CHAPTER XII

_THE INFLUENCE OF THE DEEPENING SENSE OF THE VALUE AND SACREDNESS OF THE PERSON UPON THEOLOGY_

In the discussion of the influence of the social consciousness upon theological doctrine, we turn now to ask concerning the third element of the social consciousness, How does the deepening sense of the value and sacredness of the person affect theology?

And with this sense of the value and sacredness of the person, we may well include, so far as the influence upon theology is concerned, the remaining elements of the social consciousness--the deepening sense of obligation, and of love. For, as we have already seen, the sense of obligation and of love follow so inevitably from a deep sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that it would be a needless refinement, probably, to try to analyze out their separate influence upon theological thinking. We should find them all leading us to essentially the same great emphases.

When, now, through the social consciousness, the personal has become the supreme value for us, and regard for it our eternal motive and goal, we cannot fail to demand that theology give a real personality to God and man--a consciousness marked, in Professor Howison's language, with "that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person."[92]

I. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN MAN

In the first place, the social sense of the value and sacredness of the person will emphasize the full personality of man.

1. _Man's Personal Separateness from God._--The sense of the value of the person cannot admit for a moment such a one-sided emphasis upon a universal cosmic evolution, or upon the immanence of God, as should make impossible a true personality in man. It seeks, in its view of both God and man, a really "_personal_ idealism." It does not forget, but earnestly asserts, the dependence of all other spirits upon God; and, consequently, looks for no metaphysical separateness in this sense from God. But a genuine recognition of the personality of man does require that man be conceived as separate from God in just this sense: (1) that he has a clear self-consciousness of his own, and (2) that he has real moral initiative, which makes his volition truly his own. These two factors constitute all of separateness that need be demanded for man. Possessing these, he is "outside of God" in the only sense in which a "personal idealism" feels concerned to assert separateness. But for these factors it is concerned; for without them, it believes, no truly ideal view, no moral world, no religious life, are possible.

2. _Emphasis Upon Man's Moral Initiative._--In particular, the application of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person in theology, means the emphatic recognition of the moral initiative of man--of the possession of a real will of his own. The whole social consciousness, especially in this third element of it, rests upon the assumption that man has worth, as a being capable of character as well as of happiness, and so deserves in some worthy sense to be called a child of God. If the social consciousness is, as we have seen, with any fairness to be called the recognition of the fully personal,[93] this reverence for the personal initiative of men cannot be lacking in it. Its influence upon theology at this point, therefore, is hardly to be doubted.

And theology itself is vitally concerned. For the whole possibility of the conceptions of government and providence requires this. These terms are words without meaning, having absolutely no place in theology or philosophy, if man has no moral initiative. Nor should it escape our notice, that we strike at the very root of all possible reverence for God, if we deny a real initiative to man. We have no possible philosophic explanation of either sin or error, consistent with any real reverence for God, if a true human will is denied.[94] In Professor Bowne's vigorous language: In a system of necessity "every thought, belief, conviction, whether truth or superstition, arises with equal necessity with every other.... On this plane of necessary effect the actual is all, and the ideal distinctions of true and false have as little meaning as they would have on the plane of mechanical forces.... The only escape from the overthrow of reason involved in the fact of error lies in the assumption of freedom." Moreover, if real human initiative is denied to men, we conceive God as having really less respect for persons in his dealing with them, than the most elementary ethics requires of men in their relations to one another. A one-sided doctrine of immanence, thus, degrades both man and God. It degrades man, in denying to him a true personality, and so making him simply a thing. It degrades God, in making him the real responsible cause of all sin and error, and in making him treat possible persons as things. The influence of the social consciousness, which leads us to measure the moral growth of a man and of a civilization by the deepening sense of reverence for the person, is fairly decisive at this point. It _must_ see in God the most absolute guarding of man's personality, and especially of his moral initiative.

3. _Man, a Child of God._--The Christian faith, that man is a child of God, is a faithful expression of the insistence of the social consciousness upon the recognition of the full personality of man. It expresses both man's entire dependence upon God for his being and maintenance, and at the same time his infinite value and sacredness as a spirit made in the image of God, capable of indefinite progress, and capable of personal relation to God. It voices thus Christianity's characteristic "humbly-proud" conception of man--humble in view of the eternal and infinite plans of God; proud, as "called to an imperishable work in the world." It is, indeed, but a concrete statement of that faith in love at the heart of things, and in the all-embracing plan of a faithful God, which we found required, if the social consciousness itself was to have any justification.[95]

II. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN CHRIST

In the second place, under this impulse of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person, theology is likely to insist on the recognition of the personal in the conception of Christ.

1. _Christ a Personal Revelation of God._--This recognition of the personal in Christ will mean, first, that we are to conceive Christ as a _personal_ revelation of God, rather than as containing in himself a divine substance.[96] It cannot forget, that if God is a person, and men are persons, the adequate self-revelation of God to men can be made only in a truly personal life; and that men need above all, in their relation to God, some manifestation of his ethical will, and this can be shown only in the character of a person. A merely metaphysical conception of the divinity of Christ in terms of substance or essence, as these are commonly thought, must, therefore, wholly fail to satisfy. We must be able to recognize and bow before the personal will of the personal God revealed in Christ, if we are really to find God through him. A strong sense of the personal, then, such as the social consciousness evinces, must see in Christ, above all, a personal revelation of a person.

2. _Emphasizing the Moral and Spiritual in Asserting the Supremacy of Christ._--This implies that the dominant sense of the value and sacredness of the person will certainly tend to bring into prominence the moral and spiritual in asserting the supremacy of Christ, rather than the metaphysical or the simply miraculous. So far as these latter come into its representation at all, they will follow rather than precede, and be accepted because of the moral and spiritual, or as simply working hypotheses enabling us to bring into a thought-unity what we have to recognize in the moral and spiritual realm. If one faces the matter fully and frankly, is it not plain that Christians of all shades of belief are increasingly finding the real reason for their faith in Christ in his moral and spiritual supremacy? Many may choose to _express_ their faith in him, when once reached, in terms of the miraculous or metaphysical; but the miraculous and the metaphysical are not the primary _reasons_ for their faith. It is the inner spirit of Christ himself which really masters us and calls out our confident faith and our eager submission. And it is only when we have already gotten this sense of the stupendousness of his personality, that the so-called miraculous in his life becomes to our thought natural and fitting, and we are driven to think him standing in some unique relation to God and so requiring to be conceived in unique metaphysical terms.

It is easy, no doubt, to indulge in a false polemic against the miraculous and metaphysical. One of the surest bits of autobiography we have from Christ, the narrative of the temptations, implies, as Sanday has acutely pointed out,[97] the clear consciousness on the part of Christ of the possession of what we call supernatural powers. It is a far less simple problem to rid the gospels of the miraculous element, than our age, with its greatly exaggerated estimate of the mathematico-mechanical view of the world, is likely to think. The so-called miraculous in connection with Christ is not to be impatiently and dogmatically set aside.[98] So, too, the demand of thought, that we form finally some metaphysical conception of the great personality which we meet in Christ cannot be denied as wholly illegitimate. All this is to be freely granted and asserted.

But it is of the greatest importance for Christian thought, that it still keep Christ's own absolute subordination of both the miraculous and metaphysical to the moral and the spiritual. The same narrative of the temptation, that so clearly implies supernatural powers in Christ, has its whole point in Christ's answering determination absolutely to subordinate these supernatural powers to moral and spiritual ends. His whole ministry evinces the greatest pains upon this point. And he evidently thinks a theory of his metaphysical relation to God (as ordinarily conceived) of so little vital importance that even such slight hints as we get of it in the New Testament apparently do not come from him at all. The present tendency, therefore, naturally demanded by the social consciousness, to emphasize the moral and spiritual in Christ in asserting his supremacy, is quite in harmony with Christ's own insistence. He will be followed for what he is in himself.

The real supremacy of Christ, his truest divinity, we may be sure, comes out for our time in those statements which we are able to make concerning his inner spirit. Here, and here only, the real power of his personality gets hold upon us. What are these grounds of the supremacy of Christ? How is it that we come to God through him?

3. _The Moral and Spiritual Grounds of the Supremacy of Christ._[99]--(1) In the first place, _Jesus Christ is the greatest in the greatest sphere_, that of the moral and spiritual; and this, by common consent of all men. Both the depth and the consensus of conviction concerning Christ are profoundly significant. If our earth has ever seen one of whom it could be truly said, He is a moral and spiritual authority, preëminently the one great authority in this greatest sphere,--that person is Jesus Christ. Seeing the moral problem more broadly than any other ever saw it, tracing the motives of life more deeply than any other ever traced them, applying those principles of the life which he sees with a tact and delicacy and skill that no other ever approached, speaking with an authority in this moral and spiritual sphere to which no other can for a moment lay claim,--this man is easily the greatest in the greatest sphere.

It is, perhaps, to say only the same thing in a little different way, when one says with Fairbairn, that Christ is transcendent among founders of religion, "and to be transcendent here is to be transcendent everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the organizing and the regulating of our personal and collective life."[100] The present age is, more than any other, the age of the scientific study of religion. The last forty years, indeed, have seen such attention to the study of comparative religion as the world never saw before. What has been the outcome of that study? To make the relative position of Jesus among the founders of religion lower? I do not so understand it. No, the outcome is such that it is a manifestly inadequate statement to say, that he is transcendent among the founders of religion. The very most that we may hope to say about the founder of any other religion is, that in some single particular at a long distance he can be brought into comparison with Jesus. But let one think for a moment what it means for a man to be a founder of religion. We talk of leadership. Do we know what a founder of religion does? He makes the light, in which millions of men look upon all the events of their life, in which they see the past of the world's history, in which they look forward to the entire future. The very mood and atmosphere of men's lives are determined by these founders of religion; and among these preëminent leaders, Jesus, beyond all mistake, is transcendent.

Let the nature of his kingdom, too, be his witness. He calmly aims to found a kingdom that shall be spiritual, universal, eternal. One must face the fact that this man of Nazareth in Syrian Galilee, purposes in coolness of deliberation to found a kingdom that shall be absolutely spiritual, that shall make no appeal to any of the lower elements of man; one must see that this man, in those temptations through which he passed concerning the form of his work, deliberately set aside the kingdom by bread, the kingdom by marvel and ecstasy, and the kingdom by force, and purposed to found a kingdom solely upon moral and spiritual forces. And observe that he confidently expects this kingdom to be universal--appealing to men of all races and of all times, and to be eternal--still standing when all else shall have passed away. And upon his belief in this character of his kingdom he stakes his life, and calmly gives to himself as the goal of his life the establishment of just such a kingdom; and remains to the end confident of his success. The mere vitality of will in such a purpose is hard to take in, and alone may well give us pause.

And because he is the greatest in the greatest sphere, transcendent among founders of religion, the founder of a kingdom spiritual, universal, and eternal, he becomes for us a "personalized conscience," a spiritual, moral authority for us even beyond our own conscience--an authority that grows upon us with our growth, and submission to which is earth's highest moral test.

(2) And there must be added to this first proposition, that Jesus is the greatest in the greatest sphere, a second: _He alone is the sinless and impenitent one._ And it is to be noticed that it is this man who sees more clearly than any other the moral and spiritual, who knows, as no other does, what character is and what moral life means,--it is he, who claims to be the sinless one. No other ever intelligently made this claim; for no other was it ever intelligently made. The words of the great historian Ranke seem to us to be simple truth when he says: "More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be brought even afar off into comparison with it." Only such an one could intelligently make for himself the claim of sinlessness. And for no other was this claim of sinlessness ever intelligently made. Men know each other too well to make it for others when moral consciousness has fully awakened. But he fights his battle in the wilderness, and there is no record of failure so far as he himself can see it, and none that disciple ever ascribed.

And this claim of sinlessness for Christ is to be urged, not so much because of any special statements by Christ as because of that remarkable fact to which Dr. Bushnell has called attention,--his impenitence. Jesus alone among all good men is a man of "impenitent piety;" and by this he is marked off absolutely from every other good man. What happens in the life of any other good man is this: that, as he goes forward, the sense of sin grows upon him, the ideal rises before him and he feels increasingly that his own life is inferior to it. Of Jesus this is not true. He shows no sign of consciousness of failure. There is no evidence that he feels that he has fallen short in any degree. He is absolutely without that universal characteristic of all other good men, absolutely without penitence. Contrast him for a moment with the man, who perhaps all would agree was the greatest of all his disciples, the man to whose devotion there seems to be no limit--the Apostle Paul; and notice, that years after his persecution of the church and of the cause of Jesus, with growing sense of what Jesus is, and of his own inexhaustible debt to him, there comes over him with increasing, not lessening, power the sense of his sin, and he writes to the Ephesians, "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given me that I might preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;" and in one of the very last letters that comes down to us from him, says again, "Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." What evidence have we that Christ ever felt in the slightest degree such penitence?

(3) But more than this is true. _With the highest ideal, Jesus not only does not consciously fall short of it, but consciously rises up to it_, and, as Herrmann says, "compels us to admit that he does rise to it." It were very much that a man with any ideal, however inferior, should be able to say to himself, I have not fallen short of this ideal; but that one, who sees more clearly than any other in the realm of the moral and spiritual, and who has an ideal of simply absolute love and of unbounded trust in God,--that he should show not only no consciousness of falling short, but should consciously rise to his ideal and compel us to admit that he rises to it: this is a fact unparalleled in the history of the world. It is far more than mere sinlessness; there is here a positiveness of moral achievement so great--a fact so tremendous--that we seem able but feebly to take it in.

(4) And even that is not all. _Jesus has such a character that we can transfer it feature by feature to God_, not only with no sense of blasphemy, not only with no sense of his coming short, but with complete satisfaction. I do not now ask at all as to any man's metaphysical theory about Jesus Christ; I only ask that it be noticed that those who question common theories altogether still get their ideal of God from Jesus Christ; and that this is the wonderful thing that has happened on our earth: that there has once lived a man--daily moving about among men, a concrete circumstantial account of whose life in many particulars we have--the features of whose character one can transfer absolutely to God and say, That is what I mean by God. One simply cannot add anything to the character of God himself in the highest moments of his imagination, that is not already revealed in Jesus Christ. I take it that the words of Fairbairn are literally true: he was "the first being who had realized for men the idea of the Divine." When, therefore, Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us," he could only reply as he might any day to us, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

(5) And one cannot stop here. _Jesus is consciously able to redeem all men._ With such sense of the meaning of sin and of moral conduct as no other ever had, understanding, therefore, the sin and need of men as no other ever did, and having such a vision of what it is perfectly to share the life of God as no other ever had, still, facing the masses of men, he could say to himself, "I am able to take these men and lift them into the very presence of God and present them spotless before the throne of his glory." Have we taken in what it means, that, in the consciousness of a man in form like ourselves, there could be, even for a moment, the actual belief that he was the one that was to take away the sin of the world, and had power to redeem men absolutely unto God? In another's words: "Jesus knows no more sacred task than to point men to his own person." He is himself God's greatest gift, himself "the way, the truth, the life,"--not only fighting his own battles, but consciously able to redeem all men.

(6) This simply implies, as Dr. Denison has suggested, that _Jesus has such God-consciousness and such sense of mission as would simply topple any other brain that the world has ever known into insanity_, but which simply keeps him sweet, normal, rational, living the most wholesome and simple and noble life the world has ever seen. How are we to explain that fact? On the one hand, the sense of being of even a little importance in the kingdom of God proves singularly intoxicating to men. How often, when one is strongly possessed by the idea that he is a special channel of manifestation for God, do moral sanity, influence, and character all suffer! On the other hand, there is no burden of suffering that men can bear so great as suffering in the sin of one loved--thus bearing the sin of another. But here is one who can believe that, when men come to him and simply see him as he is, they catch their best vision of God; here is one who bears consciously the sin of all men, and who can believe that he has absolute power to revolutionize the lives of other men and make them what they were meant originally to be, children of God; and yet, believing this, can, under that consciousness, keep sweet and normal, wholesome and simple, energetically ethical and thoroughly rational,--can keep sane. Indeed, he lives a life so sane, that, to pass even from some of our best religious books into the simple atmosphere of the story of his life often seems like passing from the super-heated, artificially lighted, heavily perfumed and exhausted atmosphere of the crowded drawing-room into the open fresh air of day under the heaven of God. In the very act of the most stupendous self-assertion, Jesus can still characterize himself as "meek and lowly of heart," and we feel no self-contradiction--so completely has he harmonized for even our unconscious feeling his transcendent self-consciousness and his humble simplicity of life. Has the world anywhere a phenomenon comparable to this?

(7) In consequence of all this, _Jesus is in fact the only person in the history of the race who can call out absolute trust_. As little children, we knew something of what it meant to have complete trust. There were a few years when it seemed to us that there was nothing in either power or character that was not true of our fathers and mothers. We soon lost such trust, even as children. Is there any way back to the childlike spirit? Let us ponder these golden words of Herrmann: "The childlike spirit can only arise within us when our experience is the same as a child's; in other words, when we meet with a personal life which compels us to trust it without reserve. Only the person of Jesus can arouse such trust in a man who has awakened to moral self-consciousness. If such a man surrenders himself to anything or any one else, he throws away not only his trust, but himself." There has been one life lived on earth, in whose hands one may put himself with absolute confidence and have no fear as to the result. Jesus, and Jesus alone, can call out absolute trust.

(8) Moreover, _Jesus is the only life ever lived among men in whom God certainly finds us, and in whom we certainly find God_. And, once again, I am not now asking whether one is able to come to any theory of the nature of Christ. That is a matter of comparative indifference. The great fact is this: That there has been lived among us men such a life that, if a man will simply put himself in the presence of it and stay there, he will have brought home to him with unmistakable conviction the fact that God is, and is touching him and that he is touching God; that, coupled with such a sense as he never had before of his sin, there will be also the sense of forgiveness and reconciliation with God, and so, such evidence of the contact of God with his life as he can find nowhere else. So Harnack believes: "When God and everything that is sacred threaten to disappear in the darkness, or our doom is pronounced; when the mighty forces of inexorable nature seem to overwhelm us, and the bounds of good and evil to dissolve; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding God at all in this dismal world,--it is then that the personality of Christ may save us."

(9) And all this means, finally, that _Jesus is for us the ideal realized_. Let not the commonplaceness of the words rob us of their meaning. The fact is far enough from the commonplace. Philosophy must always tell us that we have no right to expect anywhere a realized ideal, except in the absolute whole of things. Certainly, we never find in any of the inferior spheres a fully realized ideal. What does it mean, then, that in this highest of all spheres, the sphere of the moral and spiritual life, we have the ideal realized; that our very highest vision is a fact? What is there that one would add to, what, that one would take away from, the life of Christ, that it might be more completely than it is the ideal realized?

"But Thee, but Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poet's Poet, wisdom's tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest,-- What _if_ or _yet_, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's, Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, thou crystal Christ?"

4. _Christ's Double Uniqueness._--It seems hardly possible to do justice to the facts now passed in review, without recognizing, at least, that they point to a double uniqueness on the part of Christ in his relation to God, reflected in his own language concerning himself and in the spontaneous confessions of his disciples in all times. He alone, in the emphatic sense, is _the_ Son. The contrasts between Christ and other men, which the simple facts of the life and consciousness of Christ have compelled us to make, naturally, then, demand recognition from thought. The recognition of the facts _is_ the vital matter, but thought can hardly see them unmoved. How are we to _think_ of Christ? With clear remembrance, now, that Christian teaching itself insists upon the kinship of God and men; that absolute barriers, therefore, cannot anywhere be set up; that a revelation unrelated to all else could be no revelation; and that Christ himself often pointed out the likeness between his own life and work and those of his disciples;--still we may not ignore actual differences, and must honestly strive to do justice to them in our own conception of Christ. One may not forget that there is much here that we can hardly hope ever to fathom; and that into this secret of Christ's relation to the Father theology has often tried to press with a precision of statement that was quite beyond its possible knowledge, and that damaged rather than helped the religious consciousness; but one may try to think in simple, straightforward fashion what the facts mean. Now these actual and momentous moral and spiritual differences already pointed out seem, at least, to assert, I say, a genuine double uniqueness in Christ. Christ's relation to God is absolutely unique, that is, in two senses: in the absolutely unique purpose of God concerning him; in the absolutely perfect response of Christ to that purpose. If one chooses to use the language, he may say, that the first uniqueness is metaphysical; the second, ethical.[101]

First, then, God has a purpose concerning Christ, that he has concerning no other, for he purposes to make in him his supreme self-manifestation. This sets him apart from all others. His transcendent sense of God and sense of mission only correspond to the absolute uniqueness of this eternal purpose of God concerning him. We are utterly unable to see that they could be borne by any being that we know as man. He is the manifested God--"the visible presentation of the invisible God." This cannot be said, in the same sense, of any other. Now, our only adequate statement of the inner reality--the essential meaning--of any being, can be given only in terms of the purpose which God calls that being to fulfil. To see, then, that God's purpose concerning Christ is absolutely unique, and that God's purpose is, to make in Christ the completest possible personal manifestation of himself, is to see that Christ's essential relation to the Father is absolutely his own, unshared by any other. And, it may be added, there is no reason why this purpose of God concerning Christ should not be regarded as an eternal purpose, eternally realized.

But Christ is as clearly unique in his simply perfect response to this purpose of God. Our facts seem to point directly to the conclusion, that in him there was no moral hindrance to the fullness of the revelation God would make through him. His life is perfectly transparent, allowing the full glory of the character of God to shine through it. The harmony of his will with God's will is complete. If it be said that this last uniqueness is, after all, only difference in degree from other men, it must be answered, first, that degree here is so vast as to be practically kind. This is the perfect of Christ set over against the varyingly imperfect of all other men. Moreover, to ask here for difference in kind in any other sense, is probably to make an unintelligent and impossible demand; for, in the nature of the case, the relations involved are spiritual and personal, and there cannot be, in strictness, in the fulfilment of such relations any real differences in kind.

5. _The Increasing Sense of Our Kinship with Christ, and of His Reality._--Side by side with this recognition of the nature of Christ's uniqueness, there deserves to be set, as another outcome of the emphasis upon conceiving Christ as a personal revelation of God, the increasing sense of our kinship with Christ and of his reality. The connection here is by no means accidental, though it may seem almost paradoxical. We have plainly come in our day to our clearest recognition of the divinity of Christ through the sense of his transcendent character. But revelation in character requires the reality of his human life. The very route, therefore, by which we have most certainly reached our sense of Christ's divinity, leads also to an increasing sense of kinship with Christ, and so of his reality. So long as we seemed driven to conceive the divinity of Christ in terms that had no relation and no meaning for human life, just so long must he seem to us to be really moving in another world and to take on the unreality of that other world quite hidden from us. But now Christ's life has meaning; we can enter into it and feel that it is real. With all its transcendence, the life does not move now simply in the sphere of the mysterious. It is no unreal drama, no play-struggle,--utterly failing to meet our real moral and spiritual needs. Least of all, in this supreme work for man, can the revealing life be only a show. It feels real. It is real. And, with clear sense of the inevitable inadequacy of the analogy, we still rest confidently in the conviction that God's relation to Christ may be best conceived after the analogy of the relation of the Spirit of God to our spirits; and that, when we try to press beyond that, we are attempting to rise into that sphere of a supposed supra-personal, for which we have no possible organ of vision, and where, therefore, we are thinking not more, but less, truly.[102]

With this sense of the reality of the personal, spiritual life of Christ, there naturally comes home to us the appropriateness and _practicability of his ideals_. They are seen to belong to us more surely, and properly to make demands upon us. It is, probably, not too much to say that, under the influence of the social consciousness, there has been a definite, growing approach to Christ's way of thinking, and to his ideal of life. This means a consciousness increasingly Christian in tone, and, therefore, in turn, increasingly better able to interpret the teaching and life of Christ, and so to give promise of a more Christian theology. None of us, probably, are fully conscious of the more subtle inconsistencies of even our best theological thinking, when measured by a completely Christian spirit. At least, with the insistence upon Christ as a personal revealer of a personal God, it must become more true that the meaning of all terms for the work of Christ shall be more clearly reasonable, more consistently ethical, and more completely spiritual; and then the immediate rooting of Christian theology in the Christian religion can be seen and felt.

III. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN GOD

The sense of the value and sacredness of the person must lead to the special recognition of the personal not only in man and in Christ, but also in God. We have already seen reasons for believing that the social consciousness is peculiarly bound strongly to emphasize the personality of God, as in the end absolutely essential to its own justification. The social consciousness represents an ethical movement that can live only in the atmosphere of the personal.

1. _The Steady Carrying through of the Completely Personal in the Conception of God. Guarding the Conception._--This pressure of the social consciousness toward an imperative faith in the fully personal God is most valuable, as offsetting the tendency in many quarters toward a scientific or even idealistic pantheism or monism that is quite impersonal. "For," in the language of Professor Howison, "the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognizes others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest."[103] As this is preëminently the spirit of the social consciousness, it is plain that we have in the social consciousness an increasingly powerful motive for guarding the full personality of God.

It needs particularly to be noted, that we know no _definite_ "supra-personal." Pantheism or any impersonal monism is forced, therefore, when it leaves the personal conception of God, to take a lower line of development, not a higher. The result is, that it is obliged to deny the highest attributes to God, and then, as Browning is fond of arguing, man steps at once into the place of God. Men cannot permanently remain satisfied with a philosophical view, of which that is the logical outcome. Certainly, such a view can get no support from the social consciousness, with its deep conviction of the supreme value and sacredness of the person.

Moreover, it is not to be forgotten, in estimating the value of a cosmic monism, that what the cosmological really means, ethically and religiously, to a people, must always depend upon their social ideals. The natural in itself contains no command. For any effective vital interpretation, therefore, even of its impersonal Absolute, pantheism is constantly thrown back upon the personal.

Only a clear, steady carrying through by theology of the completely personal in its conception of God can ultimately satisfy this sense of the value and sacredness of the person. Professor Nash does not speak too strongly when he says: "To fulfil her function the church must develop the doctrine of a Divine Personality. She has not always been true to it in the past. Too often, by her sacraments, by her theology, by her theory of inspiration, she has glorified the impersonal."[104]

Now, such an attempt, it is perhaps worth saying once more, is not to be thought of as a running away from a thorough-going metaphysical investigation. It rather takes the ground, indicated in the earlier discussion, of what may be called, in Professor Howison's language, personal idealism; and holds that spirit, person, _is_ for us the ultimate metaphysical fact: the one reality to which we have immediate access; the reality from which all our metaphysical notions are originally derived; and, in consequence, the one reality which we can take as the key to the understanding of all else. And it believes that even essence and substance, the great words of the old metaphysics, can be really understood only as they are interpreted in personal terms. Ultimately, theology would hold, this would mean the interpretation of the essence of things in terms of the purpose of God concerning them--what he meant them to be.

In the attempt, then, clearly and steadily to carry through the conception of God as completely personal, theology may well guard carefully certain points. In the first place, theology does not mean to transfer to God human limitations; rather, it conceives him to be the only complete personality with perfect self-consciousness and full freedom, no part of whose being is in any degree foreign to himself. Nor, in the second place, does it mean to forget that the personal relations in which God stands to other persons are unique, and that, in three definite respects: that conviction of the love of God, as of no other, must underlie, as a great necessary assumption, all our thinking and all our living; that God is himself the source of the moral constitution of man, which must thus be regarded as an expression of the personal will of God, and the personal relation to God so have universal moral implications such as no other personal relation can have; and in that God is such in his universal love for all, that it is impossible to come into right personal relation to God, and not at the same time come into right relation to all moral beings.[105]

2. _God is Always the Completely Personal God._--If, now, theology is to do justice to the demands of the social consciousness for a full recognition of the personal in God, it must see clearly that God is _always_ the completely personal God. Certain conclusions, not always admitted, are believed to follow from this position.

(1) _The Consequent Relation of God to "Eternal Truths."_--In the first place, there can be no sphere of eternal truths, thought of as either created outright by the will of God, or as existing of themselves independently of God and only to be recognized by him.

The difficulty is not merely that at least one of these views would put God in the same dependent relation to truth as we finite beings, and thus practically put a God above God. Nor is the difficulty merely that it is impossible to think the real existence of such a sphere of eternal truth, since truths or laws can be said to exist only in one of two ways: either as the actual mode of action of reality, or as the perception and formulation in an observing mind of that mode of action. And these difficulties are both sufficiently serious.

But, from our present point of view, the great difficulty is, that trying to conceive God as either creating or coming to the recognition of truth, assumes, as Lotze points out, a _fragmentary_ God, a God for whom truth is _not yet_. It assumes an action of the will of God apart from his reason, that is, a God not yet completely personal, not yet the full God of truth and character. A God for whom truth and duty are not yet, is certainly no true person. Most, if not all, of our metaphysical puzzles connected with the relation of God to what we call eternal truths, seem to me to grow out of this thought of an essentially fragmentary God.

We are driven, consequently, to a denial of both the Scotist and Thomist positions, as ordinarily conceived. It is true neither that the truth is true and the good is good because God wills it, nor yet that God wills the true because it is true and the good because it is good. Both views alike assume the possibility of a fragmentary God, a God for whom at some time truth and goodness were not yet. But God has _always_ been the completely personal God of truth and love, never a bare will and never a bare intellect. Hence, neither as an independent object to be recognized, nor yet as the external product of his will, can we think of the realm of eternal truth and goodness. We must rather say, God alone is the eternal being and absolute source of all, always complete in the perfection of his personality; and, therefore, what we call the eternal truths are only _the eternal modes of God's actual activity_. This alone seems to the writer to give a thorough-going theistic view, free from self-contradiction.[106]

(2) _Eternal Creation._--But, further, if God is to be thought as _always_ the completely personal God, we are led, also, immediately to the doctrine of eternal creation.

If God has had always a completely personal life, his entire being must have been always in exercise. Can we really think of such a God as simply quiescent, and not as always active? Is not his activity involved in his complete personality? The thought of his possible quiescence arises probably out of an unconscious, but nevertheless unwarranted, transfer to God of our finite separation of will and act. But God is here, too, no fragmentary God; he has always been the completely personal God, always acting.

A second consideration carries us to the same conclusion. Theologians have felt that they have made a distinct step in advance in tracing creation to love in God, as, for example, Principal Fairbairn does. But this gives no real help as an explanation of creation as _beginning in time_; for one must at once ask, Was not the love of God eternal, and if this were the real reason leading to creation, must not, then, creation be eternal?

So far as I am able to see, there is nothing to lose and much to gain in clearness and satisfactoriness of thought in a frank acceptance of the doctrine of eternal creation. Not, of course, in the sense of an eternal dualism, in the sense of the thought of an eternity of matter set over against God, but in the clear sense of the eternal creative activity of God. And to such a doctrine of eternal creation, the social consciousness, in its emphasis on the completely personal, seems to me to lead.

(3) _The Unity and Unchangeableness of God._--And, once more, if God is always the completely personal God, we shall conceive his own unity not as monotonous self-identity, but only as consistency of meaning. We shall not, therefore, transfer to God, pluming ourselves meanwhile upon a highly philosophical view, the mechanical unchangeableness of a rock; but we shall be rather concerned with the consistency of his character and the unchangeableness of his loving will, which would be the very reasons for his changing, adapting attitude toward his changing children. From this point of view, too, the sphere of law and the sphere of the actual, will seem to us, necessarily, to root in the sphere of the ideal; the _is_ and the _must_, to rest in the _ought_; though we may not hope to trace the connections in detail. In a God, then, who is a completely harmonious person, never acting in fragmentary fashion, whose will and whose reason and whose love are never at cross purposes--only in such a God can the world find its adequate and unifying source. The world itself has real unity only in so far as it is the expression of the consistency of meaning of the purpose of God concerning it.

And this same thought of the consistency of the meaning of the purpose of God, I have elsewhere argued,[107] saves us from the necessity of a self-contradictory conception of the miraculous or supernatural, by its recognition of the dominant spiritual order. It also enables us to see, with Professor Nash, if the word personal is given sufficient breadth, that "the true supernatural is the personal, and wheresoever the personal is discovered, whether in the life of conscience or the life of reason, whether in Israel or Greece, there the supernatural is discovered. Upon this conception of the supernatural as the personal, apologetics must found the claims of Christianity. The divine and the human personality stand within 'Nature,' that is, within the total of being. But they both, the human as well as the divine, transcend the scope and reach of visible Nature."[108]

(4) _The Limitations of the Conception of Immanence._--Indeed, it ought to be clearly recognized on all sides by those who believe in religion at all, that we cannot so exclusively emphasize the immanence of God, as many are now doing, and have a God at all, beyond the finite manifestations. When the matter is so conceived, there is no real personal God with whom there can be any personal communion. Religion, thus, in any ordinary sense of it, is by this process made simply impossible; Positivism is the only logical result, and Frederic Harrison becomes the one sole, clear-sighted prophet among us, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Such an outcome is possible for any, because, and in so far as, they are not true to the social consciousness in its demand for the completely personal God, who, in Martineau's language, is a genuinely "free spirit."[109]

3. _Deepening the Thought of the Fatherhood of God._--But the influence of the social consciousness in its deepening sense of the value and sacredness of the person, of obligation and of love, not only tends to insist upon the completely personal in the conception of God, but also tends to deepen our thought of the Fatherhood of God.

(1) _History no Mere Natural Process._--No mere on-going of an unfeeling Absolute, whatever name be given it, will ever satisfy the social consciousness. The new sense of the sorrow and ethical meaning of the historical process demands, in the first place, that history shall not be regarded as a mere necessitated development, but a movement in which men effectively coöperate, never more consciously and clearly than to-day; and secondly, it demands a _God_ who cares, who loves, who guides. History cannot be a mere holocaust to God.

(2) _God, the Great Servant._--Rather, as we saw in the fourth chapter, the social consciousness requires a God whose purpose shall completely support its own purpose, and so requires us, with Fairbairn, to put Fatherhood before Sovereignty, not Sovereignty before Fatherhood, and requires us definitely to conceive God after Christ, as self-giving ministering love. It is one of the anomalies of Christian history, that the church has been so slow to cast off a pagan conception of God, and to come to a truly Christian view. We can hardly take in Christ's own revelation of God without some sharing in his sympathy for men. Some experience of our own is needed to unlock the revelation. And, so, the steady deepening of the social consciousness, both as to the value of the person and as to the sense of obligation, has certainly helped us to see that if God is to be highest, he must be love, and thus the great servant, with transcendent obligations, entering really and sympathetically into all our life.

(3) _No Divine Arbitrariness._--With such a conception of God, every trace of arbitrariness disappears. Calvinism, however strenuously insisted upon, means a far different thing for any man who really feels the pressure of the modern social consciousness, who has come to some real sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that is, who really sees God in Christ. The great truth of Calvinism, that God is the ultimate source of all, was perhaps never more secure than to-day; but that God, who is the absolute and ultimate source of all, is the fully personal God, whose will is never divorced from his reason and love, who knows no such abstraction as a bare and empty omnipotence without content or direction, but who is himself always living love. The bane of much so-called Calvinism is in this supposition of a fragmentary God, like a motion without direction or rate of speed. Arbitrary decrees are conceivable only from such a fragmentary God, not yet full and complete in his reality and personality.

(4) _The Passibility of God._--It would seem, also, that any vital defense of the Fatherhood of God, required by the social consciousness, involves further the frank admission of the passibility of God, whether it has the look of an ancient heresy or not. We must unhesitatingly admit that, without which God can be no real God to us. "Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God. If he is capable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering, and were he without the capacity for either he would be without any feeling of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth that comes by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God."[110] With the growing sensitiveness of the social consciousness, the problem of suffering and of sin presses increasingly, and itself almost compels the assertion of the passibility of God. Nothing less can satisfy our hearts, nor indeed allow us to keep our reverence for God.

Certainly, with the increasingly clear vision, which the social consciousness is giving us, of sympathetic, unselfish, definitely self-sacrificing, loving leadership even among men, we shall not rest satisfied with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, loving God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, bearing as a burden the sin of each, and not satisfied while one child turns away; no mere on-looker, but in all our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of Christ, then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of God's seeking, suffering love.

4. _As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity._--One inference for theology widely drawn from the social consciousness, it ought in fairness, perhaps, to be said, seems to me unjustified,--the doctrine of a so-called "Social Trinity." One must question the constant cool assumption made in these discussions of a social Trinity, that this view is the only alternative to what is called an "abstract simplicity." In any case, one would suppose, we must have in God all the richness and complexity of a complete personal life, freed from the limitations of finite personality. Something of the much that that involves we have been trying to point out. Here certainly is no "abstract simplicity."

Moreover, the conception of a social Trinity, so far as the writer can see, carries us inevitably to a tritheism of the most unmistakable kind. "Social" involves full personality. Nothing requires more complete personality than love, which the view affirms to exist between the persons of the immanent Trinity, between the distinctions in the very Godhead. The relations of Christ to God were, of course, distinctly and definitely personal; but it must not be forgotten that we are not permitted, on any careful theological view, to transfer these directly to the immanent relations of the Godhead.

The distinction drawn by Dr. W. N. Clarke,[111] between the doctrine of the biblical Trinity and the doctrine of the Triunity, I count of decided value; but after one has made the distinction, one may doubt the value of the contribution made by the doctrine of the Triunity. The really immanent relations of the Godhead are necessarily hidden from us, and are, also, so far as the writer can see, without ethical or religious significance for us, except in the way of possible injury through substituting some supposed altogether mysterious and incomprehensibly sacred, for the well-known and truly sacred shown in the ethical relations of common life.

The doctrine of the Triunity seems to have been originally intended to enable the church to hold the divinity of Christ. If we now get at that and hold that from quite a different point of view, the older way becomes less essential. We must, indeed, keep the ancient treasure, but we need not keep it in the same ancient chest. None of us--not the most orthodox--really find the _reasons_ for holding the divinity of Christ in the doctrine of the Triunity. It is interesting to observe how widely separated from the doctrine of the Triunity are the considerations which really move men to faith in the divinity of Christ. That doctrine is, at the very most, only our philosophical supplement intended to bring that, which on other grounds we have come to believe, into unity with our thought of God.

But, at least, we must so conceive the divinity of Christ, as not to get two or three Gods. And a "Social Trinity" does not seem to me to avoid that, except in terms. However, therefore, we are to solve our problem, we are not to take _that_ way out.

What Dr. Clarke calls the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, seems to me to contain the very heart of Christianity, whatever philosophical theory we put beneath it; and it became, therefore, as expressed in the baptismal and benediction formulas, the great daily confession of the church, since it strongly expresses that of which we have been speaking,--the living love of God, a life of absolutely self-giving love, of eternal ministry.

The biblical Trinity is, in truth, what it has sometimes been called, the trinity of redemption; and, for me, directly emphasizes the great facts of redemption. Here there are three great facts: First, the Fatherhood of God, that God is in his very being Father, Love, self-manifesting as light, self-giving as life, self-communicating, pouring himself out into the life of his children, wishing to share his highest life with them, every one. Second, the concrete, unmistakable revelation of the Father in Christ, revealed in full ethical perfection, as an actual fact to be known and experienced; no longer an unknown, hidden, or only partially and imperfectly revealed God, but a real, living God of character, counting as a real, appreciable, but fully spiritual fact in the real world. And, third, the Father revealing himself by his Spirit in every _individual_ heart that opens itself to him, in a constant, intimate, divine association, which yet is never obtrusive, but reverent of the man's personality, making possible to every man the ideal conditions of the richest life.

What metaphysical theory we put under that confession of our full Christian faith, does not seem to me to be of prime importance. Men may count it of great importance; but it can hardly be of first importance, since, at the very most, only the beginnings of such a theory can be found in the great New Testament confession of Christ.

5. _Preëminent Reverence for Personality, Characterizing all God's Relations with Men._--But the very heart of the conviction, on the part of the social consciousness, of the value and sacredness of the person, is its _reverence for personality_; and this thought has much significance for theology, for, if this judgment of the social consciousness is justified, it must be regarded as preëminently characterizing God in all his relations with men.

(1) _Reflected in Christ._--When, in the first place, we turn to Christ as the supreme revelation of God, we cannot fail to see that this reverence for the personal marks every step he takes. It begins, of course, in the priceless value which Christ gives to each person, as a child of the living, loving Father.

And it seems to determine his _whole method_ with his generation and with his disciples. It is shown in the initial battle in the temptations, as to the form his work was to take, and as to the means to be employed. There was here, as we have seen, from the start an absolute subordination of all unspiritual and unethical methods in the building of the kingdom. There is to be no over-riding of the free personality anywhere. He faced successively the temptations to place his dependence on the mere meeting of men's material needs--the kingdom by bread; the temptation to place his dependence on that which appealed most strongly to the oriental mind--the use of wonder-working power--the kingdom by marvel or ecstasy; the temptation to place his dependence on force--the kingdom by force. But Christ sees clearly that God is no mere supplier of bread; that God is no mere wonder-worker, no mere giver of wonderful experiences; and that God is not a tyrant to conquer by force. Everywhere, therefore, he sets aside whatever may override the free personality. He would replace all the attractive and seemingly rapid methods of the kingdom by bread, the kingdom by marvel, and the kingdom by force, with the slow and tedious and costly but reverent method of the spiritual kingdom by spiritual means, the kingdom of God by God's way--of a trust freely won, a humility spontaneously arising, a love gladly given. He can take no pleasure in any kingdom but one of free persons.

In the same way, in his dealings with the inner circle of his disciples, there seems to have been the most scrupulous regard for their own needed initiative. He apparently makes no clear announcement of himself as Messiah even to the disciples until late in his public ministry, and, then, only after they have been brought, through weeks, if not months, of unusually close personal contact and impression of his spirit, into their own confession of him. He steadily abjures, that is, all dogmatism about himself, and leads them along by a purely spiritual method to a confession of him, that may be truly their own. There is no piling up of proof-texts from the Old Testament, to show that he is the Messiah. He seems never to have attempted any proof with his disciples. Indeed, he seems purposely to have chosen the rather ambiguous title, "the Son of Man," that men might be left free to come by moral choice to him.

The surpassingly significant fact, that Christ's chief work in the establishment of the kingdom of God, as seems to me beyond doubt, was his personal association with a few men; that, probably, a full third, perhaps more, of his very brief so-called public ministry was taken up with a period of definitely sought comparative retirement with the inner circle of the disciples--all this points to the same recognition of the fundamental importance in Christ's eyes of such a reverence for the person. The kingdom of God can be founded only by the full winning of free persons into his discipleship. The kingdom is first and last a kingdom of free persons, in Dr. Mulford's language, always a "Republic of God." Professor Peabody's emphasis on the essential importance of Christ's individualism, that "Jesus approaches life from within, through the inspiration of the individual,"[112] it need not be said, goes upon the same assumption of Christ's reverence for the person.

In his really public ministry the same spirit appears; for Jesus seems to me here constantly to be standing with a kind of moral shudder between the spirit of contempt in the Pharisees and Sadducees, and the outraged personality of the common people, even of the publicans and sinners. He feels the contempt even for these least, as a blow in his own face.

That glimpse which the Revelation gives us of Christ standing and knocking at the heart's closed door, is a true picture forevermore not only of the attitude of Christ's earthly life, but of God's eternal relation to us. Men may over-ride and outrage us, and even think that they show the more love thereby; God, never. This principle, then, we may take as absolutely crucial, in our judgment of God's dealings with us.

(2) _In Creation._--It is fundamental even in creation. The very fact of the creation of persons implies it. Such a creation can have no significance, if, in the language already quoted from Howison, God's "consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person."

And if love is, for a moment, to be thought of as the motive of creation, it required for any satisfaction of it, persons who could freely respond to that love.

The definite bestowal of the fateful gift of moral freedom, with the practical certainty of sin--the creation of beings who could choose against him--shows how deeply planted in the very being of God is this principle of reverence for the person.

Here, too, the impossibility of arbitrary divine decrees meets us. This would be treating a person as a thing, and God himself may not do that and remain God. If a man cannot see his way to a faith both in the divine foreknowledge and in the moral initiative of men, therefore, he must not hesitate to choose even the divine nescience of the free acts of men, rather than think of God as compelling men. Our whole moral universe tumbles about our ears, if he who is the source of all is not in earnest with persons. And yet there is much theological thinking, of which the common notions of a personal reign of Christ on the earth may be taken as an example, that practically looks to a kingdom by compulsion. A kingdom of free spirits cannot be merely decreed.

(3) _In Providence._--And this same principle of reverence for personality must be felt to be the guiding motive and key, as well, in the providence and government of God. God keeps his hands off. He must so act as to call out, not to suppress, individual initiative.

This is, perhaps, the deepest reason for a sphere of law, that there may be a realm in which a person can have his own free development, uninterfered with by any moral compulsion.

If, now, this sphere of law is to be any true training ground for character, as we saw in the third chapter, results must not be forthwith set aside, the mutual influence of men must hold all along the line.

Even in the case of great evils, God does not step in at once to set things right. Character is an exceedingly costly product. This is no play-world, either as to mutual influence or as to freedom. God guards most jealously the freedom and personality of men. He never forgets that character must be from within. He will not accept, as Christ would not, a faith compelled by "signs." Hence, too, we are left to _ask_, and much is left to depend on our asking. So, also, God does not remove all difficulties and give sight in place of faith. He seems even careless, often, of how things go; for he would not only appeal to the heroic in us, but he wishes to make it impossible for us to confuse prudence and virtue in ourselves or others, and so to give us the opportunity and the joy of a real moral victory, of knowing that we have made a genuinely unselfish surrender to the right.

In the light of this deep-lying principle of God's sacred reverence for the person, one learns to hush his former complaints, and with full heart to thank God that he lives in a world where righteousness and happiness do not always seem to fall together, and where, therefore, he can "serve God for naught." Oh, let us know, that it is not that God does not care, but that he cares so much--too much to sacrifice to present comfort the character of the child he loves--too much to shut him out from his highest opportunity.

(4) _In Our Personal Religious Life._--And the same principle holds in our personal religious life. The unobtrusiveness of God's relation to us, of which we often complain, is rather to be taken as evidence of his sacred respect for our own moral initiative, and proof of his careful adaptation to our moral need. Wherever a strong personality is in relation to a weaker, the stronger must maintain a conscientious self-restraint, lest he dominate the personality of the other, to the other's moral injury and to the hindering of his individuality. It _is_ possible for a boy to be injuriously "tied to his mother's apron-strings." Much more is it necessary that God's relation to us should not be obtrusive. God must guard our freedom and our individuality. He must even take pains to hide his hand, as a strong, influential, but wise friend would do. As we go higher, our life is and must be increasingly one of faith, the Father's relation less and less obtrusive.[113] The times of vision are given to make us patient in our progress toward the goal. And after the vision comes often what Rendel Harris calls "the dark night of faith, when every step has to be taken in absolute dependence upon God and assurance that the vision was truth and was no lie."[114] We need the invisible God for character.

It is for this reason, no doubt, that God makes so rare use of overwhelming experiences in the religious life. He would be chosen with clear and rational self-consciousness, and so he rarely overpowers. And even in experiences which seem most overpowering, if the person is really awake to their true ethical and spiritual import, they will probably be found delicately adapted to call out the individual's own response. But for most of us such experiences prove a real temptation, because we allow the passively emotional to absorb our attention, and so lose the ethical and spiritual fruit. Where these marvelous experiences have been most marked, and have plainly given real help, they seem still, usually, to have been needed because of some false conception of God and the spiritual world that required a powerful corrective. Here they seem really to have been granted, as probably the transfiguration of Christ was to the disciples, as a concession to men's weakness, God consenting reluctantly to use for the time a lower line of appeal, because men are unable to rise to the higher appeal.

We have already seen the danger of the neo-platonic over-estimation of emotional experience, and of sudden and magical crises in religion; and this danger is especially seen in much that is said concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. It seems as if it were simply true, for many earnest and sincere Christians, that the superstitions, which they had conscientiously put aside elsewhere in religion, all came back in their thought of the work of the Spirit. Here their relation to God has ceased to be thought of as a personal or moral or truly spiritual one; and they are looking more or less definitely for bodily thrills, for marked and overwhelming emotional experiences, or for sudden transformations--hardly to be called transformations of character--in the passive half-magical removal of temptations altogether. That is, they are looking for moral and spiritual results from unmoral and unspiritual processes. The exact point is this: Doubtless we are not narrowly to limit what the personal influence of the personal Spirit of God may do in transforming human life--the possibilities probably far transcend what we think--but we are clearly to see that the relation is personal, that the influence is spiritual and under strictly ethical conditions, if we are to escape from simply pagan superstition. Let us see that, if God is a Personal Spirit and not an impersonal substance, then, as Herrmann says, he "communes with us through manifestations of his inner life, and when he consciously and purposely makes us feel what his mind is, then we feel himself."[115]

And, then, let us add, as has been already earlier said, that the deepening life in the Spirit becomes plainly a deepening personal friendship and communion with God, with laws--those of a growing friendship--that we may study and know and obey; and among these laws, none is of more central importance than this of the reverence for the person.

(5) _In the Judgment._--And when we turn to God's relation to us in the judgment, we can be sure, I think, of a further application of this principle, contrary to common teaching and expectation. We have no reason to look forward to a time when the secrets of all, or of any, hearts shall be laid bare to all. In so doing, God would violate, it seems to me, the principle of his entire dealing with men, and give the lie to his own revelation in Christ and in history. For myself, Dr. Clarke's words carry immediate conviction: "No man needs to know the secrets of his neighbor, and be able to trace the justice of God through his neighbor's life, and no man who respects the sacredness of individuality will desire it. Neither revelation of his own secrets nor knowledge of another's seems a good thing to a self-respecting soul."[116]

Even the judgment itself proceeds, no doubt, in clear recognition of the free personality. We are "judged by the law of liberty." And we really choose our own destiny, as Phillips Brooks suggests in one of his most striking paragraphs. "By this law we shall be judged. How simple and sublime it makes the judgment day! We stand before the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch the closed lips of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce our fate, heaven or hell. The lips do not open. The Judge just lifts his hand and raises from each soul before him every law of constraint whose pressure has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint, and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic nature of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, without one word of commendation or approval, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place.... The freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature dictates its own destiny. Could there be a more solemn judgment seat? Is it not a fearful thing to be judged by the law of liberty?"[117]

And we may be most certain, that, in any judgment by God, there can be no thought of "human waste." The man must remain for God, to the end, a child of God, a person of sacredness and value, to be dealt with always as capable of character. And it is along just this line that, independently of exegetical grounds, it seems to me, we are led to a decisive rejection of the doctrine of annihilation. And I know no more convincing putting of the matter than this brief but comprehensive statement of Fairbairn: "If there is any truth in the Fatherhood, would not annihilation be even more a punishment of God than of man? The annihilated creature would indeed be gone forever--good and evil, shame and misery, penalty and pain, would for him all be ended with his being; but it would not be so with God--out of his memory the name of the man could never perish, and it would be, as it were, the eternal symbol of a soul he had made only to find that with it he could do nothing better than destroy it."[118]

(6) _In the Future Life._--Doubtless our difficulties are not at an end even so; but, at least, our conception of God is saved from self-contradiction; and the Father is seen as suffering in the sin of the son, and perpetually desiring and seeking his return, never satisfied so long as any child of his still refuses his place in the Father's love. This deep-going principle of reverence for personality, with which we are dealing, is the finest flower of human ethical development, and seems completely to shut out the possibility of compulsion by God at any time in the future life. A person will never be treated as a thing. The soul that turns to God must be won voluntarily.

And if, then, the abstract possibility of endless resistance to God by men cannot be denied; so neither can the possibility--perhaps one might even say, the practical probability--be denied that God, in his infinite love and patience and wisdom, may finally win them all out of their resistance. And the eternal hope is at least open; but it is open, it should be noted, only upon the fulfilment by men of precisely those moral conditions which hold now in the earthly life, and which ought now to be obeyed. There will never be an easier way to God. It is shallow thinking that supposes that, if there be any possibility of turning to God in the future life, it is of small moment that one should now put himself where he ought to be. The full results of all our evil sowing, we must receive. The utmost that on any rational theory, then, can be held out to men, is the hope that, facing a greater heritage of evil than now they face, they might return to God under the same condition of absolute moral surrender, which now holds, and the fulfilment of which is now far more easily possible to them.

And it ought not to be overlooked that, even if the principle of reverence for personality be much less far-reaching than is here affirmed, the annihilation of a soul by God could seem justified only upon the assumption that God foresaw the entire future, and knew that the soul would never turn to righteousness and God. But if the doctrine of annihilation is to be justified on _that_ ground, it is to be observed, that the same foreknowledge would have enabled God to know before creation all the finally incorrigible, if there were to be any such, and so he need not have called these into being at all. A goal, therefore, as great if not far greater, than that offered by the annihilation theory would be, thus, attainable simply upon the same assumption that must rationally be made by that theory, and, at the same time, the great objection to that theory--its violation of personality--would be avoided.

It seems probable that this very principle of reverence for personality contains the chief reason why more has not been revealed to us concerning the future life. Christianity is very far from satisfying our curiosity here. It gives little more than the absolutely needed assurance of the fact and worth of the life beyond. Details are either quite lacking, or given only in broadest symbols. This reticent silence of revelation seems needed if our individual initiative is not to be hindered, either by excess of motive on the one hand, or by the depression of an unappreciated ideal on the other hand.

On the one hand, that is, so far as we could understand a detailed revelation of the future life, to set it forth with the realism of the present life would be to interfere with that unobtrusive relation of God to us, which we have seen to be so necessary to our highest moral training. We need, in this time of our training, a certain obscurity of spiritual truth; we need to walk by faith, not by sight. To be able so obviously to weigh the eternal realities against the temporal, would hinder rather than help our growth in loyal, unselfish character.

On the other hand, if a complete and indubitable revelation of the future life were given us, no doubt there would be much that could make but small appeal to us, and might even prove positively depressing, because we have not yet the experience which would interpret to us its meaning and open to us its joy. Our earthly life may furnish us an analogy. The joy of a grown man is often preëminently in his work, but he would find it difficult to explain to a child the source of his joy. And if the child were told that there would come a time in a few years when his chief joy would be found in work, the prospect would probably not seem to him inviting. The wisest of us may be as little prepared to enter in detail into the meaning of the future life.

We may be content to know that the future life is, and is of value beyond that which we can now understand; and we may be assured that at least what we have already seen to be the ideal conditions of the richest life,[119] as now we understand life, will be fully met in the future life. We can hardly doubt, therefore, that the two great centers of the life beyond must be association and work; though we may not know the precise forms that these will take, nor how greatly both may deepen beyond our present conception. Steadily deepening personal relations, rooted in the one absolutely satisfying relation to God in Christ, there must be; and work, in which one may lose himself with joy, because it is God's work. This, at least, the future life will contain. We can hardly go farther with assurance.

But perhaps even this may suggest, that men may vary much in the proportionate emphasis laid upon these two great sources of life, and still alike come into a genuine and rewarding relation to God. That God has counted individuality among men to be of prime significance, the facts of creation hardly allow us to doubt. Possibly it is only another application of this same principle of reverence for the person, in the recognition of that individuality which has its great joy in work, which is to be found in what Professor George F. Genung suggestively calls "an apocalypse of Kipling." In Kipling's poem to Wolcott Balestier, Professor Genung sees "the discovery of a religion, or assignable and eternally rewardable relation to God, in those whose inner life is not introspective or self-expressive." Their spiritual life "serves God with the joy which comes of following and satisfying, in the sphere of his plans, the eager bent of a conquering will." "It is the religion of work and of daring." And "it is only in the open vision of an eternal world that their secular ardor, which was unconsciously serving God all along, begins to come to the perception of a transcendent master and to be transformed into an adoration, an obedience and loyalty, a 'will to serve or to be still as fitteth our Father's praise.'"

It is quite possible that through our very failure to enter into God's own deep reverence for the person, in the recognition of man's divinely given individuality, as well as through failure to recognize the essential like-mindedness of men, we have been shutting the door of hope, where God has not shut it, and have limited beyond warrant the divine mercy. Even in the life of heaven men cannot be all alike. "Who art thou that judgest the servant of another? to his own lord he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be made to stand; for the Lord hath power to make him stand."[120]

[92] _The Limits of Evolution_, p. x.

[93] Cf. above, pp. 22, 66, 106.

[94] See especially Bowne, _Theory of Thought and Knowledge_, pp. 239, 377, 378; James, _The Will to Believe_, pp. 145 ff.

[95] Cf. above, p. 44 ff

[96] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 241 ff.

[97] Hastings, _Dictionary of the Bible_, Vol. II, p. 626.

[98] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, Chaps. VI and VII.

[99] I aim here to bring out with some fullness the significance of the propositions briefly summarized in the _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 244; and I venture to repeat, also, two quotations from that book, because they fit so closely into the argument here.

[100] _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 378.

[101] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 232, 233, 248, 249.

[102] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 209; and below, p. 209.

[103] _The Limits of Evolution_, p. 7.

[104] _Ethics and Revelation_, p. 270.

[105] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 205 ff.

[106] Cf. Lotze, _The Microcosmus_, Vol. II, pp. 690 ff.

[107] See _Reconstruction in Theology_, Chapter VI.

[108] _Ethics and Revelation_, p. 270.

[109] See the fuller statement in the _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 96-108.

[110] Fairbairn, _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 483.

[111] _Outline of Christian Theology_, pp. 161, ff.

[112] _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, p. 101.

[113] Cf. Fairbairn, _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, pp. 434, 435.

[114] _Union with God_, p. 109.

[115] _The Communion of the Christian with God_, p. 143.

[116] _An Outline of Christian Theology_, p. 464.

[117] _The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons_, p. 197.

[118] _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, p. 467.

[119] See above, pp. 68 ff.

[120] Romans 14:4.

INDEX

Abbott, Lyman, reference to, 131.

_American Journal of Theology, The_, reference to, 86.

Analogy of Organism. See Organism.

Annihilation, doctrine of, why rejected, 239 ff.

Arbitrariness, excluded in God, 220 ff.

Aristotle, quoted, 26; his position abandoned by mysticism, 56.

Association, personal, in redemption, 149 ff; in personal relation to God, 159 ff; in confessions of faith, 167 ff.

Assumption of the book, 3.

Atonement, in the light of social consciousness, 147 ff, 150 ff; the cost of, 150; substitution and propitiation in, 150 ff; analogy of father and child in, 154 ff; blood covenant applied to, 157.

Baldwin, J. M., reference to, 12.

Biblical Trinity, 224, 225.

Blood covenant, as applied to doctrine of atonement, 157.

Böhme, Jacob, referred to, 71.

Bowne, B. P., on causality and purpose, 43; on freedom, 182, 183.

Bradley, F. H., on the religious feeling in philosophy, 129.

Brooks, Phillips, reference to, 28, 146; on the intellectual life of Jesus, 81; on the emotional life of Jesus, 84; on the universal interest of Jesus, 124; on the likeness of men, 126; on judgment according to the law of liberty, 238.

Bruce's _The Kingdom of God_, reference to, 52.

Bushnell, H., on impenitence of Jesus, 193.

Calvinism, 220.

Causality and purpose, 42, 43.

Christ, See Jesus.

Christian, the historically, emphasized by the social consciousness, 102 ff.

Christianity, as contributing to sense of mutual influences, 13; sometimes unconscious, 130.

Church, the, importance of the doctrine of, 177 ff.

Clarke, W. N., referred to, 116, 224; quoted, 132, 133, 152; on propitiation, 151; on doctrine of Trinity and Triunity, 223; on revelation of inner life at judgment, 237.

Common qualities and interests, most valuable, 177 ff.

Confessions of faith, Christian fellowship in, 167 ff; uniformity in, impossible, 169 ff; and undesirable, 171 ff.

Corinthians, first, twelfth chapter of, as expression of analogy of organism, 23; against false mysticism, 60-61, 83.

Cornill, reference to, 64.

Creation, eternal, 214 ff; reverence for person in, 230 ff.

Creed, Christian fellowship in, 167 ff; uniformity in, impossible, 169 ff; and undesirable, 171 ff.

Denison, J. H., referred to, 197.

Devotional literature, difficulty in, 84; referred to, 141.

Dewey, John, referred to, 12.

Drummond, H., reference to, 21; on sin, 140.

Du Bois, Patterson, on true spirit of fatherhood, 110.

Edwards, Jonathan, referred to, 22.

Election, in Paul, 116; a choice for service, 116.

Emotion, extreme emphasis on, a danger in mysticism, 71; cf. 135 ff.

Eternal creation, 214 ff.

"Eternal truths," God's relation to, 212 ff.

Ethical, the, in religion, 86 ff; proofs that religion must be, 89 ff.

Ethicizing of religion, 89 ff; involved in relation to Christ, 89; the divine will in ethical command, 90; involved in nature of God's gifts, 91; communion with God through harmony with his will, 92; the vision of God for the pure in heart, 92; sharing the life of God, 93; Christ, as satisfying our claims on life, 94; attraction to Christ, ethically conditioned, 96; the moral law, a revelation of the love of God, 98.

Ethics and religion, 87, 89 ff.

Everett, C. C, criticism of Nietzsche, 120.

_Expository Times, The_, reference to, 64.

Fairbairn, A. M., his _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, mentioned, 110; on the Christian consciousness, 112; referred to, 119, 196, 215, 234; on sense of sin, 143; on Christ as transcendent, 189; on passibility of God, 221; on annihilation, 239.

Faith, necessity of, in life, 43, 44.

Faith in men, increased by sense of likeness, 128.

Father and child, the analogy of, applied to redemption, 154 ff.

Favorites, none with God, 116 ff.

Fellowship, Christian, help of, in coming into kingdom, 159 ff; within the kingdom, 162 ff; in intercessory prayer, 164 ff; in confessions of faith, 167 ff.

Fiske, John, reference to, 21.

Freedom, in man, 181 ff; Bowne on, 182, 183; references on, 182.

Fremantle, W. H., reference to, 141.

Friendship, laws of, as holding in religion, 67.

Future life; moral reality of, 132 ff; reverence for person in, 240 ff.

Galatians, Epistle to, referred to, 83.

Genung, G. F., on "an apocalypse of Kipling," 245.

Giddings, F. H., reference to, 9, 10, 19, 20, 62, 117; on the "social mind," 138.

God, immanence of, as related to social consciousness, 40 ff; his will, ethical basis of social consciousness, 44 ff; sharing in our life, 48; will of, felt in ethical command, 90; his gifts require ethical attitude to receive them, 91, 92; our sharing his life, 93; we cannot do his will in general, 100; a thoroughly personal conception of, needed, 207 ff; guarding the conception of, 208 ff, 211; suprapersonal in, 209; Nash on doctrine of personality of, 210; always completely personal, 212 ff; relation to eternal truths, 212 ff; as eternally creating, 214 ff; unity and unchangeableness of, 216 ff; limiting conception of immanence of, 217 ff; deepening thought of Fatherhood of, 218 ff; as the great servant, 219; no arbitrariness in, 220; passibility of God, 221; trinity in, 222 ff.

Grahame, Kenneth, on love, 123; referred to, 124.

Harnack, A., on Christ, 200.

Harris, J. R., quoted, 234.

Hegel, on greatest in art, 119.

Heredity, not to be over-emphasized, 37; James, on, 37, 38.

Herrmann, W., referred to, 22, 70, 173; his definition of mysticism, 56, 57; on pantheistic tendency in mysticism, 58, 74; on our satisfaction in Christ, 94; on the help of the fellowship of the church, 161; on Christ's rising to his ideals, 194; on Christ's calling out absolute trust, 199; on personal relation to God, 237.

Historical, the, under-estimated by mysticism, 72.

Historical justification needed by social consciousness, 59 ff, 102 ff.

Historically, the, Christian, emphasized by the social consciousness, 102 ff.

History, no mere natural process, 218 ff; God in, vii, 219.

Holy Spirit, doctrine of, often made superstitious, 236.

Honesty of the world, double meaning of, 80.

Hope for men, increased by sense of likeness, 128.

Hosea, as illustration of inter-play of human and divine relations, 68.

Howells, W. D., his _A Boy's Town_, quoted, 118; referred to, 123.

Howison, G. H., on the person, 180, 208, 230; referred to, 210.

Humanity, idea of, from Christianity, 13.

Ideal view, requires the facts of the social consciousness, 29 ff, 32 ff.

Imitation, to be avoided, 172 ff.

Immanence of God, as metaphysical ground of facts of social consciousness, 40 ff; Lotze on, 40, 41; limitations in conception of, 217 ff.

"Immortability," discussed, 124 ff.

Immortality, J. S. Mill on, 50; Sully on, 50; doctrine of, as affected by sense of likeness of men, 124 ff; references on, 125.

Indian mysticism, 74.

Israel, significance of its social struggle, 63; ecstasy among its prophets, 64.

James, William, on heredity, 37; on metaphysics, 40; on sense of reality, 72; on nitrous-oxide-gas intoxication, 74; on the world as a confusion, 78; reference to, 79, 122, 124, 126; on compensations, 117; on varied ideals, 128; on catching faith and courage, 147.

Jesus, Brooks on his intellectual life, 81; on his emotional life, 84; relation to, necessarily ethical, 89, 94, 96; satisfies our highest claims on life, 94; his social emphases, 111 ff; Brooks on his interest in the uninteresting, 124; the great Christian confession, 174 ff; loyalty to, best assurance for doctrine, 175; the personal in, 184 ff; a personal revelation of God, 184 ff; the moral and spiritual in his supremacy, 185 ff; grounds of his supremacy, 188 ff; among founders of religion, 189 ff; his sinlessness, 192 ff; his impenitence, 193; rises to highest ideals, 194 ff; shows character of God, 195 ff; consciously able to redeem all men, 196; transcendent God-consciousness and sense of mission, 197 ff; calls out absolute trust, 198 ff; in him God certainly finds us, 199 ff; the ideal realized, 200 ff; his double uniqueness, 201 ff; sense of kinship with, and reality of, 205 ff; divinity of, as related to Trinity, 224; reverence for person in, 226 ff.

Judgment, according to light, 132 ff; how God's can be favorable, 153 ff; reverence for person in, 237 ff; according to law of liberty, 238 ff.

Kaftan, J., referred to, 86.

Keim, quoted, 52.

King, references to his _Reconstruction in Theology_, 16, 20, 23, 43, 67, 185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 212, 217, 218.

Kipling, R., on the value of the common, 119; G. F. Genung on, 245.

Lanier, S., quoted, on Christ, 201.

Leibnitz, referred to, 172.

Life, the richest, ideal conditions of, 68 ff.

Like-mindedness of men, 9 ff; an element of social consciousness, 9 ff, 47; influence on theology, 115 ff; summary on, 134; seen under diverse forms, 121 ff.

Lotze, reference to, 13, 25, 31, 42, 213, 214; on passion for construing everything, 25, 26; on immanence of God, 40.

Love, sense of, 20; element in social consciousness, 20, 51; as motive in creation, 215.

Man, the personal in, 180 ff; separateness from God, 180 ff; freedom in, 181 ff; a child of God, 183 ff.

Matheson, George, on sacrifice, 49.

McConnell, S. D., objection to one part in his argument as to immortality, 124 ff.

McCurdy, on the significance of the social struggle in Israel, 63.

Metaphysical, not to be emphasized, in conception of Christ, 185 ff; how to be thought, as to Christ, 203, 204; in doctrine of Trinity, 226.

Mill, J. S., on immortality, 50.

Moral world, prerequisites of, 30 ff; sphere of law, 30; ethical freedom, 30; some power of accomplishment, 31; members one of another, 32.

Mistiness in mysticism, 73.

Moral initiative in men, 181 ff.

Moral law, a revelation of the love of God, 98.

Mulford, E., referred to, 229.

Münsterberg, H., referred to, 79; reference to his _Psychology and Life_, 79.

Mutual influence of men, 11 ff; contributing lines of thought, 11 ff; threefold form of the conviction, 13 ff; as element of social consciousness, 11 ff, 50; influence upon theological doctrine, 136 ff; for good, 144 ff; in attainment of character, 145 ff; in personal relation to God, 160 ff; in confession of faith, 167 ff.

Mystical, the falsely, opposition of the social consciousness to, 55 ff, 57 ff; Nash's definition of, 55, 56; Herrmann's definition of, 56, 57; unethical, 58; no real personal God, 58; belittles personal in man, 59; Paul's rejection of, 60, 61; leaves historically Christian, 62 ff.

Mystical, the truly, emphasized by the social consciousness, 66 ff, 70 ff; requires laws of a deepening friendship, 67; requires ideal conditions of the richest life, 68; protest in favor of whole man, 78 ff; its self-controlled recognition of emotion, 82 ff.

Mysticism, its relation to the social consciousness, 55 ff; false, 55 ff; true, 66 ff, 70 ff; justifiable and unjustifiable elements in, 71 ff; its dangers: emotionalism, 71; subjectivism, 72; under-estimating historical, 72; mistiness, 73; pantheism, 73 ff; symbolism, 76. justifiable elements in, summed up, 77.

Nash, H. S., on ethical basis of social consciousness in will of God, 45 ff; his definition of the mystical, 55, 56; referred to, 70; on doctrine of divine personality, 210; on the supernatural, 217.

Neo-Darwinian school, referred to, 37.

Neo-Platonic mysticism, 55 ff, 74.

_New World, The_, reference to, 12, 120.

Neitzsche, criticism of, by Everett, 120.

Obligation, sense of, 18 ff; element in social consciousness, 18, 51.

Organism, analogy of, 23 ff; value of, 23; classical expression in I Cor. 12; inadequacy of, for social consciousness, 24 ff: comes from the sub-personal world, 24; access to reality only through ourselves, 24; mistaken passion for construing everything, 25; tested by definition of social consciousness, 26 ff.

Orr's _The Christian View of God and the World_, reference to, 51.

Pantheism, tendency to, in mysticism, 58, 74.

Paul, his rejection of the falsely mystical, 60, 61, 83.

Paulsen, on key to reality, 25; reference to, 30, 129; on necessity of faith, 46, 47.

Peabody, F. G., referred to, 65; on the social principles of Jesus, 111; on Christ's individualism, 229.

Person, value of, 16 ff, 50; influence of sense of value of, on theology, 179 ff; reverence for, characterizing all God's relation to men, 226 ff.

Personal, the, recognition of, 179 ff; recognition of, in man, 180 ff; recognition of, in Christ, 184 ff; recognition of, in God, 207 ff.

"Personal idealism," 180, 181, 210.

Personal relation, in religion, emphasized by social consciousness, 66 ff; leads to the truly mystical, 70 ff.

Philo, as representative of mysticism, 55.

_Philosophical Review, The_, reference to, 40.

Philosophy, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 12.

Plato, his position abandoned by mysticism, 56.

Plotinus, as representative of mysticism, 55.

Prophets, the, their standpoint abandoned by Philo, 55; their sense of the significance of the social struggle in Israel, 63; ecstasy in, 64.

Propitiation, ethical meaning of, 150 ff, 156, 158 ff.

Providence, reverence for person in, 232 ff.

Psychology, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 12.

Purpose and causality, 42, 43.

Race-connection, not prime cause of unity of men, 35 ff.

Race, real unity of, 136 ff; its solidarity, how conceived, 16, 35, 30, 137.

Ranke, on Christ, 192.

Rational, two senses of, 80.

_Reconstruction in Theology_, references to, 16, 20, 23, 43, 67, 185, 187, 188, 203, 205, 212, 217, 218.

Redemption, as viewed from point of view of mutual influence for good, 147 ff; the cost of, 150; substitution and propitiation in, 150 ff.

Religion, and theology, 6, 113; influence of the social consciousness upon, 53 ff, 70 ff; the personal relation in, emphasized by the social consciousness, 66 ff; its thorough ethicizing demanded by social consciousness, 86 ff; and ethics, 87; a supreme factor in life, 189.

Reverence for the person characterizing all God's relations to men, 226 ff; reflected in Christ, 226 ff; in creation, 230 ff; in providence, 232 ff; in the personal religious life, 233 ff; in the judgment, 237 ff; in the future life, 240 ff.

Ritschl, A., referred to, 137.

Royce, Josiah, reference to, 12.

Sabatier, A., reference to, 171.

Sanday, W., reference to, 187.

Schiller, F. C, S., reference to, 40.

Science, as contributing to sense of mutual influence, 11.

Scotist position as to God, 213.

Separateness from God, meaning of, 180 ff.

Sin, sense of, deepened by social consciousness, 139 ff; Drummond on, 140; lack of sense of, among Greeks, 140; when most feared, 143.

Smith, G. A., reference to, 64.

Social consciousness, definition, 9 ff; elements in, 9 ff; meaning of, for theology, 5 ff; analogy of organism, inadequate for, 24 ff; analogy, tested, 26 ff; necessity of its facts for ideal interests, 29 ff; the question, 29; else, no moral world, 30 ff, 32 ff; ultimate explanation and ground of, 35 ff; metaphysical ground, 35 ff: not due to physical race-connection, 35 ff; nor primarily to heredity, 37 ff; nor to mystical solidarity, 37 ff; but to immanence of God, 40 ff; ethical basis, 44 ff; supporting will of God, 44; Nash on, 45; Paulsen on, 46; God's sharing in our life, 48 ff; consequent transfiguration of, 49 ff. its influence upon religion, 53 ff; opposed to the falsely mystical, 57 ff; emphasizes personal relation in religion, and so the truly mystical, 66 ff; demands the ethicizing of religion, 86 ff; needs historical justification, 102 ff; its influence upon theological doctrine, 105 ff: general results, 105 ff; influence of like-mindedness of men, 115 ff; of mutual influence of men, 136 ff; of sense of value of person, 179 ff.

"Social mind," real meaning of, 138; Giddings on, 138.

"Social Trinity," 222 ff.

Solidarity, a mystical, not to be pressed, 39.

Solidarity of race, often falsely conceived, 16, 35, 39, 137 ff.

Stevenson, R. L., on the poetical and ideal in men, 122; referred to, 123, 124.

Subjectivism, tendency to, in mysticism, 72.

Substitution, ethical meaning of, 150 ff, 158 ff.

Sully, J., on immortality, 50.

Supra-personal, the, in God, 209.

Symbolism, strong tendency to, in mysticism, 76.

Sympathy with men, increased by sense of likeness, 127.

Tennyson, his self-hypnotism, 74.

Theme of the book, 1 ff.

Theologian, the, an interpreter, 5; a believer in the supremacy of spiritual interests, 6; assumes the fact of religion, 6; assumes a personal God, 7; takes point of view of Christ, 7.

Theologian's, the, point of view, 5 ff.

Theology, and religion, 6, 113; in personal terms, 106 ff; Fatherhood of God, determining principle in, 109; as influenced by social consciousness, 105 ff; general results in, 105 ff; influence of likeness of men on, 115 ff; influence of mutual influence of men on, 136 ff; influence of value of person on, 179 ff.

Thomist position as to God, 223.

Trinity, doctrine of, 222 ff; biblical, 224, 225.

"Trinity, Social," 222 ff.

Tritheism, involved in a real social trinity, 222 ff.

Triunity of God, doctrine of, 223 ff.

"Truths, eternal," God's relation to, 212 ff.

Unchangeableness of God, 216 ff.

Unconscious Christianity, 130.

Uniqueness, a double, in Christ, 201 ff; metaphysical, 203, 204; ethical, 204, 205.

Value and sacredness of person, 16 ff; sense of, element in social consciousness, 16, 50.

Weismann, referred to, 37.

Transcriber's Notes: Page 182, "GOd" changed to "God". Inconsistent hyphenation retained. Apparent printer's punctuation errors corrected. Italics indicated by _underscores_ and transliterated Greek by +plus signs+.