Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructive

ficulties than it professed to settle; and a somewhat similar charge has more than once been brought against the doctrine of Divine i

here, might be untenable in philosophy, but it was at least intelligible and practically helpful to ordinary minds; but does not the idea of

what is bound to happen when God's indwelling in man is explained as meaning that man is de facto one with his Maker. What could the general reader think when he was told with vehemence, "You are yourself the infinite"-"You are yourself God; you never were anything else"? If that reader was lacking in mental balance, he was likely to be swept off his feet by such a declaration, and to accept, with all its implications, a view so flattering to h

in man is God as man. There is no real Divine Immanence which does not imply the {25} allness of God." [1] It is not too much to say that this brief statement contains the fons et origo of all the misunderstandings with which the re-

shall have to recognise as such, and to get rid of with what speed and thoroughness we can. This, it is true, is more easily said than done, for our whole life both of thought and action bears incessant witness to the opposite; there are, however, those to whose temperament such a complete contradiction, so far from being distressing, is pos

thing-for all is

ething-that also h

thing-but Thou wi

ile thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"-i.e., in practice ignores-it. Problems of this description are not so

God. The fallacy upon which this fiction rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen. ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we predicate, i.e., what we already called homogeneity-like

rendered useful service by insisting that in creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem-a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall no longer be troubled by the unreal difficulty of having to reconcile the principle of Divine immanence w

placed the Creator altogether outside the universe, and yet embrace a view which for want of a better name might be called spiritual dualism, and which maintains the distinction of which we are speaking. What happens when that distinction is lost, is sufficiently apparent from a statement like the following, actually addressed to a miscellaneous audience: "If there is an eternal throne, you are on it now; there has never been a moment when you were not on it." S

ch a supposition, why pray-for even were there One other than ourselves to pray to, what is there to pray for? Or, to quote the actual question of a believer in this kind of immanence, Why ask outside for a strength which we already possess? What a na?ve question of this calibre reveals only too plainly is that self-complacency which is the most deadly foe of the spiritual life. One is reminded of the American story in which a bright and intelligent wife asks her cultured but indifferent husband, "Is it true that God is immanent in us all?" "I suppose

actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to that extent it is true that all life expresses Him; nevertheless our original divine endowment is no more than the material which has to be shaped and wrought into "the type of perfect." Without this divinity of substance a

vil will come up for treatment at a later stage, we need not now enter into its discussion. At one aspect, and one only, of this vast and complex theme we may, however, be permitted to glance for a moment before we pass on. If God dwells in us, it is frequently asked, whence comes what Paul so pathetically calls "the law of sin which is in our members"-whence come the wrongful desires and harmful passions of whose power we are so painfully conscious? That is an entirely legitimate and even inevitable query, but the solution of the enigma is not past finding out, though we must content ourselves wit

organic world? How, e.g., does a stone embody or express His essence?-and yet, if it is not somehow a manifestation of Him, what is this cold, lifeless, ponderable substance we call a stone? Nor do matters grow simpler when we ascend in the scale: we may trace the immanent Deity in all that is good and fair in nature, in all its smiling and

ave

at disturbs m

ted thou

something "far more deeply interfused" of which

t of set

ocean, and t

blue s

year; are we going simply to ignore these realities when we speak of the Divine indwelling in the world? And, once more, shall w

these queries suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose-to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but

esence, through

silver-like el

orms from Mà

d perish all-b

so in the same manner or the same measure, and not any of them nor all of them are He. To the specific inquiry, What, if not part of God, is this stone?-we can, indeed, only answer in the words of Tennyson that if we knew what the least object was in itself, we "should know what God and man is." But, dealing with the question more generally, we may say that what inorganic nature shows forth of the indwelling God is His prevailing Power and abiding Law; looking upon the works of Him who "stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon {36} nothing," we can but feel that awed admiration of His wisdom and might which is expressed over and over again in the B

antly overlooked, that God cannot be ethically present in the unethical, nor personally present in the impersonal. And here, it seems to us, we go to the root of our present problem, viz., by re-emphasising what is indispensable to a right conception of this whole doctrine-that immanence i

e organs designed to fulfil the lower functions of the organism. To proceed to the obvious application-animals are not moral beings, but act, with the occasional exception of such of their number as have been humanised by contact with men, from instinct and not from conscious choice; and for that reason we are not called upon to reconcile the loving-kindness and tender mercy of God with the habits and general behaviour of the lower creation. In ascribing all sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same {38} tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad, presuppose conscious choice,

in history, shall we not do well to distinguish in some manner between it and every lesser manifestation of immanence? Mr. W. L. Walker has admirably pointed out that while {39} God is personally present to everything, and entirely absent from nothing, yet it is certainly false to imagine that He is "personally inside of everything." "Nothing can happen wholly apart from Him-He is in some measu

ing our conscious selves, manifests so much, and such aspects, of God as it has the capacity to manifest-His Power, His Purpose, His moral Law, which vindicates its sanctity upon whosoever would violate it; but His own Essence, His Character, could be revealed only in One whose soul harboure

as humanity transcends the animal creation. We leave this as a suggestion which the reader may develop for himself. So much is certain, that in Christ alone does the edifice of faith reach its culminating point-in Him our questionings receive their complet

Pantheism. For the phrase and the Idea of the "allness of God" see als

Hamish Hendry's, in which the outcome of such theosop

reat First Cause, Sk

4