COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL.

BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK.

THE river Rhine is a majestic stream until in the Netherlands of the North Sea shore it divides into shallows, and swamps, and steaming oozes. Man's adoration of God is a majestic stream until in the Netherlands of religious experience it divides among three gods or among many gods, and so becomes a collection of shallows, and swamps, and steaming oozes. Out of these North Sea hollow lands, wherever they have existed in any age of the moral experience of the race, there has invariably arisen a vapour obscuring the wide, undivided azure, and even the near landscapes, of natural truth. Give me the Christian and the scientific surety of the Unity of the Divine Nature, and let my whole soul flow toward one God; let me not worship three separate wills, three separate consciences, three separate sets of affections; but one Will, one Conscience, one Heart, which was, and is, and is to come; and so long as the Alps of thought feed me with their cool, impetuous, crystalline streams, I shall be like the Rhine, deep enough in the current of my adoring affections to drive out the driftwood and boulders in the stream, and not permit them to accumulate and form islands, to divide the river into shallows and oozes. Let me move toward God, one in nature outside of the soul, one in Christ revealed in history, one as tangible to the conscience in the intuitions; let me feel that all these subsistences are one substance; and it may be that the Rhine of the human affections, turned thus toward God as one will, one heart, and one conscience, will be majestic enough to float fleets, both for peace and for war, and will go out into the ocean at last not as a set of befogged shallows and oozes, but as the Amazon goes out—an undivided river into an undivided ocean, a thousand flashing leagues caught up into infinite times ten thousand flashing leagues, the intersphering of wave with wave, in every case the interspersing of a portion of the finite personality with the Infinite Personality, one, invisible, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal; the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; holy holy, holy; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

For one, I had rather go back to the Bosphorus, where I stood a few months ago, and worship with that emperor who lately slit his veins and went hence by suicide, than to be in name only an orthodox believer, or in theory to hold that there is but one God, but

in imagination to worship three gods. I am orthodox, I hope, but my first concern is to be straightforward. I purpose to be straightforward, even if I must be orthodox. Revere the orthodoxy of straightforwardness; and when that justifies you in doing so, but only then, revere the straightforwardness of orthodoxy. Mohammedan paganism contains one great truth-the divine unity. And I never touch this majestic theme of the divine triunity without remembering what that single truth, as I heard it uttered on the Bosphorus, did for me when I knelt there once in a mosque with the emperor and with the peasants, with the highest officers of state and with the artisans, and saw them all bow down and bring their foreheads to the mats of the temple, and heard them call out, from the highest to the lowest, as they prostrated themselves: "Allah el akbar!" -"God is one, and God is great." So prostrating themselves, they three times called out, "Allah el akbar!" and then remained silent, until I felt that this one truth had in it a transfiguration. I affirm that I had rather go back to that shore of the azure water which connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and, omitting the leprosy of Mohammedanism, take for my religion pure theism, than to hold that there are three gods, with three wills, three sets of affections, three intellects, three consciences, and thus to deny the assurances of both scriptural and scientific truth, and make of myself the beginning of a polytheist, although calling myself orthodox.

At what should we arrive, however, if we should adopt the bare idea of the divine unity without taking also that of the triunity? Should we thus be faithful to the scientific method? Should we thus be looking at all the facts? Should we obtain by this method the richest conception of God, or should we see from such a point of view only a fragment of that portion of his nature which man may apprehend?

Theodore Parker taught God's immanence in mind and matter, and it is amazing that he thought this truth a new one. If you are of my opinion, you will reverence that one portion of his far from original teaching; for it is at once a scientific and a Christian certainty that wherever God acts, there he is. The Bridgewater treatises affirm this truth with more emphasis than Parker ever laid upon it. The one chord which he struck in theology to which all hearts vibrate was the certainty of the Divine Immanence in matter and mind. And this one certainty was the secret of any power he had in distinctively religious endeavour. Men, he said, have a conscience; and in that conscience the moral law is revealed; and that moral law reveals a Holy Person.

Your Helmholtz, and Wundt, and Beale, and Carpenter, and Herschel, and Faraday, and Darwin, and Agassiz, as well as your Lotze, and Kant, and Leibnitz, and your St. Chrysostom, and Jeremy Taylor, and Archbishop Butler, all unite with Plato, and Aristotle, and David, and Isaiah in asserting the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind. There is no cloud at this moment, shot through by the moon, so completely saturated by light, as all mind and matter are by the Divine Immanence-that is to say, by this invisible, incomprehensible Personality which the moral law reveals.

But, granting the fact of the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and mind, to what results must a rigid use of the scientific method bring us on the theme of the Triunity of the Divine Nature? I know of no question on this topic fairer or more fruitful than this.

1. Since a personal God is immanent in all matter and mind, it follows that in all Nature outside the soul we look into God's face.

2. For the same reason it is incontrovertible that in the Soul we call Christ, and in his influence in history, we look into God's face.

3. For the same reason, it is certain that in the intuitions of conscience we look into God's face.

4. These three spheres of his self-manifestation embrace all of God that can be known to man.

5. In each of these spheres of the self-manifestation of the Divine Nature something is shown which is not shown with equal clearness in either of the other spheres. In each of them the Ineffable Immanent Person says something new.

6. In external Nature he appears chiefly as Creator; in Christ chiefly as Redeemer; in conscience chiefly as Sanctifier.

7. These are all facts scientifically known.

8. A scientific scheme of religious thought must look at all the facts. 9. When all the facts known to man are taken into view, a Trinity of Divine Manifestations is, therefore, scientifically demonstrable.

10. But, according to the admitted proposition that a Personal God is immanent in all matter and mind, he reveals himself in each of these manifestations as a Person and yet as one.

11. A Personal Triunity, of which Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier are but the other names, is, therefore, scientifically known to exist.

12. This is the Trinity which Christianity calls Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of all parts of whose undivided glory it inculcates adoration in the name of what God is, and of what he has done, and of what man needs.

All these propositions you will grant me except the second; but you

cannot deny that without throwing away your own admissionthat a Personal God is immanent in all matter and mind.

Even Rousseau could say that Socrates died like a man, but the Founder of Christianity like a God. Carlyle affirms that Voltaire's attacks on Christianity are as battering-rams winging in the wrong direction. Who doubts that at the head of the effect we call Christianity there was an adequate cause, or a Person? and who can deny that in the soul of that Person God spake to man as never before or since? Scholarship has outgrown the old forms of historical doubt; and historical science now admits that, whether we say Christ possessed proper Deity or not, he assuredly has been the chief religious teacher of the race. But that fact means more than much, if looked at on all sides.

Napoleon, at St. Helena, said that something mysterious exists in universal history in its relation to Christianity. "Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" said this Italian, greater than Cæsar, and as free from partisan religious prejudices. The question was declined by Bertrand, and Napoleon proceeded: "Well, then, I will tell you." I am reading now from a passage authorized by three of Napoleon's biographers, and freely accepted by European scholars as an authoritative statement of his conversation in exile.* "Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded his empire upon love, and to this very day millions would die for him. . . I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you all these were men, and I am a man. No other is like him. Jesus Christ was more than a man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me; but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present, with the electric influence of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke with them I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts. Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the Unseen that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy. He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; he will have it entirely to himself; he demands it

* See Liddon's "Bampton Lectures," Eng. ed., p. 148, for a full list of authorities for this extract.

unconditionally, and forthwith his demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in him experience that remarkable supernatural love toward him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man's creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish the sacred flame; Time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is that which strikes me most. I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ."

It is beyond all controversy that precisely this central thought of Christianity which convinced Napoleon was what most struck the ancient Roman philosophers. Christ's continued life in the Holy Spirit was that heard of in the first centuries? Why, I open an ancient book, written in opposition to Christianity, by Arnobius, and I read: "Our Gods are not displeased with you Christians for worshipping the Almighty God; but you maintain the deity of one who was put to death on the cross. You believe him to be yet alive (et superesse adhuc creditis) and you adore him with daily supplications."* Pliny's letter to Trajan implies all this, but is so celebrated that I need not recite its majestic facts here.

Men showed me at Rome, in the Kircherian Museum, a square foot of the plaster of a wall of a palace not many years ago uncovered on the Palatine Hill. On the poor clay was traced a cross bearing a human figure with a brute's head. The figure was nailed to the cross, and before it a soldier was represented kneeling and extending his hands in the Greek posture of devotion. Underneath all was scratched in rude lettering in Greek: "Alexamenos adores his God." That representation of the central thought of Christianity was made in a jeering moment by some rude soldier in the days of Caracalla; but it blazes there now in Rome, the most majestic monument of its age in the world.

You believe your Lord is yet alive? You adore him? Listen to the last words of the martyrs through all the first five centuries of Christianity. They are these and such as these: "O Lord God, who didst make heaven and earth; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, be near us! Save the Church!"

Poor Blandina, there at Lyons, in the year 177-you remember how they roasted her, frail girl, on the red-hot iron chair; put her in a net and exposed her to the horns of the wildest oxen; whirled

* Arnobius," Adv. Gentes," i. 36.