prove a weapon we grasp by the blade.' The Christian doctrine of the Divine immutability is not that of the Epicurean and the Deist, that He is for ever removed from the transient in human experience, and the fleeting moods of its moral progress. He has a share in these, because they are the means and opportunity He has chosen for the impartation of the moral qualities of His own nature; He is never arbitrary and despotic in ethical discipline. Infinite variety and resourcefulness are the indications rather than the contradiction of His immutability. His character and purpose, not His methods, are unchangeable. His methods change like the movements of an infinite strategy, in order that He may accomplish His changeless purpose. His moral consistence, true to His righteous and loving character, reveals His immutability through activities in which the divine powers are brought under dominion to the single and eternal purpose of His will to impart Himself to creatures foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son. The immanence of God, therefore, is to be regarded as an ever-increasing reality in human nature. It is dependent upon the stages of receptivity for His presence as Holy Love reached through progressive acts of ethical obedience in man. An immanence admitting of degrees and ethically conditioned is a safeguard to the doctrine which some of its advocates overlook. Before we can assert immanence in ethical natures we must wisely define the aspect of the Divine whose immanent presence in man we assert. The religious interest of immanence far exceeds the philosophical. 1 1 Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. 270. A purely metaphysical conception of immanence applied to moral creatures is meaningless and spiritually barren. Immanence in the ethical sphere must be ethical in character and activity. Man and God must be considered on the same plane of moral nature. To some degree likeness between the human and divine must be mutual. A certain degree of anthropomorphism in our idea of God is a necessary correlative of a certain amount of theomorphism in our ideas of man. The Christian idea of immanence must claim and justify itself to the highest known morality. The general trend of recent investigation into the ethical values of personality suggests that the doctrine of God as the supreme personality will centre in the goodness of His will rather than in any attempt to fashion a perfectly consistent theory of His relation to a certain group of metaphysical attributes. In ethical life, therefore, we may say that, on the one hand, the Good which the personal self recognizes as its own self-fulfilment leads us to the doctrine of the Divine immanence. On the other hand, the Good as the law which the personal self accepts as the demand of the supremely Good-Will leads to the truth of the Divine transcendence. The two interpretations are complementary, and present us with an ethical conception of God rich in all the wealth of moral experience to set in place of abstract philosophical ideas of the Absolute. For Christian thought this conception is presented in perfectness in the Divine Word. in the Divine Word. Christ indeed might be called the Conscience of Man. Surely Wordsworth had ethical truths in mind when he wrote: The voice of Deity, on height and plain, Philo taught that where Logos had not stirred in a man there was no moral responsibility. 'The conception of God which Jesus gives throws off all that is not ethical.' Character enters into all His immanent activity. He is such a God as men can only know as moral; otherwise He would be the Unknown God. Of such a holy, indwelling God conscience is the abiding witness; and to this allGood God human goodness points up. It is that which we find within ourselves more than ourselves, and yet the ground of whatever in us is good.'• This that is more than ourselves' is not an occasional visitation of the Highest; it abides within us all the days like the ministry of an unchanging priesthood helping our infirmity. A further implication legitimately following the acceptance of Divine immanence in the sphere of man's moral nature is a release from the difficulty long felt in Christian thought of distinguishing sharply between the 'natural' and the Christian' conscience. This distinction is a phase of the farreaching contrast between Natural and Supernatural and similar to that often maintained between natural and revealed religion. It is commonly presented as a difference of kind, or at least of source. In this form it approaches too closely to a false antithesis. The constant recognition of God's immanence in the natural implies that 1 Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 37. 1 this distinction is more of degree than of kind. The divine is not introduced into human consciousness at particular points or in exceptional crises only. Every man knows something of the divine indwelling as a permanent possession, and as the source and strength of the activity of his real selfhood. The meaning of human personality is seen more and more clearly to be inextricably involved in the increasing recognition by the human of the divine personality. For God's goodness, whilst it infinitely transcends that of His creatures, belongs to the same ethical category as theirs. Goodness that is natural and goodness that is supernatural must not be distinguished in kind. If this is done, the possibilities of moral and spiritual communion between God and man must be forsaken. Right and wrong, justice and love, must mean the same to the conscience of the natural man, so far as they are apprehended by him, that they mean in fuller degree of apprehension to the Christian conscience. They will mean the same also when we reverently attribute them in their infinite perfection to God Himself. J. Stuart Mill's well-known saying, 'I will call no being Good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures,' • was a notable and noble assertion of immutable morality.' We cannot assume that God is above morality, or that man is beneath it. Wherever ethical qualities are found they are of God. Whether in the natural or the spiritual man, these are active according as God worketh in man to will and to do 1 1 John Wesley objects to the expression' natural conscience' because conscience is a ' supernatural Gift of God' (Works, vii. 188). 2 Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103. of His good pleasure. Their varying degrees of expression are conditioned by the moral response of the human personality. The effort to establish ethics independent of God's immanence has mischievous effects alike for religion and morality. Man is never moral apart from God. Indeed, the solution, so far as such a solution can ever be possible, of the problem how to reconcile the sovereign power of God as the perfectly Good Will with human freedom may best be sought in the doctrine of immanence. God works through man, and man acts through God. Reason, will, and conscience are equally the testimony to God's indwelling in man and to man's indwelling in God; that is, to the Divine immanence in harmony with the Divine transcendence. A secondary, or natural authority for the moral ideal and the sense of moral obligation in man which claims an ultimate independence of the one perfect Fount of all moral truth and order, would lead towards an ethical dualism inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of God and man. An eternal law of Righteousness,' superior to the personality of God as to that of man, which some writers, both in ethics and theology, assume, has no more satisfactory value for the Christian thinker. The Moral cosmos is one. ethical demand for unity here is no less insistent than the intellectual demand for unity in the physical universe. Truth shines with one lightand always from the one underived Sourcewhether it be truth in aesthetics, in reason, in ethics, or religion. And the soul of man receives it, as the eye of man receives the light, wherever access is given for it. This is the light that lighteth The |
