In prayer for spiritual blessings we are no longer beset by the same difficulty; for in praying for these we are praying in detail for nearer communion with God, and this we believe to be not only in strict accordance with his holiness and love, but to be conditioned by prayer. This truth is confirmed by the experience of saintly men. It is in prayer that they find God, and are found of him. It is by prayer that their spiritual life is nourished, and they are made worthy of their place in the Divine kingdom. For each man the ultimate proof of this must be in his own experience, his own realization of that drawing of the Spirit which leads him into prayer, his own consciousness of entering into a higher communion, where earthly passion is subdued, where visions and revelations of the Lord present themselves to the quickened spiritual sense, and a heavenly peace falls upon the waiting heart.

But even here an objection is raised to which we must give a moment's attention. The spiritual effects of prayer are not denied; but then, it is said, these are only the reaction of the mind upon itself, and thus the chill of doubt is introduced into the holiest activity of the soul. To the believer in God, however, this objection is without meaning. You can always describe events from the two points of view of natural law and of Divine providence. To the denier of God these represent two contrasted hypotheses; but to the believer they are only two modes of describing the same ultimate reality. If it be a natural law that prayer is followed by a certain mental reaction, this does not exclude the agency of God, but may be expressed religiously by saying that God invariably answers prayer in a certain way. We may make the constant faithfulness of God a reason for denying his presence in the universe; but we may also regard the majesty of universal law as a manifestation of eternal Reason, and exclaim with Paul, 'Of him, and through him, and to him are all things; to him be glory for ever.'

PART III

DOCTRINE OF MAN

We must now enter on another main division of our subject, which is usually denoted by the term 'Anthropology.' Anthropology in its widest sense is a science of very extensive range; and, although researches in this department of inquiry throw an interesting light on the history of religion and on the origin of religious belief, we must here limit our attention to the ideal and actual relations between God and man, straying into other fields only so far as they may affect our decision in regard to the central topic.

The subject with which we concluded our last section at once suggests to us the ideal condition of man. It is that of perfect communion with God, a communion in which he is not only absolutely obedient to the Divine Will, but filled and governed by the Divine Spirit. It is this communion that constitutes him a son of God, and we may briefly describe man's ideal end as Divine Sonship. It is not necessary to prove at any length that this forms a dominant note in the Christian Scriptures. The truth has its deepest foundations in the consciousness of Jesus himself, who gives distinct individual realization to a thought which was held more vaguely and generally by the greatest prophets of Israel; and it is taken up and repeated by the disciples. The earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God';1As many as are led by the Spirit of God,

1 Rom. viii. 19.

1

these are sons of God ';1 'Every one who loves has been born of God.'2 These wonderful utterances find their confirmation in the experiences of faith, which reveal an ideal always above and beyond us, and yet dwelling within us as the spring of progress and the hope of ultimate beatitude, and making us so conscious of the working of the Holy Spirit in our hearts as to convince us that, but for some obstruction in ourselves, we should be pure organs of the Divine will, and with the unveiled faces of sons of God reflect, as a pure mirror, the Divine glory.

3

We might be content to rest in this great spiritual fact; but it is necessary to notice one of those insoluble questions which have so often engaged the interest of theologians. In former times it was usually, though not universally, assumed that the narrative in the opening chapters of Genesis was literal history, and gave an unerring account of the origin and primitive constitution of man, and of the beginning of sin and death. An elaborate theory was founded on the statement that God created man in his own image and likeness, a careful distinction in meaning being sometimes drawn between the two principal Hebrew words. A description of the various shades of interpretation applied to the Biblical language belongs to the history of opinion rather than to our present subject; and it must be sufficient to state that in the course of time the opinion prevailed that man's likeness to God consisted in the possession of reason and free will and authority over the other occupants of the world. This, however, was not all. Man was endowed by the Creator with original righteousness,'4 or, as the Westminster Confession has it, with knowledge, righteousness,

1 Rom. viii. 14.

6

2 I John iv. 7. The Greek is even more significant, mâs ò åyaжŵv Èk τοῦ θεοῦ γεγέννηται.

3 Gen. i. 26.

4 Originalis justitia: sanctitatem et justitiam, in qua constitutus fuerat.' Conc. Trid., Sessio v. § 1.

On this point a

and true holiness, after his own image.'1 curious difference arose between Catholics and Protestants. The former believed that the pura naturalia with which man was created did not include, on the ethical side, more than the faculty of moral action, and that his original righteousness was a supernatural and superadded gift of grace; the latter, on the contrary, maintained that wisdom and righteousness were included in the act of creation, so that by his own native strength man could love God supremely and execute his commands, and might have transmitted this exalted nature to his posterity.2 Immortality, whether as part of man's natural constitution or as a subsequent gift, is generally included in the idea of the image of God.

This doctrine is largely based on a very natural assumption. It seems to be almost a dictate of piety to believe that whatever was created immediately by God must have been perfect in all its parts, and represented fully the idea which it was intended to enshrine. But we have been compelled by facts to recognize a different order, and to see the finished embodiment of the Divine thought slowly evolved from rudimentary beginnings. And it is interesting to observe how little support the Bible gives to the doctrine of the theologians. In the story, or the combined stories, in Genesis no ethical ideal is attached to the image of God'; and Adam and Eve are represented as living in naked innocence, and with no knowledge of good and evil. The acquisition of this fatal knowledge constitutes their fall; and so far are they from being immortal that they are turned out of paradise lest they should become so by eating of the tree of life. If we met the unfallen Adam as he appears in the Bible, we should take him for a savage, though possibly an intelligent and harmless one. This view is not altered by the two passages

1 iv. 2.

2 See the citations in Winer's Comparative Darstellung des Lehrbegriffs. Wendt points out that this distinction indicates a different conception of what is essential to the true ideal of man: Syst. d. chr. Lehre, pp. 163 sq.

in which Paul dwells upon the subject. In Romans1 he betrays no knowledge of Adam except that he was disobedient and so brought sin and death into the world. In I Corinthians2 the first man is of the earth, earthy, a mere psychical being, in contrast to the spiritual. It may surprise us that this representation agrees so closely, in the essential point, with the results of modern research. For all who prefer knowledge to superstition the tale of Adam and Eve has vanished from history. Human civilization is far older than the first man of the Bible, and the traces of human activity reach back into a still dimmer distance. Of the primitive man we know nothing. If our bodily constitution was evolved from that of some anthropoid ape, we know not when or how the creature ceased to be ape, and began to be man. These are questions for biologists, and not for theologians. We must judge of man by our experience of men, and acknowledge the grand spiritual facts of his nature, whatever may be the date or the method of their origin. Through the ages the distinctive human faculties have been rising into greater clearness and power, and we must form our conception of the Divine ideal of humanity from that which is deepest and purest in our own consciousness, when illuminated by the radiant thought of those who can be truly described as 'the light of the world.'

Now when we come to deal with actual men, and examine the contents of the Christian consciousness, we find not only a recognition of their Divine sonship, but, united with this, a perception that the ideal of sonship is always above and beyond them, and that they have neither been perfectly obedient to the Divine Will nor wholly governed in their inward life by the Divine Spirit; and when we take a more extended survey, we find that, even where the ideal has been lower than that presented by Christianity, still there has been a sense of coming short of some Divine requirement, or, if we turn to men of a baser type, we observe that