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supposed. God, according to the Deist, was cause of the world, after which His functions were over. But in the light of what we have just said, this will mean, that God is no longer necessary at all; there is no place for Him in the world. He appeared in answer to a necessity of thought, which is satisfied when the world has come into being. The religious associations of the word God may lead us still to talk of Him as existent, but everything would be just the same if the effort of creation had annihilated Him. The difficulty of Deism is, then, that it means practical atheism. It cuts at the roots of all positive conceptions of God-His personality, His eternity, His goodness.

Pantheism also has its notion of cause lying at its root, and it is diametrically opposed to that of Deism. Causation, from this point of view, is an immanent process, as it is technically called-that is, it consists in the balance of two related forces. The effect is as necessary to complete the cause, as the cause to bring the effect into being. They stand and fall together. When one ceases the other ceases too. This explanation, as in the other case, tends to bring the difficulty of Pantheism into clearer light. God is still cause of the world, but He is immanent cause. The world (evil and all) is the correlative of His existence. Without the world He would have no means of self-expression. He would vanish into blank nothingness.

Theism, in the Unitarian sense, tries to cut between these two difficulties. It endeavours to believe in God as separate in nature from the world, yet necessarily living and eternal. Instead of accepting the Deistic view of Him as merely a cause, it endeavours to find Him functions in the world as created. It inclines to

allow that He occasionally interferes with the progress of the world-alters its movement to suit a special occasion, works a miracle here and there. It accepts the Bible account of revelation, thinks of God ruling in history, believes in the special mission of Christ, as a godly man, and so on. But then it comes into violent collision with all orderly speculation about nature. It is not at this stage philosophical at all; it is eclectic; it aims at combining and selecting out of a variety of possible positions, and its collision with the man of science reveals its weaknesses only too clearly. The occasional interferences by which it had hoped to keep up a divine influence upon things are shown to be impossible, to render all serious scientific effort hazardous and liable to disappointment. It is shown, too, that they must imply weakness if they are, as is contended, occasional. They must mean that the original plan of the world was found not to answer, and was patched up as occasion required. Slowly but surely it is driven over by this kind of criticism into a more or less Pantheistic position. It loses hold of the idea of a personal God; for it becomes more and more difficult to think of a lonely being with no object for His love or interest. Or perhaps it finds its chief trouble over the idea of eternity. How can this lonely solitary Being while away the endless years till the creation dawns upon it? The whole theory becomes repulsive, and the warmth of life which Pantheism brings becomes attractive. For Pantheism never leaves God alone. The world is always there, always expressing the will of the Spirit, from whose will it springs, or rather, whose will it perpetually represents. In one case, and, as far as we know, one only, space is made to play the part of the object of the

Divine activity. This is in Dr. Martineau's Study of Religion, Bk. II. ch. i. We do not propose to discuss it at length, because we do not think that the theory as it stands is likely to be popular. We only mention it in order to illustrate the straits to which pure Theism is driven in its endeavour to avoid Pantheism and Deism alike. Dr. Martineau, of course, is a philosopher, and the form of Christianity which he represents so ably, is credited with being the most philosophical type of it. We are inclined to think, on the other hand, that Unitarian Theism is rather a compromise between a philosophical belief in God and the theory of His nature which depends on revelation. The philosophical theory is bandied about between the two tendencies of Transcendence and Immanence, and Theism tries, ineffectually, as we think, to mediate between them.

Trinitarianism, however, satisfies the conditions which Theism fails to satisfy. By its assertion of a plurality of persons in the Godhead it avoids the dangers which are fatal to Unitarian Theism. There need be no talk of space or of a world co-eternal with God upon a Trinitarian theory of His nature. We have already shown that the Word and the Holy Spirit answer every condition which we can require of this kind. And the identification of the nature of God with love enables us to shadow out the motive which may have been at the root of the world's existence. It enables us to shadow it out and no more, for we are not so far masters of the ultimate purposes of God as to see how the original counsels are being carried forward to their attainment. What we can see is consistent with the motives that we know.

But it may be asked, Is not Trinitarianism, then,

after all, a mere matter of philosophical speculation, a means of satisfying philosophical problems, and not a matter for a Creed? The answer is, that it is nothing of the kind. The fact that it satisfies, or appears to some to satisfy, certain philosophical questions is not part of its essence, as it were. In itself, as we have so often argued, it is the amplification, the explicit statement of the fact of the Incarnation. Its first appearance is made in the most unphilosophical region of the world. But, once grasped as a matter of fact, it is seen to involve a certain attitude towards questions of philosophy. It does not hold aloof from all these. It carries with it an answer to them. And in order to make this plain, the Church may and will use the language of philosophy. It will express its answers to the philosophical problem in the terms which philosophy employs at the time, just as it teaches its Creed, in contents if not in form, to various nations in the language which they speak.

This fact will define the limits within which restatement of the articles of the Catholic faith will be possible. The philosophical language changes from age to age. The philosophical questions are asked in different ways at different times. At all times men have sought to bring into system the three great facts in experience the soul, the world, and God. But the problem has been expressed in different forms. In Greece little was said about the soul. It was assumed that man could know the world and God, and the problem was to order and systematize the knowledge he had to build up a scheme of thoughts which should correspond with and reproduce the scheme of things outside. And the Church entered upon this question

and gave its answer. Its doctrine of God, besides everything else that it was, offered a solution of this question, which could be expressed in the technical language of the day. Some modifications had to be made, some associations had to be set aside. But, for the most part, the philosophical language of the Church was the language of the Greek philosophic schools, just as the ordinary language of Alexandrian Christians was Greek. In the present day our problem is differently expressed: it is to explain the possibility of our knowledge of God and of the world. Here, again, the old doctrines may be translated into the language which this new aspect of the matter requires, just as the Nicene Creed may be translated into English. The new light, which the investigation leading to the new problem brings, will aid us in restatement. If we may use a portion of the present chapter as an illustration, the peculiar form given to the analogy of human personality to the Holy Trinity is one which does not occur in S. Augustine, but is suggested by more modern speculations. To have recited the Augustinian parallels pure and simple would not, we hope, have involved any departure from our present point of view. But to have done so would have made it necessary to introduce a dissertation upon the psychology of Augustine's day in order to make it reasonably intelligible that there was an analogy at all. It is not quite the same with articles of the Creed, such as the famous Homoousion. This also requires translation; it must be expressed in the language in which we think. But it is the formal definition of the Church of one age, continually accepted by successive ages, of the Catholic belief as to the nature of the Son. It expresses the

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