gives to men an untroubled heart in the midst of an exceedingly trouble-rent world? He is the Christlike God-" the Personal Spirit, perfectly good, who in holy love creates, sustains, and orders all." This definition, given by the late Newton Clarke, is at once sublimely simple and splendidly comprehensive. For it contains, according to his own analysis, four statements concerning the God of Christ. First, the Nature of God: He is the Personal Spirit. This means that God thinks, feels, wills. Your limited consciousness is prophetic of God's limitless consciousness; that which is a broken gleam in you is a fountain of unemptying splendour in Him; your tiny spark of being is flung out from that God who is a vast, golden sun. Furthermore, God is personal as contrasted with vagueness, dimness, elusiveness. "A personal spirit is a selfconscious and self-directing intelligence; and a personal God is a God who knows Himself as Himself, and consciously directs His own action." Second, the Character of God; He is perfectly good. He is more than kind and gracious; He is the utmost of moral excellence; all love, wisdom, goodness, and power are gathered up and sheaved in Him. A perfectly good God is the crowning glory of Christ's revelation. We do not get this conception from the universe. Indeed, many hold that the cosmos is stoutly opposed to the idea that God is good. They point to the red-in-tooth-and-claw tendency in nature and say: "Is this your soul of goodness in things evil?" Yet however much or little the physical universe may reveal it, there is no doubt that God's perfect goodness is made manifest in His Son. Therefore, while men may find God in nature, it is absolutely certain that God does find men in Christ. Third, the relation of God to other existence: He creates, sustains, and orders all. All worlds and all systems; all angels and all men were created by Him; all are sustained by Him; all are governed by Him. "Of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all things." The Christlike God is the beginning, the path, the goal of all that was, of all that is, of all that shall be. Fourth, the motive of God in His relation to other existence: God is Holy Love. This is implied in perfect goodness; but God's holy love is so uniquely the revelation of our Lord that it demands special emphasis. Why was the universe created? What is the motive behind it all? Holy love is the answer. For example: God did not create our race because eternity went heavy on His hands and He was in need of something to do. He created us that He might lavish His love upon us, thus rendering us capable of loving Him and all men. Christ is God's explanation of the universe. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him, should not perish, but have eternal life." It is God's holy love in Christ that is conducting the world toward the goal of ultimate redemption. Faith in such a God, then, is the secret, and the only secret, of the untroubled heart. Surely, this is the faith we need; the faith we must have, or ingloriously perish in all worthful spiritual endeavour. Among other things, this faith will save you from being victimized by the new dogmatism abroad today. We have already been warned against the new predestination. Obsessed by popular ideas of heredity, men easily become moral shirks. Standing by ancestral graves, they backbonelessly lament: "Dead sires, it was all your fault and not mine!" And this scientific fatalism, as taught by the materialistic school of eugenists, eats the vitals of morality like gangrene. The old iron-clad predestination, as compared with this mechanical fatalism, is as soft as a June zephyr sighing in the wake of a tornado. And just now the new predestination has its counterpart in the new dogmatism. The chief characteristic of the new dogmatism is the insistence with which it asserts what the modern man thinks about God, about himself, about society, about destiny. Now we must know what a man thinks in order to know what a man is; and this modern man thinks aloud so much that it were impossible to ignore him. He should not be ignored; he is of vast importance. And yet there is something more important still. It is this: To know what the supreme mind-the mind of the Christlike God-thinks of the modern man. Are we not in real danger of overlooking this phase of the problem? Many seem to think of the Creator as Comte thought of the laws of the solar system. He said: "We can easily conceive them improved in certain respects." But for some reason, the Almighty did not see fit to let the contract for improving the solar system to the positivist. It is nothing less than tragical to see men extending their intellectual frontiers while at the same time contracting their spiritual boundaries. "How profoundly true it is," said James Martineau, "that in divine things the child may know what the great philosopher has missed." Speaking of a godless civilization, he also says: "It is a fatal delusion to imagine that the arts of life, which only enlarge its resources, have any necessary tendency to improve its spirit; or that the completest acquaintance with science affords any guarantee of highest goodness. No laboratory can neutralize the poison of the passions, or find a crucible to make the nucleus of the heart flown down; no observatory can show us a new constellation of the virtues, correct the aberration of life's true light, or deepen any heavens but those of space." All reasonable men are in hearty sympathy with what George Meredith called rational progress. It is the blasé Comteism; the intellectual conceit unaware of the rattle of its dry bones; the new dogmatism more repulsive than the old, bereft of thoroughgoing morality and orphaned of spiritual vitality; the smiling ease with which old faiths are chucklingly thrown off and new ones grimacingly taken on; the superficial mental illumination that lacks the urge and ache of sacrificial passion; the fad to be glibly modern rather than the desire to be eternally right-these are a few expressions of that reckless spirit which chants for its marching song: "Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore On tortured puzzles from our youth. We are the three Wise Men of yore, And we know all things but the truth." a Consequently, a just critique of large sections of current life is this: Our humanitarianism is not robustly moral; our morality is not deeply spiritual ; and our spirituality is not vitally Christian. Therefore, we need to be delivered from the peril-ghastly smooth and tremendously insinuating-of "Christless Christianity." Having a form of godliness and practically denying its power is equivalent to having a painted fire and freezing to death. So long as we ministers prophesy soft things we shall be rewarded with a harvest of soft souls. Our up-to-date cleverness is a sorry substitute for the dateless reality of sustained repentance and eternal life mediated by the unaging Christ. Where there is no trenchant, rapier-like thrust in the pulpit, there is no bleeding, sin-convicted heart in the pew; and both alike stumble into the abyss of unchristian inefficiency. |