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not proclaim a God of love. The God we need is not to be found outside of ourselves, but within. Religion is consecration to the moral ideal, to the power of the good, to the Thou shalt of conscience. Religion is not science, not a view of the world, but a specific conception of life. Pure morality, holiness is the content of religion." Or as a writer of our own has put it: "The newest philosophy of Holland deems it enough that the morality shall be ideal; not the prosaic will of duty that toils under the burden and heat of the day, but the free flight towards visionary perfection to which midnight contemplation invites. Religion, we are assured, is Moral Idealism. In this definition the modern tendency finds its most exact expression."

Easy as it may be to carry such positions to undue lengths, we must not allow these excesses to keep us from finding a real basis for theistic belief, and a real vantage-ground for conflict with materialistic thought, in the moral elements to be found in man. We cannot but flee spiritual atrophy,

and follow after that faith of the heart which believes unto righteousness. Yes, and it is impossible here to forget how men have persisted in mixing up the very existence of God with His righteous character, for they have strangely passed, in their moral difficulties, from any disbelief in His righteousness to stark doubt of His existence. This righteousness of the Divine character we trace to those moral principles of the Divine nature which

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make God what He is. There is here no thought

of any sort of necessity, but His will ever chooses to be in action what He ethically is by nature. And for ourselves, the ethical ideal in us, whose absolute worth, we have shown, is to be maintained, runs back into an Absolute Being in Whom it is grounded, and in Whom it may become perfected. Yes, for Kant came short in so thinking that we impose the moral law upon ourselves, when it is really put upon us from without and beyond us. And if it be from above us, then we clearly must put ourselves into harmonious relation with the higher order above us the Divine Source of moral strength. Is not all this most natural, most probable, most harmonious with reasonable expectation? Or would it be more so if our moral consciousness and experience were related, not to a Personality in the way we have described, but to some abstract and impersonal entity, as unlike ourselves as possible?

Of course, the moral argument of Kant does not bring us to such a Personality as One whose existence is, from the mere fact of man's highest nature requiring it, demonstrated; but it does bring home to us, in most forcible manner, the dire alternative that conscience and moral obligation are shams or lies, and all our virtue the most unreliable thing in the world. And if we cannot choose but repel so dire an alternative, then the strange authoritative sway of conscience, as it

works through all the exercise of our freedom and self-determination, may drive us ever upwards towards an alter ego, an Infinite Personality Whose mind is for us represented within us by the moral imperative. Clearly, mere phenomena are seen to be transcended in the resultant sacred union with the Perfect Mind, and the ethical ideal is perceived to work in us in the most living and vital way. Yes, for nothing less than personal relations can satisfy the workings of the moral order the relation we sustain to the truth is in things moral a personal one: every impersonal tendency is in the last result swept away by theistic philosophy as defective and unsatisfying. It postulates a Lord of the conscience, just as conscience is lord of man, for it holds that sense impressions, and intellectual reasonings, so blend in us with the intuitions of the conscience that our supposed autonomy gives way before a real theonomy. Is it not with justice that the need and importance of free ethical obedience on our part to these eternal laws of righteousness have been emphasised? For how, save in this free ethical region, shall man raise himself from mere phenomena to the heights of moral personality? From the failures and defects of hedonism theistic philosophy still turns to say, to that Supreme Being who is its Ideal of Goodness no less than its Power of Life, "In THY Presence is fulness of joy; in THY right hand there are pleasures

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for evermore." Yes, for God is more clearly seen by it to be not only a necessity of man's reason and a moral postulate, but also the indispensable basis of universal human morality and of the whole moral order of the world. It is, in fact, on this cumulative aspect and not on mere testimony of the isolated consciousness, that the force of theistic evidence has been felt to depend. For, as Mr Balfour has said, when "we have been moved to postulate a rational God in the interests of science," we can "scarcely decline to postulate a moral God in the interests of morality." No, the witness of conscience or our God-consciousness will not allow us to do otherwise than postulate the presence of One Who is not only the Oversoul, the Architect of the universe, and the Overseer of our activities, but also the Father of our spirits, God of truth and righteousness. Whatever clouds and darkness intellect may find round about Him, the moral sense within us is still sure that righteousness and truth are the habitation of His dwelling. And not the notions-even the profoundest -of the intellect bring God near us, but only those sighings of the heart and those outgoings of the spiritual nature in which the soul becomes lost in wonder, love, and praise.

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CHAPTER X.

RECENT THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE
PERSONALITY OF GOD.

THE question of the personality of the Infinite God, with the modes of His manifestation to mankind, has, in recent philosophy of theism, more and more assumed the aspect of being one of fundamental significance, in view of the contentions of those who have declared personality, in the case of the Deity, a vague, unverifiable idea, and who argue for a vapid, absurd, infinite non-personality. Personality has always more manifestly appeared to be no "incompatible attribute" of the Absolute, but something which pours meaning into what would otherwise remain meaningless and abstract. Neither being, nor substance, nor force, nor cause, nor extra-mundane forms of Deity, will suffice for our conception of God-such conception of Him as may make great realities like creation and incarnation possible. We do crave, behind all these, an Eternal Self-Consciousness or Absolute Person

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