The motives once so carefully pondered have melted into the spontaneity and energy of the love. The light of reason and the heat of love blend indissolubly in the sunshine of the perfect character. So they are eternally blended in God, whose character was never formed or perfected in time, but is perfect eternally in his own free choice in love. Here we see from a new point of view that God's love is absolutely disinterested. He has no wants. He does not seek men in redemption because their salvation is necessary to his own happiness, for he is eternally blessed in himself. He seeks to redeem men in pure disinterested love to them unmingled with any sense of his own need. It is not want which impels him. And it is not fulness which by any constitutional necessity must overflow. Absolute disinterested love moves him to forthputting and blessing in creating and governing the universe; and still further in coming into humanity in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. "Nothing brought him from above, 6. Christ is the exponent, under human limitations and conditions, of what God is. As soon as God comes into humanity revealing his love in Christ, it is a suffering and sacrificial love even to the extreme of giving up his life for men. The necessary inference is that there must be in God's love that which corresponds to human love in suffering and self-sacrifice for those who are loved; though, when existing in the absolute Being, it cannot manifest itself in suffering as it does in humanity. We know that in its essence it is the same with the love manifested by Christ, the man of sorrows, suffering in self-sacrifice even unto death. We can picture it as it would be under human limitations and conditions, not as it is in the absolute blessedness of God. Therefore we properly use the scriptural representations of God, and speak of his compassion and pity, his mercy and grace, of his being grieved with our sins, of his patience and longsuffering, of his indignation and wrath against sin. We may ascribe to him love, as universal good-will regulated in its exercise by righteousness, in all the human forms in which it is manifested in Jesus Christ. God declares that his love exceeds that of a mother for her child: "She may forget, yet will not I forget thee." The mother who has a wayward and wicked son is in anguish on account of him and so continuously "bears his sin" in her own personal suffering for him; and in compassion and good-will she continually tries by every means in her power to save him from his wickedness and ruin. So God in Christ bears the sins of men while seeking to save them. Herein Christ is the exponent to us of God's feelings. The agony of Christ in Gethsemane we must suppose was the anguish of his spirit in view of the sinfulness of men made in the likeness of God and sought by him in love, yet renouncing him and using the divine powers and susceptibilities with which he has endowed them only to sin against him, to oppose him in all that he does to realize his grand ideal of the kingdom of God on earth, and rejecting and crucifying him in whom God had come as their redeemer to save them from sin. This anguish of Christ is the true exponent to us of God's feeling in view of human sin, ever bearing the sin of men on his heart in loving sorrow. This divine sorrow, expressed in Christ under human conditions and limitations, is the agony in Gethsemane. When Christ wept over Jerusalem, but could not deliver the people from the inevitable consequences of their persistence in sin, he expressed what God's sorrow in punishing the wicked would be if manifested under human conditions and limitations, "reluctant wrath," which cannot be changed into approval unless God should act contrary to the fundamental principles of reason and to the constitution of the universe, and so crush the universe into chaos. When Christ looked on the people in a synagogue with indignation, being grieved at the hardening of their hearts, when he said, " Woe, unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," it was the expression of God's eternal and intense antagonism to all sin as well as of his sorrow for the sinners, as these feelings would be expressed under human limitations and conditions. When he wept at the grave of Lazarus he expressed in human tears God's sympathy with men in bereavement and sorrow. When he healed the sick, when he attended the wedding in Cana, when he dined both with Pharisees and with publicans, when he took little children in his arms and blessed them, when he led a blind man by the hand through the streets of a village and then in a retired place restored his sight, when he taught men respecting God and his kingdom, when he suffered even unto death to save men from sin, he opened to men's view the very heart of God, he expressed to them God's eternal and never-changing feelings as they would be expressed if exercised under human limitations and conditions. The conclusion is that God is susceptible of feeling, which under human limitations and conditions would be the feeling of the human spirit as it is manifested in Christ; not changed in essence or lessened in degree by the fact that God is the absolute Being, but greatened to infinite fulness; unchanged and unruffled in eternal peace, because its fulness makes it impossible that it should be greater, and God's perfection as the absolute Spirit, whose delight is with the sons of men, makes it impossible it should be less. And because the spiritual motives and emotions of men as manifested in Christ are the real exponents of the feeling of God, the anthropomorphic representations of it in the Bible are accordant alike with devout religion, true philosophy and sound theology. They present a reality essential in every worthy conception of God; but in interpreting them we must clear them of all human weakness, imperfection, and limitation. VOL. I. 14 THEODICY: CHAPTER VII THE JUSTIFYING OF GOD TO MAN. THEODICY is the justifying of God to man. Especially it is the vindication of God's love, in answer to objections founded on the existence of suffering and sin, by showing the harmony of the universe in its constitution and ongoing with his righteousness and benevolence. The Christian is a witness for God rather than his judge or even his advocate. But it is not presumptuous to justify God against objectors who allege that facts both in the physical and spiritual systems are incompatible with his love. The ethical principles underlying the evidence that God is love, and to a considerable extent the evidence itself, have already been examined.1 I present in this chapter some additional aspects of the evidence in vindication of his righteousness and good-will against objections. I. THE BASIS OF THEODICY. -The basis of all true theodicy is the supremacy of absolute Reason. The vindication of God's love in the presence of sin and suffering rests on the facts already established, that God is the absolute Spirit in whom the principles, laws, and ideals of reason are eternal and immutable; that the universe is ultimately grounded in absolute Reason and pervaded and regulated by it. 1. The skeptic presents his objection in the form of a dilemma: Either God could have prevented sin and evil but would not, if so he is not benevolent; or he would have prevented them but could not, and if so he is not almighty. It is boasted that this position is impregnable, "the Gibraltar of unbelief." 1 Philosophical Basis of Theism, chap. ix. pp. 185-226; The Self-Revelation of God, chap. xii. xiii. xiv. The fact that God is the absolute Reason completely dissolves the dilemma proposed by the skeptic, and overthrows his boasted impregnable fortress. The objection does not establish a complete dilemma between a defect either in God's power or his benevolence. This is evident, because it entirely overlooks the supremacy of the divine reason regulating all action under unchangeable law. The objector regards God as arbitrary, capricious, lawless almightiness. He conceives that if this lawless one should become rational and exercise his power in harmony with reason, he would cease to be almighty. But so soon as God is recognized as absolute Reason, then the universe must be acknowledged as a scientifically ordered system, there must be a real relation of means to ends, effects must be commensurate with the agencies causing them, everything must be subject to law. And when rational persons appear, a moral system comes into existence in which must be moral law sanctioned by penalty, probation, discipline, education, progressive development, conflict, temptation, struggle with difficulties, the risk of failure. The fundamental fact as to the universe is that from centre to circumference it and all creatures in it are bound under law, the eternal and unchanging law of the absolute Reason.. Here, then, is a third reality, the most fundamental of all, which completely dissolves the objector's dilemma. The reason why God does as he does, and not otherwise, in the prevention of sin is not necessarily either a defect of power or a defect of benevolence. It may be an unchangeable truth or law of reason which would be disregarded, an essential element in some rational ideal of perfection or good which would fail, if God should do otherwise than he does. The moment we know that God obeys the eternal laws and is realizing the ends of reason, the dilemma is dissolved. James Mill used to say: "Think of a God who would make a hell." Here is the bald conception of God as the Lawless One, arbitrarily making a hell and forcibly putting his creatures into it. This conception is utterly foreign to theism, and much more to Christianity. God does not make hell any more than he makes sin. The persons who refuse to conform to the law of love make both sin and hell. God has constituted the universe according to the principles and laws of reason and for the real |