CHAPTER III THE AFFIRMATION OF THE FATHER In following the Creed to this point we have considered what might be called the philosophic foundations of the Christian faith. Now we come to a simpler and more familiar line of thought. We have seen that faith is thought kindled by emotion, and concentrated by the will; that it contains a principle of knowledge, a principle of power, and a principle of action. For the Christian faith is something more than an affirmation of the intellect. It is an affirmation of the intellect addressed to our entire nature, summoning us to give all our powers to a definite service. We have advanced from that fundamental conception, to consider the direction in which our service is to be rendered, and the impulse out of which the strength of our life is to come. We have said, “I believe in God." We know something more of God than that he is "a mighty darkness filling the seat of power." We have seen that the thought of God is the final test of reality and the final arbitrament as to the right. We have attained the eternal Presence, the personal, vital source of all life, by whose judgment all other judgments are to be tried, and before whom, as the supreme consciousness, all purposes and thoughts and desires of men must finally be brought. Now we pass to that phrase in the ancient creed which brings us to a definite revelation. We turn from the uncertain ground of man's philosophic thinking to the clear, authoritative and enduring statement of the revealed Word of God. If man had not sinned, God's revelation of himself to men, we can believe, would have been, in everenlarging measure, progressive according as man advanced in his capacity of knowing God-a doubly progressive movement, in the coming down of God to man, and in the ascent of man toward God. But with man's fall, that uniform and steadily advancing revelation must necessarily be interfered with. We shall find, as we open the story, that the revelation has been a slow and troubled process, in which at every point man is seen little prepared to receive the knowledge which God is waiting to bestow. We shall expect to find simplicity in the revelation of the one God making himself known to man; but it will be the simplicity not of a single unfolding, but the simplicity of harmony. Man will be gradually prepared, and the divine nature will appear, now in one manifestation and now in another, according to the vicissitudes of his condition or the requirements of his training. As the child in the home needs now guidance and now withholding, as his growing spirit reveals itself under the influences amid which he lives, so this revelation will be various. It will often seem to be devious, and even inconsistent with itself. But at any one time it will be possible to look back upon its course, and see that it is a revelation proceeding to one end, and lifting man little by little to a larger, truer knowledge of his God—a knowledge which will be made complete when at last we shall see him as he is. We discover that the names of God have been always more than a name; each has marked a forward step in the revelation. "Tell me thy name!" was the beseeching prayer of Jacob struggling with the angel; for in that revelation of the name he was aware he would have full knowledge of who his midnight antagonist was. There was a time in the history of Israel when it was said, "By my name Jehovah I was not known to them." The great stages in the development of Israel are marked by three distinct names by which God has thus been revealed in the Old Testament. The old Hebrew name El Shaddai, the Omnipotent, the Almighty, was the name by which God was known to the patriarchs-a name suggestive of the richness of God's power in blessing whom he chose, of the solemnity of his worship, of the scope |