I

WHAT IS GOD?

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son.-Hebrews i. 1-2.

He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.

P

-Hebrews xi. 6.

ROFESSOR HAECKEL, almost the last sur

viving exponent of scientific materialism, says that God, Freedom, and Immortality are the three great buttresses of superstition which it must be the business of science to destroy. Of these three subjects the first is overwhelmingly the greatest, and we will address ourselves to the question "What is God?"

The passages chosen to guide our meditation not only state the question, but also the conditions upon which an answer can be expected, and has actually been given; for every man believes in God, even when he denies, as I shall endeavour to show. There is no quarrelling at the starting-point; those who ask the question, What is God? already believe that He is. The difference between the creeds of those who speak confidently about the nature of God, and those who speak hesitatingly, is less in what they respectively say than in what they do not say; it depends upon what we put into the meaning of that word of three letters,

which is the greatest in the English tongue. "He that cometh unto God" does believe that He is, and some believe that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Moreover, the highest spiritual experience rises above this, in maintaining that God, who is never within sight, but who from the beginning of time hath spoken unto men, hath in the last days spoken unto us by His Son; and when we have heard and seen the Son, the Christ in whom Christians believe, there is nothing more that we know or need to know in answer to the question, What is God?

I can imagine someone saying at this point, "Are you quite sure that we are all agreed about the being of God; is there no doubt about the question whether God is; have we nothing to ask but the question what He is?" My answer is, Undoubtedly I am right, and you yourself are my witness. There are at least three orders of mind, which represent three different ways of thinking about the fundamental questions of our being and our destiny-the scientific mind, the philosophic mind, the religious mind. In one of those three classes every man finds a place. The man of science may not be conspicuously in evidence, but the men trained under scientific methods are. Those who have been to school within the last twenty years know well that it is impossible to escape the habit of mind which is the result of inductive-that is, of scientific-reasoning. Then there are the men of philosophic temperament, who start by believing in mind. Whether aught else is real or no, they believe in the Mind that thinks the world. They believe in their own mind, they may believe in a Whole Mind greater than their own, but still mind. And the religious man would say, "I

believe not only in my own mind, but I believe in a Mind which is the source of mine; I believe not only in my own soul, I believe in the Oversoul. Moreover, I believe in an essential relationship between my soul and that Soul; the Father of my spirit is ever speaking unto me."

It is often said that a three-cornered contest is going on between the representatives of these three temperaments, and that in two of them at least at the present time the antagonism is more pronounced than it has ever been before. This question has been addressed to me recently, " Is not the rift between science and religion wider than it ever was?" Thank God, no! I am well aware that some of the exponents of science and some of the professors of religion conscientiously think that it is; but to me, on the contrary, the future is full of hope, because of this-that for the first time in the history of human thought science, philosophy, and religion have a common starting-point -the human mind, viewing itself as part of an ordered whole, or as one effect of a Universal Cause. All three, through their exponents, affirm God, if they affirm at all. Let us take the three positions seriatim.

The old materialism is gone; it is as dead as the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. To-day men do not think of atoms and molecules as being the ultimate reality. If Miss Marie Corelli were going to write "The Mighty Atom" over again, she would write it differently, or, if you will excuse an Irishism, she would not write it at all. The man of science has ceased to speak of materialism as the explanation of life and mind, although many are old enough to remember Professor Tyndall's famous dictum about that.

Modern science speaks of a Universal Substance which, if it be matter, is also mind, but may be neither. To the man of science God, law, and the universe are one and the same; to him, again, the universe is self-contained, self-explanatory, self-acting by its own laws. Again, the man of science no longer speaks about a dead world of matter over against a living world of men. These are not two, but one; there is no death, but only life. The distinction between the organic and the inorganic is going, or gone. Nothing is dead, all is alive, the light from heaven and the dust on the ground. The Universal Substance is one; ever in movement. Here it is a sob, there a song; here it is the mud on London streets, there the men who walk on it; here it is a vapour, there a prayer; yonder a mountain, here a Gladstone; but all the while the same Substance in myriad manifestation, never at rest, ceaselessly acting, in infinite forms. Did I say rightly at the beginning of this sermon when I affirmed that the man of science has his God? The Universal Substance is his God. He would say, All is God, and God is all. His quarrel with religion consists, not in what he says that the man of religion does not say, but in what he does not say that the man of religion does say.

Let me study the position of the philosophy of the moment. Until quite recently the system of philosophy which held the field was what has been called Consistent Idealism. Do not be afraid of the word-it is very simple, after all. It means no more than thisthat every man, thinking about everything, starts by assuming his own mind and the validity of his own judgment. To be consistent he must not assume anybody else's mind-only his own. So that every one of

us, looking out on the rest of the world, might say, "I am; perhaps nobody else is; it may be that my mind is the only mind in the wide universe of things; it may be that outside of my being there is no being; everything that passes into my experience comes as a series of mind-pictures, passing in idea before my mind." That idealism has completely broken down. Common sense steps in and declares, though you cannot prove it, that there are other minds than yours-you are only one, a spark perhaps, of the Universal Mind. You can enter into relations, soul with soul, with others of whose being you can have no reasonable doubt. So Consistent Idealism has gone, just as Scientific Materialism has gone, and in the place of both we have now the Universal Substance on the side of science, and on the side of philosophy the Universal Mind.

What says the man of religion? His position will not take long to state, because we all know it. Everything which science has said so far I can say, you can say. God is all, and in all; nowhere is He not; in every corner of the pathless universe He dwells and reigns. He is the power behind all things, in all things; through Him all things consist; He is the intimately near, as well as the infinitely far. But where the man of science stops short in declaring that the universe is self-contained and self-explanatory, the man of religion goes on to say, The universe of universes cannot contain my God. And where the man of philosophy would say, God is the Universal Mind, the man of religion would say, God is the Universal Heart; and in the words of the noble psalm our prayer is ever rising thus, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way