THE GOD WHO IS FAR

THE debate about the meaning of religion is one that has gone on among scholars for many a year. It will go on for years to come, for we seem to be not much nearer to agreement than we have been in the past. The reason is not far to seek. Religion is not one thing in our human life to be marked off and studied; it is the inner side of everything. There is no part of human nature which does not come to expression in it; it is a matter of mind and heart and will. There is no part of human life which it does not lay hold of inner and outer, individual and social, custom, duty, beauty, truth, it relates itself vitally to all. It takes different forms. It appears as creed and offers a philosophy of the world and life. It comes to us as ethics and seeks to direct all behavior. It creates organizations, churches, which include whole peoples and live on from age to age. It takes form as culture, or mode of worship, with priests and prayers and hymns and sacraments and rites of every kind. And to different individuals and peoples and ages, different aspects of all this make their appeal.

Out of all this, however, two elements emerge. We might describe religion as an ellipse and say that its curve moves about these two foci. Indeed, we may say that at every point religion is determined by these two centers of interest

The first of these is the needs of men. On that we are more and more agreed: religion roots in mans nature and his fundamental needs. It is not an idle curiosity looking out on the world and trying to find an explanation. It is not a fraud forced upon men for the profit of priests. It is not a matter of meaningless custom passed on from age to age. That is why religion remains in the midst of change. The codes and customs of religion vary from age to age.

Ritual, most tenacious of all, comes under the same rule—what church in all the earth has the same customs as did Paul's churches or that at Jerusalem? And as for creeds, one might say that their form changes most of all. But religion, banished by persecution, confuted by argument, defeated in its hopes, suffering not least from the disloyalty of its adherents or their mistaken zeal, has lived on, growing weak at times, yet coming again and again, in changed form it may be, to a greater rebirth. All this is possible only because religion rests upon something basic in man.

There are two fundamental urges of human life that all recognize: hunger and love. It is hunger that has forced man to toil, that has sharpened invention, driven to thought and study, led to cooperation with his fellows, compelled great -migrations, and has been the mainspring of war down to our own day. It is love that has built families and communities, states and nations, that has made man willing to take up burdens which he would not assume for himself, that has been the fruitful soil of high ideals and noble sentiment. Without hunger the individual could not survive, without love the race would perish.

Is religion, then, a third instinct to be placed by the side of these? No, not if you think of it as an independent instinct. But we may put it by the side of these two and call it the third great hunger of our humankind. For there are these three sides to our human life, there is the physical which binds us to earth, the social that binds us to our fellows, and this third which takes in these others but goes beyond them.

It is man's quest for meanings and values,  his relation to the whole world of the unseen. How they come we do not now ask, but here they are, these ideals and values. There is mans sense of the worth of his own life; it may be selfish at first, ! but at its best it takes in human personality as a whole. Here is his feeling for moral values, for  what is ; right arid just and good in his own life and in the group. Here is his sense of Unify and order and purpose. All this may be suggested by the world in which he lives, but it is very plain that he feels here not so much what is as what ought to be. The world that is, at least this world that he sees and handles, does not show him these things. There is no justice in rocks and trees, no love in the silent stars, no moral ends that appear in the storms and tides, no clear purpose in the passing years. And he himself with all his hopes and ideals and sense of human worth, what is there in nature that pays heed to him? What is he more than a grain of sand on the shores of time compared with the infinite spaces in which there float a million million suns?

But religion is not constituted by the mere sense of mans needs or of the goods which he desires Leaving the question aside as to how this may have arisen, there remains the fact of mans sense of a higher power which is inseparable from religion wherever this appears. God and mans need, these are the foci about which religion always moves, mans need and the answer in God. For that is what religious faith is; it is the conviction that there is something that answers to this need, something in which lies mans highest good, the meaning and end of his life and the help by which he may achieve it. Looked at from one aspect you may say that at every point as we plot the curve of religion we find the dominating idea of mans needs and the goods he desires. But it is equally true that at every point there is the determining thought of that higher reality which religion calls God. God is not one of our religious beliefs; he is the belief. He is not one doctrine; he is the heart of all doctrine. Is there a Truth in which all partial truths find their place and meaning? That is God. Is there a Life from which all life comes? That is God. Is there a Righteousness in which all that is holy and just and right has its perfect being? Is there a Power on which our weakness depends, a Help that answers to our need? Is there a final Good in which all our goods have their being and their goal and their assurance of achievement? All that is in the meaning which religion sees in God,

Men may not believe in this God; they may pass him by, or search and not find him. But two facts  are clear; one is the presence of this hunger in our humankind, the other is that when a man really finds God, this is the place that God fills. No one among the modern "seekers after God" has said this more effectively than H. G. Wells, writing in the war novel, "Mr. Britling Sees It Through/ into which he put so much of his own experience. "Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place, only with God. Only with God."¹ But that is only repeating in a modern way what all the saints have seen and known. Augustine said it: "Thou hast made us onto thyself, and our soul is restless until it rests in thee." And the psalmist phrased it for us long ago:

"Whom have I in heaven but thee?

And there is none upon earth that

     I desire besides thee.

 

"My flesh and my heart faileth;

But God is the strength of my heart

     And my portion forever."

The goods and ideals of the group will, of course, especially in the earlier stages, play the leading role here and in this day we have come to a clearer recognition of the place of social values in religion. But there is a curious blindness to what for men of religion has always been at the heart of their experience, when religion is simply equated with "the consciousness of the highest social values." ² Orthodoxism, for which religion can be stated in terms of traditional and authoritative doctrine, rationalism (so much like orthodoxism in its one-sided intellectualism), for which religion is a philosophy discoverable by mans reason, and the moderns for whom religion is merely a social function or a social passion—these all alike miss this unique quality of religion. For religion is mans life as lived in relation to something higher than himself, a being upon whom he feels himself dependent, from whom he expects help, and to whom he recognizes his obligation.

In his significant book, "The Idea of the Holy," Rudolf Otto has given a searching analysis of religious experience, especially in its more primitive forms. Call it mana or wakanda or orenda, or call it, as Otto does the numinous, or simply the holy in the experience of religion man becomes aware of something higher than himself. It may come to him some night when the tempest reveals its overwhelming power and his own impotence. He may feel it in the mysterious presence of death or in the awe that is stirred by the glory of sunrise or the wonder of the stars. Loneliness and the sense of peril in strange surroundings may quicken it as with the fleeing Jacob, but in some way the soul of man awakes to a strange presence and cries out: "Surely God is in this place; and I knew it not/ Awe, wonder, fear, fascination, a sense of dependence are all mingled here, and all are called forth by the growing feeling of man that he is in the presence of something that is more than himself or his fellows or the world of things about him, and that this higher power has a meaning for himself and his world.

This sense of a higher presence, moreover, abides as religion moves up into more ethical and spiritual forms. There are those who will dispute this. We do not reach the higher forms of religion, they will say, until we eliminate the supernatural reference. We must rationalize religion and ethicize it, they declare; we must set it forth in logical and demonstrable ideas and make it practical by reducing it to moral ideals and rules. Unfortunately when religion reaches this stage it tends to die out, losing not only its hold as religion but its moral power. But, indeed, they-are mistaken as to the highest form of religion. The idea of the supernatural, of that which is above this natural world in power and beyond mans comprehension, of that which has the right to command mans life and before which be bows in awe—this is not found merely among the primitive and superstitious, nor does it disappear when religion becomes ethical and rational. The world knew no higher religion before the coming of Jesus than that of the Hebrew prophets. It was a rational religion, one that appealed to the mind, calling men to worship not some blind and inscrutable power but a God whose character was revealed and whom men might know; and it was an ethical religion alike in its concept of God and its demand upon men. Yet the prophets have this same idea of a God high and lifted up, filling the hearts of men with revererice and awe. Where is there a truer picture of the soul of reverence bowed before the most High than in the story of Isaiah's call, or a more lofty vision of the God who moves with power and purpose in nature and history than that which is given us in the second Isaiah? It is not otherwise with Jesus. He does not hesitate to speak about fearing God. He bids us pray "Our Father," but we do not get the power and meaning of these words except as we sense their background in the words that follow, "who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." For these latter words bear all that thought of the God of infinite majesty and power, the holy God, before whom the soul of man is to be hushed in reverence and fear. And the literature of religion has no scene so searching, none so fitted to awaken awe and humility, as the picture of the paying Jesus in Gethsemane, the Son of Man with soul prostrate in the presence of the Eternal, in awe and humble submission before that which seems to have been hidden even from him.

Our own age, in which we have been so busy harnessing up religion to everyday tasks, gives evidence of this feeling for the infinite and this hunger for the eternal. It may be seen in the revival of mysticism. It appears in a growing appreciation among students of the real nature of religion. The very religious aberrations of our day, Christian Science and theosophy and "new thought," and the rest, point the same way. And, at far remove from these, does not the strength of "fundamentalism" lie in this direction? Its method may be quite mistaken, with its insistence upon tradition, its external authority) its Biblical literalism, and its mechanical conception of the supernatural; yet it has made large numbers feel that it alone is preserving the supernatural, the essentially divine and eternal in religion. And what shall we say of the appeal of the Roman Catholic Church^ whose crowding worshipers are surely impelled by something more than a fear that they may be excluded from a future world whose keys the Church holds? Has not this Church set itself definitely through its cultus to appeal to this sense of the supernatural? And in our Protestant Churches, with their traditional intellectualism, whether dogmatic or rational, and with their emphasis on the social and practical, is there not coming a deeper appreciation of worship, a worship with beauty and order and reverence and helpful surrounding all as means to lead men into the presence of the divine?

So far we have spoken only in general terms of this idea of the far God. We have thought of it as the infinite, the eternal, as that which, however near to man, is yet above him and the whole world of finite things in power and meaning. We need now to define the term more closely. We will begin with a historical consideration, with the idea of holiness, and first of ail as this appears in the Old Testament. So accustomed are we to the Christian idea of holiness that it is hard to get back to the original Old Testament meaning. In its primary sense there is nothing ethical in holiness, no reference to character; nor is its first meaning, as so often stated, that of separation, whether of God from his world, or of man from sin or ceremonial defilement. These are later ideas. Holiness belongs first of all to God. It is that which makes him God, his power and majesty, his contrast with all that is finite and perishable and weak. It is that which the nations must come to recognize. When in Ezekiel Jehovah says, "I will be hallowed" (that is, recognized as holy), he means that he will assert his power so that the nations that have oppressed Israel will recognize that he is really God. Holiness is that before which men are to bow in reverence and awe, as did Isaiah in the temple.

Such an idea could be easily abused. Men thought of the power as something strange and mysterious, something incalculable. It was like the electricity of the live wire, useful but needing to be handled with care, able to help but also to inflict great harm. This power was not necessarily thought of as joined to character and purpose. It could be communicated to persons and objects, and then these needed to be handled with care. An Uzzah with the best of intentions might touch the ark and be killed, while the same ark brought great prosperity to Obed-edom simply by being lodged at his home. It is this primitive idea of the holy that has gone over, for example, into the Roman Catholic Church, where holiness is less a matter of the ethical than of such a strange mysterious quality or force that can belong to things quite as well as to persons. It was a conception that could give rise to all kinds of superstition. With the growth of insight the idea of the holy undergoes change. In fact, the transformation of the idea of the holy is the index of the development of religion. For the prophets the majesty of Jehovah and his power are not blind or strange or unknown in their meaning. Jehovah is more than a power before whom men are to bow in fear, "Jehovah of hosts is exalted injustice, and God-the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness." ³ The transcendence of God comes to be seen not in mere might, in dazzling splendor, but in his mercy and righteousness. The name of Jehovah is still "the Holy One of Israel," but it is in his spirit and character that he is holy, or lifted above men. ⁴ Christian thought is wonderfully expressed here when Paul speaks of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, not in the majesty of the stars or the power of the storm, but in the face of Jesus Christ. That which now commands the worship of man, that before which he bows in deepest awe, is moral majesty. And yet it would be wholly wrong to suppose that the Christian thought of holiness becomes merely that of goodness. It is not simply goodness: it is goodness joined to power. We do not simply look up to God and say, "There is goodness, I should obey it." There remains still the sense of infinite power, of ways that we cannot fully comprehend, the sense of reverence and awe. Nor let us forget that Jesus himself, who taught us the word of simple trust, "Father," with which to approach God, used also the word "fear." ⁵ The heart of religion is reverence and awe.

Religion then, at its highest as well as lowest, roots in this thought of a Being that is above man. We turn now to the Christian thought of God and ask more specifically what this idea of the far God means in the Christian faith. It means first the God of creative and controlling power. God is the God of power. He is not simply one of many beings in this world that we know, a little stronger, it may be, than the rest. He is not simply an idea of beauty or goodness, in itself helpless to command or to aid its worshipers, like some Venus of Milo whose beauty men admire but who has no arms to lift her worshipers. There is a striking Old Testament expression to which -we- may well go back for our thought; it speaks of Jehovah as ^the living God." That does not mean "the being of God" about which we debate so much; that way lies philosophy. Religion demands far more; it must have not just a God who exists, but one who counts, a God who does things. That is "the living God." So Israel saw God in the storm that swept down from the bills, in the smiling harvest, in the defeat of their enemies; yes, and it was the triumph of the moral insight of the prophets that they saw God in the very victory of their foes and the reverses of Israel.

"Thou art the God that doest wonders;

Thou hast made known thy strength among the peoples.

The voice of thy thunder was in the whirlwind;

Thy lightnings lightened the world:

The earth trembled and shook.

Thy way was in the sea,

And thy paths in the great waters.

Thou leddest thy people like a flock,

By the han4 of Moses and Aaron," ⁶

Nowhere is this more finely set forth than in Second t Isaiah, ⁷ Here the pure religious instinct asserts its faith. Despite political reverses and national disasters and the overwhelming superiority of the foe, whether in miltiary power or in ancient "culture," the prophet proclaims the God who has created all things, who nightly leads forth the silent stars, who directs history, who sets kings upon their thrones to work his will even when they do not know him.

There are those who fear in the name of faith that modern science would change all this, and there are some who assume to speak for science and declare this to be a fact. The latter assert that science has shown that there is in this universe one energy, and one alone, fixed in amount, working by inevitable law, explaining all, determining all. Nature is a great Machine and we have no right to think that there is a Soul in it or a Power above it. There is no place here to confute this argument. It suffers from one fatal defect: it leaves out of account one whole world of reality, the world of personal-spiritual life; it leaves aside the forces which are mightiest in commanding and shaping the life of humanity—hope and fear and love and justice and brotherhood, and the whole conscious human life of impulse and interest and ideal. I do not minimize what modern, science^ has really done in changing our view of the world. It has pushed back the boundaries of the universe beyond all our imagining, not only into the infinite astronomic spaces, but into those equal marvels of the infinitely small where the orbits of electrons are plotted like the orbits of the stars and not only the boundaries of space, but those of time as well. Second, it has asserted the sway of law, the reign of order in all the universe. Third, it has shattered the old geocentric world, with all its meaning for mans thought of himself and his relation to the universe, and has made our earth a tiny fragment amid infinities. Finally, it has changed the old static system, in which all things had their final form and fixed place, into a world where forces have taken the place of things, where all has come to its present state through endless eras of change, and where the same development is still taking place.

Undoubtedly these changes have affected deeply the forms of religious thinking; and, more than that, beginning with Copernicus, faith felt its foundations shaken too; for men are always inclined to identify their faith with the form in which it has been held and feel that religion is gone when some altar is moved or a phrase is changed in the creed. But in the end these changes have made it no whit harder for faith to find the living God in his world. Science to-day, no more than at any previous age, concerns itself with the final questions of life or can answer them—the question of the Power that moves in all forces, of the Life that is the source of all life, of the Mind whose thoughts are reflected in that order which we call law, and of the Meaning which works through it all to some final goal. Indeed, science is helping us to a truer and larger vision of God. How could it be otherwise, if it be true science, since its subject is the world of God? Faith saw long since that Gods ways were those of wisdom and steadfast character; the faithfulness of God, in Old Testament phrase, means just this. What science means by law is just the order that belongs to such a dependable God; the correlate of the natural law of science is the character of God. Further, science has made impossible the old idea of an absentee God. Either we must find God in the ongoing processes, the ever-moving forces of this world, or else we have put a blind energy on the throne and made God an impotent idea. Science has helped us regain the Old Testament idea of a living God. And so it has helped us to see that the creative work of God is an ever-renewed story and not an event of the past

Christian faith sees this far God, this God that is more than this world, in the second place, not only as Power but as Purpose. The God of purpose is above the world, while still working in it The world by itself, whether in nature or history, compels no such conclusion. There have been those, it is true, who have found in the world itself the plain evidence of purpose and progress which nature is working out. And this rather shallow optimism has in the last generation or so been wont to clothe itself in scientific form. Evolution, so its logic ran, is an established fact of science. Evolution means development, progress. That development is by natural forces and is inevitable. Evolution therefore will be for us science and religion both, and we need no God. Andrew Carnegie gives us a rather naive expression of this in his Autobiography: "When I, along with three or four of my boon companions, was in this stage of doubt about theology. ... I came fortunately upon Darwins and Spencers works. . . . Reaching the pages which explain how man has absorbed such mental foods as were favorable to him, retaining what was salutary, rejecting what was deleterious, I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. . , . I had found the truth of evolution, All is well

since all grows better/ became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. ⁸ It need hardly be said that all this is not science but philosophy, When the Great War came it showed what human nature, plus science and engineering and minus religion and ethics, could do. The philosophy of mans Mural goodness and of inevitable progress in the universe broke down and Mr. Carnegie broke off the Writing of his autobiography. Nature shows dystelelogy as Well as teleology; human nature shows degeneracy as well as progress. If nature is to be more than a mere mechanism and history more than a tangle of events or an endlessly repeated and unmeaning cycle then we must believe in a God who is more than nature, in whom purpose and meaning have their reality, Without that we should be much more consistent if we took the gloomy view of Bertrand Russell and held that "man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the ends they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no force, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that the whole temple of mans achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." ⁹

There is a third form in which this vision of a far God is held by Christianity and that is in the thought of absolute goodness. It is not power which a spiritual man worships. If the gods be only that arbitrary will which some theologians have set up, then we might well honor Prometheus in his defiance of them. But the heart of a spiritual religion lies in the conviction that power and goodness are one. That is the meaning of our first great confession, "Our Father, who art in heaven"; for by Father we mean goodness and by heaven the place of rule. God is for us the supreme and perfect goodness. We know something of Goodness here, but it is mingled with evil; it is at best only the good in the making. Above all the worlds evil or imperfect good rises the goodness of God, the perfect holiness. This transcendent goodness means for i us three things. It means a good and a right that are real and not a mere idea or dream. It means next a good that has a right to command, a righteousness which it is pur highest life to obey. And it means, finally, a good that is to triumph. We do not fight for the good in a world of blind forces, nor yet with evil tipping the scales against us. Rather the stars are fighting in their courses against Sisera, the unseen forces are on the side of good. What Socrates said is true: "If the gods do not prefer the good man to the evil, then it is better to die than to live." If the foundations of the world are not laid in righteousness, if goodness be not the highest reality,

"Then earth is rotten at the core,

     And dust and ashes all that is."¹⁰

The God that is far means for us the reality and authority of righteous, and the foundation for all high hope of the future. .

But here we come to a group of questions that have concerned Christian thinkers and others a good deal of late. This far God, of whom you are speaking, is not that what philosophers mean by their Absolute? Are you not leading us away from religion into abstraction? Or are you not falling back into that outworn theology that pictured a God far removed and made of him an autocrat whose essence was sheer power and arbitrary will? What we need, say these voices, is a God that is linked in closest fashion to our human life. What we want is not a hard and fast system dominated by an all-controlling will. We want a world of action and life and growth, with place for human freedom and initiative and responsibility. Is it not a finite God that we want? So we have Mr. Wells with his Comrade God fighting with us against the blind forces of the Universe, and Mr. Dickinson with his "Religion of a Social Passion" whose God is apparently an idealized humanity, and Professor James with his pluralism that would seem to give room for a good many gods, and Samuel Butler, who will have no theologians God sitting above the clouds, but whose God seems pretty much identical with the animal and vegetable world. ¹¹

Now some of this protest is certainly in place, Philosophy is interested commonly in the abstract, in some final substance, some world ground, some absolute, in which is found the unity and the explanation of the whole. Religion on the contrary is concerned with personal relations and the value of the individual; in the words of Mr. Balfour, in "a God whom men can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose attributes, however conceived, leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between himself and those whom he has created."¹² The formal definitions of the theologians, anxious to remove God from all limitation, full of assertions of abstract perfection! have resulted in something very far from the real concern of religion and the real experiences of life. Nor is it much better when a theologian like John Calvin pictures a God of arbitrary will, backed by irresistible power which carries his decrees into effect,

But when we have conceded all this, the fact remain? that religion demands the absolute. For religion always centers in the highest; it is man seeking, with sure instinct, something before which he can bow and in which he can find the completion of life. In the highest sense, there is no religion until a man has found that which has the right to command his life and in which he can trust But when a man has found this, then this is his absolute, this is his God. The good that can command men will be no partial, no relative good; it must be a goodness with absolute reality, a goodness fundamental to the universe itself. It is the good that is God for us. The power that we worship must be more than some being like ourselves, struggling like Mr. Wells's Invisible King toward a goal that must ever be uncertain. It is not that we ask for sheer, irresistible power. It is no autocratic universe that we seek; but we do want to know that the goodness which is God commands the power that will lead at length to its goal.

This then, I take it, is the sense in which Christian faith demands an absolute God, whether we care to use that term or not: a God who is the source of all life and being, upon whom all things are dependent, who himself is not dependent for being upon aught outside himself, whose reason moving in all makes one ordered universe, whose goodness is perfect and has the right as such to command, and who has the resources to carry this world, through whatever sacrifice and toil may be needed, to a final goal of good. At least a brief reference should be made to the idea of God as above human* knowledge. There is an essential element of agnosticism in the Christian faith, and the great spokesmen of the Bible bear witness to it. God is always for us both revealed and hidden. So he appears in the lofty lines of Job, where faith holds to God yet realizes his hidden ways. Paul is sure that men may know the character of God in Jesus Christ, yet he cries out: "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord ? or who hath been his counsellor?" It is Martineau who writes: "It is the essence and beginning of religion to feel that all our belief and speech respecting God is untrue yet infinitely truer than any nonbelief and silence." And John Owen gives the reason for this: "We know so little of God because it is God who is thus to be known." ¹³ Augustines phrase has too often been forgotten by the dogmatists when he declares that he uses the term "persons" in connection with the Trinity, not because he would say this, but that he might not keep silent. These great teachers are all of them sure of God, sure that he has turned his face upon them, that they know him, that they can trust him utterly, that their life is to be found only in absolute devotion to him; yet at the same time they have the keenest sense of the infinitude of being in God that is beyond their knowledge.

It remains for us to note briefly the meaning which this conception of the God that is far, or the transcendent God, has for religion. By the far God we mean the God who is not only in man, but who is more than man, who is above us in power, who is absolute in goodness, from whom is the order and unity that obtain in the universe, in whom is the purpose that gives meaning to all. What does this signify for religious faith?

Here is, first of all, moral transcendence and moral authority. The good is not our dream, it is really existent The object of our aspiration is not an imperfect and idealized we, but a perfect Thou. Our loyalty is not simply to our group, or even to a total humanity as such, but to that humanity as seen in the good purpose of this God. The breakdown of moral sanctions in our day makes clearer than ever how deeply we need the conviction that there is a right and good which is more than social convention or individual preference, that it is grounded in the very foundations of the world order, and that it speaks with authority, It is not that we do riot have to search for this good which we must obey, not that our experience must not help point the way, not that it comes to us as external authority, but that, however it comes, once here we know that it is more than we and that it has the right to command our life.

There is, in the second place, the conviction that this transcendent goodness is also transcendent power. Of itself, the mere thought of supreme power does not evoke religion in man, any more than does Schleiermachers absolute feeling of dependence. There is, indeed, a thought of the infinite or even of sheer power which brings to man a crushing sense of insignificance and impotence, which casts down instead of lifting up. So modern astronomy may well terrorize the imagination of man who is thus reduced to nothingness. That was Carlyles thought when his friend exclaimed over the glory of the heavens on a clear, starry night and the dour old sage replied, "Man, it is just terrible." The infinite spaces of the skies or the blind fury of the sea with its irresistible power may well awaken such a feeling. But there is a power that lifts up as well as casts down; it is the power to which a man prays and which he can trust. When a man has found this, then he has found his God Then power has a face that man can read and a heart that man can trust Then power becomes liberation, not oppression, and man rejoices in it as that which makes him strong in confidence, which brings him courage as it brings him peace. Bishop F. J. McConnell tells of a Scotch regiment that he addressed one night during the World War just before they were to move up to the front line trenches, and how, when he asked them to sing at the close, the voices that came from here and there all called for the same hymn:

"0 God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come."

The great hymns and psalms which have lifted the hearts .of men in worship have been those in which men rejoiced in a majesty which they could worship and a power they could trust. Here is the reason for worship and joy:

"For the Lord is a great God.

And a great King above all gods.

In his hand are the deep places of the earth;

The strength of the hills is his also.

The sea is his, and he made it;

And his hands formed the dry land."

Not so clearly, and yet of the same spirit and the same source, is the reverent confidence that breathes through John Burroughss poem, "My Own":

"Serene I fold my arms and wait,

     Nor care for wind or tide or sea;

I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,

     For lo! my own shall come to me.

 

"I stay my haste, I make delays,

     For what avails this eager pace?

I stand amid eternal ways,

     And what is mine shall know my face."

Here is the same sense of an order and a power above man which mean for him life and peace.

Burroughs's poem suggests the last consideration in the matter of the meaning and value of this conception, and that is the assurance of the final achievement of the good. We shall consider later the tragic fact of evil in the world. That fact of itself, however, is not destructive of faith so long as man is convinced that the issue is certain. But the fight for the good, and the loyalty to the right and true, will not last long where men lack the assurance that the good and right form the power that rules this world. Moral faith demands religious faith; without such religious faith it has never been able to maintain itself in strength and permanence among men. What man needs is the assurance that the high ideals that command his life, the hopes that stir him as he thinks of the future of mankind, are more than his dreams, that they are the expression of the will that rules the world. It is this truth which appears, however imperfectly in the old doctrine of election and in the apocalyptic hope of early Christianity, and the truth has permanent place both for individual assurance and for social faith to-day. The form has changed, but the Christian man with all his stress upon freedom and initiative and responsibility, still faces the future unafraid because the world order is on the side of the angels and there is something more than his own strength. "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you." Fear not, little flock; for it is your Fathers good pleasure to give you the kingdom."

NOTE

The foregoing discussion has sought to consider the idea of God constantly from the point of view of its place in religion, and not as a dogmatic concept. It stands in very definite disagreement with the conception of religion typically voiced by E. S. Ames in his "Psychology of Religious Experience." There is no reason why Professor Ames should not set forth his personal faith as he has done in "The New Orthodoxy." There, we are told, God is to be found in the associated life of men, that he is, in fact, nothing more than this associated life as Idealized and personified. He is compared to the individuality of a college class to which each member shows loyalty and reverence. So God apparently is the vague idea for Professor Ames, wavering between the composite life of humanity as it is and the ideal that humanity holds before itself. This is understandable, though one wonders as to the justification of the use of the word "God" by Professor Ames in a sense so different from what readers share or congregations at worship assume when it is used.

But there is a major criticism which is to be raised against Professor Ames and all those for whom religion is to be understood simply in its social function, for whom God is an idea that is to be "utilized," a convenient rallying point for our ideals and emotions, but not a being of objective reality apart from the life of the worshiper or his group. The criticism is that these men are not describing what religion really is. The dogmatist has gotten the better of the scientist, the effort at description has passed over into the defense of a norm, and the effort at descriptive psychology is vitiated by this unconsciously operative interest. We can sympathize when Professor Ames Says, "The highest type of religion to-day is that which has the finest devotion to the most adequate ideal of life," or when he sums up religion as involving, "Reverence for life and for the moral distinctions which commend themselves to the experience of the

race; love for our fellowmen . . .; and the forward-moving action of life in the quest for better things than have yet been achieved." ¹⁴

But over against this, two facts need plainly to be stated. First, if you are trying to describe religion as it is or as it has been through long ages, you are leaving vast ranges of religious life out of account, and it is quite unjustifiable to say flatly "These then are the attitudes of the religious life." ¹⁵ Further religion at its highest includes more than what is here given. It involves something that we call God, and a God who is more than our human life first idealized and then personified. It is of the very breath of the life of religion to believe that that which it worships is, that it has power, in the end that it has some absolute place in the world. Without this, religion might live on with a few of the poetically or ideally minded; it would die in the hearts of the multitudes whose God must mean reality and authority and help.

Two quotations may be added which seem to the writer to reflect more truly the nature of primitive and of developed religion at this point. "The quality of holiness and of absolute obligation are the surest mark of genuine religion from the beginning throughout history." ¹⁶ "It is in the long run impossible for religion to remain contented, as the aesthetic consciousness can, with an object which is merely its object, without placing it, so to say, in the center of things, and relating to everything in itself and in its environment." ¹⁷ In the high forms of religion there is involved here, as Webb goes on suggest, a definite Weltanschauung, but at every stage religion involves not only values and interests, but an objective reference the thought of some Being with power, with meaning for life by way of help and command.

1) See the whole passage, "Mr. Britling Sees It Through," pages 438 ff.

2) Ames. "The Psychology of Religious Experience," page vii.

3) Hallowed means "seen as holy," Isaiah v. 16.

4) Isaiah Iv. 1-9.

5) Matthew x 28. That is why religion is so different from magic. That Is why I cannot but feel that writers like Frazer are wholly wrong when they make religion rise out of the failure of magic which drives men to the idea of gods who will help where other things have failed. Religion does not begin with the idea of gods as beings who can be used, however closely it may be allied with mans sense of need.

6) Psalm Ixxvii. 14, 18-20.

7) Note especially Isaiah xl to xlv.

8) Andrew Carnegie, "Autobiography," page 339.

9) "Mysticism and Logic," page 47.

10) Tennyson, "In Memoriam,"

11) "God the Known and the Unknown," pages 55, 67.

12) "Theism and Humanism," page 36.

13) The two quotations are taken from a suggestive passage by H. G. Wood, "Living Issues of Religious Thought," pages 21, 22,

14) "The New Orthodoxy," pages 95, 27, 28.

15) Ibid., page 27.

16) Soderblom, "Natuerliche Theologie und allgemeine Re glonsgeschichte," S. 62.

17) C. C. J. Webb, quoted in "Foundations," page 426.