A Greylock Pulpit.

GOD IN HIS WORLD.

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. Psalms 139:9, 10.

While we all presumably believe in God, it would amaze us to see how few believe in a present God. If many believe in Christ, how few believe in a present Christ. Since Jesus has thrown so much light on the nature of God, we too easily form the habit of going back two thousand years for God. We would make a mistake to neglect the study of the historic Christ. If, however, we accustom ourselves to think of Christ as only in Palestine, if our best thought of Him is associated with the customs of a single race and a single land, if He is to us a memory alone and not a presence, we shall miss His own conception of Himself, mankind and God. It is my purpose to trace the history of the Real Presence, to outline the fortunes of a noble idea and to mark the hindrances which it encountered from the time of the apostolic fathers down to these modern years. The strictures, which I shall have to make, are not designed to cast reflection upon any Church, Greek, Roman or Protestant. Let the faults be human faults, the virtues human virtues.

Consider then, the perpetual presence of God in His world. From the second century to the fourth, the freest city, in hospitality afforded to thought, was Alexandria. Here the great arena was a Coliseum of culture. Here was no Pantheon of borrowed gods, yet an atmosphere stimulating and attractive to all the schools. Here the Platonist, the Eclectic, and the Christian philosopher met on equal terms with the Jew and the magician. It was a Greek city with a Christian civilization. Christianity justified herself by life among the lowly, and by reason with the schools. Clement of Alexandria, a man of wide travel and profound learning, found Christianity acceptable to his reason and to it he gave his heart. He discerned that it was rational both by what it included and by what it excluded. It contained all the truth of Greek philosophy. It was for and against Aristotle. It was for Plato and against him. It fulfilled the best in that great philosopher. Said Plato, “We must wait for one, be it a god or a god inspired man, who will teach us our religious duties and take away the darkness from our eyes." The greatest pupils of Plato saw that their master would have been a Christian had he lived in the Christian era. Plato unwillingly remanded God to a distant sphere. When the great majority

confessed the same belief, it was for an opposite reason. They were so immoral that they could not even conceive of a present moral Deity.

It was left to a third class, the Stoics, a school founded sixty years after the death of Plato, to teach the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets, that the God of the whole earth is in His world. Paul on Mar's Hill, seeking for common ground with his Greek audience, quoted this fundamental basis of agreement from their own poets. Clement could not forget, if he would, that God is exalted, but the Spirit of a present God, strengthened the fortress of his memory on its weaker side and brought to his remembrance that climactic word of the Ascension, "Lo, I am with you alway."

Humanity not only seized upon the Gospel of God's presence, but was quick to detect the implied Gospel of man's dignity. Man was not even closely akin to God. He was constitutionally related to God. He is made in God's identical image. He therefore is not an object of patronage, condescension, or adoption. He is for development. He is a prince in disguise on the way to his crown. This nature of man is the essential basis of progress, a necessary ground of spiritual education. In this identity of the nature of God and man lies the possibility and the certainty of the Incarnation. Man's nature is capable of realizing sonship with God. The teaching, of the ancient world, that there are many gods, was sometimes employed as a bridge over an imaginary gulf. Certain speculators invented intermediary beings to relieve God of responsibility for sin. These creatures also served to break the force of the light of God, so that His children might endure the modified and weakened disclosure. The distinction of Christianity is not in the assumption of man's sin nor in the sin consciousness which goes with ideals, but in God revealed in a nature so Divinely created that it can know Divinity as personal, eternal and present love. Christ brushed away the intermediaries as so many cobwebs. The fair city on the Nile sings a new song with the old words of the Hebrew poet, "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even then shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me."

Following Clement, Origen and Athanasius made the same great principles emphatic. The word "Son" as applied to the Incarnation of God, was thought to imply subordination, but they cleared themselves by saying that the Son was the eternal Word. This Word was the eternal necessity of God's self-expression. Man was therefore made by the Word, and this Word is "the light of every man that cometh into the world." We have no power to measure the infinite One but He has revealed His heart in our Elder Brother Jesus Christ, God with us. The early Church was not frightened by three words. They had more reason to fear polytheism than we have. They did not give the Gnostic any ground to say that the terms Father, Son or Word, and Spirit were unequal gradations of being, a descending scale of gods, a new paganism. The baptismal words represent the richness, complexity, fellowship and glory of the Divine nature. In this interpretation, we escape from Mohammedanism, Judaism, Deism, Buddhism, and every form of religion where the Supreme Being is a cold, distant, isolated and careless spectator of the earth.

God is more than any expression of God. We assert His transcendence, and refuse to identify Him with His work as do the Pantheists. God is in and above both Nature and the soul.

It is an absurd speculation, to consider how far along the world would be, if there had been no Roman empire to decline and fall. It is impossible to tell what would have happened had all the Romans been Greeks. Doubtless the Church would have fallen much further, if some traces of this older truth of God in His World, had not followed it through all its history. Augustine in a few of his better moments had glimpses of the great promise of the Presence. The Church which had begun with the idea that Christ was to soon come again, always contained those who were sure that the day was not distant when they were to meet the Lord in the air. They at last gave up trying to do much alone with the wicked world and fled to the monasteries. Fortunately they kept alive fellowship and good works. They preserved Greek manuscripts, but their civilization, their speech, their thought was chiefly Latin. So far as the Latin tongue prevailed it was a check to the western course of empire for the ideas which had captured the world's greatest center of culture, Alexandria. We are not to blame the Church of the middle ages for the sins of the old paganism. We are to ask how much worse it would have been but for that Church. Christianity did alleviate, but could not at once cure all the evils of the world thrown upon its hands in one city. All things are possible with God, but not all things are at once possible to God and natural law. The Roman genius for law and administration put a legal tone into everything. Superstition, and the consciousness of moral weakness, combined with their affinities to make a lower mould for Christian thought and life. Christianity did not decline but the Church adjusted itself to new conditions. Latin thought was legal, not philosophic. It was the genius of the empire, not that of the Church, which substituted authority for reason. They started with God's transcendent nature. Laying little or no emphasis on a present God, it became a natural development to make the Church a ladder between low man and the high God. Law, ritual and priesthood were so many rounds of this ladder. The Church, losing heart, narrowed its scope by adding the word Roman to the term Catholic. The Greek and the Donatist were disfellowshipped. Another downward step was made when the Roman Catholic Church was still further limited to the clergy. They, and they only, received what they believed to be the only deposit of grace and authority in direct line of succession from the apostles. The bishop of Rome was the head of the clergy, the successor of Peter and the Vicar of Christ. He enlarged his prerogative, assuming control of the state.

Augustine was the father of the papal theology. This descended to our day by the way of John Calvin. Thousands of Protestants congratulate themselves that they are free from Calvinism who have yet to escape from the false ideas of both Calvin and Augustine. While Augustine gave us the comparatively external church and Calvin gave us the comparatively external Bible, the fires of martyrdom revealed the gloom of an absent Lord. Augustine, in his early life, was a Manichaean. This sect believed

the world to be in the hands of malignant forces. Matter was evil and nature despised. Fear and superstition widened the gulf between man and God. Augustine, after his conversion, was never able to shake off the corrupting influence of this early asceticism. Captivated by the grandeur of the mediaeval Church under Ambrose at Milan, and tired of swinging round the circle in search of a creed, he gave his allegiance to the Roman obedience. There seems to be implied, and probably admitted, a distrust of reason. This, in its turn, implies distrust in self and God. The ultraconservative Roman Catholic declares that he uses his reason to guide him into the Roman Church. The corresponding type in the Protestant Church declares that he uses his reason to guide him to the Bible. Both fail to see, that if they have right to use the reason to take them to either Bible or Church they have equal right to bring both Church and Bible to the reason. To some extent, they really do, even when they are most sure that they do not. The happy results vary with our faith in that "revival of learning" which is perennial and divine. It is beginning to be quite evident that the man of the future is the man of faith in man and in God. He does not grow in his regard for tradition, the letter, or any form of the external Church. Fear is cast out. One may be frightened out of the Roman faith because he thinks he has not found the right basis of authority. He may be frightened into it, as Newman, who did not sufficiently weigh the causes of the French Revolution. He may make false claims for his Bible and for his Church, fearing to trust an open conflict with science and philosophy, but high over all, deep under all, permeating all, is the living God.

Contrast again the early eastern with the later western thought. To the Greek, God was present in every man. He might be his own priest. To the Roman, God was absent from man as such, therefore every man called a prophet, who was not also a priest, was a fraud. Scripture, to the Greek, was a partial record of what God had first inspired in some soul. So much of the Scripture as was useful to the Church, found emphasis in the western thought. With the Greek, salvation was a moral process. With the Roman, it was exemption from endless punishment. Creation and revelation were to the Greek, gradual. To the Roman, both were sudden, by fiat or decree. The Greek believed in the standing up again of the soul, and a spiritual judgment. The Roman believed in the actual standing up again of the body as well as the soul in a spectacular assize for all the human race. Michael Angelo's portrayal of the last judgment, the wonder of the Vatican is the wonder of all time. To one type, the Incarnation was the most natural thing in the world. To the other it was miraculous. One type believed in eternal love, the other spoke of the covenanted and uncovenanted mercies of God, as though God had given His note, and this was considered safer than His word and character. Thought may dwell upon the reason in Scripture or it may economize Scripture in the interest of a desirable tradition. The danger of every Church is, that it may not rise into true practical catholicity, but remain in narrow, shallow, fatalistic and mechanical groves. Instead of welcoming truth, wherever it can be found, it is assumed that this or that church has all the truth. Assumption

soon fails, and the sects raise up a class of pugilists, to prove that each is quite right and everybody else wholly wrong without the sacrament of their indorsement. This is a human error. It is found in and out of all folds. Had we lived in the middle ages, we should all of us have behaved just as the people of those dark days did. We would have extended guilt and damnation to the Greek church and other sects, to all heathen and to all non-elect babes. We should all of us have considered the arguments of the schoolmen very plausible.

The debt we owe to Rome contains this among many items. She stood her ground, when she could not do more. Mohammedanism claimed a prior succession. Rome replied with voice and power, Christ precedes Mohammed. The Church remembered that God had once been on earth, and had walked with the people. She did not seem to know that He had never been away, but the fact that He at least had made a visit stood the shock of Mohammedan arms. The Church taught our ancestors in the forests of Northern Europe that there had been a Christ on earth, and that it was their business to defend His holy sepulcher. The knight of the nineteenth century can be in better business, only because the knights of darker days made it certain that there had once been a Holy Presence in Palestine. Under brighter skies we now add to our treasures the long-lost consciousness of a present God. The revelation of God, is in every man, and may be in any Church. It is in, not on the soul. It is not to, but in humanity. The early Christians had but one doctrine, that of the Incarnation. Later interest in it was more due to the fact that the council of Nicaea had given to it the seal of authority, than because it harmonized with the tendencies of the times. The Church came at last to have as many doctrines as the pagans had gods. A low thought of God is accompanied by a lower conception of his creature. Original sin and total depravity, as an inheritance from the first man, furnish the starting point. The freedom of the will is denied. Fatality is asserted, and its denial made heresy. The few are elected to Heaven, the masses to Hell, a place of endless, unmitigated, material fire, with its premise of a bodily resurrection. From Rome to San Francisco, from the fifth century to the twentieth, these dark lines are intertwined with threads of hope. The cry to-day is not only back to Alexandria and "back to Christ," but forward with the present Spirit of God.

If sin were secreted in the bones as the liver secrets bile, and generated apart from rising standards, if the need of a high moral tone of recuperation is not felt, then the mind is empty, swept and garnished for penitential books, artificial atonements, absolutions and conveyances. Specifics will take the place of constitutional treatment. A dole of grace will supplant the immanent God. A miracle becomes of first importance, in an attempt to prove a revelation. And why not, surely if God is almost always absent, it would almost require a miracle to prove Him present.

The people, of the middle ages, had fixed upon the year one thousand as the time when Christ would return, and the ending world would be wrapped in conflagration. Devils meanwhile had the advantage. Exorcism was employed, without success, to drive away the evil spirits.

God is of