CRITICISM OF PROFESSOR W. L. DAVIDSON. 125 He brings which it is his professed aim to show. not out in its modern bearings and relations the significance of the fact that "Lebt' nicht in uns der Gottheit eig'ne Kraft, Wie könnte uns die göttliche entzücken." "If in my soul dwelt not God's might, He ne'er could quicken me." It has been by another truly enough noted that "if it be said that faith in God is never actually the result of reasoning, it may be replied that, as matter of fact, such faith usually comes by instruction, and is verified by reasoning; not to insist that there are implicit, unconscious acts of reasoning, in which some of the steps are left out." Hence it is no marvel that recent theistic philosophy has more trustfully turned to that vague and somewhat illdefined yet real spiritual faculty in man, termed the God-consciousness-in virtue of which we have the secret presage of the Infinite-for its certification of the Being of God, Who is increasingly verified to the soul through this God-recognising faculty as He comes through the revelation that is in Christ. Yes, for as one of strong reflective power has in our time said, "the passionate religious tendency is not a sentiment fluttering round a fancy, but is a feeling rooted deep in the structure and mechanism of consciousness.' There can be no doubt that, with more fruitful result, rational reflection has been exercised on such content of the Christian con sciousness as is given us in our intuitive perception or primal mysterious notion of God, so that, our idea of God having received explication, development, and adjustment, God has become better known to us as the Absolute Personality. And, as Professor J. S. Banks has said, "The fact that intuitive truths are involved in the proof, and that we so seldom need to examine the grounds of our faith, is perhaps the reason why the conclusion has come to be regarded as itself belonging to this class." God is to be less thought of as the Infinite, in any sense that would imply that He is an empty abstraction or such an indeterminate Being as Pantheism has made Him, and is to be regarded more as the Infinite in the sense of the Absolute Being, the Unconditioned Source of all existence. "In real knowledge, Theism and it alone enables us to comprehend the multitude of individuals in a system. in which we find at once the unity of thought and the unity of being, and thus solve the ultimate and inevitable problem of the Reason. It builds on the knowledge of determinate beings; not on Intuitions, grasps of guess, That pull the more into the less, Nay more, God is to be conceived as, in His Divine Essence, the positive fulness and perfection of all goodness and truth-the one infinitely perfect Being in virtue of the internal interdepend THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. 127 ence and unity of His attributes. No sesquipedalian negations are the attributes of the Deity Whose Divine self-revelation has made Him thus known to us. It is no disparagement of metaphysics to say that recent philosophy of theism has laid its stress, in treating of the Triune Being, in terms that savour of life and personality rather than of being. Its God is a positive and infinite Personality, and not a mere aggregate of attributes. Its completely ethicised Deity, as it seeks to expound the Godhead, mitigates, as Principal Fairbairn puts the matter, the gravest of the initial difficulties of theism-a mitigation which, though no more than a mitigation, represents a great gain to thought. Not only have the proofs for the Being of God been viewed more helpfully and suggestively in their organic relation, but, as we must also note, have been of late more adequately recognised at least, if not actually treated, on the historic side. This line of treatment, whereby they have been examined in the light of their genesis and development, and of the historic evidence which they furnish of the persistent endeavour of the race to grasp and explain the transcendent reality -the notion of which they embody-has already borne fruit, and yielded much philosophical promise, from its study of the arguments as they thetically appear in the course of history. More or less historic approaches have, it may be remarked, without going back upon the labours in this line of Bobba, Bouchitté, and earlier workers, been made in late years by Dorner, Pfleiderer, Dr Stirling, Professor Flint, and others, both in Germany and Britain. There can be no doubt that recent philosophy of theism has acutely felt the difficulty of working its way through the selva oscura of reconciling evil with the goodness and power of God, especially in the light of the contradictions of actual experience. It has noted how absurd often are the pessimistic expectations from Omnipotence. It has, as we think, more carefully discriminated existent suffering, however, from the intentional plan and law of organic being, and has more forcefully exhibited the rational and moral grounds on which the permissive agency of evil can be conceived as perfectly consonant with an entirely benevolent Deity. We are bold enough to claim that, to the most clear-sighted thought of recent years, the suffering, which painfully obtrudes itself everywhere in the world, has yet been allowed to obscure the goodness, and to strain our belief in the beneficence, of the Deity, to so needless and unwarrantable extent, that these sufferings have made this become to us no more a world in which "thorns are mixed with flowers." "Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo We have, in consequence, a state of things, as regards the race alike of animals and of men, that may well serve to remind us of the dread THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING. 129 smitings and death agonies of which the Iliad' spake “Οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπώχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς, "First attacked he the mules and the swift dogs, but afterwards despatching a piercing arrow against themselves [Greeks], he smote them, and thick funeral-piles of dead were continually burning." But there are facts of new life and beauty, of rest and progress, no less than those of destruction and decay, and these we must carefully consider, even in aspects and relations that may not be fully known to us, before we give way to a materialistic mode of interpreting the world as charnel -house. Have not the life struggles, in which the animal world has seemed to revel, been seen to have been overdone, in their having been contemplated, quite frequently, with an almost morbid sensitiveness, in the light of our own higher, more painful experiences, until resultant perfection was lost sight of, and judgment remained no more clear, nor thinking robust? Has not the time come to ask with the poet "Who knows but that the darkness is in man?" Has it not been more open to observation what an immense proportion of the sufferings of life man himself may, if he will, prevent or avert, and furthermore, what a large purpose the residue |