Astronomy showed a universe in the making—under natural law. The new geology showed us an earth that had come to be in similar manner. Darwin was only the last in this series. The forms of organic life were the last stronghold of the old static view. Were not the various species fixed and immutable.^ To cross them meant sterility. They could not have come out of anything else. They must, therefore, have been due to an original act of creation. When Darwin and organic evolution came, and showed how these, too, were under the reign of law and had been brought forth by gradual evolution, it seemed as though God had been driven out from His last place in nature.

But one step remained: the theory of the conservation of energy and correlation of forces. Upon this theory men built up at last an absolute "naturalism," a real mechanical world-view. Nothing new can come into the world. What we see is simply forces changing their form. Life itself adds nothing, but simply takes and gives back again. The world is a big machine. It is a closed circuit; there i& no room for God in it, and no chance for God to break in. There is nothing but matter and motion, or matter and force.

Now, the first error in all this is one of which both theologian and scientist were guilty. The former found God and the "supernatural" only wHere the "natural" failed. His world was a dualism with two kinds of explanation: nature and God, natural and supernatural. He must fight for some place where nature could not explain, something that would prove God. The business of the scientist was to find the "natural" explanation, and his goal was a monism with nothing but nature and law. The fault of both was in the idea that God was absent where natural law was present. Both failed to see that orderly succession was God's way of working in His world, just as the progressive development was God's way of creation.

How theology has profited by this schooling of science we shall see later. Now we must look at the other side. Again, it is not the scientist, but the philosopher, that we are criticising. I might better say the dogmatist. The dogmatist is the man who is so in love with his theory that he shuts his eyes to the facts. Sometimes he is in the theological camp, but not always. It is dogmatism that we have here, not science, and the real scientific spirit must correct it. For the spirit of modem science is the desire to see things as they are, and to see all things.

The trouble with naturalism is that it is unscientific; it leaves out of account the most Teal and fundamental fact of life. That is the fact of personality. Our conception of reality to-day is dynamic. Matter itself we conceive in terms of action, of force. It is not some dead, inert thing that is real only because you can not destroy it. Nothing is real except as it works, as it has power, life. But the most potent of all reality is the personal. What difference does it make that you can not weigh it or measure it.^ We see what it works. Look at human history. Just as soon as the personal appears, we have new forces, new laws. The physical is the setting for these forces, conditioning them, used by them. But the heart of history is the personal, and there lies its motive power. One name is enough to prove it. Jesus means more than a new dream in the hearts of men. Nineteen centuries are the continuous register of His supremacy over material forces as well as over the hearts of men. The changed boundaries of empire, the migrations of peoples, great voyages of discovery, new industries and new institutions all bear witness that this Person is the greatest fact and the greatest power in the world.

The same is true in the common life of to-day. The crises in our life bring it out, whether for man or nation. Then we see that it is the personal and ideal that rule, not the physical and natural. The highest power with the men of the Titanic was not physical. It was our fine personal ideals of loyalty, courage, duty, self-sacrifice. These words do not stand for anything that you can weigh or measure. You can not set them forth in natural law. If they are real, the scheme of naturalism breaks down. If naturalism be right, then such words are the breath of fools. If the only power be physical, if the only standard be the measure of force, what folly to save weak women and children, and let the strength and skill of manhood go down! But the world saw in the deeds of that hour not the delusion of a moment, but the finest fruitage of the spirit of our race. The power that could move men to such deeds, and then bow a whole world in homage before them, is the highest power that the world knows.

Our social life to-day is showing this same power of the personal and ideal. It is easy enough to discern the material forces that are at work in our modern political and industrial life. Too often our institutions have been merely the organs of selfishness and brute force. To-day they are undergoing a change. It is the human, the personal, the ideal that is coming to the fore. And these impalpable forces, breathing a love for man and a passion for righteousness, are overturning ancient institutions founded on force and greed, and shaping the order of a new age. Love, truth, right, home, country, God—^these ideals are the final interests of our human life, and by these men live and die to-day. It is a petty and purblind scheme of things that can not find room for them.

But that is not all. The personal demands not only room, but the first place. If it be real, it must be the highest and the key to all the rest. You must rule it out altogether, or you must put it first. It is supreme or it is nothing. The naturalistic thinker rarely has the courage to accept the logic of his position. He holds to his mechanical scheme, but wants to smuggle in the ideal by some back door. He holds to a mechanical, naturalistic theory of evolution, but is always borrowing for it some garb of Christian thought to make it seem a hopeful and benevolent progress. He tries to rear a structure of justice and mutual regard on the sands of his brute struggle for existence. We can not allow that in logic, we dare not build upon that for life. If the ideal is real at all, then it is the key to all the rest. And we hold with Professor James that it is the fruit and not the root that decides. Naturalism breaks down as a theory of life. The personal is real and is first. Not only is there room for God, but the deepest reality that we know points inevitably to Him.

The Objection from Agnosticism

There remains the objection of agnosticism: We can not know God, even if there be one.

Now, there is a wholesome agnosticism which has a place in our faith. Faith does not mean omniscience. Theology has known too much in the past. We have speculated and dogmatized about first things and last things and the inner depths of the being of God, and we have been too much wont to identify faith with our declarations about these things. Faith is a personal trust. But it still remains that we must know God in order to trust Him. We do not ask to know the mysteries of His nature, but can we know Him as such a righteous and loving Being that we may commit our life to Him.''

Well, what do you mean by knowing.? The people who make this objection usually mean one of two things. It is either knowledge through senses: what I can see and touch; more exactly, what I can measure and weigh and count. Or else it is logical knowledge: I know what I can demonstrate. I can prove to you, for example, that the sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square on the hypotenuse.

I am quite ready to admit that by neither of these ways may we know God. We can not see Him, we can not demonstrate Him. But that is not the only way of knowing. Such a scheme again leaves out of account the deepest realities of life, life itself to begin with, and love and truth and right and trust and men and God. These, as we have seen, are the actual forces in our life; they are the realities by which and for which men really live. This is the world of the personal. Our ambitions and hopes and joys and fears, all that gives purpose and power to our life centers here. That is as true of the philosopher and scientist as man, as it is of the rest of us.

But we must go further. How are these men so sure that they can know "things" at all? I do not begin with any world of things. There is no way by which things can walk into me so that I can get hold of them immediately. All that I have is certain feelings and ideas, something that is going on in me. I begin with this personal world in me, not with any world of things. My first step as scientist or philosopher is an act of faith. I will trust these feelings as giving me some kind of reliable report of the world without. I will trust these processes of thought. And I venture to believe that there are other beings who feel and think as I do. I believe this, though I can not see their thoughts or weigh their feelings or demonstrate that there is in them such a world as I know myself to be. Here, to begin with, we have self and truth and trust and other selves. We have not seen them or demonstrated them. We have accepted them in order to live, and there is nothing more sure for us than these. Once started, we find that this faith works. But without such a working faith we can not move a step toward the knowledge of the world of things.

This third way of knowing, then, is the most important. You may speak of intuition or what you will. It is not simply a theory of knowing, but a theory of what is real. The real things in life are the vital and personal, and we know these not by mere feeling or by mere intellect. We know them by daring and living. We must look at this further as it applies purely to the human before we ask the final question. Can we know the personal God? How do I come to know any of the moral and spiritual elements of life, right and justice and love and good-will? First comes a conviction, an intuition, some sense that these are and are real. Then comes a venture, a surrender to these as that which is worth while. Then comes the knowledge that is given in the actual commerce of life, something far broader and richer than our first vision, at its best something big enough to satisfy our life and strong enough to hold it.

Here is friendship, love. I can not know the soul of another; there is no logic to prove affection. There is a conviction, a venture, an experience. We know only as we dare. All marriage is a noble adventure where it is not an ignoble bargain. The great treasures of life, truth and loyalty and love and the rest, are never known from the outside. They can never be demonstrated to sight or reason. They belong to those who live. They are known only from within.

But some one will say. Have I any right to venture like this upon the unseen and the undemonstrated? Back of that question is a worship of the merely logical, from which we are fortunately escaping. A man's first obligation is not a perfect logic, it is life. "Speculation is a luxury," as Bergson puts it, "while action is a necessity."⁵ Otherwise our ideal would be the centipede, who never moved because he had no sufficient reason for stirring any one of his hundred legs before the rest. The urgency of common life has kept us from such folly. We have acted without waiting for logic, and better knowledge has come with the acting. What is true there is true in the higher realm. The treasures of life have come to those who dared.

"Are there not, Festus, . . .

Two points in the adventure of the diver:

One—when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge;

One—when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?"⁶

All this, with equal right, we apply to our knowledge of God. He is the final justice and truth and right and love. He is the Person that is back of all personal. Why can He not speak to me as truly as my friend.^ You can not picture how.? No more can you with your friend. Waves of sound that smite the ear, waves of light that beat upon the eye, these and the touch of a hand are all that come to you, and all this is physical. How the soul of your friend comes into your soul, that is another thing. You can make no picture of that, but you are sure it is real. Has the Infinite Person less chance to speak to us than the finite friend? What happens between us and God is just what takes place when we know the ideal and personal in human relations. Somehow in the heart of man there has been wrought the conviction of God. To that conviction men have given themselves in lives of trust and obedience. It has upheld them in sorrow. It has given peace and joy, It has transformed the spirit of their life. And through the life the knowledge of God has grown, the God of righteous demand, the God of gracious help, the God of merciful pardon.

The sin of our lives is not too great trust, but too little. The right to believe is not the right to be credulous. It is not the surrender of our right to think. It does not mean that we shall take unthinking all that comes from past tradition or present authority. It is just the right to trust the highest that comes to us, to believe that truth and right and love are real, and that their name is God. There is a third great mainspring of life besides hunger and love, and that is faith. There is a third need besides food and a friend, and that is the Supreme Friend, God. The old theories as to the origin of religion are passing away. It did not begin as an institution devised by priests, nor as a theory to explain the world. Religion sprang out of the needs of man, and it lives because it meets those needs. The right of faith is the right to live^ to live our life at its highest and fullest. It is not only right, but duty. The highest that comes thus to us and works conviction ceases to be a mere appeal and becomes a challenge. What shall we do with it? Life is imperious. Whether it be the problem of hunger or of truth or of God, its first demand is not logic, but action.

And what lies beyond the venture and the deed? The fine word of John's Gospel gives answer: "He that willeth to do His will shall know."⁷ We may not begin with the "I know," but out of the years in which we trust and obey and walk humbly with God there comes forth ever clearer and richer and stronger the knowledge of God. In that certainty men have gladly yielded life itself. And the language of such experience has always been, not I think, but, in Paul's word, "I know whom I have believed."⁸

What we have been considering so far has been not simply so many objections to be answered. We have been getting material for the question to which we now turn: What is this God whom we need for our working faith, and what is His relation to the world.? It is a threefold that we need: (1) We need a God who is in His world. (2) We need a God who is more than this world, who is working out His purpose in it. (3) We need a God with whom we can have fellowship. These three we need: the presence, the purpose, the person.

God as Presence

We need God as a Presence. Science has given us a new world. We look at the sky at night. Beyond us stretch the infinite spaces peopled by flaming worlds beside which our earth is but a grain of sand. We look back in time. It is no longer the story of the few thousand years that began with Eden and man. To what primeval mist must we go back in thought! What a tale of being moving through endless cycles, before our world even comes into sight! Just as wonderful is the story of the world of the infinitely small, as we follow molecule and atom, ion and electron to the end of our knowledge.

All this is giving us not a lesser place for God, but a larger vision of His being. There is no world apart from God. There is no life that is not in Him. The old idea is gone of a finished and inert world which has some kind of being outside of the God who made it. The atom, which once marked for science the last indivisible element, is now found to be only a world beyond the world that we knew before, with whirling electrons moving in their orbits. And who knows what we shall find the electron to be? Our new idea of the world is dynamic. And all that vibrant power is one, and that oneness is in God. In the same way the thought of development has given us a truer and more intimate idea of God in His world. The idea of creation is not lost. As we have already seen, evolution is the name for a method, and not the answer to our question as to cause or meaning. We still say, "In the beginning God;" and we declare over against the world as the only answer to its riddle, "God created the heavens and the earth."⁹ But how different our picture is! The world is in the making. Not six days, but endless ages give the story of its creation. And God does not stand outside the world as its carpenter, but moves in it as its shaping and informing life. "Of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things."¹⁰ The whirling electron infinitely small moves in Him. The circling worlds are His deed. The prayer that rises in us is the gift of His life. This is the new world that we can only understand by the doctrine of His presence.

"Earth's crammed with heaven.

And every common bush aflame with God." ¹¹

Day by day His presence creates this world anew. Day by day His shaping power leads it on toward its goal.

The truth of this Presence helps us understand the meaning of natural law. Natural law is not a separate being or power that is above things and rules them. To speak of law in this way is neither science nor philosophy; it is only mythology, even though we dress it in modem terms. Laws are the observed ways in which things behave. So science must say, and it can say no more. For us, however, laws are simply the thoughts of God expressed in His world. We hear a great deal about the reign of law and the uniformity of nature. And men have thought of this great truth as a sort of cast-iron mold which shuts in things and men and God. What it really means is that God is trustworthy. The heart of the world is order, and not chance. God will not do one thing to-day and another to-morrow. He will be true to Himself. Men may build their knowledge and their lives upon that. "Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."¹² But to use such a thought against God's free action in His world, against God's guidance of nations or answer to man's prayer, against providence or even miracle, that is unwarranted. The order of nature is God's self-consistent way of action which reveals His trustworthiness. Back of that order and that way is His great purpose for men. It is ours with open mind and waiting heart to look for what God will do, not to determine what God will not or can not do. That is neither the spirit of faith nor the province of science.

The supreme presence of God is in the life of men. What that means we shall see more fully later. Here it is simply necessary to protest against that old dualism which set the human over against the divine as something foreign to it, which divided the sacred from the profane, and set off for God only one little part of His world as holy. To-day we see His presence in all the life of men and in all history. Not all lives, it is true, have opened to His Spirit, not all nations have yielded themselves to His guidance. But if Jesus could say that not one sparrow fell without His Father, how much more is that true of men and nations? Even the Old Testament had caught that vision. "Thus saith Jehovah to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before Him."¹³ "Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance." "Have I not brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"¹⁴ So Amos speaks, and Isaiah, and the great unknown prophet. So we speak to-day: There is no life apart from God, no star whose orbit is beyond His ken, no nation that is without His presence.

What a new vision of God and the world this gives us! Evolution is no blind struggle, but the patience of God working through the ages and slowly filling the world with His larger life as He leads it up in its course. Nature has a deeper beauty because of the glory of the great Spirit who is behind it. History is not a tangle, but a great march. We catch the inner meaning of it all and say:

"Here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can."¹⁵ For every man there are these two ways of looking at life, that of science and that of faith. The one looks at the outward form of life, the other seeks for its inner meaning. The one seeks to describe its order, the other its goal. The one seeks to link all happenings in cause and effect, the other to find the life that flows through it all. And it is the same world, without self-contradiction, that shows these two sides. He alone is wrong who says there is but one side. He is rich who finds this inner presence when other men can only say nature, man, evolution, law.

"A fire mist and a planet,

     A crystal and a cell;

A jellyfish and a saurian,

     And caves where the cavemen dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty.

     And a face turned from the clod—

Some call it Evolution,

     And others call it God.

 

"A haze on the far horizon.

     The infinite, tender sky.

The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields.

     And the wild geese sailing high—

And all over upland and lowland

     The charm of the goldenrod—

Some of us call it Autumn,

     And others call it God.

 

"Like the tides on a crescent sea beach.

     When the moon is new and thin,

Into our hearts high yearnings

     Come welling and surging in—

Come from the mystic ocean.

     Whose rim no foot has trod—

Some of us call it Longing,

     And others call it God.

 

"A picket frozen on duty—

     A mother starved for her brood—

Socrates drinking the hemlock.

     And Jesus on the rood;

And millions who, humble and nameless,

     The straight, hard pathway trod—

Some call it Consecration,

     And others call it God."¹⁶

God as Purpose

In the second place, we need God in His world as a Purpose, as a power greater than the world that is here working out His ends. The thought of God's presence we call immanence, the thought that God is greater than the world we call His transcendence. Both of these we must have for our Working faith. It is not enough to have the Presence in all things. What does that Presence mean? Has it a purpose for us.? Is there power that will carry out that purpose? There is a lot of shallow optimism in our thinking to-day. Some of it is connected with the word evolution. It is so easy to assume that evolution means progress, that there is a sort of natural drift to the higher and better. What the natural drift is we may know pretty well by studying ourselves. The higher with us comes only with clear purpose and resolute will. The natural drift is in the line of selfishness and laziness and too often evil passion. And as to nature, the men of science know better than that. They know that nature simply means the long struggle of the ages in which the weaker has gone down. True there is order in nature. So is there in the prize-ring. But the order of the prize-ring is simply meant to give the chance to the larger measure of cunning and brute strength. It is so in nature. Of love and mercy, of righteousness and goodness it says nothing and knows nothing. Nor is there much more than this when we come to history and look at the dreary succession of rise and fall, and try to find some thread of order in the awful tangle.

Our working faith declares that the Presence in this world means a purpose, and that back of that purpose is a power that is in the world, but greater than the world. If this world has any meaning at all, it is because we can so believe. With that confidence we can look squarely at the story of the long ages and the hard struggle. We do not mind so much the long, hard road if we can be sure of the end. That is the meaning of this faith. I can not understand the way, but because God is there with His purpose for me and the world, I can be sure of the goal.

"I go to prove my soul!

I see my way as birds their trackless way.

I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first,

I ask not: but .

In some time, His good time, I shall arrive:

He guides me and the bird. In His good time!"17

And it is not a goal for the single soul alone, but for this world: the goal which the Christian Church expresses in the phrase, the Kingdom of God. The world is not a place where God puts men on trial, to receive at last to Himself those who remain true. It is the place where God is working now with men. That is the ground of our optimism. That is why we dare to talk of banishing disease and driving out poverty and overthrowing oppression. That is why we venture the last and most daring hope, that some time bitterness and hatred and selfishness shall yield and a new spirit of peace and truth and good-will shall rule all the life of men. We dare believe it because God is no mere permissive presence in His world, but a great power that is slowly-working out that purpose of mercy which He revealed in Jesus Christ.

It is our modem Christian thinking that has brought these last two ideas together, the thought of evolution and of Christ. We see to-day their fine congruity. Christ is for us the great revelation of God's purpose. He shows us what it is that God has in view for men. First of all, it is a purpose of mercy to lift men into fellowship with Himself. With that comes the other end, the social end if you will: God is establishing a fellowship, a brotherhood, a communion, in which men shall serve Him by their love and service for one another. At the same time Christ shows us by what forces this end is to be realized; not by might that works from without, but by His own transforming spirit of holiness and love working within. The thought of evolution has given us a double aid. It has given us the forward look, showing us that we could see the meaning of things only as we looked ahead. And it has shown us God's way of working. For just as the idea of law has made us see that God's way of working is by uniform order, so the idea of evolution has shown us that God works His ends not by sudden catastrophe wrought from without, but by patient progress working from within. Evolution, which does not exclude great crises and epochs, tells us that God's way is that of patient development, whether He be making a world or growing a man or leading the race up to Himself.

God as Person

Our final need is this: the Presence must be a Person. It is not enough to know that God is in His world. Can we speak to Him? Does He know.? Does He care.? It is not enough to say,

''Closer is He than breathing. Nearer than hands or feet."

Tennyson's other word must be true,

"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears.

And Spirit with spirit can meet." 18

A beneficent world-order is not enough. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: When shall I come and appear before Him?"¹⁹ "If I have but Thee, I ask for nothing in heaven or on earth."²⁰ The final cry of man's heart is for God Himself. That personal fellowship is the heart of religion. "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee."²¹ Such a fellowship man can have only if God be Person.

We need this conviction that God is Person for the sake of our social faith. We come here to the issue that is back of all our social turmoil to-day. Which is first, persons or things? What shall govern our laws and institutions, mere power or the interests of men? Our social program to-day is putting the personal first. We have put down human slavery and political autocracy; now we are putting down industrial autocracy, the right of money to rule because it stands for power as once kings and armies did. The personal is supreme to-day: men and women and children. How can we hold such a program for society if it does not rest upon a corresponding faith. And that faith is this: the ultimate reality of this world is personal. God is not mere power or wisdom or some indefinite spiritual being. God is Person, our Father; the world is made for persons, His children; and our social program will win because it has the God of the world on its side.

It was Jesus' great deed to make this faith in a personal and present God live again in the hearts of men. There is a certain cycle of development through which religion seems to pass among men. It begins as a vision and a fellowship in the heart of some saint or prophet. It becomes a doctrine, a ritual, an institution. And these, which ought to express the life, often serve but to crush it out. Jesus came with the passion for God in His heart. Prayer was the breath of His soul. It was His meat and drink to do His Father's will. He brushed aside the meaningless forms and the endless laws which summed up religion for the people. He showed men God, and then He taught them to say, "Our Father." That was the first Christian creed.