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THE HOMILETIC REVIEW.

VOL. XXIII.- -JANUARY, 1892.—No. 1.

REVIEW SECTION.

1.-PRESENT ASPECTS OF NATURE AND REVELATION AS RELATED TO EACH OTHER.

BY SIR J. WILLIAM DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., MONTREAL, CANADA.

MUCH is said and written at present of the origin of religion and of the distinction between that which is natural and that which is revealed; though it would seem that the latter has few charms for most of those who discuss these questions. They at least attach no great importance to it. As to natural religion, we are told that it may be of three kinds: First, that which attributes the phenomena of the outward world-its winds, its sunshine, the movements of its heavenly bodies-to the action of intelligent agents or an intelligent agent; second, that which deifies the spirits of the dead and supposes them to exercise superhuman power; third, that which recognizes man as an embodiment and image of God, either in the person of the worshipper himself and his works, or in those of the rulers and magnates of the world. Each of these has its advocates, hostile to each other, while some have the good sense to combine them all. The publication, by Professor Max Müller, of his Gifford Lectures last year, added new interest to the first,* which he advocates; though we cannot read his book without perceiving that in the ancient idolatries, at least as presented to the common people, all were inextricably interwoven.

It is the object of the present paper to snow that all these forms of natural religion are not only reconcilable with, but cognate to and in some degree contained in the religion of Jesus Christ; and that nature is not only in harmony with revelation, but cannot be fully understood without its aid. It will also appear that the various forms of nature-worship found where revelation is unknown or has been lost, are all more or less rational, and are based on a felt want of humanity, which makes religion of some kind as necessary to man as his daily food, and renders questions as to a supposed origin of religion among peoples destitute of the religious

"Physical Religion," Longmans, London, 1891.

instinct as useless and frivolous as it would be to search for a tribe of men who had not learned to eat and drink.

The Old Testament knows nothing of a spontaneous development of man from lower animals, nor of a gradual development of religious ideas through various stages of fetichism and polytheism. On the contrary, it assumes man from the first as a being capable of religion and of intercourse with his Maker.

This appears in the first sentence of the Book of Genesis, whose words are absolutely unique in their grandeur and far-reaching significance "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." No evidence of the truth of this initial statement is given. The writer was aware that it required none, because the fact is one which admits of no alternative. The universe must have had a beginning somewhere in past time. We cannot conceive of it as eternal. It cannot have been causeless or selfproduced. There must have been a first cause, and in that First Cause must have been potentially all that has been produced. The reason of the most primitive or of the most modern men cannot, without contradicting itself, reach any other conclusion than that Power and Divinity lie behind nature. What name shall we give to this omnipotent, eternal First Cause? He is Elohim-a name implying might and awe, power and divinity; and its plural form indicates a plurality of persons in the unity of the Godhead, so that all that are called gods might be included under this one great name.

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In harmony with this are the succeeding statements that God revealed Himself to primitive man, gave him a law to observe, was known to him in the evening breeze that murmured through the leaves.* Let it be observed here that, according to Genesis, natural religion and revealed religion coexist from the first. Man-untutored, primitive man-can perceive behind the machinery of nature the power and divinity of its Author, and this intuitive and natural religion is supplemented by a direct revelation, placing the mind of the Creator in relation to that of His creature. Theism is thus "a fundamental truth, because it is founded on the very nature of our mind, our reason, and our language, in a simple and ineradicable conviction that where there are acts there must be agents, and in the end one prime agent, whom man may know, not, indeed, in his own inscrutable essence, but in his acts as revealed in nature." This is natural religion as indicated in the first verse of Genesis, and in many succeeding passages of the Bible; but to this it adds that revealed religion which presents to us the Creator as a personal being in whose likeness our own rational and moral nature is made, with whom we may hold intercourse, and who cares for and loves us.

Let us now consider the relation of the earlier chapters of the Bible to the three kinds of natural religion above referred to, and to their distorted and diseased development into polytheism and idolatry. All three of the forms

Gen. ii. 16; iii. &

+ Max Müller, "Physical Religion."

of natural religion-that which recognizes God in physical nature, that which believes in the continued and glorified existence of the holy dead, that which recognizes our own kinship to God and capacities of intercourse with Him, revelation recognizes, but at the same time opposes that superstitious degeneracy of these ideas which leads to actual deification of natural objects, of ancestry and heroes, or of ourselves and our works.

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How wonderfully does the first chapter of Genesis dispose of all the raw material of ancient idolatry! The heavenly bodies are pointed out as the work of God, and their obedience to definite law is indicated in connection with that important purpose which they serve to us as the great clock of nature. They are for signs and for seasons and for days and for years," servants of ours, like our household timekeeper, not gods to be worshipped. The capricious atmosphere and its waters, its storms and its thunders, fall into the same categories of creation and fixed law. The dry land and the sea, with all the living things, plant or animal, on or in them take their places in the same great procession. So it is with early human history. We now know that Eden, the tree of life, those mysterious cherubim, whether natural or spiritual, that guarded the paradise of God, formed part of the materials of the myths and worships of the heathen world. In Genesis they appear as included in God's dealings with men. Learned archæologists may vehemently dispute as to whether natural objects or deceased heroes and ancestors furnished the early material of religion. Genesis quietly includes both, and ranges as ordinary men in primitive human history all ancestral gods and demi-gods of the old mythologies, from Eve to Nimrod; for Eve was evidently the original of Ishtar and all the other mother-goddesses of antiquity; while Nimrod is now known to be Merodach, the great tutelar divinity of ancient Babylon. Thus the Bible, if we only will receive its simple statements of positive fact, has already settled all these vexed cosmological and mythological questions, and this in a way which seems consonant with common sense and with all that we can glean from the relics of primeval man. The deification of humanity itself, whether in the general or the individual, and that of man's works, seems to have been of later growth, but on this the Bible everywhere pours contempt, reminding man of his inferiority, imperfection, and mortality, and ridiculing the attempt on his part to make a portion of a log of wood into a god, while he burns the remainder.

If now we turn from the Bible to consider those views of nature and religion which have arisen independently in the minds of men destitute of direct revelation from God, or who have rejected that revelation, we shall find that whether in ancient myths or modern science they have some features in common, and are characterized by conclusions and results of the most partial and imperfect kinds. In both the creature is regarded to the exclusion of the Creator. Both consequently fall short of a first cause, and whether a man worships the sun or fire or a deceased hero, or limits his view to physical energies and to the dicta of great authorities,

the ultimate character and results of his religion or want of it become nearly the same.

The steps by which men came to worship fire, the great god Agni of the Hindoo mythology, are well explained by Max Müller in his Gifford Lectures, though the view which he presents is necessarily one-sided and imperfect, regarding, as it does, man as a being working his way to religious ideas from a state of destitution of religion, and supposing that the habit of speaking of his own actions was transferred to what seemed to be the actions of fire and other agents, as when we now speak of fire as raging, roaring, devouring; natural, even necessary modes of speech, which might, perhaps, lead simple minds to fancy the fire a living agent. So we may think or speak of the sun as "like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber" to run his daily race, or of the moon as "walking in brightness;" but there is no necessary connection between these forms of speech and idolatrous worship.

The magic influence of fire is indeed one which many may have felt. Its spontaneous action, its devouring energy, require but little imagination to convert it into a living, active agent. I remember an incident of my own youth which strongly impressed this upon me. I used to take long rambles through the woods in search of rare birds or other animals to add to my collections. On one occasion, on a hot, still summer day, I suddenly came on a tall, dead tree on fire from top to bottom. There was no other fire near, and there it stood blazing quietly in the still air. How it was set on fire I do not know, probably not by human hands, and it may have been by lightning. The strange, causeless, spontaneous burning struck me forcibly. I could sympathize with Moses when he saw the bush that burned without being consumed, and could easily imagine some primitive savage unacquainted with fire, in presence of such a sight, imagining that he saw a god or at least something supernatural. This might be superstitious, but when we see any strange natural phenomenon, or even the ordinary rising and setting of the sun, and are ignorant of the causes, it is surely natural and not irrational to refer the effect directly to a divine first cause, and it requires but a small stretch of imagination to deify the seen agent. When, however, we find that neither the sun nor fire are voluntary agents, but obey unchanging laws which we can understand, and in the case of fire, can regulate to our own advantage, we learn that these are not gods, but only manifestations of a higher power. will be a curious failure of sound reason if, when disenchanted as to the divinity of natural objects, we fail to recognize their Maker. There is good reason to believe that in ancient times the priests and the initiated did not make this mistake, but continued to regard natural objects as emblems of God. But whatever may have been the case among the heathen, this was certainly the attitude of the Hebrew writers, to whom nature was not itself divine, but the manifestation of the unseen Elohim.

It

On the other hand, it is to be observed that hero-worship, regarded in

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