Chapter II: The Christian Doctrine of God (1)

AUBREY MOORE.

I. The object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called 'proofs' of the existence of God, but to shew what the Christian doctrine of God is, and how it has grown to be what it is, out of the antagonisms of earlier days; and then to ask--What fuller realization of God's revelation of Himself is He giving us through the contradictions and struggles of to-day? If it is true that 'the only ultimate test of reality is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all efforts to change them[59],' it is of first importance to discover what it is which, through all the struggles of past history, the religious nature of man has persistently clung to. Much which was once dear to the religious consciousness, and which seemed at the time to be an integral part of the religious idea, has been given up. A former age abandoned it with regret, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding. A later age looks back with thankfulness, and recognises 'the good Hand of our God' leading us to truer knowledge of Himself.

It would be idle to deny, after all due allowance has been made for the natural tendency to believe that the present is the critical moment, not only for us, but for the world at large, that the crisis of the present day is a very real one, and that the religious view of God is feeling the effects of the change, which is modifying our views of the world and man. When such a fundamental idea is challenged, men are naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally onesided attitudes, to commit themselves either to a policy of unintelligent protest, or to a policy of unconditional surrender. And if the one is needlessly despairing, the other is unwarrantably sanguine. The one asks,--'How much must I give up, of what religion has always been to me, that a little of the old may survive amidst the new?' The other asks,--'How little of the old need I keep, so as not to interfere with the ready acceptance of the new?' The one view is pessimist, the other optimist. Both have their representatives in our day, and each party is profoundly conscious of the danger to which the other is exposed. The advocates of the one view, finding themselves 'in a place where two seas meet,' think it safer to 'run the ship aground'; those of the other 'seeing they cannot bear up against the wind' prefer to 'let her drive.' But if the spirit of the one is merely protestant, the spirit of the other is certainly not catholic.

In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to approach the question in the full conviction that the revelation of God in Christ is both true and complete, and yet that every new truth which flows in from the side of science, or metaphysics, or the experience of social and political life, is designed in God's providence to make that revelation real, by bringing out its hidden truths. It is in this sense that the Christian revelation of God claims to be both final and progressive; final, for Christians know but one Christ and do not 'look for another'; progressive, because Christianity claims each new truth as enriching our knowledge of God, and bringing out into greater clearness and distinctness some half-understood fragment of its own teaching. There are, no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are ready to treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books in the library of Alexandria,--'they agree with the Koran and are unnecessary, or they disagree with it and must be destroyed.' But an intelligent Christian will not ask, 'Does this new truth agree with or contradict the letter of the Bible?' but 'How does it interpret and help us to understand the Bible?' And so with regard to all truth, whether it comes from the side of science, or history, or criticism, he adopts neither the method of protest nor the method of surrender, but the method of assimilation. In the face of new discoveries, the only question he is anxious to answer is this,--'What old truth will they explain, or enlighten, or make real to us? What is this new world of life and interest which is awaiting its consecration? "Truth is an ever-flowing river, into which streams flow in from many sides[60]." What is this new stream which is about to empty itself, as all knowledge must, into the great flood of Divine truth, "that the earth may be filled with the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea"?'

Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the assimilation of the new truths will go on as a matter of course. The Christian knows that the acceptance of truth is a moral, as well as an intellectual, matter, and in the moral world there is no place for _laisser faire_. He expects to be called upon to struggle; he expects that the struggle will need his utmost effort, moral and intellectual. His work is both to keep and to claim; to hold fast the faith 'once for all delivered to the saints,' and yet to see in every fragment of truth a real revelation of the mind and will of God. He has no cut and dried answer to objections; he does not boast that he has no difficulties. But he does claim to look out upon the difficulties of his day, not only fearlessly, but with hope and trust. He knows that Christianity must triumph in the end, but he does not expect all difficulties to be removed in a moment. And he is strong enough, if need be, to wait.

II. Whether anyone is really guilty of what Hume calls the 'multiplied indiscretion and imprudence' of dogmatic atheism, whether positivism can rightly be so classed, whether agnosticism is not atheism to all intents and purposes, are questions which fortunately lie outside the scope of the present enquiry. As for polytheism it has ceased to exist in the civilised world. Every theist is, by a rational necessity, a monotheist. But we find ourselves, in the present day, face to face with two different views of God, which though they constantly, perhaps generally, overlap, and even sometimes coincide, yet imply different points of view, and by a process of abstraction can be held apart and contrasted with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers and men of science; many men of science and philosophers are devout Christians. But the God of religion is not the God of science and philosophy. Ideally, everyone will allow that the religious idea of God, and the scientific and philosophical idea of God must be identical, but in actual fact it is not so, and in the earlier stages of the development of both, there is a real antagonism. To accept this antagonism as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, to compel one to give way to the other. We cannot long hold two contradictory truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose. We may have Religion or Philosophy, but not both.

Very few, however, are prepared to go this length. It is much more usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting one of two alternative methods.

(1) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory, in which religion is allotted to faith, and philosophy and science to reason. Such an expedient, though not uncommonly, and perhaps even wisely, adopted by individuals, who refuse to give up either of two truths because they cannot harmonize them, becomes ridiculous when seriously proposed as a solution of the difficulty. Moreover the proposed division of territory is unfair to start with. 'Give us the Knowable, and you shall have the rest, which is far the larger half,' sounds like a liberal offer made by science to religion, till we remember that every advance in knowledge transfers something from the side of the unknown to the side of the known, in violation of the original agreement. Mr. Herbert Spencer calls this division of territory a 'reconciliation[61].' But if anything in the world could make religion hate and fear science and oppose the advance of knowledge, it is to find itself compelled to sit still and watch the slow but sure filching away of its territory by an alien power. We say nothing here of the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer's division ignores the truth that knowledge of correlatives must be of the same kind[62], and that if knowledge has to do with one and faith with the other, either faith must be a sort of knowledge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely notice the unfairness of a division which assumes rationality for science, and leaves irrationality to religion.

Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people, who would be horrified at the thought that they had borrowed from Agnosticism, and who have nevertheless made a similar division of territory. They are the people who stake all upon what reason cannot do. They have no interest in the progress of knowledge. The present gaps in science are their stronghold, and they naturally resist every forward step in knowledge as long as they can, because each new discovery limits the area in which alone, according to their imperfect view, faith can live. Every triumph of science on this theory, as on Mr. Herbert Spencer's, becomes a loss, not a gain, to religion. The very existence of God is bound up with that part of His work in nature which we cannot understand, and, as a consequence, we reach the paradox that the more we know of His working, the less proof we have that He exists. Modern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argument. It is the devout form of the worship of the unknowable. Yet it is no wonder that people who take refuge in gaps find themselves awkwardly placed when the gaps begin to close.

(2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted, for it fits in well with the vagueness and want of precision in language, which is at a premium in dealing with religious questions. This consists in frittering away the meaning of definite terms till they are available for anything, or adopting a neutral term which, by a little management and stretching, will include opposites. This is the method of indefinite inclusion. The strength of the former alternative lay in the appearance of sharp scientific delimitation of territory: the strength of the latter in its unlimited comprehensiveness. A term is gradually stripped of the associations which make it what it is, it is 'defecated to a pure transparency,' and then it is ready for use. The term 'God' is made merely 'a synonym for nature[63]'; religion becomes 'habitual and permanent admiration[64],' or 'devout submission of the heart and will to the laws of nature[65]'; enthusiasm does duty for worship, and the antagonism between religion and anything else disappears.

Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against intolerance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity, there is not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper may be both Christian and Catholic. But the method is a radically false one. It is not a real, but only an abstract, unity which can be reached by thinking away of differences. As Dr. Martineau says, in his excellent criticism of this method, 'You vainly propose an _cirenicon_ by corruption of a word.' 'The disputes between science and faith can no more be closed by inventing "religions of culture" than the boundary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in the air[66].' 'A God that is merely nature, a Theism without God; a Religion forfeited only by the "nil admirari" can never reconcile the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind[67].' As well might we attempt to reconcile the partizans of the gold and silver shields by assuring them that in reality the shields were silver gilt.

We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between the religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God. The counter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism on the one side, and of pantheism and rationalism on the other, serve to bring out the antithesis of the two views. No division of territory is possible. There may be many sciences, each with its defined range of subject-matter; but there can be only one God. And both religion and philosophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of thought and feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms help us to a reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue. The conflict is too real and too keenly felt to admit of any patched-up peace. The idea of God, which is to claim alike the allegiance of religion and philosophy, must not be the result of compromise, but must really and fully satisfy the demands of both.

III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction from one another? We are at once met by the difficulty of defining religion. But if we cannot define religion, or trace it back to its hidden source, we can at least discover its characteristics, as we know it after it has emerged from the obscurity of prehistoric times, and before any conscious attempt has been made to reconcile religion and philosophy, or find a middle term between them.

Now traditional definitions of religion, given as it were from within, and constructed with no view of opposition to, or reconciliation with, philosophy, are agreed in representing religion as a relation between man and the object or objects of his worship, and this implies, not only the inferiority of the worshipper to that which he worships, but also something of likeness between the related terms, since, as even Strauss allows, in our inmost nature we feel a kinship between ourselves and that on which we depend[68]. It is quite indifferent which of the rival etymologies of the word 'religion' we adopt[69]. S. Augustine[70], following Lactantius, speaks of religion as 'the bond which binds us to One Omnipotent God.' S. Thomas[71] adopts almost unchanged the definition given by Cicero: it is 'that virtue which has to do with the worship of a higher nature known as the Divine.' It is not too much to say that, for the modern religious world, religion implies at least the practical belief in a real and conscious relation between the inner life of man and an unseen Being. And whatever of mystery there may be about that unseen Being, it would seem as if a real relationship demands so much of likeness in the related terms, as is implied in personality.

It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to distinguish between the religious and the philosophical ideas of God. It is not that religion and philosophy necessarily contradict or exclude one another, but that they approach the problem with different interests. Religion demands a personal object, be that object one or many. It is committed to the belief in a moral relationship between God and man. Philosophy demands unity, whether personal or impersonal. For philosophy is nothing if it does not completely unify knowledge. And it seems as if each finds lacking in the other that which it values most and thinks of first. The only hope, then, of reconciliation is in the idea of God as personal, and yet one. So long as religion retains a trace of polytheism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say to it. So long as philosophy has no room for a personal God, religion must exclude philosophy. The whole issue of the controversy lies here. If the belief in a personal God is to be called anthropomorphism, religion is hopelessly anthropomorphic. With the disappearance of anthropomorphism in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees[72], religion disappears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, though our anthropomorphism may be crude or critical[73]. We do not read our full selves into the lower world, because we are higher than it; we do not transfer to God all that belongs to our own self-consciousness, because we know that He is infinitely greater than we are. But we should be wrong not to interpret Him by the highest category within our reach, and think of Him as self-conscious life. Christianity refuses to call this anthropomorphism, though it stands or falls with the belief that, in his personality, man is in the image of God. An anthropomorphic view of God for a Christian means heathenism or heresy: a theomorphic view of man is of the essence of his faith[74].

The religious idea of God may, of course, become philosophical without ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a religion for man as a rational being it must become so. But there is a point beyond which, in its desire to include philosophy, religion cannot go. It cannot afford to give up its primary assumption of a moral relationship between God and man. When that point is surrendered or obscured the old religious terms become increasingly inapplicable, and we find ourselves falling back more and more on their supposed philosophical equivalents, the 'Infinite' or the 'Absolute,' or the Universal Substance, or the Eternal Consciousness, or the First Cause, or the Omnipresent Energy. But these terms, which metaphysicians rightly claim, have no meaning for the religious consciousness, while, in metaphysics proper 'God' is as much a borrowed term as 'sin' is in non-religious ethics. Moral evil is 'sin' only to those who believe in God; and the infinite is only 'God' to those in whom it suggests a superhuman personality with whom they are in conscious relation. Even when religion and philosophy both agree to speak of God as 'the Infinite,' for the one it is an adjective, for the other a substantive. The moment we abandon the idea of God as personal, religion becomes merged in philosophy, and all that properly constitutes religion disappears. God may exist for us still as the keystone in the arch of knowledge, but He is no longer, except as a metaphor, 'our Father, which is in heaven.'

IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from extensions of the term made in the interests of a reconciliation, assumes a moral relationship, the relationship of personal beings, as existing between man and the Object of his worship. When this ceases, religion ceases: when this begins, religion begins. But of the beginnings of religion we know nothing. Prehistoric history is the monopoly of those who have a theory to defend. But we may take it as proven that it is at least as true that man is a religious, as that he is a rational, animal. 'Look out for a people,' says Hume, 'entirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes[75].' Hume's statement is confirmed by the fact that those who would prove that there is no innate consciousness of Deity are driven to appeal to the case of deaf mutes and degraded savages[76]. Whether monotheism was a discovery or a recovery, whether it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or whether polytheism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we decide the priority of claim to the title of religion as between nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The farther we go back in history the more obviously true is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought against religion. The natural tendency to treat the object of religion as personal, exists long before any attempt is made to define the conditions or meaning of personality, and includes much which is afterwards abandoned. For religion in its earliest stages is instinctive, not reasoned. It is 'naively objective.' It is little careful to clear up its idea of the nature and character of its God. It is still less anxious to prove His existence. It is only when conscience grows strong, and dares to challenge the religion which had been instinctively accepted, that men learn to see that God not only is, but must be, the expression of the highest known morality. It is only when the light of conscious reason is turned back upon religious ideas, that polytheism becomes not merely untrue, but impossible and inconceivable. What religion starts with is not any theory of the world, but an unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however conceived of, who shall be in a greater or less degree like the worshipper, but raised above him by the addition of power, if not omnipotence; greatness, if not infinity; wisdom, if not omniscience.

But, while implying from the first something of a moral relationship between man and the object of his worship, religion does not always conceive of that Object as necessarily holy or perfectly wise. There are religions which are both immoral and childish. They have in them no principle of growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of moral and intellectual progress. _Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum_ is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is argued, 'Religion is the enemy of morals and of science. Away with it. It is a mere matter of feeling, which cannot and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of conscience and reason.' Such a view has both truth and falsehood in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify itself to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the rest. There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out[77], a kind of idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has exposed many superstitions only to become itself the final object of superstition. Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only 're-coordinating states of consciousness already coordinated in certain simpler ways,' and that that which is unreasoned is not always irrational. Rationality in man is not shut up in one air-tight compartment. 'There is no feeling or volition which does not contain in it an element of knowledge[78].' This is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion as 'reason talking naively.' You can no more shut up faith to the compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true religion is that which can make good its claim.

The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the process by which that which has its secret birthplace behind all the distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim on man, absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his moral and intellectual being, as conscience and reason successively emerge into conscious activity: while, from another point of view, it is the progressive purification of the religious idea of God till He is revealed as, what He is to a thinking Christian of to-day, the Object of reverent worship, the moral ideal, the truth of nature and of man.

Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result of a process with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolution by antagonism. The true has to be separated from the false. Immoral and irrational conceptions of God have to be thrown aside. It is only after what looks like an internecine struggle between religion and morality that man learns the truth about the character of God, and only after a conflict with philosophy and science, which seems to threaten the very life of religion, that he learns what can be known of the Divine Nature. For among religions, too, there is a struggle for existence, in which the fittest survive. And the test of fitness is the power to assimilate and promote moral and intellectual truth, and so to satisfy the whole man. An ideally perfect religion is not 'morality touched by emotion,' but a worship which reflects itself in the highest known morality, and is interpreted and justified to itself by reason. It is this process, as we know it in history, that we proceed to examine.

V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary forms, takes for granted some relationship of likeness between the worshipper and the Object or objects of his worship, by no means implies that all religion associates the highest morality with its idea of God. On the contrary, we know that not only are there immoral religions, but that immorality sometimes lingers on in religion long after it is condemned elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a religious duty what, according to their thinking, nothing but religion would justify. We cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the moral condition of a people by the received teaching about its gods, for morality is often far in advance of religion, and the character which in a god or goddess is protected by a religious halo is looked upon as hateful or impure in man or woman. The sense of dependence, which, though it does not constitute the whole, is yet an essential element in the religious consciousness, the awe which, in a low state of development, shews itself in a grovelling fear of the invisible beings, makes it impossible for the worshipper to judge his god by the standard he applies to his fellow man. The god may be lustful, but his lusts must be respected; he is strong and vengeful and must by all means be kept in a good temper, cajoled, or outwitted, or bribed, or humoured. His commands must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and bye the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert its independent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion. The relations between religion and morals become more strained. Some heretic dares to say that the Gods are immoral; that they are men 'writ large,' and bad men too. Their claim to reverence is challenged. There is a moral awakening. Soon the old religion is treated with scorn and contempt, and either a new religion takes its place, coming in as it were on the crest of the wave of moral reformation, or the old religion is purified and becomes the foster-mother of the new morality, giving to it a divine sanction, and receiving from it in turn new strength and vitality. Or failing these, men abandon religion in the supposed interest of morals. A religion with mysteries may be tolerated, but a religion once seen to be immoral is at an end. For a time ethics, with a background of metaphysics or politics, prevails, but gradually it tends to drift into a mere prudentialism, while a merely mystical philosophy tries in vain to satisfy those deeper instincts which reach out to the unseen.

In the history of Greek thought the collision came in the days of Xenophanes. Long before what is sometimes called the era of conscious morality, Greece had outgrown its traditional religion. Greek philosophy at its birth was mythology rationalized, and the beginning of independent morality in Greece shewed itself in a criticism of the religious teaching of Homer and Hesiod. The scathing satire of Xenophanes reminds us at times of the way in which Isaiah speaks of the idolatry of his day. It is not only wrong, it is capable of a _reductio ad absurdum_. Anthropomorphism, immorality, childish folly--these are the charges which Xenophanes brings against the worship of Magna Graecia. Anaxagoras had already been banished for suggesting that the god Helios was a mass of molten iron, but Xenophanes turns into open ridicule the religion of his day.

'Homer and Hesiod,' he says, 'ascribe to the gods all that among men is held shameful and blameworthy, theft, adultery, and deceit[79].'

'One God there is mightiest among gods and men, who neither in form nor thought is like to men. Yet mortals think the gods are born and have shape and voice and raiment like themselves. Surely if lions and cows had hands, and could grave with their hands and do as men do, they too would make gods like themselves, horses would have horse-like gods, and cows gods with horns and hoofs[80].'

When the age of moral philosophy begins, amidst the unsettlement of the sophistic period, the same protest is taken up by Plato. In Xenophanes the protest of the reason and the conscience went together. In Plato the criticism of the received theology is more distinctly a moral criticism. God cannot lie or deceive. He cannot be the cause of evil. He is good, and only the source of good. He is true in word and deed. If not, we cannot reverence Him. It cannot be true that the gods give way to violent emotions, still less to sensuality and envy and strife[81]. 'For God cannot be unrighteous, He must be perfectly righteous, and none is like Him save the most righteous among men[82].'

Here we have a collision between an immoral religious conception of God and a morality which is becoming conscious of its own strength. And what was the result? Religion in Greece received its death blow. It had no real recuperative power. It could not absorb and claim the new morality. Homer and Hesiod, the 'Bible' of the Athenian, were too profoundly immoral. A Kephalus might go back in silent protest to his sacrifice, but the youth of Athens turned from religion to morality. When we pass from Plato to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in morals has disappeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and has no place in the world of practical life. The religious element has disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in the mysticism of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In metaphysics and science we owe everything to the Greeks; in religion, as distinguished from theology, we owe nothing.

From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone, among the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern world trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the religion of the Old Testament as 'revealed' in contrast with all other pre-Christian religions. Is that distinction tenable? If so, what does it mean, and what justifies us in making it? It is clear that the answer must be sought in what the Old Testament revelation is, rather than in the process by which the Jews became the appointed depositaries of it. For whatever were the prehistoric elements out of which the religion of Israel came, whether Assyrian or Accadian or Indo-German or Egyptian, and whatever were the steps by which Israel was led[83] to that doctrine of God which constituted its mission and its message to the world, as we look back from the point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of Israel stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no Pagan religion stands[84]. The Law and the Prophets were for all the world 'a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and the ordering of the soul[85].' If it is true that the Bible only records the later and more important stages in a process which began in prehistoric times amidst the various forms of polytheistic worship, even if it could be shewn that the history, as we have it, has been subjected to successive revisions, that its laws have been codified, its ritual elaborated, its symbolism interpreted, it would still remain true that the religion of Israel, which begins where its history begins, and of which, indeed, its history is little more than the vehicle, is bound up with the assertion of Monotheism. The central fact of its revelation is this, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord.' The central utterance of its law is, 'Thou shalt have none other gods but Me.' The unity of God, that truth which other religions were feeling after and tending towards, stands out clearly and distinctly as the characteristic of the religion of Israel, and is fearlessly claimed as an inheritance from the patriarchal age.

And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity of God is the assumption that this One God is a God of Righteousness. He is 'a God of truth and without iniquity; just and right is He.' Here, again, it was not that the religion of Israel asserted what other religions denied, but that Israel proclaimed clearly and with increasing certainty a truth which the highest contemporary religions were struggling to express. In the religion of Israel the pre-Christian world rose to articulate religious utterance. Its highest and truest intuitions found a voice. Israel had yet much to learn and much to unlearn as to what true morality is. It had anthropomorphisms of thought and language to get rid of. It had to rise in Psalmist and Prophet to moral heights unknown to the patriarchal age. But the remarkable thing is that the claim is made. Morality is claimed for God: God is declared to be irrevocably on the side of what man knows as righteousness. And this truth is proclaimed not as a discovery but as a revelation from God Himself. It was this, not less than the proclamation of monotheism, which made the teaching of the Old Testament what it was. It consciously transformed the natural law of 'might is right' into the moral truth that 'right is might.'

And the consequences of this new departure in the religious history of man were far-reaching. It made the difference between the religion of Israel and all other religions a difference not merely of degree but of kind. The worship of the Lord and the worship of the heathen gods becomes not only a conflict between the true and the false in religion, but between the moral and the immoral in practice. More than this, it changes the mere emotional feeling of awe and dependence on invisible powers into trust and confidence. If God is irrevocably on the side of right, the nation or the individual, that is struggling for the right, is fighting on the side of God. It was this which made the great Hebrew leaders, and the Psalmists after them, take it for granted that their cause was the cause of God, and that the Lord of Hosts was with them. Even the wars of extermination were the expression in act of the utter antagonism between good and evil, the cause of God and that of His enemies. And when Saul spared Agag it was from no excess of charity, no glimpse of a higher morality; it was an act of moral weakness. Finally, this claim of morality for God precluded the possibility of such a collision as took place in the history of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals in the Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect character[86] was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the character of God. Step by step the religious idea advanced with moral progress. And, as they advance, the contrast with other religions becomes more marked. 'It was the final distinction between Polytheism and the religion of Israel that the former emphasized power, the latter the moral element to which it subordinated and conjoined power[87].' And this moral conception of God was constantly kept before the people. If they lapse into idolatry and adopt heathen practices and heathen ideas of God, the prophets are ready with the warning that God is the God of Israel, only because Israel is a chosen people to bear His name and His truth before the world; and if they are false to their mission, they will be rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system loses its moral significance as the recognition of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of the sinner, and the forward-pointing look towards the great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes merely ritual, and perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to denounce even the divinely ordered sacrifices as things which God hates.

Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was made the essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with a halo of religious emotion round it. It was that the religious and the moral consciousness are brought together in a real unity. To love the Lord is to hate evil. God is One who gives His blessing to the righteous, while the ungodly and him that delighteth in wickedness doth His soul abhor. He, then, who would ascend into the hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place, must have clean hands, and a pure heart, and a lowly mind. The Lord God is holy. He has no pleasure in wickedness, neither shall any evil dwell with Him. Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. The sacrifice that He loves is the sacrifice of righteousness. He is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. What He requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with his God.

All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clearness in the Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that earlier claim made by the religion of Israel, that the true God is on the side of righteousness, and that to be false to righteousness is to be a traitor to God. In this union of religion and morality neither is sacrificed to the other. Each gains from its union with the other. The religious idea of God, and the religious emotions which gather round it, are progressively purified with the growth of moral ideas; and morality receives new life and strength when the moral law is seen to be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous God, and moral evil is known as 'sin' against a Personal Being. The earnest moral protest which in Greece was directed against the national religion, is found in the Old Testament making common cause with the national religion against the immoral beliefs of heathenism. Hence the Jew was not called upon, as the Greek was, to choose between his religion and his conscience. He never felt the strain which men feel in the present day, when a high and pure morality seems ranged against religious faith. For the Jew every advance in moral insight purified, while it justified, that idea of God, which he believed had come down to him from the 'Father of the Faithful.' His hope of immortality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of the God of Israel, were alike based upon the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy, and that the Righteous One could not fail His people, or suffer His holy One to see corruption. Even though with the growth of morality, and the fuller unfolding of the character of God, there came, like a shadow cast by light, the deepening consciousness of sin as the barrier between man and God, the Jew refused to believe that the separation was for ever. Sin was a disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not free himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to, with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should come to Zion and save His people from their sins.

The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a continuation and development of the religion of Israel, and claimed to be the fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a 'republication' of the highest truth about God which had been realized hitherto. For it came 'not to destroy but to fulfil.' God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally Righteous. Not sacrifice but holiness, not external 'works' but inward 'faith,' not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of God--this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel. But Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel of God, and the children of faithful Abraham, in whom, according to the ancient promise, all the families of the earth should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and west and north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as one family under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, as the Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Revealer of the Father. For 'no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.' What fresh characteristics, then, has this new revelation to add to the Old Testament teaching about God? He is still One, the only God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy, 'Who wills not the death of the sinner.' But more than all this, He is now revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One Father of humanity, Whose only begotten Son is Incarnate and 'made man that we may be made God.' Not one jot or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of Righteousness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and uncompromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, is not the invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which some would reduce it. 'The highest righteousness of the Old Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the Mount[88].' The New Testament,' it has been said, 'with all its glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book[89].' For the goodness and the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and the concave in His moral nature. But what seized upon the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation of Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and compassion of this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this which shone out in the character of Christ, He was Very God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living as man among men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only realizing in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral regeneration, of which the world had never dreamed.

The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon the Old Testament revelation consists then, not only in the new truth it teaches as to the character of God, but in the new relation which it establishes between God and man. So soon as men learn the Old Testament truth that God is eternally on the side of righteousness, the awe and cringing fear, which lies behind heathen religions, and justifies us in calling them superstitions, gives place to trustful confidence, which deepens into faith, and gathers round it those affections and desires for union with God which find expression in the book of Psalms. The saints of the Old Testament could 'rest in the Lord' and wait for the vindication of His Righteousness in human life; they could yearn for His presence and hope for the day when they should 'see the King in His beauty.' But they were yet separated from Him by the unobliterated fact of sin. Enoch 'walked with God,' Abraham was called 'the friend of God,' Moses 'the Lord knew face to face,' David was 'a man after God's own heart,' Daniel 'a man greatly beloved.' But one and all of these fell short, and necessarily fell short, of the closeness of that union which is the Christian's birthright. In the Gospel, God is revealed as one with man. And this truth changed the whole attitude and atmosphere of worship. There was worship still, for humanity was not merged and lost in Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the statement[90] that 'in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is partaker of the Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation of Dependence but of Love.' Rather the antithesis between dependence and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out fear, yet leaves reverence, so the consciousness of union with God, as distinct from absorption in Him, while it destroys the last remnant of what is servile and degrading in religious emotion, and gives man freedom, yet gives the freedom of loving dependence upon God. And by this gift it sets free new affections and appeals to new motives. It was the assured consciousness of union with God which gave the first Christians their power in the great moral struggles of their day. Their moral ideal with its loftiness, its purity, its perfect truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have paralyzed effort, had they not believed that they were one with Him Who had not only proclaimed but realized it, that they could do all things through Christ which strengthened them. And the horror of sin, which was a characteristic note of Christian ethics, was due to the same fact. Unrighteousness, not only as under the Old Testament, ranged a man on the side of the enemies of God, but according to its degree tended to break the supernatural bond which through the Incarnation united men with God. Impurity, which meant so little for the civilized world of the first Christian centuries, was for the Christian not defilement only, but sacrilege, for his body was God's temple. The love of the world was enmity against God, yet the neglect of social duties, and of all that is now summed up in the 'service of man,' was for the Christian _ipso facto_ the declaring himself outside the love of God, just as, conversely, the love of the brethren was the proof that he had 'passed from death unto life.'

Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral consciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament, but both are now raised to their highest level. Free scope is given for the development of both, and the satisfaction of the demands of both, in Christian life and Christian worship. Side by side they fought and triumphed over heathenism, taking up and assimilating all that was best and truest in non-Christian ethics. And though Christians were long in learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed as if a real conflict between religion and morals, within the area of Christianity, was impossible.

And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity, such a conflict has come about. Every moral reformation within the Church was a protest of the conscience against unworthy views of God; every new Order that was founded was a nursery of moral reformation. Yet every protest against formalism and unreality in religion, every attack on ecclesiasticism and 'priestcraft' in the Church, or on worldliness and laxity in professing Christians, owed its strength to the reassertion of the truth, that in the Christian idea religion and morals are inseparably united. The moral reformer always claimed Christianity on his side, when attacking the Christianity of his day. This was conspicuously so in the great moral upheaval of the sixteenth century. In actual fact, religion and morality had separated. And the nearer one got to the centre of Western Christendom, the more open and unabashed the neglect of morality was. In Italy of the fifteenth century renaissance we see, in strange confusion, 'all that we love in art, and all that we loathe in man[91].' It seemed as if, as in the old riddle, a swarm of bees had settled in the dead lion's carcass, and there was sweetness instead of strength, corruption where once was life. When the new century opened, Borgia was the supreme Bishop of the West, and the strength of the protest of Christianity against immorality may be gathered from the list of prices to be paid to the pardoner. The devout retired from the contest into the severer discipline of the monastic life, and hoped against hope for the days of a _Papa angelicus_, who never came. Yet when the strained relations of religion and morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to those, who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion was outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place. They appealed from the Christianity of the sixteenth century to the Christianity of Christ. Even of those who, in their fear of popery, broke away farthest from the Christian idea of God, all, if we except the Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on their side. It was a genuine moral revolt against a religion which had come to tolerate immorality. The hatred of 'ecclesiasticism' and 'sacerdotalism' was not at first a rejection of the Church and the Priesthood, but a protest against anything which, under the sacred name of religion, becomes a cover for unreality, or makes sin a thing easy to be atoned for. The Reformation was a moral protest, and its results were seen within as well as outside the Roman communion. The Council of Trent was a reforming Council; the Jesuits were the children of the Reformation; and Roman Christianity in the strength of its own moral revival, even in the moment of defeat, became again 'a conquering power[92].'

On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a protest in favour of a moral religion and a belief in a God who hates iniquity, have bequeathed to the world a legacy of immorality, of which they never dreamt, and of which we, in the present day, are feeling the full effects. Lutheranism starts with the belief that God is love: Calvinism with the conception of God as power. With the former, the desire, at all costs, to guard the belief in the freedom of God's grace, led to a morbid fear of righteousness, as if it were somehow a rival to faith. With the latter, a one-sided view of the power of God gradually obscured the fact that righteousness and justice eternally condition its exercise. If the one was, as history shews us, in constant danger of Antinomian developments, the other struck at the root of morality by making God Himself unjust. Forensic fictions of substitution, immoral theories of the Atonement, 'the rending asunder of the Trinity' and the opposing of the Divine Persons, like parties in a lawsuit[93], were the natural corollaries of a theory which taught that God was above morality and man beneath it.

How deeply these false views of God have influenced English religious thought is shewn by the fact that every attack on the moral, as distinguished from the intellectual position of Christianity, is demonstrably an attack on that which is not Christianity, but a mediaeval or modern perversion of it. J. S. Mill's well-known words[94], 'I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures,' was a noble assertion of 'immutable morality' against a religion, which alas! he mistook for Christianity. The conscience of to-day,--and it is a real gain that it should be so,--refuses to believe that the _imprimatur_ of religion can be given to that which is not good, or that God would put us to moral confusion. It would rather give up religion altogether than accept one which will not endorse and advance our highest moral ideas.

But men do not always stop to make the necessary distinctions. On the one side they see a traditional view of religion which they cannot harmonise with the highest morality; on the other, they see a morality, which, though it has grown up under the shadow and shelter of religion, seems strong enough to stand alone. And their first thought is 'Away with religion. We have outgrown it. Henceforward we will have morals unencumbered by religion.' What would be the effect on the morals of a nation of thus renouncing the religious sanction it is not safe to predict. In individuals certainly it sometimes has disastrous results. But there is one thing which those who talk about the 'secularization of morals[95]' seldom take into account, and that is the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion. The religious consciousness always refuses to be treated as defunct, and the religious emotions, if they no longer find their object in a God of Righteousness, and are no longer controlled by morality, will not be satisfied with the worship of the Unknowable or of idealized humanity, but will avenge themselves, as they have done again and again, in superstition[96].