Theism

II

The theistic inference, although a complex process, is not a difficult one. It looks, indeed, long and formidable when analysed in books of evidences, and elaborated with perverse ingenuity into series of syllogisms. But numerous processes, very simple and easy in themselves, are toilsome and troublesome to analyse, or describe, or comprehend. Vision and digestion are, in general, not difficult bodily functions, but they have been the subjects of a great many very large treatises; and doubtless physiologists have not even yet found out all that is to be known about them. As a rule, the theistic process is as simple and easy an operation for the mind as vision or digestion for the body. The multitude of books which have been written in explanation and illustration of it, and the subtle and abstruse character of the researches and speculations contained in many of these books, are not the slightest indications of its being other than simple and natural in itself. The inferences which it involves are, in fact, like those which Weber, Helmholtz, and Zöllner have shown to be implied in the perceptions of sense, involuntary and unconscious. If not perfectly instantaneous, they are so rapid and spontaneous as to have seemed to many intuitive. And in a loose sense, perhaps, they may be considered so. Not, however, strictly and properly, since the idea of Deity is no simple idea, but the most complex of ideas, comprehending all that is great and good in nature and man, along with perfections which belong to neither nature nor man; and since the presence of Deity is not seen without the intervention of any media – face to face, eye to eye – but only as "through a glass darkly." The contemplation of nature, and mind, and history is an indispensable stage towards the knowledge of Him. Physical and mental facts and laws are the materials or data of reason in its quest of religious truth. There is a rational transition from the natural to the supernatural, wherever the latter is reached.

Our knowledge of God is obtained as simply and naturally as our knowledge of our fellow-men. It is obtained, in fact, mainly in the same way. In both cases we refer certain manifestations of will, intelligence, and goodness – qualities which are known to us by consciousness – to these qualities as their causes. We have no direct or immediate knowledge – no intuitive or a priori knowledge – of the intelligence of our fellow-creatures, any more than we have of the intelligence of our Creator; but we have a direct personal consciousness of intelligence in ourselves which enables us confidently to infer that the works both of God and of men can only have originated in intelligences. We grow up into knowledge of the mind of God as we grow in acquaintance with the minds of men through familiarity with their acts. The Father in heaven is known just as a father on earth is known. The latter is as unseen as the former. No human being has really ever seen another. No sense has will, or wisdom, or goodness for its object. Man must infer the existence of his fellow-men, for he can have no immediate perception of it; he must become acquainted with their characters through the use of his intelligence, because character cannot be heard with the ear, or looked upon with the eye, or touched with the finger. Yet a child is not long in learning to know that a spirit is near it. As soon as it knows itself, it easily detects a spirit like its own, yet other than itself, when the signs of a spirit's activity are presented to it. The process of inference by which it ascends from the works of man to the spirit which originates them is not more legitimate, more simple, or more natural, than that by which it rises from nature to nature's God.

In saying this, I refer merely to the process of inference in itself. That is identical in the two cases. In other respects there are obvious differences, of which one important consequence is, that while the scepticism which denies the existence of God is not unfrequently to be met with, a scepticism which denies the existence of human beings is unknown. The facts which prove that there are men, are grouped together within limits of space and of time which allow of their being so easily surveyed, and they are in themselves so simple and familiar, that all sane minds draw from them their natural inference. The facts which prove that there is a God need, in order to be rightly interpreted, more attention and reflection, more comprehensiveness, impartiality, and elevation of mind. Countless as they are, they can be overlooked, and often have been overlooked. Clear and conspicuous as they are, worldliness and prejudice and sin may blind the soul to their significance. True, the existence and possibility of atheism have often been denied, but the testimony of history to the reality of atheism cannot be set aside. Although many have been called atheists unjustly and calumniously, and although a few who have professed themselves to be atheists may have really possessed a religious belief which they overlooked or were averse to acknowledge, we cannot reasonably refuse to take at their own word the majority of those who have inculcated a naked and undisguised atheism, and claimed and gloried in the name of atheist. Incredible as it may seem that any intelligent being, conscious of human wants and weaknesses, should be able to look upon the wonders of the heavens and of the earth, of the soul within him and of society around him, and yet say that there is no God, men have done so, and we have no alternative but to accept the fact as we find it. It is a fact which involves nothing inconsistent with the truth that the process by which the mind attains to a belief in God is of the same natural and direct, yet inferential, character as the process by which it attains to belief in the existence of finite minds closely akin to itself.

Our entire spiritual being is constituted for the apprehension of God in and through His works. All the essential principles of mental action, when applied to the meditative consideration of finite things, lead up from them to Infinite Creative Wisdom. The whole of nature external to us is a revelation of God; the whole nature within us has been made for the reception and interpretation of that revelation. What more would we have? Strange as it may seem, there are many theists at the present day who represent it as insufficient, or as even worthless, and who join with atheists in denying that God's existence can be proved, and in affirming that all the arguments for His existence are inconclusive and sophistical. I confess I deem this a most erroneous and dangerous procedure. Such theists seem to me not only the best allies of atheists, but even more effective labourers in the cause of unbelief than atheists themselves. They shake men's confidence to a far greater extent in the reasonable grounds of faith in God's existence, and substitute for these grounds others as weak and arbitrary as any atheist could possibly wish. They pronounce illegitimate and invalid the arguments from effect to cause, from order and arrangement to intelligence, from history to providence, from conscience to a moral governor, – an assertion which, if true, infallibly implies that the heavens do not declare the glory of God, and that the earth does not show forth His handiworks – that the course of human events discloses no trace of His wisdom, goodness, or justice – and that the moral nature of man is wholly dissociated from a Divine law and a Divine lawgiver. Then, in place of a universe revealing God, and a soul made in His image, and a humanity overruled and guided by Him, they present to us as something stronger and surer – an intuition or a feeling or an exercise of mere faith. For it is a noticeable and certainly not a promising circumstance, that there is no general agreement as to what that state of mind is on which the weight of the entire edifice of theism is proposed to be rested even among those who profess to possess it. An intuition, a feeling, and a belief are very different things; and not much dependence is to be put on the psychology which is unable to distinguish between them.

Man, say some, knows God by immediate intuition; he needs no argument for His existence, because he perceives Him directly – face to face – without any medium. It is easy to assert this, but obviously the assertion is the merest dogmatism. Not one man in a thousand who understands what he is affirming will dare to claim to have an immediate vision of God, and nothing can be more likely than that the man who makes such a claim is self-deluded. It is not difficult to see how he may be deluded. There is so much that is intuitive involved in the apprehension of God that the apprehension itself may readily be imagined to be intuitive. The intuitive nature of the conditions which it implies may arrest the attention, and the fact that they are simply conditions may be overlooked. The possibility, however, of analysing the apprehension into simpler elements – of showing that it is a complex act, and presupposes conditions that can be indicated – is a conclusive proof that it is no intuition, that our idea of God is no more or otherwise intuitive than our idea of a fellow-man. Besides, what seem intuitions are often really inferences, and not unfrequently erroneous inferences; what seem the immediate dictates of pure reason, or the direct and unclouded perceptions of a special spiritual faculty, may be the conceits of fancy or the products of habit and association, or the reflections of strong feeling. A man must prove to himself, and he must prove to others, that what he takes to be an intuition is an intuition. Is that proof in this case likely to be easier or more conclusive than the proof of the Divine existence? The so-called immediate perception of God must be shown to be a perception and to be immediate; it must be vindicated and verified: and how this is to be done, especially if there be no other reasons for believing in God than itself, it is difficult to conceive. The history of religion, which is what ought to yield the clearest confirmation of the alleged intuition, appears to be from beginning to end a conspicuous contradiction of it. If all men have the spiritual power of directly beholding their Creator – have an immediate vision of God – how happens it that whole nations believe in the most absurd and monstrous gods? that millions of men are ignorant whether there be one god or thousands? that even a people like the Greeks could suppose the highest of their deities to have been born, to have a body, and to have committed the vilest actions? A true power of intuition is little susceptible of growth, and its testimonies vary within narrow limits; any development of which it admits is only slightly due to external conditions, and mainly the necessary consequence of internal activity, of inherent expansibility. It is thus, for example, with the senses of sight and hearing, in so far as they are intuitive. But it is manifestly very different with the religious nature. Its growth is mainly dependent, not on the organic evolution of a particular faculty, but on the general state of the soul, on the one hand; and on the influence of external circumstances – education, example, law, &c. – on the other hand. It is this difference in the character of their development which explains why the deliverances of the senses are so uniform and nearly infallible, while the most cursory survey of the religious world shows us the greatest want of uniformity and truthfulness in religious judgments. The various phases of polytheism and pantheism are inexplicable, if an intuition of God be universally inherent in human nature. Theism is perfectly explicable without intuition, as the evidences for it are numerous, obvious, and strong.

The opinion that man has an intuition or immediate perception of God is untenable; the opinion that he has an immediate feeling of God is absurd. A man feels only in so far as he perceives and knows. Feeling is in consciousness essentially dependent on, and necessarily subsequent to, knowing. Mere feeling – feeling without knowing – is an utterly inconceivable and impossible experience. Admit, however, not only that there may be a mere feeling, but that there is a mere feeling of God. What worth can it have? By supposition – by definition – no knowledge of God underlies and explains it. But in that case, how can any man pretend to get a knowledge of God out of it? What right can any one have to represent it as a source of knowledge of God? I am not aware that these questions have ever been answered except by the merest verbal jugglery. The very men who tell us that we cannot know God, but that we feel Him, tell us also that the feeling of Him is an immediate consciousness of Him, and that immediate consciousness is its own self-evidence, is absolute certainty, or, in other words, the highest and surest knowledge. We do not know God, but we feel Him; however, to feel Him is to know Him, – such is their answer more or less distinctly expressed, or, I should rather say, more or less skilfully concealed. It is at once a Yes and a No, the affirmation of what is denied and the denial of what is affirmed. And it is this because it cannot be anything else – because mere feeling is an impossible experience – and because feeling, so far as it is uncaused and unenlightened by knowledge, testifies only to the folly or insanity of the being which feels. If theism have no other basis than feeling, it is a house which foolish men have built upon the sand. The first storm will cast it down, and no wise man will regret its fall. Whatever is founded on mere emotion – on emotion which is not itself explained and justified by reason – stands but by sufferance; has no right to stand; ought to be cast down and swept from the earth. But the storms which have already in the course of the ages spent their force against theism with no other effect than to make its strength more conspicuous, and to carry away what would have weakened or deformed it, are sufficient to show us that it has been built on eternal truth by the finite human reasons which have been enlightened by Infinite and Divine Reason.

The strangest of all theories as to the foundation of our belief in God is, that it has no foundation at all – that it is a belief which rests upon itself, an act of faith which is its own warrant. We are told that we can neither know that God is nor what God is, but that we can nevertheless believe in God, and ought to believe in Him, and can and ought to act as if we knew His existence and character. But surely belief without a reason must be arbitrary belief, and either to believe or act as if we knew what we do not know, can never be conduct to be justified, much less commended. Faith which is not rational is faith which ought to be rejected. We cannot believe what we do not know or think that we know. We have no right to believe more than we know. I know, for example, that the grass grows, and consequently I believe, and am justified in believing, that it grows. I do not know how the grass grows, and I do not believe how it grows; I can justify my believing about its growth nothing beyond what I know to be true. This law of belief is as binding for the highest as for the lowliest objects. If I have no reason for believing that there is a God, I have no right to believe that there is a God. If I do not know that God is infinite, I am bound not to believe that He is infinite. Belief is inseparable from knowledge, and ought to be precisely coextensive with knowledge. Those who deny this fundamental truth will always be found employing the words knowledge and belief in a capricious and misleading way.13

III

When man apprehends God as powerful, wise, and good – as possessed of will, reason, and righteousness – obviously he thinks of Him as bearing some likeness to himself, as having in an infinite or perfect measure qualities which human creatures have in a finite and imperfect measure. This can be no stumbling-block to any one who believes that God made man in His image, after His likeness. If man be in some respects like God, God must, of course, be in some respects like man. Power and freedom, knowledge and wisdom, love, goodness, and justice, are, according to this view, finitely in man, because they are infinitely in God. But it is a view which excites in certain minds deep aversion. There are men who protest, in the name of religion, in the name of God, against this anthropomorphic theism, as they call it. According to them, to attribute to God any human qualities, even the highest and best, is to limit and degrade Him – is contrary to reason and contrary to piety – is idolatrous and profane. The Psalmist represents the Lord as reproaching the wicked for supposing that He was like them in their wickedness – "altogether such an one as themselves;" but the modern philosophers to whom I am referring are horrified at the thought that the most righteous man, even in his righteousness, has any likeness to God. According to them, to think of God as wise is to dishonour Him, and to declare Him holy is to calumniate Him. To think of Him as foolish, and to pronounce Him wicked, are, in their eyes, only a little more irreverent and no more irrational.

"We must not fall down and worship," writes one of these philosophers, "as the source of our life and virtue, the image which our own minds have set up. Why is such idolatry any better than that of the old wood and stone? If we worship the creations of our minds, why not also those of our hands? The one is, indeed, a more refined self-adoration than the other; but the radical error remains the same in both. The old idolaters were wrong, not because they worshipped themselves, but because they worshipped their creation as if it were their creator; and how can any anthropomorphic theory 'escape the same condemnation'?"14 The writer does not see that God can only be thought of as wise and righteous and free because the mind of man is His creation, so that His being thus thought of can be no proof that He is its creation. The fact that we can think of God as wise and righteous and free is no evidence that He is an image which our own minds have set up. The man who draws such an inference from such a premiss can be no dispassionate reasoner. And certainly the fact that we can think of God as possessed of intellectual and moral perfections is no reason for our not falling down and worshipping Him, and no evidence that our doing so is idolatry. To fall down and worship any being whom we do not know to possess these characteristics is what would clearly be idolatry. And this idolatry is what the philosophers to whom I refer are manifestly chargeable with encouraging. When they have rejected the living, personal, righteous, loving God, in whom humanity has so long trusted, they can only suggest as a substitute for Him a mysterious Power which is wholly unknown, and even unknowable. Great is their simplicity if they fancy that they can persuade men to receive any such god as that, or if they fancy that men would be any better for a faith so vague and empty. To believe in we know not what, is directly contrary to reason; to worship it would be "an idolatry no better than that of the old wood and stone." What we know is often not the creation of our minds: the unknowable is in itself nothing at all to us, and, as a thought, is always the mere creation of our minds; it is different for each creature, each mind; it is the mere result and reflection of our finiteness. There can be no unknown or unknowable to an infinite mind. To worship what is unknowable would be, therefore, simply to worship our own ignorance – one of the creations of our minds least worthy, perhaps, of being worshipped. There is, at least, no kind of worship less entitled "to escape condemnation," even as anthropomorphic idolatry, than the worship of the Unknowable, – the god proposed to us by some as the alone true God, belief in whom – perhaps I should rather say, belief in which – is to be the final and perfect reconciliation of science and religion.

All true theism implies a certain likeness between God and man. It holds that God is not merely an all-pervading and all-sustaining Power, but an omniscient Mind and perfectly holy Will. It refuses to think of Him merely according to the analogies of the physical world, as if human reason and human love were less worthy expressions of His perfections than mechanical or brute force. It refers to Him not only "all the majesty of nature, but all the humanity of man." This truth – that there is a likeness between God and man – must, however, be combined with two other truths, otherwise it will lead to the gravest errors.

The first is, that while God and man are both like each other, in that both possess certain excellences, they are utterly unlike, in that God possesses these excellences in all their perfection and in an infinite measure, while man possesses them in a very small degree and violated with many flaws and faults. The highest glory which a man can hope for is, that he should be made wholly into the image of God; but never can God be rightly thought of as mainly, and still less as merely, in the image of man. It was the great error of classic heathendom that it thus conceived of the Divine. "Men," says Heraclitus, "are mortal gods, and the gods immortal men." And the gods of Greece, as represented by her poets and adored by her people, were simply magnified and immortal men – a race closely akin to their worshippers in weaknesses and vices no less than in powers and virtues. They were supposed to be born as men are, to have voice and figure, parts and passions, and even at times to cheat and rail and lie. They reflected all the tendencies of the Greek mind, both good and evil.

Worshippers of the one God can scarcely fall into the same extravagance of error in this respect as the Greeks and Romans did, as all polytheists do; but they can, and often do, fall into the error, and think of God as subject to limits and defects, which are only in themselves. For instance, what is called deism, as distinguished from theism, rests wholly on the conception that the presence and power of God are limited, and that He acts in the manner to which man as a finite creature is restricted. The deist thinks of God as outside of and away from the universe; he thinks of the universe as a mechanism which God has contrived, and which He has endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which it is able to sustain itself in existence, and to perform its work so as to save God, as it were, all further trouble and labour concerning it. It is a great gain for us to have a machine doing what we desire without our needing to pay any attention to it or even to be present where it is, because we cannot give our attention to more than one object at one and the same instant of time, and cannot be present at the same time in more places than one; but those who liken God to man in this respect, divest Him of His omnipresence and omnipotence, and represent Him as characterised in some measure by their own impotency. There is a truth which Pantheism often claims as peculiarly and distinctively its own, – the truth that in God we and all things live, and move, and have our being – that of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things, – but which theism must sincerely and fully appropriate as one of its simplest and most certain elements, otherwise the charge against it of being a false and presumptuous likening of God to man will be warranted. We must not think of Him as "an absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of His universe, and 'seeing it go'" – as a God at hand but not afar off, or afar off but not at hand – as here, not there, or there, not here; but we must think of Him as everywhere present, everywhere active – as at once the source of all order, the spring of all life, and the ground of all affection and thought.

We need to be still more on our guard against limiting His wisdom or righteousness or love, as it is what we are still more prone to do. These attributes of God are often thought of in the meanest and most unworthy ways; and doubtless it has to a large extent been horror at the consequent degradation of the idea of God which has made some men refuse to assign to Him any of the properties of humanity, saying, with Xenophanes, that if the animals could think, they would imagine the Deity to be in their likeness – and with Spinoza, that if a circle could think, it would suppose His essence to be circularity. But this is to flee from one extreme to another extreme, from one error to a still more terrible error, through utterly failing to distinguish between perfection and imperfection, between what ought and what ought not to be ascribed to God. Circularity, animal forms and dispositions, human limitations – these are imperfections, and we must not refer them to God; but intelligence, righteousness, love – these are so little in their own nature imperfections that an intelligent being, however feeble, would be more excellent than an omnipotent and omnipresent being destitute of intelligence; and righteousness and love are as much superior to mere intelligence as it is to mere power and magnitude. To ascribe these to God, if we only ascribe them to Him in infinite perfection, is no presumption, no error; not to ascribe them to Him is the greatest presumption, the most lamentable error.