Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876. Flint Robert
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spiritual affections need a single Divine object. To distribute them among many objects is to dissipate and destroy them. The reverence, love, and trust which religion demands are a whole-hearted, absolute, unlimited reverence, love, and trust, such as can only be felt towards one God, with no other beside Him. The will of man in like manner requires to be under not a number of independent wills, but a single, all-comprehensive, perfectly consistent, and perfectly righteous will. It cannot serve many masters; it can only reasonably and rightly serve one. It can only yield itself up unreservedly to be guided by One Supreme Will. If there be no such will in the universe, but only a multitude of independent and co-ordinate wills, that full surrender of the will of the worshipper to the object of his worship, in which religion should find its consummation, is impossible.
Further, polytheism is not only the belief in more gods than one, but in gods all of which are finite. There can be no true recognition of the infinity of God where there is no true recognition of His unity. But the mind of man, although finite itself, cannot be satisfied with any object of worship which it perceives to be finite. It craves an infinite object; it desires to offer a boundless devotion; it seeks an absolute blessedness. The aim of the religious life is the communion of the finite with the infinite; and every religion, however otherwise excellent, which suppresses the infinite, and presents to the finite only the finite, is a failure.
Religion can no more attain to its proper development in pantheism than in polytheism. For pantheism denies that the One Infinite Being is a person—is a free, holy, and loving intelligence. It denies even that we ourselves are truly persons. It represents our consciousness of freedom and sense of responsibility as illusions. God, according to pantheism, alone is. All individual existences are merely His manifestations—all our deeds, whether good or bad, are His actions; and yet, while all is God and God is all, there is no God who can hear us or understand us—no God to love us or care for us—no God able or willing to help us. Such a view of the universe may have its attractions for the poet and the philosopher in certain moods of mind, but it assuredly affords little foundation for religion, if religion be the communion of the worshipper and the worshipped. What communion of reason can a man have with a being which does not understand him, or of affection with a being which has no love, or of will with a being which has no choice or freedom, and is the necessary cause both of good and evil? Pantheism represents absorption in Deity, the losing of self in God, as the highest good of humanity; but this is a mere caricature of that idea of communion with God in which religion must find its realisation, as pantheism leaves neither a self to surrender, nor a personal God to whom to surrender it. The absorption of the finite in the infinite which pantheism preaches is as different from that surrender of the self to God, which is the condition of God dwelling in us and we in God, as night is from day, as death is from life.
We find ample historical confirmation of what has just been said in the very instructive fact, that widespread as pantheism is, it has never in itself been the religion of any people. It has never been more than the philosophy of certain speculative individuals. India is no exception, for even there, in order to gain and retain the people, pantheism has had to combine with polytheism. It is the personal gods of Hindu polytheism and not the impersonal principle of Hindu pantheism that the Hindu people worship. The Sankhya and Vedanta systems are no more religions than the systems of Spinoza, Schelling, or Hegel. They are merely philosophies. Buddhism has laid hold of the hearts of men to a wonderful extent; not, however, in virtue of the pantheism, scarcely dis-tinguishable from atheism, which underlies it, but because of the attractiveness of the character and teaching of the Buddha Sakyamuni himself, of the man-god who came to save men. The human heart cries out for a living personal God to worship, and pantheism fails miserably as a religion because it wholly disregards, yea, despises that cry.
We are compelled to pass onwards, then, to theism. And here, applying the same view of religion as before, it soon becomes obvious that of the three great theistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—the last is far inferior to the other two, and the first is a transition to and preparation for the second. Although the latest of the three to arise, Mohammedanism is manifestly the least developed, the least matured. Instead of evolving and extending the theistic idea which it borrowed, it has marred and mutilated it. Instead of representing God as possessed of all spiritual fulness and perfection, it exhibits Him as devoid of the divinest spiritual attributes. Although the Suras of the Koran are all, with one exception, prefaced by the formula, "In the name of Allah, the God of mercy, the merciful," there is extremely little in them of the spirit of mercy, while they superabound in a fierce intolerance. Allah is set before us with clearness, with force, with intense sincerity, as endowed with the natural attributes which we ascribe to God, but only so as to exhibit very imperfectly and erroneously His moral attributes. He is set before us as God alone, beside whom there is none other; as the first and the last, the seen and the hidden; as eternal and unchanging; as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; as the Creator, the Preserver, and the Judge of all;—but He is not set before us as truly righteous or even as truly reasonable, and still less as Love. He is set before us as an infinite and absolute arbitrary Will, the acts of which are right simply because they cannot be wrong, and which ordains its creatures and instruments to honour or dishonour, heaven or hell, without love or hate, without interest or sympathy, and on no grounds of fitness or justice.
His infinite exaltation above His creatures is recognised, but not His relationship to and interest in His creatures. His almighty power is vividly apprehended, but His infinite love is overlooked, or only seen dimly and in stray and fitful glimpses. His character is thus most imperfectly unveiled, and even seriously defaced; and, in consequence, a whole-hearted communion with Him is impossible. As an unlimited arbitrary Will He leaves man with no true will to surrender to Him. Inaccessible, without sympathy, jealous, and egoistic, His appropriate worship is servile obedience, blind submission—not the enlightened reverence and loving affection of the true piety in which mind and heart fully accord; unquestioning belief, passionless resignation, outward observances, mere external works—not the free use of reason, not the loving dependence of a child on its father, not an internal life of holiness springing from a divine indwelling source. God and man thus remain in this system, theistic although it be, infinitely separate from each other. Man is not made to feel that his whole spiritual being should live and rejoice in God; on the contrary, he is made to feel that he has scarcely any other relation to God than an inert instrument has to the hand which uses it. Submission to the will of God, whatever it may be, without recognition of its being the will of a Father who seeks in all things the good of His children, is the Mussulman's highest conception either of religion or duty, and consequently he ignores the central principle of religious communion and the strongest motive to moral action.
The theism of the Old Testament is incomparably superior to that of the Koran. It possesses every truth contained in Mohammedanism, while it gives due prominence to those aspects of the Divine character which Mohammedanism obscures and distorts. The unity and eternity of God, His omniscience, omnipresence, and inscrutable perfections, the wonders of His creative power, His glory in the heavens and on the earth, are described by Moses and the author of the Book of Job, by the psalmists and the prophets, in language so magnificent that all the intervening centuries have been unable to surpass it. And yet far greater stress is justly laid by them on the moral glory of God, which is reflected in so dim and broken and disproportionate a way through the visions of Mohammed. It is impossible to take a comprehensive view of the Old Testament dispensation without perceiving that its main aim, alike in its ceremonial observances, moral precepts, and prophetic teaching, was to open and deepen the sense of sin, to give reality and intensity to the recognition of moral law, to make known especially that aspect of God's character which we call His righteousness, His holiness. At the same time God is set forth as merciful, long-suffering, and gracious; as healing our diseases, redeeming our life, and crowning us with loving-kindnesses; as creating in us clean hearts, and desiring not sacrifice but a broken spirit.
Before the close of the Old Testament dispensation, a view of God's character had been attained as complete as could be reached through mere spiritual vision and expressed through mere words. The character of God was so disclosed that His people longed with their whole hearts for the blessedness of true spiritual communion with Him, and worthily apprehended what that communion ought to be. But with the widening of their views and the deepening of their longings as to this the