Chapter III — Faith in the Personal God

Daily Readings

We are to consider this week the Christian faith that God is personal. Before, however, we deal with the arguments which may confirm our confidence in such a faith, or even with the explanations that may clarify our conception of its meaning, let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the familiar attitudes in every normal human life, that require God's personality for their fulfillment. People have believed in a personal God because their own nature demanded it.

Third Week, First Day

People have believed in a personal God because of a deep desire to think of creation as friendly. F. W. Myers, when asked what question he would put to the Sphinx, if he were given only one chance, replied that he would ask, "Is the universe friendly?" Some have tried to think of creation as an enemy which we must fight, as though in Greenland we strove to make verdure grow, although the soil and climate were antagonistic. Some have tried to think creation neutral, an impersonal system of laws and forces, which we must impose our will upon as best we can, although in the end the system is sure to outlast all our efforts and to bring our gains to nothing. But at the heart of humanity is an irresistible desire to think creation a friend, with whose good purposes our wills can be aligned, and whose power can carry our efforts to victorious ends. Says Gilbert Murray, of Oxford University, "As I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct." But friends are always persons, and if creation is friendly then God is in some sense personal. This faith is the radiant center of the Gospel.

"But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him. In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." —Matthew 6:6–14 (NKJV)

O Lord, we would rest in You, for in You alone is true rest to be found. We would forget our disappointed hopes, our fruitless efforts, our trivial aims, and lean on You, our Comfort and our Strength. When the order of this world bears cruelly upon us; when Nature seems to us an awful machine, grinding out life and death, without a reason or a purpose; when our hopes perish in the grave where we lay to rest our loved dead: O what can we do but turn to You, whose law underlies all, and whose love, we trust, is the end of all? You fill all things with Your presence, and press close to our souls. Still every passion, rebuke every doubt, strengthen every element of good within us, that nothing may hinder the outflow of Your life and power. In You, let the weak be full of might, and let the strong renew their strength. In You, let the tempted find help, the sorrowing consolation, and the lonely and the neglected their Supreme Friend, their faithful Companion.

O Lord, we are weary of our old, barren selves. Separate us from our spiritual past, and quicken within us the seeds of a new future. Transform us by the breath of Your regenerating power, that life may seem supremely beautiful and duty our highest privilege, and the only real evil a guilty conscience. Let us be no longer sad, or downcast, or miserable, or despairing, vexed by remorse, or depressed by our failures. Take from us the old self. Give us a new self, beautiful, vigorous, and joyous. Let old things pass away and let all things become new. Kindle within us a flame of heavenly devotion, so that to us work for You shall become a happiness, and rest in You shall become an energy, unchecked by fears within and foes without. Give us love, and then we shall have more than all we need, for You are Love, Yourself the Giver and the Gift. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Third Week, Second Day

Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. —Psalm 103:1–5 (NKJV)

Such an attitude of thankfulness as this psalm represents is native to the human heart. When we are glad we feel grateful: we have an irrepressible impulse to thank somebody. As between a boastful Nebuchadnezzar — "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built ... by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty" (Daniel 4:30 NKJV) — and the Master, grateful for the dawning success of his cause — "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth" (Matthew 11:25 NKJV) — we can have no doubt which is the nobler attitude. We are at our best when we look upon our blessings as gifts, our powers as entrustments, our service as a debt which we owe, and our success as an occasion of gratitude rather than pride. But we cannot be really thankful to impersonal power. Little children blame chairs for their falls and thank apple trees for their apples, but maturity outgrows the folly of accusing or blessing impersonal things. Thankfulness, in any worthy interpretation of the term, can never be felt except toward friendly persons who intended the blessing for which we are glad. A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot be grateful to a godless world-machine, even though it has treated them well, for the world-machine never purposed to treat anyone well and our happiness is a lucky accident, with no good will to thank for it. Haeckel says that there is no God — only "mobile, cosmic ether." Imagine a congregation of people, under Haeckel's leadership, rising to pray, "O Mobile Cosmic Ether, blessed be thy name!" It is absurd. Unless God is personal, the deepest meanings of gratitude in human hearts for life and its benedictions have no proper place in the universe.

O God above all, yet in all; holy beyond all imagination, yet friend of sinners; who inhabits the realms of unfading light, yet leads us through the shadows of mortal life; how solemn and uplifting it is even to think upon You! Like sight of sea to wearied eyes, like a walled-in garden to the troubled mind, like home to wanderer, like a strong tower to a soul pursued; so to us is the sound of Your name.

But greater still to feel You in our heart; like a river glorious, cleansing, healing, bringing life; like a song victorious, comforting our sadness, banishing our care; like a voice calling us to battle, urging us beyond ourselves.

But greater far to know You as our Father, as dear as You are near; and ourselves begotten of Your love, made in Your image, cared for through all our days, never beyond Your sight, never out of Your thought.

To think of You is rest; to know You is eternal life; to see You is the end of all desire; to serve You is perfect freedom and everlasting joy. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Third Week, Third Day

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight. —Psalm 51:1–4 (NKJV)

Penitence is one of the profoundest impulses in the human heart. And at our deepest we always feel about our sin as the Psalmist did: we have wronged not only this individual or that, but we have sinned against the whole structure of life, against whatever Power and Purpose may be behind life, and our penitence is not complete until we cry to the Highest, "Against You, You only, have I sinned." While we have always asked each other for forgiveness, we have as well asked God for it. But such an attitude is utterly irrational if God is not personal. Persons alone care what we do, have purposes that our sins thwart, have love that our evil grieves, have compassion to forgive the penitent; and to confess sin to a world-machine — careless, purposeless, loveless, and without compassion — is folly. Yesterday we saw how impossible it was really to feel grateful to a materialist's god; today imagine congregations of people addressing to the Cosmic Ether any such penitent confessions as Christians by multitudes continually address to their Father: "We have erred and strayed from Your ways like lost sheep." Plainly in a world where creative power is impersonal the deepest meanings of penitence have no place. Read over the prayer that follows, considering the futility of addressing such a penitent aspiration to anything impersonal; and then really pray it to the God whom Christ revealed:

We ask You, Lord, to look upon us with favor, folk of many families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof, weak men and women living under the shelter of Your patience. Be patient still; bear with us yet awhile longer — with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavors against evil, bear with us awhile longer to endure and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, brace us to play our part under affliction. Be with our friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labor — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.¹

We thank You and praise You; and in the words of him to whom this day is sacred, close our offering. Amen. —Robert Louis Stevenson.

Third Week, Fourth Day

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. —Romans 15:13 (NKJV)

For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. —Romans 8:24–25 (NKJV)

Hope is no fringe on the garment of human life; it is part of the solid texture of our experience; without it we may exist, but we cannot live. Now some minds live by hope about tomorrow, or at the most, the day after tomorrow, and do not take long looks ahead. But as we grow mature in thoughtfulness, such small horizons no longer can content our minds; we seek a basis for hope about the far outcome of humanity's struggle and aspiration. We cannot bear to think that creation lacks a "far-off divine event"; we cannot tolerate a universe that in the end turns out to be

But it is obvious that if God is not in control of creation, with personal purpose of good will, directing its course, there is no solid basis for hope. If the universe is in the hands of physical forces, then a long look ahead reveals a world collapsing about a cold sun, and humanity annihilated in the wreck. Some such finale is the inevitable end of a godless world. As another pictures it, humanity, like a polar bear on an ice floe that is drifting into warmer zones, will watch in growling impotence the steady dwindling of its home, until it sinks in the abyss. All optimistic philosophies of life have been founded on faith in a personal God, who purposes good for His children, and without such faith no hope, with large horizons, is reasonable. Paul is fair to the facts when he says, "having no hope and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12 NKJV). When one asks why people have believed in a personal God, this clearly is part of the answer: only a personal God can be "the God of hope."

O God of heaven above and earth beneath! You are the constant hope of every age — the reliance of those who seek You with thoughtfulness and love. We own You as the guardian of our pilgrimage; and when our steps are weary we turn to You, the mystic companion of our way, whose mercy will uphold us lest we fall. You lay on us the burden of labor throughout our days; but in this sacred hour You lift off our load, and make us partakers of Your rest. O ever faithful God, our guide by cloud and fire! Without this blessed repose our life were but a desert path; here we abide by the refreshing spring, and pitch our tents with joy around Your holy hill. Yet when we seek to draw near to You, You are still above us, like the heavens. O You who remain in the height, and cover Yourself with the cloud thereof! Behold, we stand around the mountain where You are; and if You will commune with us, the thunder from Your voice of love shall not make us afraid. Call up a spirit from our midst to serve Your will; and take away the veil from all our hearts, that with the eye of purity we may look on the bright and holy countenance of life. And when we go hence to resume our way, may it be with nobler spirits, with more faithful courage, and more generous will. For life and death we trust ourselves to You as disciples of Jesus Christ. Amen. —James Martineau.

Third Week, Fifth Day

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; You maintain my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; yes, I have a good inheritance. I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel; my heart also instructs me in the night seasons. I have set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; my flesh also will rest in hope. For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. —Psalm 16:5–11 (NKJV)

Many things in human life bring joy. From the sense of a healthy body and the exhilaration of a sunshiny day to the deep satisfactions of home and friends — there are numberless sources of happiness. But we have always been athirst to find joy in thinking about the total meaning of life. Lacking that, the details of life lose radiance, for, in spite of ourselves, we

If when we think about God, we can, like this psalmist, rejoice in the love behind life, the good purpose through it, the glorious future ahead of it, then all our other blessings are illumined. Not only are there happy things in life, but life itself is fundamentally blessed. But if when we raise our thought to the Eternal, we have no joyful thoughts about it, see no love or purpose there, then a pall falls on even our ordinary happiness. Alas for those who do not like to think about life's origin and destiny and meaning, because they have no joyful faith about God! Some have what Epictetus called "paralysis of the soul" every time they think of creation, for to them it is a huge physical machine crashing on without reason or good will. But some have such a joyful faith in the divine that their gladness about the whole of life redeems their sorrow about its details. So Samuel Rutherford in prison said, "Jesus Christ came into my room last night and every stone flashed like a ruby." For the thought of God in terms of friendly personality is the most joyful idea of Him that anyone has ever had. Our thirst for joy is one of the sources of our faith in a personal God. We have wanted what Paul called "joy and peace in believing" (Romans 15:13 NKJV).

We rejoice, O Lord our God, not in ourselves nor in the firm earth on which we tread, nor in the household, nor in the church, nor in all the procession of things where humanity moves with power and glory. We rejoice in the Lord. We rejoice in Your strength. A strange joy it is. Day by day we find ourselves breaking out into gladness through the ministration of the senses, and by the play of inward thought; but You are never beheld by us.... You never speak to us, nor do we feel Your hand, nor do we discern Your face of love and glory and power. We break away from all other experiences, and look up into the emptiness, as it seems to us, which yet is full of life; into that which seems cold and void, but wherein moves eternal power; into the voiceless and inscrutable realm where You dwell, God over all, blessed forever.... O Lord our God, how near You are to us! And we do not know it. How near is the other life! And we do not feel it. It clothes us as with a garment. It feeds us. It shines down upon us. It rejoices over us.... There, out of narrow and anguished ways, out of sorrows, out of regrets, out of bereavements, we look; and already we are rested before we reach it.

Grant to us, today, we ask You, this blessed vision. Amen. —Henry Ward Beecher.

Third Week, Sixth Day

For when one says, "I am of Paul," and another, "I am of Apollos," are you not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers through whom you believed, as the Lord gave to each one? I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, you are God's building. —1 Corinthians 3:4–9 (NKJV)

One of the profoundest motives that can grip the human heart is the conviction that we are fellow workers with the Divine. To feel that there is a great Cause, on behalf of which God Himself is concerned, and in the furtherance of which we can be God's instruments and allies, is the most exhilarating outlook on life conceivable. Even people who deny God try to get this motive for themselves. One such person hopes for the success of their favorite causes in "the tendency of the universe"; another talks about "the nature of things taking sides." But nothing save personality has moral tendencies, and only persons take sides in moral issues. If the guidance of the world is personal, then, and then only, can we rejoice with confidence in a great Ally, who has moral purposes and who has committed to us part of His work. This was the Master's motive when He said, "My Father has been working until now, and I have been working" (John 5:17 NKJV). But one clearly sees that such an inspiring consciousness of cooperation with the Eternal depended on the certainty with which the Master called the Eternal by a personal name — Father. When people like Livingstone have gone out in sacrificial adventure for the saving of others, they have not banked on the "tendency of the universe," nor trusted in any abstract "nature of things taking sides"; they have been servants of a personal God, under orders from Him, and they have counted on personal guidance in the service of a cause whose outcome was safe in God's hands.

O God, we pray for those who come after us, for our children, and the children of our friends, and for all the young lives that are marching up from the gates of birth, pure and eager, with the morning sunshine on their faces. We remember with a pang that these will live in the world we are making for them. We are wasting the resources of the earth in our headlong greed, and they will suffer want. We are building sunless houses and joyless cities for our profit, and they must dwell therein. We are making the burden heavy and the pace of work pitiless, and they will fall wan and sobbing by the wayside. We are poisoning the air of our land by our lies and our uncleanness, and they will breathe it.

O God, You know how we have cried out in agony when the sins of our parents have been visited upon us, and how we have struggled vainly against the inexorable fate that coursed in our blood or bound us in a prison-house of life. Save us from maiming the innocent ones who come after us by the added cruelty of our sins. Help us to break the ancient force of evil by a holy and steadfast will and to endow our children with purer blood and nobler thoughts. Grant us grace to leave the earth fairer than we found it; to build upon it cities of God in which the cry of needless pain shall cease; and to put the yoke of Christ upon our business life that it may serve and not destroy. Lift the veil of the future and show us the generation to come as it will be if blighted by our guilt, that our lust may be cooled and we may walk in the fear of the Eternal. Grant us a vision of the far-off years as they may be if redeemed by the sons of God, that we may take heart and do battle for Your children and ours. Amen. —Walter Rauschenbusch.

Third Week, Seventh Day

I will extol You, my God, O King; and I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. I will meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works. Men shall speak of the might of Your awesome acts, and I will declare Your greatness. They shall utter the memory of Your great goodness, and shall sing of Your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy. The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works. All Your works shall praise You, O Lord, and Your saints shall bless You. —Psalm 145:1–10 (NKJV)

Adoration springs from the deeps of the human spirit. We never can be content with looking down on things beneath us, nor with looking out on things that find our level. We always must look up to things above us. As a medieval saint said, "The soul can never rest in things that are beneath itself." Worship, therefore, is an undeniable impulse in the human heart. Poets worship Beauty; scientists worship Truth; every person of honor worships Right. That is, the good, true, and beautiful stand above us calling out our adoration, and all the best in us springs from our worshipful response to their appeal. But this impulse to adore is never fulfilled until we gather up all life into spiritual unity and bow down in awe and joy before God. That is adoration glorified, worship crowned and consummated. And the only God whom we can adore with awe and joy is personal. No impersonal thing is worshipful; however great a thing may be it still lies beneath our soul. No abstract Idea is worshipful; we still are greater than any idea that we can hold. Only God, thought of in personal terms but known to be greater than any terms which human life can use, is adorable. People have believed in Him because worship is our holiest impulse.

Such are the experiences of humanity, with which faith in a personal God is inseparably interwoven. Our demand for a friendly creation, our deepest impulses to thanksgiving, penitence, hope, joy, cooperation with the Eternal, and adoration of the highest — all require personality in God. As Professor William James said, "The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou if we are religious."

O Lord our God, Your greatness is unsearchable, and the glory of Your presence has overwhelmed us. You are hidden in excess of light; and if we were to behold You in the great sphere in which You are living, none of us would dare to draw near to You. Our imperfections, our transgressions, our secret thoughts, our wild impulses, that at times come surging in upon us, are such that we should be ashamed to stand before the All-searching Eye. Our lives are before You, open as a book, and You read every word and every letter of it. Blessed be Your name, You have taught us to come to You through the Lord Jesus Christ as through a friend, and You have taught us to draw near to You in person through the familiar way of Fatherhood; from our childhood we have said, Our Father, and in this way we are not afraid; in this way we come familiarly and boldly: not irreverently, but with the familiarity which love gives. You have poured the light of Your love upon the path which we tread, and You have taught us to come rejoicing before You.... Open Your hand and Your heart, and say to every one of us, Peace be unto you! Amen. —Henry Ward Beecher.

Comment for the Week

I

We have been using freely the most momentous word in human speech as though we clearly understood its meaning. We have been speaking of God as though the import of the term were plain. But most of us, asked to state precisely what we mean by "God," would welcome such a refuge from our confusion as Joubert sought. "It is not hard to know God," said he, "provided one will not force oneself to define him." Many people who stoutly claim to believe in God live in perpetual vacillation as to what they mean by Him. Writes one: "God to my mind is an impersonal being, but whether for convenience or through sheer impotence I pray to him as a personal being.... I know I talk on both sides of the fence, but that is just where I am."

At times, indeed, some question whether there is any need to think or say what "God" may signify. They call Him by vague names — the All, the Infinite. In moods of exalted feeling, impatient of definition, they wish to be left alone with their experience of the Eternal; they resent the intrusion of theology, as a poet, lost in wonder at a landscape, might resent the coming of surveyors with their clanking chains. So Walt Whitman wanted to see the stars rather than hear the astronomer, and after listening to the learned lecture, with its charts and diagrams, he says,

But, for all that, we well may be thankful for astronomers. At times the "mystical, moist night air" is absent; we do not wish to "look up in perfect silence at the stars"; and, even though we know in advance that they are bound to be inadequate, we do want as clear and worthy ideas as possible about the universe. Moreover, when such ideas are ours, looking up in perfect silence at the stars is more impressive than it ever was before. No more can we content ourselves with a vague consciousness of God. Spirits like Wordsworth have raptures of which they sing,

In communion with nature, in love for family, in fellowship with God, such hours may come, but nature, family, and God must also be the objects of understanding thought. Days of vital need, if not of mental doubt, inevitably come when it is impossible any longer to use a term like "God" without knowing what we mean.

The special urgency of this is felt by most of us because as children we were taught to picture the Divine in terms of personality. The God of the Bible is personal. Little that persons do, save sinning, is omitted from the catalogue of God's activities as He is pictured for us in the Scripture. He knows, loves, purposes, warns, rebukes, allures, rewards, and punishes, as only persons can. And all our relationships with Him are clearly personal. When we pray we say "Our Father"; when we seek our duty we ask, "What would You have me do?" God is He and You, not It, and friendship is the ideal relation of all souls with Him.

Moreover, in our maturity we are not likely to be interested in a God who is not personal. Whoever curiously asks why they believe in God will find not simply reasons but causes for their faith, and will perceive that the causes of faith lie back of the reasons for it. Vital need always precedes the arguments by which we justify its satisfaction. A person eats one thing and shuns another on principles of dietetics that can be defended before the intelligence; but behind all such sophisticated reasons stands the vital cause of eating — hunger. So back of intellectual arguments for belief in God lies the initial cause of faith: we are hungry. We believe in God because we hunger for a world that is not chance and chaos, but that is guided by a Purpose. We believe in God, because in our struggles after righteousness we hunger for a Divine Ally in whom righteousness has its origin, its ground and destiny. We believe in God because we hunger for confidence that Someone cares about our race in its conflicts and defeats and because in our individual experience we want a friend. Without such faith we feel ourselves to be, in Goethe's phrase, "a troubled wanderer upon a darkened earth." Plainly this elemental human hunger for purpose, righteousness, and friendship calls for something akin to personality in God. Only persons have purpose, character, and friendliness. The vital motives which lead us to seek God's comfort, forgiveness, guidance, and cooperation plainly imply His personality. Things do not forgive us, love us, nor purpose good concerning us, nor can any thing be imagined so subtle and so powerful as to satisfy the needs on account of which we come to God. If God is not personal, He can feel no concern for human life and a God of no concern is of no consequence.

The philosophers of India, with a well-reasoned pantheistic system and centuries to make their philosophy effective, have failed to quell this deathless thirst for a God who counts. Every wayside shrine of Hinduism incarnates the old faith in gods conceived as friends, not things; and Buddha, who taught impersonal deity, is now himself adored as the Personal Lord of Love and Blessedness. Wherever one finds vital religion one finds that God is no dry impersonal abstraction, but our friend. Boscamen, speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and of the Chaldean Tablets, says: "Six thousand years ago in Egypt and Chaldea — it is not dread, but the grateful love of a child to his father, of friend to friend, that meets us in the oldest books of the world." And when one turns from the oldest to the newest books this inner demand of our religious life has not ceased; it has been refined and confirmed. "The All would not be the All unless it contained a Personality," said Victor Hugo. "That Personality is God."

Biography is lavish in illustrations of this need in our religious life. The biographer of Theodore Parker, the freelance preacher of Boston, remarks: "In his theology God was neither personal nor impersonal, but a reality transcending these distinctions. In his devotions God was as personal as his own father or mother, and he prayed to him as such, daringly indifferent to the anthropomorphisms of his unfettered speech." When one passes from speculation to religion, one always comes into a realm where only a personal God will do. On this point even confessed unbelievers furnish confirmation. One who calls himself an agnostic writes: "At times in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments, I experience a sort of communion of myself with Something Great that is not myself. Then the Universal Scheme of things has on me the effect of a sympathetic Person, and my communion therewith takes on a quality of fearless worship. These moments happen, and they are to me the supreme fact in my religious life." Always for the purposes of vital religion, God must have on us the "effect of a sympathetic Person."

II

When one, however, subjects this need of their religious life to searching thought, what difficulty they encounter! Multitudes, if they were candid, would confess what a college senior wrote: "When I am just thinking about God in a speculative or philosophical way, I generally think of him as impersonal, but for practical purposes I think of him as personal." Many folks feel thus distraught; at the heart of their religious life is the paralyzing doubt that in a universe like this, to think of God as personal is absurd. If a train moving a mile a minute should leave the earth, it must travel 40,000,000 years before it would reach the nearest star. The Creator of such a world is not readily reduced to the similitude of human life. Once we lived on a flat earth, small in compass and cosily tucked beneath the sky's coverlet, but now the world's vastness beggars imagination. As an astronomer remarked, coming from a session with his telescope, "This does away with a six-foot god; you cannot shake hands with the Creator of this." We used to suppose that Arcturus was a single star, but now new telescopes reveal Arcturus as a galaxy of stars, thousands in number, with interstellar spaces so immense that thought breaks down in spanning them and imagination even cannot make the leap. Is the God of such a universe to be conceived in terms of a magnified person?

So to picture deity seems at first sight a survival of mere childishness. Professor John Fiske, of Harvard, has told us that when he was a boy God always conjured up in his imagination the figure of a venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske. How many of us can recall such early crude and childish thoughts of God! A mother asked her young daughter what she was drawing. "A picture of God," was the answer. "But no one knows what God looks like," the mother said. "They will," came the rejoinder, "when I get through." We all began with some such primitive idea of deity. Indeed, these early conceptions long persist in many minds, as the following statements, written by college students, indicate: "I think of God as real, actual skin and blood and bones, something we shall see with our eyes some day, no matter what lives we lead on earth." "It may be a remnant of youth, but anyhow, every time I think of God there appears a vague image of a man, with all members of the body, just enormously large." "I have always pictured him according to a description in Paradise Lost as seated upon a throne, while around are angels playing on harps and singing hymns." "I think of God as having bodily form and being much larger than the average man. He has a radiant countenance beaming with love and compassion. He is erect and upright, fearless and brave."²

No one of us may be contemptuous of such crude ideas; we all possessed them once. Indeed the loss of them, with their picture of deity, clear in feature and distinct in outline, has been to some a shock from which faith has not recovered. When increasing knowledge discredited our immature theology, and our world immeasurably widened, the very human God of our first imaginations was lost among the stars. We learned that this is a universe where the light that falls upon our eyes tonight left the far heavens when Abraham was shepherding on Syrian hills. The Christian Gospel of the personal Father which once was good news became a serious problem. We still may cling to the old meanings of our religious faith; still we may pray in hours of need as though our childhood's God were really there; but at times we suspect that we are clinging to the beauty of an early memory while reluctantly we lose conviction of its truth. Many modern men and women can understand the plight of the famous Dr. Jowett of Oxford, who, so runs the tradition, inserted "used to" in a muffled voice, when he recited the creed: "I used to believe in God the Father Almighty."

With such misgivings, whether as habitual disturbers of our faith or as occasional moods of unbelief that come and go, most of us must be familiar. What Charles Darwin is reported to have said about himself, many if they spoke frankly would say too: "Sometimes I feel a warm sense of a personal God, and then" — with a shake of his head — "it goes away."

III

Whatever may be our theology, the fact is plain that the denial of a personal God solves no problem. For if we may not think of God in terms of personality, the query still remains, which was there before — in what terms shall we conceive of the Eternal? In a discussion on the nature of the sky, one boy, denying the idea of a solid canopy, exclaimed, "There ain't any sky." Said the other, seeing how little this negation solved the problem, "Well, what is it that ain't?" Some such inquiry one must put to one's doubts about God's personality. Though we may deny a personal God, nevertheless in the place where He once stood, creator and sustainer of all existence, is Something that we do think of somehow. We may have but little of Carlyle's sublime imagination; may not easily transport ourselves to stand with him on the far northern cliff, "behind him all Europe and Africa fast asleep, except the watchmen, and before him the silent Immensity and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but the porch-lamp." Yet who of us, regarding the illimitable universe, on the far outskirts of which our little earth is whirling, so minute that through the strongest telescope from the nearest star its conflagration would be quite invisible, has escaped the sense of a Universal Power? And the human mind cannot so keep itself at home in little tasks and pleasures as to evade the question: How shall we think of the Power that made the universe? In what terms? By what analogies? Hours of revelation come in every serious life when no desire compares in urgency with the desire to know the character of the Eternal. It does make a prodigious difference what hands hold the leash of the universe.

This second fact is also clear, that if we are to think of the Eternal at all, we must think in terms of something drawn from our experience. When we sing of Paradise we speak of golden streets and gates of pearl, and Thoreau remarks that, arriving in heaven, he expects to find pine trees there. Such words we do not take literally, but such words we cannot utterly avoid, for if we are to speak at all of the unknown glory, we must use pictures from the known. So we think of God in human symbols. We cannot catch Him in an abstract definition as though a boy with a butterfly net should capture the sun at noon. Our minds are not fitted for such enterprise. Of necessity we take something homely, familiar, close at hand, and lifting it up as far as we can reach, say God is most like that. No one who thinks at all of the Eternal escapes this necessity.

By this method the materialist reaches their philosophy. Haeckel laughs to scorn the opening clause of the "Apostles' Creed." "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth" — for such faith no words are contemptuous enough. This denial does not mean however that Haeckel has no faith; he deliberately offers a creedal substitute which runs in part: I believe in a "chemical substance of a viscous character, having albuminous matter and water as its chief constituents." In such terms does Haeckel think of the Eternal. A professor of medicine has remarked that such a theory reduces all reality to "phosphorus and glue." When some Psalmist cries, "Bless the Lord, O my soul," nothing substantial is speaking or is being spoken to save phosphorus and glue! When an Italian patriot cries, "The time for dying comes to all, but the time for dishonoring oneself ought never to come," nothing is real and causal save phosphorus and glue! And every gracious and redeeming deed in history from the love of mothers to the cross of Christ has been a complicated working out of phosphorus and glue! In whatever labored phrases the materialist may state the case, the method is obvious; physical energy, of whose presence in the body one is first assured, and whose reality one has then read out into the world, has been lifted up as far as possible to say, the Eternal is most like that.

So far as method is concerned, the theist of necessity travels the same road; only they insist on a nobler symbol than physical energy in terms of which to think of God. They take mind. They say in effect: There may be wide stretches of the universe where our intellects meet no answer and find no meaning. But in much of the universe we do see meaning; and how can intelligence find sense where intelligence has not put sense? A few scratches on a cliff's face in Assyria, after centuries of neglect, rendered up their meaning to the mind of Rawlinson. They were themselves the work of intelligence, and intelligence could read them. So, the theist continues, the universe is in part at least intelligible. Our minds fit into it and are answered by it. We can trace its laws and predict its movements. Humanity first worked out the nature of the ellipse in theoretical geometry, and then telescopes later showed the gigantic ellipses of planetary orbits in the heavens. Can it be that this intelligible world, readable by mind, is itself essentially mindless? As easily believe that the notes of Wagner's operas were accidentally blown together by a whirlwind and yet are playable by us! Therefore the theist believes the universe to be rational; they take mind as known in themselves, and lifting it as high as they can reach, cry, God is most like that.

So far as the general method of approach is concerned, the Christian travels the same road to their idea of God. Only the Christian cannot believe that the best they know is too good or too great to be a symbol in terms of which to think of the Eternal. Therefore the Christian will not take a byproduct of experience such as physical energy, nor a section of personality such as mind; they take the full orb of personality, self-conscious being that knows and purposes and loves, and affirm that God is most like this. Such in its simplest form is the Christian assertion of God's personality.

In one of his noblest passages Martineau has put into classic form this necessity, which we have been discussing, of thinking about God in terms of human experience: "God, being infinite, can never be fully comprehended by our minds; whatever thought of him be there, his real nature must still transcend: there will yet be deep after deep beyond, within that light ineffable; and what we see, compared with what we do not see, will be as the raindrop to the firmament. Our conception of him can never correspond with the reality, so as to be without omission, disproportion, or aberration; but can only represent the reality, and stand for God within our souls, till nobler thoughts arise and reveal themselves as his interpreters. And this is precisely what we mean by a symbolical idea. The devotee who prostrates himself before a black stone — the Egyptian who in his prayers was haunted by the ideal form of the graceful ibis or the monstrous sphinx — the Theist who bends beneath the starry porch that midnight opens to the temple of the universe — the Christian who sees in heaven a spirit akin to that which divinely lived in Galilee, and with glorious pity died on Calvary — all alike assume a representation of him whose immeasurable nature they can neither compass nor escape. And the only question is, whether the conception they portray upon the wall of their ideal temple is an abominable idol, or a true and sanctifying mediatorial thought."

IV

In their endeavor thus to think of God in terms of personality, some are perplexed because in their imagination a person is inseparable from flesh. "I think of God as a personal being," writes a college student. "A personal being would have a form that you could see or touch." But this would be true only if the grossest materialism were accepted, and the spiritual life declared to be the product of brain as digestive fluids are of salivary glands. On any other basis, personality is not indissolubly bound to body nor by it necessarily limited. We cannot hear without our ear, but we are not our ear; we cannot hear without the auditory nerve, but we are not the auditory nerve; we cannot hear without the temporal lobe of the brain, but we are not the brain nor any portion of it. These may be the instruments which we use; we are free when they are well, hampered when they are broken, and at last we are separable from them all. John Quincy Adams at the age of eighty met a friend upon a Boston street. "Good morning," said the friend, "and how is John Quincy Adams today?" "Thank you," was the ex-president's reply, "John Quincy Adams himself is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable and I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is quite well, quite well." Such a conception of a person as being a permanent personality and having a temporary body is essential to any worthy meaning when we use personal terms about God.

With such an elevated thought, however, of what personality does mean, it soon is evident that no other reality with which we deal is so worthy to be the symbol of an Eternal Spirit. Is one perplexed that God, who is invisible, should be pictured in the similitude of human persons? But we are invisible. The outward husks and fleshly garment of our friends we indeed have seen, but upon the friend — consciousness, love, purpose, ideal, and character — no eye has looked. No mirror ever has been strong enough to show us to ourselves. In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God.

Indeed, personality is essentially the most unlimited reality with which we deal; in comparison a solar system is a little thing. Consider memory, by which we can retrace our youthful days, build our shanties once again at brooksides, replay our games, and recapitulate the struggles and the joys of the first days at school. Nothing in all the universe can remember except persons. Were we not so familiar with this element in human greatness, we would more often pause to exclaim, as did Augustine, fifteen centuries ago, "Great is the power of memory. Amazement overcomes me when I think of it. And yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains, the broad rivers, the wide ocean, the courses of the stars, and pass themselves, the crowning wonder, by!" Consider imagination, by which, sitting still in body we can project ourselves around the world, can walk down Princes Street in Edinburgh, or stand in mingled awe and condemnation before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, or rise uncovered before the majesty of the Matterhorn. Nothing in all the universe can do that except persons. Were full power to act wherever we can think added to our gifts, we should come so near to incipient omnipresence as to be in dread of our responsibility. Consider love, by which we live not so much where our bodies are as where our friends and family may be. Love expands the individual until their real life is independent of geography. Says one lover to another:

Many a mother in America has lived in the trenches of France; many a person has found that what might happen to them where their body was could not be compared with what might happen to them where their friendships were; and as we grow in love and loyalty we find ourselves scattered all over creation. How far such an expansion of life may go our Lord revealed when He said, "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me" (Matthew 25:40 NKJV). Nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath can so extend itself in love save persons.

Finally, consider creative power by which human beings project themselves into the future, and, with masterful ideals in mind, lay hold on circumstance and bend it to their will. As if sharing creative power with the Eternal, an engineer summons nature's forces to their bidding and lays their will upon them, until where nothing was a structure stands that humanity may use for centuries. Nothing in all the universe can so create except persons. In that essentially creative act where deathless ideas and harmonies are given being by poets and musicians, so that something out of nothing is brought to pass by personality, we face a mystery as abysmal as God's making of the world. "Paradise Lost" is wonderful; but not half as wonderful as the creative personality itself who years before projected it. "An inward prompting," Milton says, "which now grew daily upon me, that by labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they should not willingly let it die." Nothing can so create save personality.

Personality is not so limited that we should be ashamed to think of God in terms of it. Rather, of all realities with which we deal, personality alone, invisible, reaching back in memory, reaching out in imagination, expanding itself in love, and laying hold upon the future with creative power, is a worthy symbol of the Eternal Spirit.

Even when the meaning of personality has been so enlarged and elevated, we should not leave our statement of belief in God as though our experience of personality were a mould into which our thought of Him is poured and so limited. We are not presumptuous Lilliputians, running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall, majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exultation round our capture. We know better than that. We understand how insufficient is every human name for God. We know that when we have said our best — "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!" (Romans 11:33 NKJV).

Nothing more has marred the Christian message and discredited the Christian faith than the unwise presumption that has forced its definitions into the secrets of the Infinite. "It is enough to say," exclaims Leslie Stephen, "that they defined the nature of God Almighty with an accuracy from which modest naturalists would shrink in describing the genesis of a black beetle." The antidote to such vain pride of theology is found in the wholesome modesty of the Bible. There we inquire, "Can you search out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than heaven — what can you do? Deeper than Sheol — what can you know?" (Job 11:7–8 NKJV). There God replies: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9 NKJV). Scripture bears abundant testimony to the symbolic nature of our human terms for God. "As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him" (Psalm 103:13 NKJV). "As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13 NKJV). "I will betroth you to Me" (Hosea 2:19 NKJV). "'Return... ,' says the Lord, 'for I am married to you'" (Jeremiah 3:14 NKJV). "So the Lord spoke to Moses... as a man speaks to his friend" (Exodus 33:11 NKJV). Father, Mother, Bridegroom, Husband, Friend — these are symbols of God. People, endeavoring to frame some worthy thought of the Eternal, lift up their best in phrases such as these, and in them enshrine their noblest concepts of the divine. They have no better, truer thing to say of God, no wiser way in which to say it. But when they think of the Eternal as He must be, and of their human words, infinitesimal in comparison, they know that all their best names for God are like small measures of water dipped from an immeasurable sea. For all that, so much of God as they can grasp and understand is the most important truth that humanity knows. Let even a tea-cup of water be taken to a laboratory and it will tell the truth about the sea; that one tea-cup will reveal the quality of the whole ocean. Yet it will not reveal all the truth about the ocean. When one considers the reach of the sea over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can pierce, the distances that no mind can imagine; remembers the currents that sweep through the sea, the tides that rise there, and the storms that beat it to its nether wells, one dare not try to put these into a tea-cup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At once so true and so inadequate are all our words for Him.

So we might speak to one who incredulously looks upon our faith, but for one who whole-heartedly approaches God as Christianity suggests, no negative and cautionary word is adequate. The Christian method of conceiving God brings the most exhilarating thought of Him that humanity has ever had. It says in brief: Take your best and think of God as most truly symbolized in that. As to what our best is, not even the agnostics doubt. The physical universe belittles us on one side only; it makes a pygmy of the body. In our spirits we still tower above the physical; we are greater than the world we know. Our supreme good, the divinest reality with which we deal, is personality. Then lift that up, says Christianity; it is your best, and you dare not think of God in terms of less; you have Christ's example in arguing from the human best to the divine: "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" (Matthew 7:11 NKJV).

The Christian faith asserts that when we thus think of God in terms of the best we know we are on the road toward truth. How many billion spiritual miles we may have to travel to the end, no one can tell. Only we will never need to stop, retrace our steps, and start upon a lower path than personality, a road that lies beneath righteousness and love. The road leads on and up beyond our imagination, but it is the same road and not another. God is personality plus, or else He alone is completely personal and we are but in embryo.

If God so is personal, then all the deep meanings of religious life and faith that the saints, our spiritual ancestors, have known are open to us modern men and women. Forms of thought indeed have changed, but if God is thus our Father and our Friend, the essentials of Christian experience are waiting for us all. Life then is not purposeless; all creation is bound into spiritual unity by personal Will; and in sacrificial labor we are serving one who is able to guard what we "have committed to Him until that Day" (2 Timothy 1:12 NKJV). Old hymns of confidence in time of trial, we too can sing:

And we can pray, not indeed with clamorous beggary as though the grace of God were a wayside stall where every greedy hand can pluck what passing whim may wish, but we can commune with God as the real saints have always prayed with humility and gratitude and confident desire for good. Most of all, that priceless privilege is open to us which is the center and sun of Christian thought and life. For if among all realities in our experience, we have dared take the best, personality, as a symbol in terms of which to think of God, how should we not, among all personalities, take the best we know as the highroad of approach to Him. Therefore our real symbol of God shall be no person among us, frail and sinful, but our Lord Himself "fairest among ten thousand" — "the one altogether beautiful." We shall think of God in terms of Him. We shall see "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6 NKJV).

Footnotes

¹ Original: "We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favor, folk of many families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof, weak men and women subsisting under the covert of thy patience." — Stevenson's original phrasing is particularly beautiful here; "subsisting under the covert of thy patience" carries a tenderness that "living under the shelter of Your patience" cannot fully match. ↩

² From a questionnaire, "Belief in God and Immortality," by Professor James H. Leuba. ↩