VI

THE HYPOTHESIS OF GOD IN HUMAN HISTORY

Men's best hopes and aspirations have paralleled their conceptions of the Divine. Men have striven as they have conceived God to have led them. And still for a conception of the universe the hypothesis of God is better than any no-hypothesis of no-God. The thought of God arises from the convergence of our intellectual needs and noblest human impulses. We may not throw aside our furthest spiritual insistences.

One feels convinced of God: how shall we conceive and think Him, so as to justify our surrender to His influence, or to the impulse of our passionate conviction?

First, in relation to natural or physical law. The whole natural world and the sidereal universe, so far as known, follow regular sequences, bound by the laws or nature of their substances, energies, and relations. Physical law is of the essence of inorganic matter or energy. It also enters and to a vast extent controls organic life, determining the forms and functioning of plants and animals, and apparently even the scintillae of mentality discerned in animals below the state of man. Their volitional or mental freedom is doubtful; their instincts and impulses or quasi-thoughts seem but expressions of their physical organisms, though perhaps suggest

ing something more. Natural law likewise determines not merely the bodily functions, but the bulkier portion of the impulses and perceptions of mankind.

The sequences which we group under the general concept of natural law seem to belong to matter or to physical energy.1 The relation of Something or Some One, i.e. God, to matter or physical energy or law, seems a problem of creation, or of the contribution of energy or the bestowal of life or evolutionary power. It is a superhuman problem, and any conceivable solution is altogether beyond our knowledge or experience, and perhaps beyond our powers of thought. Nor is it a problem of practical moment for mankind. Because just as natural law works in apparently unswerving sequences, so, in respect to these sequences, God is equally obdurate and ineluctable, or, perhaps, hardly conceivable as free. Vainly will man lift his hands to God to stay the earthquake or the tempest or bring rain upon the earth; or to stop the ravening of jungle beasts or invisible germs whose homing or multiplying means the sickness and death of men. We cannot stay the sun, nor in the smallest material things prevent the course of natural law through prayer

1 Linguistically natura is equivalent to puois, and the two words have a like range of meaning in Latin and Greek respectively. So natural law is equivalent to physical law. Yet natural has gradually acquired a broader or looser sense than physical," and is not so definitely contrasted with " mental" or 66 spiritual."

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to any God or gods. Yet we may profitably remember that many philosophers and physicists, from the earliest to the most recent times, have seen in this unfailing operation of natural law the profoundest evidence of a divine control.1 Moreover, we may deem that the man whose prayers cannot check the course of nature may still be spiritually helped by them; and it is very thinkable that in answer to prayer God may turn physical ills to the spiritual benefit of the responsive and faithful sufferer.

So we turn to the God who is mind and love, whether He be the same as the God of natural law or quite another. Him we conceive to act with that freedom of choice and discrimination which we cannot dissociate from the functioning of mind. We conceive God to act upon the minds and moods of men as spirit addressing itself to spirit; for men are capable of being thus acted on, and moved and drawn, perhaps to think and will as the Divine Spirit thinks and wills. Freedom of mind is of the essence of the action of God, and also of the essence of the human response, acceptant or recalcitrant. Here there is no coercion. The man is free to accept or reject the grace of God.

Nevertheless, God's proffered inspiration

or

1 "Au vrai, il semble que rien ne manifeste ici-bas la présence mystique du divin autant que cette harmonie éternelle et inflexible qui lie les phénomènes et qu'expriment les lois scientifiques " (C. Nordmann, Einstein et l'univers (Paris, Hachette, 1921), p. 190). (Eng. Trans. by M'Cabe, p. 207.)

guidance and man's acceptance or rejection, although free, are not exempted from the law of consequences. Inevitably the human spirit is raised or lowered by its acceptance or refusal, as in its heightened or blunted power of further response.

The cruder religions have more to do with the needs and cravings of men's bodies than with the aspirations of their minds. The primitive God divides the Red Sea or feeds His people with manna in the wilderness, or, as Indra or Zeus, may wield the thunderbolt. The gods send shipwreck or plagues. The arrows of Apollo smite men with mortal bodily disease. Such gods are very powerful, but are not philosophically conceived as infinite or omnipotent.

With advancing thought religions become more spiritual,1 and the intercourse between the higher type of worshipper and his god may relate itself more genially to the condition and action of the spirit the spirit or impassioned mind of man seeks the aid of God to save or purify or ennoble it. Yet in all ages the vast majority of men have been concerned with material welfare, and only the finer sort with the interests of the soul or mind.

This

1 The Jewish religion tended to become spiritual through the generations of the prophets, till it may be said (loosely speaking) to have culminated in Jesus and Paul. But as common beliefs are always below the spirituality of religious leaders, so the subsequent general acceptance and interpretation of the gospel of a supreme Founder falls in an indefinite number of ways from its high pattern.

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is still true, while it is more true than ever that the religion, the faith, of the "finer sort" relates to the needs and aspirations of the mind or yearning spirit. Our God is God of our mind and spirit; it is to our minds that He speaks, and our minds that He persuades or inspires to His purposes. We come close to Him-for is He not within our minds ? -in prayer for wisdom and righteousness, and not in foolish petitions touching our bodies or the material things of living on the earth. In the spirit He is our God, and we are His spiritual children communing with Him in the spirit.1

As for the part this God of ours has taken in the world-drama, whether or not He built the stage and made the actors out of nothing, we believe that He is furthering the dénouement and climax of the play. We look back over the record of life upon this earth, and we perceive life inscrutably beginning, persisting, and advancing into more complex and agile and subtle forms: life, as it were, inclusive, the life of plants and beasts and men, of the marvel

1 Thus we rely upon the immediacy of our religious experience which is spiritual. But the crasser, earlier man, or, indeed, the crasser present man and woman, may have had, and may still have, an immediacy of religious experience arising from things physical and relating to them, having to do with the crashing powers of nature, or with physical disease. And so men still pray for many kinds of things. Religious men cannot help praying for whatever they want very much, whether or no their minds bid them to expect it in answer to prayer. It is the chief mode of their communion with the Great Companion.