Chapter VII: Section II: Preservation

I. Definition of Preservation.

Preservation is that continuous agency of God by which he maintains in existence the things he has created, together with the properties and powers with which he has endowed them. As the doctrine of creation is our attempt to explain the existence of the universe, so the doctrine of Preservation is our attempt to explain its continuance.

In explanation we remark:

(_a_) Preservation is not creation, for preservation presupposes creation. That which is preserved must already exist, and must have come into existence by the creative act of God.

(_b_) Preservation is not a mere negation of action, or a refraining to destroy, on the part of God. It is a positive agency by which, at every moment, he sustains the persons and the forces of the universe.

(_c_) Preservation implies a natural concurrence of God in all operations of matter and of mind. Though personal beings exist and God’s will is not the sole force, it is still true that, without his concurrence, no person or force can continue to exist or to act.

Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40-42—“Creation and preservation
cannot be the same thing, for then man would be only the product
of natural forces supervised by God,—whereas, man is above nature
and is inexplicable from nature. Nature is not the whole of the
universe, but only the preliminary basis of it.... The _rest_ of
God is not cessation of activity, but is a new exercise of power.”
Nor is God “the soul of the universe.” This phrase is pantheistic,
and implies that God is the only agent.

It is a wonder that physical life continues. The pumping of blood
through the heart, whether we sleep or wake, requires an
expenditure of energy far beyond our ordinary estimates. The
muscle of the heart never rests except between the beats. All the
blood in the body passes through the heart in each half-minute.
The grip of the heart is greater than that of the fist. The two
ventricles of the heart hold on the average ten ounces or
five-eighths of a pound, and this amount is pumped out at each
beat. At 72 per minute, this is 45 pounds per minute, 2,700 pounds
per hour, and 64,800 pounds or 32 and four tenths tons per day.
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11:554—“The heart does about one-fifth of
the whole mechanical work of the body—a work equivalent to raising
its own weight over 13,000 feet an hour. It takes its rest only in
short snatches, as it were, its action as a whole being
continuous. It must necessarily be the earliest sufferer from any
improvidence as regards nutrition, mental emotion being in this
respect quite as potential a cause of constitutional bankruptcy as
the most violent muscular exertion.”

Before the days of the guillotine in France, when the criminal to
be executed sat in a chair and was decapitated by one blow of the
sharp sword, an observer declared that the blood spouted up
several feet into the air. Yet this great force is exerted by the
heart so noiselessly that we are for the most part unconscious of
it. The power at work is the power of God, and we call that
exercise of power by the name of preservation. Crane, Religion of
To-morrow, 130—“We do not get bread because God instituted certain
laws of growing wheat or of baking dough, he leaving these laws to
run of themselves. But God, personally present in the wheat, makes
it grow, and in the dough turns it into bread. He does not make
gravitation or cohesion, but these are phases of his present
action. Spirit is the reality, matter and law are the modes of its
expression. So in redemption it is not by the working of some
perfect plan that God saves. He is the immanent God, and all of
his benefits are but phases of his person and immediate
influence.”

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Preservation.

1. From Scripture.

In a number of Scripture passages, preservation is expressly distinguished from creation. Though God rested from his work of creation and established an order of natural forces, a special and continuous divine activity is declared to be put forth in the upholding of the universe and its powers. This divine activity, moreover, is declared to be the activity of Christ; as he is the mediating agent in creation, so he is the mediating agent in preservation.

_Nehemiah 9:6_—“_Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made
heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and
all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and
thou preservest them all_”; _Job 7:20_—“_O thou watcher_ [marg.
“preserver”] _of men!_”; _Ps. 36:6_—“_thou preservest man and
beast_”; _104:29, 30_—“_Thou takest away their breath, they die,
And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are
created, And thou renewest the face of the ground._” See Perowne
on _Ps. 104_—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for
good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the
whole Cosmos.” _Acts 17:28_—“_in him we live, and move, and have
our being_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 1:2,
3_—“_upholding all things by the word of his power._” _John
5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—refers most
naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed;
compare _Gen. 2:2_—“_on the seventh day God finished his work
which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his
work which he had made._” God is the upholder of physical life;
see _Ps. 66:8, 9_—“_O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in
life._” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see _1 Tim.
6:13_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all
things alive_” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables
us to persist in our Christian course. _Mat. 4:4_—“_Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God_”—though originally referring to physical nourishment
is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In _Ps. 104:26_—“_There
go the ships,_” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the
reference is not to man’s works but to God’s, as the parallelism:
“There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant
“floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th
Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps
alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great.

2. From Reason.

We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:

(_a_) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Were the world self-existent, it would be
God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world
has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are
subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—_i. e._, are
dependent for their continued existence upon God.

(_b_) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.

For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see
Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy,
Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of
Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen,
Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and
Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to
the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in
walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the
walk.” It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force
with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is
fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is
lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with
human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will.
To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are
one.

We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation
pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects
to this view as follows: “This implies, first, that the conception
of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes
in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we
derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the
causal relation always involves will; it would follow that the
universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It
implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe,
and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations
of one single force—the Creator’s.” We reply to this reasoning by
asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call
involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or
unremembered activities of the will.

From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge,
Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from
mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is
a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter
is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the
external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will
believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and
that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.”
New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second
causes, _i. e._, machines, very little to accomplish his purposes.
His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or
his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method
as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher
conceptions of the divine action.” Dorner: “If the world had no
independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean
anything.” But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives,
moves and has his being in God (_Acts 17:28_), and whatever has
come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in
Christ (_John 1:3, 4_, marginal reading).

Preservation is God’s continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych.
Theory, 305, speaks of “a kind of wholesale willing.” Augustine:
“Dei voluntas est rerum natura.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is
spirit.” Tennyson, The Ancient Sage: “Force is from the heights.”
Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion,
392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting.
It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is
God.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit
in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be
that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own
self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both
matter and mind.”

(_c_) God’s sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.

James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is
will.... This identification of nature with God’s will _would_ be
pantheistic only _if_ we turned the proposition round and
identified God with _no more_ than the life of the universe. But
we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God’s will, but
God’s will _is_ more than they. He is not the equivalent of the
All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild
beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective
to him.... He puts his power into that which is _other than
himself_, and he parts with _other use of it_ by preëngagement to
an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the
system.”

Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with
their power of alternative, are the product of God’s
self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not
always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing
finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as
immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as
opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing
of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M.
Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we
walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but
depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which
it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will
does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.” A. R.
Wallace: “The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but
actually _is_, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme
intelligence.... Man’s free will is only a larger artery for the
controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long
evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite
One.” This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far
too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all
holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed
upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct.
Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin,
and guilt.

All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give
testimony to the will of God which originated them and which
continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no
sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant
willing of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in
the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself
any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy
will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The
being that sins can maintain its existence only through the
preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore
holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite
personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence.
On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being
and their powers only as they are upheld by God.

God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to
God’s transcendence as well as to God’s immanence. Immanence alone
is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore,
Incarnation, 136 _sq._—“Christian theology is the harmony of
pantheism and deism.” It maintains transcendence, and so has all
the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains
immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability
to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic
Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic
organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one
supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and
teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which
prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an
intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly
apart from it.” On the persistency of force, _super cuncta_,
_subter cuncta_, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic
Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of
preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond
nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is
exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of
Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.

1. Deism.

This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism
into a system. His book _De Veritate_ was published in 1624. He
argues against the probability of God’s revealing his will to only
a portion of the earth. This he calls “particular religion.” Yet
he sought, and according to his own account he received, a
revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in
disproof of revelation. He “asked for a sign,” and was answered by
a “loud though gentle noise from the heavens.” He had the vanity
to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to
extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of
half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God
would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See
Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the
exaggeration of the truth of God’s transcendence. See Christlieb,
Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon
illustrates by the shipbuilder: “Ut faber discedit a navi
exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.” God is the maker, not the
keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes
Teufelsdröckh speak of “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since
the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it
go.” Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.

“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a
mechanical view of the world” (Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of
Hindu Brahma, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted
ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce,
Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that
the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible.
Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by
separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no
resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet
George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord
Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the
founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston
its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature.
Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special
revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion
of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of
positive institution.”

We object to this view that:

(_a_) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.

Deism regards the universe as a “perpetual motion.” Modern views
of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is
the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to
deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and
then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the
key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made
mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an
impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver
or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces
God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls
the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.” Hence Spinoza,
the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See
Woods, Works, 2:40.

(_b_) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would
seem care to man. To God’s inexhaustible fulness of life there are
no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has
created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may
alter the poet’s verse and say: “There’s not a flower that’s born
to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” God
does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are
not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being
in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of
To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God,
if he be nothing to the world.” See Chalmers, Astronomical
Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in
Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.

(_c_) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.

Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert
Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it
treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent
divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies
them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and
makes the relation between them a purely external one.” Ruskin:
“The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on
every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the
pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and
to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same
power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the
casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the
mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.” See
Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit,
76.

2. Continuous Creation.

This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.

Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor’s
utterance: “God is the original of all being, and the only cause
of all natural effects.” Edwards himself says: “God’s upholding
created substance, or causing its existence in each successive
moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of
nothing at each moment.” He argues that the past existence of a
thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a
thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not. “This is
equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall
last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative
power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot” (A. S. Carman).
Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation “is really continued
creation.” Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are
dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must
originate in a divine efficiency.” 2:683—“There is but one true
and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated
for centuries: ‘Whence came evil?’ and that is: It came from the
first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the
moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises
in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make
moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he
pleases.” God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as
he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material
world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression
is necessary to God. His maxim was: “Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There
can be no God without an accompanying world.” See Rothe, Dogmatik,
1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib.
Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.

The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that
all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is
_divine_ will, and divine will in _direct_ exercise. But the human
will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of
nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate,
workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain
of truth in the following utterances which need important
qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202,
likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on
condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says
that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought
out from a piano, which successively die away as others are
produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but
asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of
the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the
brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the
performer’s mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living
thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our
being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The
barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others
have done.”

To this we object, upon the following grounds:

(_a_) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.

Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in
Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is
momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually
new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally
true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From
the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis
tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60,
says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew
in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only
admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L.
Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional
intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary
absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of
God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science
relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion
does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their
relation to God.”

Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to
human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature
and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God
acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even
on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in
nature, since God’s regular and habitual action is a second and
subsequent thing, while his act of initiation and organization is
the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be
identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be
identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April,
1895:559—“What is _nature_, but the promise of God’s pledged and
habitual causality? And what is _spirit_, but the province of his
free causality responding to needs and affections of his free
children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then
be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s
agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be
a phantasm, as thou say’st, A splendid fiction and prodigious
dream, To reach the real and true I’ll make no haste, More than
content with worlds that only seem.”

(_b_) It exaggerates God’s power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God’s veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God’s love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God’s will is the only force in the universe, God’s holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.

Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases
identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by
so decreeing, make Adam’s posterity one with their first father
and responsible for his sin. Edwards’s theory of continuous
creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of
original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises
with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or
natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and
guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not
been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and
far too little of substance.

It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards’s
idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of
Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King’s
College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and
an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College
while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield
while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those
disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin,
479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says:
“The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in
philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and
operation of the Author of nature” (see Allen, Jonathan Edwards,
16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan.
1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier’s Clavis Universalis is the
source of Edwards’s idealism. It is more probable that his
idealism was the result of his own independent thinking,
occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and
Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C.
Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in
Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned
from Noah Porter’s Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and
quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct.
1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and
bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists
only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly
when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its
operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, ’tis
nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes
of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the
brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of
all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly
stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the
same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds
according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or,
in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise
divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact,
precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent
communications to created minds and effects on those minds.” It is
easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the “Exercise-system”
of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards’s
Idealism, see Frazer’s Berkeley (Blackwood’s Philos. Classics),
139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn’s
ed.), 327-334.

(_c_) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.

Lotze tries to escape from _material_ causes and yet hold to
_second_ causes, by intimating that these second causes may be
spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit
in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we
call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very
peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a
one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog
would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James
Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a
veritable lion’s den,—all the footprints are in one direction.
Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply
the All,—the ununified totality of existence.” Dorner well remarks
that “Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance
of its activity, not new bringing it into being.” On the whole
subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi,
Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst.
Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.

(_a_) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God’s sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.

Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying
the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes
(continuous creation or pantheism). _1 Cor. 12:6_—“_there are
diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things
in all_”; _cf._ _Eph. 1:23_—the church, “_which is his body, the
fulness of him that filleth all in all_.” God’s action is no
_actio in distans_, or action where he is not. It is rather action
in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral
beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of
nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not.
God works through these human second causes, but he does not
supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action
of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are
real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of
God’s concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together
produce the writing, so God’s working causes natural powers to
work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words “_wherein
is the seed thereof_” (_Gen. 1:11_) has its counterpart in the
spiritual growth described in the words “_his seed abideth in
him_” (_1 John 3:9_). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency
in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (_1 Cor.
4:15_); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work
of God (_1 Pet. 1:3_). We are bidden to work out our own salvation
with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who
works in us both to will and to work (_Phil. 2:12, 13_).

(_b_) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.

In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and
Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil
action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of
these powers is caused only by man. _Jer. 44:4_—“_Oh, do not this
abominable thing that I hate_”; _Hab. 1:13_—“_Thou that art of
purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on
perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal
treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up
the man that is more righteous than he?_” _James 1:13, 14_—“_Let
no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot
be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man
is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed._”
Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that
the fire did it; he asked the people for gold; “_so they gave it
me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf_”
(_Ex. 32:24_). Aaron leaves out one important point—his own
personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our
sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had
given him great talents, of which the devil had given the
application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he
himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are
electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to
which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the
wind or breath of the organ is God’s; but the fingering of the
keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at
every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his
instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual
grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds
all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the
suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which
the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary
(_Heb. 1:3_). On the importance of the idea of preservation in
Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).