chapter 2

, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in the _medulla oblongata_, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as the _principal_ seat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or less _subordinate_ consciousness or intelligence.” Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”

In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.” William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.” See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.

(_b_) God’s omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.

_1 Kings 8:27—_“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain (circumscribe) thee.” God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is “totus in omni parte.” Alger, Poetry of the Orient: “Though God extends beyond Creation’s rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.” From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.

A. J. Gordon: “In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.” _Mat. 13:20—_“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” “The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people’s heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said, ‘Come down and die,’ And he cried out from the steeple, ‘Where art thou, Lord?’ And the Lord replied, ‘Down here among my people.’ ”

(_c_) God’s omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.

God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God’s transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God’s personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah: “The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!” God’s omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.

The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying: “I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.” But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God’s omnipresence in space, as evolution is God’s omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.” _Rom. 10:6-8—_“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.” Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar: “Is God in my pocket?” “Certainly.” “No, he isn’t, for I haven’t any pocket.” God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.

2. Omniscience.

By this we mean God’s perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.

God knows his inanimate creation: _Ps. 147:4—_“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.” He has knowledge of brute creatures: _Mat. 10:29_—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.” Of men and their works: _Ps. 33:13-15—_“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.” Of hearts of men and their thoughts: _Acts 15:8—_“God, who knoweth the heart”; _Ps. 139:2—_“understandest my thought afar off.” Of our wants: _Mat. 6:8—_“knoweth what things ye have need of.” Of the least things: _Mat. 10:30—_“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Of the past: _Mal. 3:16—_“book of remembrance.” Of the future: _Is. 46:9, 10—_“declaring the end from the beginning.” Of men’s future free acts: _Is. 44:28—_“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.” Of men’s future evil acts: _Acts 2:23—_“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” Of the ideally possible: _1 Sam. 23:12—_“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up” (_sc._ if thou remainest); _Mat. 11:23—_“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.” From eternity: _Acts 15:18—_“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.” Incomprehensible: _Ps. 139:6—_“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”; _Rom. 11:33—_“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.” Related to wisdom: _Ps. 104:24—_“In wisdom hast thou made them all”; _Eph. 3:10—_“manifold wisdom of God.”

_Job 7:20—_“O thou watcher of men”; _Ps. 56:8—_“Thou numberest my wanderings” = my whole life has been one continuous exile; “Put thou my tears into thy bottle” = the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one; “Are they not in thy book?” = no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt: “Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein’, Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.” _Heb. 4:13—_“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice, _or_ seized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb: “God has forgotten to forget.”

(_a_) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God’s omniscience.

It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God’s self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God’s knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon: “Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon’s mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”

Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”

Browning, Ferishtah’s Fancies, Plot-culture: “How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute’s deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night’s help around me?”

(_b_) Since it is free from all imperfection, God’s knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.

An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are “more than can be numbered”_ (Ps. 40:5)_, not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497. _Gen. 16:13—_“Thou art a God that seeth.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.” So God’s scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.

Armstrong, God and the Soul: “God’s energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.” Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panorama _some where_, for the beholding of _some one_.” Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”_ (Mat. 10:26)_. The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God “the night shineth as the day”_ (Ps. 139:12)_.

Professor Mitchel’s equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was so fearful to the prisoner in the French _cachot_ as the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The text _Gen. 16:13—_“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us. _Ps. 139:17, 18—_“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”

(_c_) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.

God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (_Is. 48:18—_“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God’s own free agency, since God’s future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those

## actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye

which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”

(_d_) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men’s acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.

Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God’s foreknowledge of free acts: “So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”

With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God’s foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter’s denial and Judas’s betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter’s and Judas’s wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that “the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.” See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring, ‘What will he do?’ ”

So Dugald Stewart: “Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?” Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.” Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as “one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.” Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”

Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God’s perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. In _Is. 41:21, 22_, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”_ (Rev. 13:8)_ was only a sacrifice to be offered _in case_ Adam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, and _in case_ Judas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man’s will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.

How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God’s knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—

1. _Mediately_, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last “certainly” is to be accepted, if either; since motives are never _causes_, but are only _occasions_, of

## action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be

said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—

2. _Immediately_, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded as _intuitive_, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.” Even upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God’s mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God’s perfection to maintain God’s perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say: “Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.” With Whedon: “It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.” See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.

(_e_) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.

Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon: “Knowledge _takes_ them, not _makes_ them.” Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that “the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add: “God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”

(_f_) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.

God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know “whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?” Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”

(_g_) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated “wisdom.” In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.

Wisdom is not simply “estimating all things at their proper value” (Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as “the talent of using one’s talents.” It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.” Thus man’s wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”

3. Omnipotence.

By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.

_Gen. 17:1—_“I am God Almighty.” He performs natural wonders: _Gen. 1:1-3—_“Let there be Light”; _Is. 44:24—_“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”; _Heb. 1:3—_“upholding all things by the word of his power.” Spiritual wonders: _2 Cor. 4:6—_“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”; _Eph. 1:19—_“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”; _Eph. 3:20—_“able to do exceeding abundantly.” Power to create new things: _Mat. 3:9—_“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”. _Rom. 4:17—_“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.” After his own pleasure: _Ps. 115:3—_“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”; _Eph. 1:11—_“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.” Nothing impossible: _Gen 18:14—_“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?” _Mat. 19:26—_“with God all things are possible.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”

The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (_Gen. 1:2_; _John 3:8_; _Acts 2:2_). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (_Mal. 3:10_). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (_Mat. 3:11_; _2 Pet. 3:7-13_). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.

(_a_) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.

Self-contradictory things: “facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying: “May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this: “I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.” Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.

Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past: “All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.” Sunday-school scholar: “Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” Seminary Professor: “Can God tell a lie?” Seminary student: “With God all things are possible.”

(_b_) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.

Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza’s _natura naturans_ and _natura naturata_. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God’s pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to “raise up children unto Abraham,” but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. So _Job 26:14—_“Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?” See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.

_1 Pet. 5:6—_“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.” “The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power. _Prov. 16:32—_“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.” Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.” When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.

(_c_) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God’s power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

Thomasius: “If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.” _Ps. 113: 5, 6—_“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?” _Phil. 2:7, 8—_“emptied himself ... humbled himself.” See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.” We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love’s sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God’s creatures. Isaac Watts: “His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”

Third Division.—Attributes having relation to Moral Beings.

1. Veracity and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth.

By veracity and faithfulness we mean the transitive truth of God, in its twofold relation to his creatures in general and to his redeemed people in

## particular.

_Ps. 138:2—_“I will ... give thanks unto thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: For thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name”; _John 3:33—_“hath set his seal to this, that God is true”; _Rom. 3:4—_“let God be found true, but every man a liar”; _Rom. 1:25—_“the truth of God”; _John 14:17—_“the Spirit of truth”; _1 John 5:7—_“the Spirit is the truth”; _1 Cor. 1:9—_“God is faithful”; _1 Thess. 5:24—_“faithful is he that calleth you”; _1 Pet. 4:19—_“a faithful Creator”; _2 Cor. 1:20—_“how many soever be the promises of God, in him is the yea”; _Num. 23:19—_“God is not a man that he should lie”; _Tit. 1:2—_“God, who cannot lie, promised”; _Heb. 6:18—_“in which it is impossible for God to lie.”

(_a_) In virtue of his veracity, all his revelations to creatures consist with his essential being and with each other.

In God’s veracity we have the guarantee that our faculties in their normal exercise do not deceive us; that the laws of thought are also laws of things; that the external world, and second causes in it, have objective existence; that the same causes will always produce the same effects; that the threats of the moral nature will be executed upon the unrepentant transgressor; that man’s moral nature is made in the image of God’s; and that we may draw just conclusions from what conscience is in us to what holiness is in him. We may therefore expect that all past revelations, whether in nature or in his word, will not only not be contradicted by our future knowledge, but will rather prove to have in them more of truth than we ever dreamed. Man’s word may pass away, but God’s word abides forever (_Mat. 5:18—_“one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law”; _Is. 40:8—_“the word of God shall stand forever”).

_Mat. 6:16—_“be not as the hypocrites.” In God the outer expression and the inward reality always correspond. Assyrian wills were written on a small tablet encased in another upon which the same thing was written over again. Breakage, or falsification, of the outer envelope could be corrected by reference to the inner. So our outer life should conform to the heart within, and the heart within to the outer life. On the duty of speaking the truth, and the limitations of the duty, see Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 386-403—“Give the truth always to those who in the bonds of humanity have a right to the truth; conceal it, or falsify it, only when the human right to the truth has been forfeited, or is held in abeyance, by sickness, weakness, or some criminal intent.”

(_b_) In virtue of his faithfulness, he fulfills all his promises to his people, whether expressed in words or implied in the constitution he has given them.

In God’s faithfulness we have the sure ground of confidence that he will perform what his love has led him to promise to those who obey the gospel. Since his promises are based, not upon what we are or have done, but upon what Christ is and has done, our defects and errors do not invalidate them, so long as we are truly penitent and believing: _1 John 1:9—_“faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” = faithful to his promise, and righteous to Christ. God’s faithfulness also ensures a supply for all the real wants of our being, both here and hereafter, since these wants are implicit promises of him who made us: _Ps. 84:11—_“No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly”; _91:4—_“His truth is a shield and a buckler”; _Mat. 6:33—_“all these things shall be added unto you”; _1 Cor. 2:9—_“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him.”

Regulus goes back to Carthage to die rather than break his promise to his enemies. George William Curtis economizes for years, and gives up all hope of being himself a rich man, in order that he may pay the debts of his deceased father. When General Grant sold all the presents made to him by the crowned heads of Europe, and paid the obligations in which his insolvent son had involved him, he said: “Better poverty and honor, than wealth and disgrace.” Many a business man would rather die than fail to fulfil his promise and let his note go to protest. “Maxwelton braes are bonnie, Where early falls the dew, And ’twas there that Annie Laurie Gave me her promise true; Which ne’er forget will I; And for bonnie Annie Laurie I’d lay me down and dee.” Betray the man she loves? Not “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’the sun.” God’s truth will not be less than that of mortal man. God’s veracity is the natural correlate to our faith.

2. Mercy and Goodness, or Transitive Love.

By mercy and goodness we mean the transitive love of God in its two-fold relation to the disobedient and to the obedient portions of his creatures.

_Titus 3:4—_“his love toward man”; _Rom. 2:4—_“goodness of God”; _Mat. 5:44, 45—_“love your enemies ... that ye may be sons of your Father”; _John 3:16—_“God so loved the world”; _2 Pet. 1:3—_“granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness”; _Rom. 8:32—_“freely give us all things”; _John 4:10—_“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

(_a_) Mercy is that eternal principle of God’s nature which leads him to seek the temporal good and eternal salvation of those who have opposed themselves to his will, even at the cost of infinite self-sacrifice.

Martensen: “Viewed in relation to sin, eternal love is compassionate grace.” God’s continued importation of natural life is a foreshadowing, in a lower sphere, of what he desires to do for his creatures in the higher sphere—the communication of spiritual and eternal life through Jesus Christ. When he bids us love our enemies, he only bids us follow his own example. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2:2—“Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them, then, in being merciful.” Twelfth Night, 3:4—“In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; None can be called deformed but the unkind. Virtue is beauty.”

(_b_) Goodness is the eternal principle of God’s nature which leads him to communicate of his own life and blessedness to those who are like him in moral character. Goodness, therefore, is nearly identical with the love of complacency; mercy, with the love of benevolence.

Notice, however, that transitive love is but an outward manifestation of immanent love. The eternal and perfect object of God’s love is in his own nature. Men become subordinate objects of that love only as they become connected and identified with its principal object, the image of God’s perfections in Christ. Only in the Son do men become sons of God. To this is requisite an acceptance of Christ on the part of man. Thus it can be said that God imparts himself to men just so far as men are willing to receive him. And as God gives himself to men, in all his moral attributes, to answer for them and to renew them in character, there is truth in the statement of Nordell (Examiner, Jan. 17, 1884) that “the maintenance of holiness is the function of divine justice; the diffusion of holiness is the function of divine love.” We may grant this as substantially true, while yet we deny that love is a mere form or manifestation of holiness. Self-impartation is different from self-affirmation. The attribute which moves God to pour out is not identical with the attribute which moves him to maintain. The two ideas of holiness and of love are as distinct as the idea of integrity on the one hand and of generosity on the other. Park: “God loves Satan, in a certain sense, and we ought to.” Shedd: “This same love of compassion God feels toward the non-elect; but the expression of that compassion is forbidden for reasons which are sufficient for God, but are entirely unknown to the creature.” The goodness of God is the basis of _reward_, under God’s government. Faithfulness leads God to keep his promises; goodness leads him to make them.

Edwards, Nature of Virtue, in Works, 2:263—Love of benevolence does not presuppose beauty in its object. Love of complacence does presuppose beauty. Virtue is not love to an object for its beauty. The beauty of intelligent beings does not consist in love for beauty, or virtue in love for virtue. Virtue is love for being in general, exercised in a general good will. This is the doctrine of Edwards. We prefer to say that virtue is love, not for being in general, but for good being, and so for God, the holy One. The love of compassion is perfectly compatible with hatred of evil and with indignation against one who commits it. Love does not necessarily imply approval, but it does imply desire that all creatures should fulfil the purpose of their existence by being morally conformed to the holy One; see Godet, in The Atonement, 339.

_Rom. 5:8—_“God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We ought to love our enemies, and Satan is our worst enemy. We ought to will the good of Satan, or cherish toward him the love of benevolence, though not the love of complacence. This does not involve a condoning of his sin, or an ignoring of his moral depravity, as seems implied in the verses of Wm. C. Gannett: “The poem hangs on the berry-bush When comes the poet’s eye; The street begins to masquerade When Shakespeare passes by. The Christ sees white in Judas’ heart And loves his traitor well; The God, to angel his new heaven, Explores his deepest hell.”

3. Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness.

By justice and righteousness we mean the transitive holiness of God, in virtue of which his treatment of his creatures conforms to the purity of his nature,—righteousness demanding from all moral beings conformity to the moral perfection of God, and justice visiting non-conformity to that perfection with penal loss or suffering.

_Gen. 18:25—_“shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” _Deut. 32:4—_“All his ways are justice; A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”; _Ps. 5:5—_“Thou hatest all workers of iniquity”; _7:9-12—_“the righteous God trieth the hearts ... saveth the upright ... is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”; _18:24-26—_“Jehovah recompensed me according to my righteousness.... With the merciful, thou wilt show thyself merciful ... with the perverse thou wilt show thyself froward”; _Mat. 5:48—_“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; _Rom. 2:6—_“will render to every man according to his works”; _1 Pet. 1:16—_“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” These passages show that God loves the same persons whom he hates. It is not true that he hates the sin, but loves the sinner; he both hates and loves the sinner himself, hates him as he is a living and wilful antagonist of truth and holiness, loves him as he is a creature capable of good and ruined by his transgression.

There is no abstract sin that can be hated apart from the persons in whom that sin is represented and embodied. Thomas Fuller found it difficult to starve the profaneness but to feed the person of the impudent beggar who applied to him for food. Mr. Finney declared that he would kill the slave-catcher, but would love him with all his heart. In our civil war Dr. Kirk said: “God knows that we love the rebels, but God also knows that we will kill them if they do not lay down their arms.” The complex nature of God not only permits but necessitates this same double treatment of the sinner, and the earthly father experiences the same conflict of emotions when his heart yearns over the corrupt son whom he is compelled to banish from the household. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 7—“It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin.”

(_a_) Since justice and righteousness are simply transitive holiness—righteousness designating this holiness chiefly in its mandatory, justice chiefly in its punitive, aspect,—they are not mere manifestations of benevolence, or of God’s disposition to secure the highest happiness of his creatures, nor are they grounded in the nature of things as something apart from or above God.

Cremer, N. T. Lexicon: δίκαιος = “the perfect coincidence existing between God’s nature, which is the standard for all, and his acts.” Justice and righteousness are simply holiness exercised toward creatures. The same holiness which exists in God in eternity past manifests itself as justice and righteousness, so soon as intelligent creatures come into being. Much that was said under Holiness as an immanent attribute of God is equally applicable here. The modern tendency to confound holiness with love shows itself in the merging of justice and righteousness in mere benevolence. Instances of this tendency are the following: Ritschl, Unterricht, § 16—“The righteousness of God denotes the manner in which God carries out his loving will in the redemption alike of humanity as a whole and of individual men; hence his righteousness is indistinguishable from his grace”; see also Ritschl, Rechtf. und Versöhnung, 2:113; 3:296. Prof. George M. Forbes: “Only right makes love moral; only love makes right moral.” Jones, Robert Browning, 70—“Is it not beneficence that places death at the heart of sin? Carlyle forgot this. God is not simply a great taskmaster. The power that imposes law is not an alien power.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 237-240—“How can self-realization be the realization of others? Why must the true good be always the common good? Why is the end of each the end of all?... We need a concrete universal which will unify all persons.”

So also, Harris, Kingdom of Christ on Earth, 39-42; God the Creator, 287, 290, 302—“Love, as required and regulated by reason, may be called righteousness. Love is universal good will or benevolence, regulated in its exercise by righteousness. Love is the choice of God and man as the objects of trust and service. This choice involves the determination of the will to seek universal well-being, and in this aspect it is benevolence. It also involves the consent of the will to the reason, and the determination to regulate all action in seeking well-being by its truths, laws, and ideals; and in this aspect it is righteousness.... Justice is the consent of the will to the law of love, in its authority, its requirements, and its sanctions. God’s wrath is the necessary reaction of this law of love in the constitution and order of the universe against the wilful violator of it, and Christ’s sufferings atone for sin by asserting and maintaining the authority, universality, and inviolability of God’s law of love in his redemption of men and his forgiveness of their sins.... Righteousness cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to the merely formal principle of the law without telling us what the law requires. Benevolence cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to hedonism, in the form of utilitarianism, excluding righteousness from the character of God and man.”

Newman Smyth also, in his Christian Ethics, 227-231, tells us that “love, as self-affirming, is righteousness; as self-imparting, is benevolence; as self-finding in others, is sympathy. Righteousness, as subjective regard for our own moral being, is holiness; as objective regard for the persons of others, is justice. Holiness is involved in love as its essential respect to itself; the heavenly Father is the holy Father (_John 17:11_). Love contains in its unity a trinity of virtue. Love affirms its own worthiness, imparts to others its good, and finds its life again in the well-being of others. The ethical limit of self-impartation is found in self-affirmation. Love in self-bestowal cannot become suicidal. The benevolence of love has its moral bounds in the holiness of love. True love in God maintains its transcendence, and excludes pantheism.”

The above doctrine, quoted for substance from Newman Smyth, seems to us unwarrantably to include in love what properly belongs to holiness. It virtually denies that holiness has any independent existence as an attribute of God. To make holiness a manifestation of love seems to us as irrational as to say that self-affirmation is a form of self-impartation. The concession that holiness regulates and limits love shows that holiness cannot itself be love, but must be an independent and superior attribute. Right furnishes the rule and law for love, but it is not true that love furnishes the rule and law for right. There is no such double sovereignty as this theory would imply. The one attribute that is independent and supreme is holiness, and love is simply the impulse to communicate this holiness.

William Ashmore: “Dr. Clarke lays great emphasis on the character of ‘a good God.’... But he is more than a merely _good_ God; he is a just God, and a righteous God, and a holy God—a God who is ‘angry with the wicked,’ even while ready to forgive them, if they are willing to repent in his way, and not in their own. He is the God who brought in a flood upon the world of the ungodly; who rained down fire and brimstone from heaven; and who is to come in ‘flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God’ and obey not the gospel of his son.... Paul reasoned about both the ‘goodness’ and the ‘severity’ of God.”

(_b_) Transitive holiness, as righteousness, imposes law in conscience and Scripture, and may be called legislative holiness. As justice, it executes the penalties of law, and may be called distributive or judicial holiness. In righteousness God reveals chiefly his love of holiness; in justice, chiefly his hatred of sin.

The self-affirming purity of God demands a like purity in those who have been made in his image. As God wills and maintains his own moral excellence, so all creatures must will and maintain the moral excellence of God. There can be only one centre in the solar system,—the sun is its own centre and the centre for all the planets also. So God’s purity is the object of his own will,—it must be the object of all the wills of all his creatures also. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 282—“It is not rational or safe for the hand to separate itself from the heart. This is a _universe_, and God is the heart of the great system. Altruism is not the result of society, but society is the result of altruism. It begins in creatures far below man. The animals which know how to combine have the greatest chance of survival. The unsociable animal dies out. The most perfect organism is the most sociable. Right is the debt which the part owes to the whole.” This seems to us but a

## partial expression of the truth. Right is more than a debt to

others,—it is a debt to one’s self, and the self-affirming, self-preserving, self-respecting element constitutes the limit and standard of all outgoing activity. The sentiment of loyalty is largely a reverence for this principle of order and stability in government. _Ps. 145:5—_“Of the glorious majesty of thine honor, And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate”; _97:2—_“Clouds and darkness are round about him: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”

John Milton, Eikonoklastes: “Truth and justice are all one; for truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in our practice.... For truth is properly no more than contemplation, and her utmost efficiency is but teaching; but justice in her very essence is all strength and activity, and hath a sword put into her hand to use against all violence and oppression on the earth. She it is who accepts no person, and exempts none from the severity of her stroke.” A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 326—“Even the poet has not dared to represent Jupiter torturing Prometheus without the dim figure of Avenging Fate waiting silently in the background.... Evolution working out a nobler and nobler justice is proof that God is just. Here is ‘preferential

## action’.” S. S. Times, June 9, 1900—“The natural man is born with

a wrong personal astronomy. Man should give up the conceit of being the centre of all things. He should accept the Copernican theory, and content himself with a place on the edge of things—the place he has always really had. We all laugh at John Jasper and his thesis that ‘the sun do move.’ The Copernican theory is leaking down into human relations, as appears from the current phrase: ‘There are others’.”

(_c_) Neither justice nor righteousness, therefore, is a matter of arbitrary will. They are revelations of the inmost nature of God, the one in the form of moral requirement, the other in the form of judicial sanction. As God cannot but demand of his creatures that they be like him in moral character, so he cannot but enforce the law which he imposes upon them. Justice just as much binds God to punish as it binds the sinner to be punished.

All arbitrariness is excluded here. God is what he is—infinite purity. He cannot change. If creatures are to attain the end of their being, they must be like God in moral purity. Justice is nothing but the recognition and enforcement of this natural necessity. Law is only the transcript of God’s nature. Justice does not make law,—it only reveals law. Penalty is only the reaction of God’s holiness against that which is its opposite. Since righteousness and justice are only legislative and retributive holiness, God can cease to demand purity and to punish sin only when he ceases to be holy, that is, only when he ceases to be God. “Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.”

Simon, Reconciliation, 141—“To claim the performance of duty is as truly obligatory as it is obligatory to perform the duty which is prescribed.” E. H. Johnson, Systematic Theology, 84—“Benevolence intends what is well for the creature; justice insists on what is fit. But the well-for-us and the fit-for-us precisely coincide. The only thing that is well for us is our normal employment and development; but to provide for this is precisely what is fitting and therefore due to us. In the divine nature the distinction between justice and benevolence is one of form.” We criticize this utterance as not sufficiently taking into account the nature of the right. The right is not merely the fit. Fitness is only general adaptation which may have in it no ethical element, whereas right is solely and exclusively ethical. The right therefore regulates the fit and constitutes its standard. The well-for-us is to be determined by the right-for-us, but not _vice versa_. George W. Northrup: “God is not bound to bestow the same endowments upon creatures, nor to keep all in a state of holiness forever, nor to redeem the fallen, nor to secure the greatest happiness of the universe. But he is bound to purpose and to do what his absolute holiness requires. He has no attribute, no will, no sovereignty, above this law of his being. He cannot lie, he cannot deny himself, he cannot look upon sin with complacency, he cannot acquit the guilty without an atonement.”

(_d_) Neither justice nor righteousness bestows rewards. This follows from the fact that obedience is due to God, instead of being optional or a gratuity. No creature can claim anything for his obedience. If God rewards, he rewards in virtue of his goodness and faithfulness, not in virtue of his justice or his righteousness. What the creature cannot claim, however, Christ _can_ claim, and the rewards which are goodness to the creature are righteousness to Christ. God rewards Christ’s work _for_ us and _in_ us.

Bruch, Eigenschaftslehre, 280-282, and John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223, both deny, and rightly deny, that justice bestows rewards. Justice simply punishes infractions of law. In _Mat. 25:34—_“inherit the kingdom”—inheritance implies no merit; _46_—the wicked are adjudged to eternal punishment; the righteous, not to eternal reward, but to eternal life. _Luke 17:7-10—_“when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.” _Rom. 6:23_—punishment is the “_wages of sin_”: but salvation is “_the gift of God_”; _2:6_—God rewards, not _on account of_ man’s work but “_according to his works_.” Reward is thus seen to be in Scripture a matter of grace to the creature; only to the Christ who works for us in atonement, and in us in regeneration and sanctification, is reward a matter of debt (see also _John 6:27_ and _2 John 8_). Martineau, Types, 2:86, 244, 249—“Merit is toward man; virtue toward God.”

All mere service is unprofitable, because it furnishes only an equivalent to duty, and there is no margin. Works of supererogation are impossible, because our all is due to God. He would have us rise into the region of friendship, realize that he has been treating us not as Master but as Father, enter into a relation of uncalculating love. With this proviso that rewards are matters of grace, not of debt, we may assent to the maxim of Solon: “A republic walks upon two feet—just punishment for the unworthy and due reward for the worthy.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 139—“Love seeks righteousness, and is satisfied with nothing other than that.” But when Harris adopts the words of the poet: “The very wrath from pity grew, From love of men the hate of wrong,” he seems to us virtually to deny that God hates evil for any other reason than because of its utilitarian disadvantages, and to imply that good has no independent existence in his nature. Bowne, Ethics, 171—“Merit is desert of reward, or better, desert of moral approval.” Tennyson: “For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee.” Baxter: “_Desert_ is written over the gate of hell; but over the gate of heaven only, _The Gift of God_.”

(_e_) Justice in God, as the revelation of his holiness, is devoid of all passion or caprice. There is in God no selfish anger. The penalties he inflicts upon transgression are not vindictive but vindicative. They express the revulsion of God’s nature from moral evil, the judicial indignation of purity against impurity, the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. But because its decisions are calm, they are irreversible.

Anger, within certain limits, is a duty of man. _Ps. 97:10—_“ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”; _Eph. 4:28—_“Be ye angry, and sin not.” The calm indignation of the judge, who pronounces sentence with tears, is the true image of the holy anger of God against sin. Weber, Zorn Gottes, 28, makes wrath only the jealousy of love. It is more truly the jealousy of holiness. Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. on _1 Thess. 2:10_—“_Holily_ and _righteously_ are terms that describe the same conduct in two aspects; the former, as conformed to God’s character in itself; the latter, as conformed to his law; both are positive.” Lillie, on _2 Thess. 1:6_—“Judgment is ‘_a righteous thing with God_.’ Divine justice requires it for its own satisfaction.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:175-178, 365-385; Trench, Syn. N. T., 1:180, 181.

Of Gaston de Foix, the old chronicler admirably wrote: “He loved what ought to be loved, and hated what ought to be hated, and never had miscreant with him.” Compare _Ps. 101:5, 6—_“Him that hath a high look and a proud heart will I not suffer. Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me.” Even Horace Bushnell spoke of the “wrath-principle” in God. _1 K. 11:9—_“And Jehovah was angry with Solomon” because of his polygamy. Jesus’ anger was no less noble than his love. The love of the right involved hatred of the wrong. Those may hate who hate evil for its hatefulness and for the sake of God. Hate sin in yourself first, and then you may hate it in itself and in the world. Be angry only in Christ and with the wrath of God. W. C. Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 264—“But we must purge ourselves of self-regard, Or we are sinful in abhorring sin.” Instance Judge Harris’s pity, as he sentenced the murderer; see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 192, 193.

Horace’s “Ira furor brevis est”—“Anger is a temporary madness”—is true only of selfish and sinful anger. Hence the man who is angry is popularly called “mad.” But anger, though apt to become sinful, is not necessarily so. Just anger is neither madness, nor is it brief. Instance the judicial anger of the church of Corinth in inflicting excommunication: _2 Cor. 7:11—_“what indignation, yea what fear, yea what longing, yea what zeal, yea what avenging!” The only revenge permissible to the Christian church is that in which it pursues and exterminates sin. To be incapable of moral indignation against wrong is to lack real love for the right. Dr. Arnold of Rugby was never sure of a boy who only loved good; till the boy also began to hate evil, Dr. Arnold did not feel that he was safe. Herbert Spencer said that good nature with Americans became a crime. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty: “There is one thing worse than corruption, and that is acquiescence in corruption.”

Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 139—“Xenophon intends to say a very commendable thing of Cyrus the Younger, when he writes of him that no one had done more good to his friends or more harm to his enemies.” Luther said to a monkish antagonist: “I will break in pieces your heart of brass and pulverize your iron brains.” Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:175-178—“Human character is worthless in proportion as abhorrence of sin is lacking in it. It is related of Charles II that ‘he felt no gratitude for benefits, and no resentment for wrongs; he did not love anyone, and he did not hate anyone.’ He was indifferent toward right and wrong, and the only feeling he had was contempt.” But see the death-bed scene of the “merry monarch,” as portrayed in Bp. Burnet, Evelyn’s Memoirs, or the Life of Bp. Ken. Truly “The end of mirth is heaviness”_ (Prov. 14:13)_.

Stout, Manual of Psychology, 22—“Charles Lamb tells us that his friend George Dyer could never be brought to say anything in condemnation of the most atrocious crimes, except that the criminal must have been very eccentric.” Professor Seeley: “No heart is pure that is not passionate.” D. W. Simon, Redemption of Man, 249, 250, says that God’s resentment “is a resentment of an essentially altruistic character.” If this means that it is perfectly consistent with love for the sinner, we can accept the statement; if it means that love is the only source of the resentment, we regard the statement as a misinterpretation of God’s justice, which is but the manifestation of his holiness and is not a mere expression of his love. See a similar statement of Lidgett, Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, 251—“Because God is love, his love coëxists with his wrath against sinners, is the very life of that wrath, and is so persistent that it uses wrath as its instrument, while at the same time it seeks and supplies a propitiation.” This statement ignores the fact that punishment is never in Scripture regarded as an expression of God’s love, but always of God’s holiness. When we say that we love God, let us make sure that it is the true God, the God of holiness, that we love, for only this love will make us like him.

The moral indignation of a whole universe of holy beings against moral evil, added to the agonizing self-condemnations of awakened conscience in all the unholy, is only a faint and small reflection of the awful revulsion of God’s infinite justice from the impurity and selfishness of his creatures, and of the intense, organic, necessary, and eternal reaction of his moral being in self-vindication and the punishment of sin; see _Jer. 44:4—_“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!” _Num. 32:23—_“be sure your sin will find you out”; _Heb. 10:30, 31—_“For we know him that said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” On justice as an attribute of a moral governor, see N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:253-293; Owen, Dissertation on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:483-624.

VII. Rank and Relations of the several Attributes.

The attributes have relations to each other. Like intellect, affection and will in man, no one of them is to be conceived of as exercised separately from the rest. Each of the attributes is qualified by all the others. God’s love is immutable, wise, holy. Infinity belongs to God’s knowledge, power, justice. Yet this is not to say that one attribute is of as high rank as another. The moral attributes of truth, love, holiness, are worthy of higher reverence from men, and they are more jealously guarded by God, than the natural attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. And yet even among the moral attributes one stands as supreme. Of this and of its supremacy we now proceed to speak.

Water is not water unless composed of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen cannot be resolved into hydrogen, nor hydrogen into oxygen. Oxygen has its own character, though only in combination with hydrogen does it appear in water. Will in man never acts without intellect and sensibility, yet will, more than intellect or sensibility, is the manifestation of the man. So when God acts, he manifests not one attribute alone, but his total moral excellence. Yet holiness, as an attribute of God, has rights peculiar to itself; it determines the attitude of the affections; it more than any other faculty constitutes God’s moral being.

Clarke, Christian Theology, 83,92—“God would not be holy if he were not love, and could not be love if he were not holy. Love is an element in holiness. If this were lacking, there would be no perfect character as principle of his own action or as standard for us. On the other hand only the perfect being can be love. God must be free from all taint of selfishness in order to be love. Holiness requires God to act as love, for holiness is God’s self-consistency. Love is the desire to impart holiness. Holiness makes God’s character the standard for his creatures; but love, desiring to impart the best good, does the same. All work of love is work of holiness, and all work of holiness is work of love. Conflict of attributes is impossible, because holiness always includes love, and love always expresses holiness. They never need reconciliation with each other.”

The general correctness of the foregoing statement is impaired by the vagueness of its conception of holiness. The Scriptures do not regard holiness as including love, or make all the acts of holiness to be acts of love. Self-affirmation does not include self-impartation, and sin necessitates an exercise of holiness which is not also an exercise of love. But for the Cross, and God’s suffering for sin of which the Cross is the expression, there would be conflict between holiness and love. The wisdom of God is most shown, not in reconciling man and God, but in reconciling the holy God with the loving God.

1. Holiness the fundamental attribute in God.

That holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, is evident:

(_a_) From Scripture,—in which God’s holiness is not only most constantly and powerfully impressed upon the attention of man, but is declared to be the chief subject of rejoicing and adoration in heaven.

It is God’s attribute of holiness that first and most prominently presents itself to the mind of the sinner, and conscience only follows the method of Scripture: _1 Pet. 1:16—_“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy”; _Heb. 12:14—_“the sanctification without which no man shall see the lord”_;_ _cf._ _Luke 5:8—_“Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Yet this constant insistence upon holiness cannot be due simply to man’s present state of sin, for in heaven, where there is no sin, there is the same reiteration: _Is. 6:3—_“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”; _Rev. 4:8—_“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty.” Of no other attribute is it said that God’s throne rests upon it: _Ps. 97:2—_“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”; _99:4, 5, 9—_“The king’s strength also loveth justice.... Exalt ye Jehovah our God.... holy is he.” We would substitute the word holiness for the word love in the statement of Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 45—“We assume that love is lord in the divine will, not that the will of God is sovereign over his love. God’s omnipotence, as Dorner would say, exists for his love.”

(_b_) From our own moral constitution,—in which conscience asserts its supremacy over every other impulse and affection of our nature. As we may be kind, but must be righteous, so God, in whose image we are made, may be merciful, but must be holy.

See Bishop Butler’s Sermons upon Human Nature, Bohn’s ed., 385-414, showing “the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man.” We must be just, before we are generous. So with God, justice must be done always; mercy is optional with him. He was not under obligation to provide a redemption for sinners: _2 Pet. 2:4—_“God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell.” Salvation is a matter of grace, not of debt. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 277-298—“The quality of justice is necessary exaction; but ‘the quality of mercy is not (con)strained’ ” [_cf._ Denham: “His mirth is forced and strained”]. God can apply the salvation, after he has wrought it out, to whomsoever he will: _Rom. 9:18—_“he hath mercy on whom he will.” Young, Night-Thoughts, 4:233—“A God all mercy is a God unjust.” Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it; else it is none.” Martineau, Study, 2:100—“No one can be just without subordinating Pity to the sense of Right.”

We may learn of God’s holiness _a priori_. Even the heathen could say “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” or “pereat mundus.” But, for our knowledge of God’s mercy, we are dependent upon special revelation. Mercy, like omnipotence, may exist in God without being exercised. Mercy is not grace but debt, if God owes the exercise of it either to the sinner or to himself; _versus_ G. B. Stevens, in New Eng., 1888:421-443. “But justice is an attribute which not only _exists_ of necessity, but must be _exercised_ of necessity; because not to exercise it would be injustice”; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:218, 219, 389, 390; 2:402, and Sermons to Nat. Man, 366. If it be said that, by parity of reasoning, for God not to exercise mercy is to show himself unmerciful,—we reply that this is not true so long as higher interests require that exercise to be withheld. I am not unmerciful when I refuse to give the poor the money needed to pay an honest debt; nor is the Governor unmerciful when he refuses to pardon the condemned and unrepentant criminal. Mercy has its conditions, as we proceed to show, and it does not cease to _be_ when these conditions do not permit it to _be exercised_. Not so with justice: justice must always be exercised; when it ceases to _be exercised_, it also ceases to _be_.

The story of the prodigal shows a love that ever reaches out after the son in the far country, but which is ever conditioned by the father’s holiness and restrained from acting until the son has voluntarily forsaken his riotous living. A just father may banish a corrupt son from the household, yet may love him so tenderly that his banishment causes exquisite pain. E. G. Robinson: “God, Christ and the Holy Spirit have a conscience, that is, they distinguish between right and wrong.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theology, 85, 86—“Holiness is primary as respects benevolence; for (_a_) Holiness is itself moral excellence, while the moral excellence of benevolence can be explained. (_b_) Holiness is an attribute of being, while benevolence is an attribute of action; but action presupposes and is controlled by being. (_c_) Benevolence must take counsel of holiness, since for a being to desire aught contrary to holiness would be to wish him harm, while that which holiness leads God to seek, benevolence finds best for the creature. (_d_) The Mosaic dispensation elaborately symbolized, and the Christian dispensation makes provision to meet, the requirements of holiness as supreme; _James 3:17_—‘_First pure, then_ [by consequence] _peaceable_.’ ”

We are “_to do justly_,” as well as “to love kindness, and to walk humbly with” our God (_Micah 6:8_). Dr. Samuel Johnson: “It is surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contains.” There is a sinful mercy. A School Commissioner finds it terrible work to listen to the pleas of incompetent teachers begging that they may not be dismissed, and he can nerve himself for it only by remembering the children whose education may be affected by his refusal to do justice. Love and pity are not the whole of Christian duty, nor are they the ruling attributes of God.

(_c_) From the actual dealings of God,—in which holiness conditions and limits the exercise of other attributes. Thus, for example, in Christ’s redeeming work, though love makes the atonement, it is violated holiness that requires it; and in the eternal punishment of the wicked, the demand of holiness for self-vindication overbears the pleading of love for the sufferers.

Love cannot be the fundamental attribute of God, because love always requires a norm or standard, and this norm or standard is found only in holiness; _Phil. 1:9—_“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more in knowledge and all discernment”; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405. That which conditions all is highest of all. Holiness shows itself higher than love, in that it conditions love. Hence God’s mercy does not consist in outraging his own law of holiness, but in enduring the penal affliction by which that law of holiness is satisfied. Conscience in man is but the reflex of holiness in God. Conscience demands either retribution or atonement. This demand Christ meets by his substituted suffering. His sacrifice assuages the thirst of conscience in man, as well as the demand of holiness in God: _John 6:55—_“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” See Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 280, 291, 292; Dogmatic Theology, 1:377, 378—“The sovereignty and freedom of God in respect to justice relates not to the _abolition_, nor to the _relaxation_, but to the _substitution_, of punishment. It does not consist in any power to violate or waive legal claims. The exercise of the other attributes of God is regulated and conditioned by that of justice.... Where then is the mercy of God, in case justice is strictly satisfied by a vicarious person? There is mercy in _permitting_ another person to do for the sinner what the sinner is bound to do for himself; and greater mercy in _providing_ that person; and still greater mercy in _becoming_ that person.”

Enthusiasm, like fire, must not only burn, but must be controlled. Man invented chimneys to keep in the heat but to let out the smoke. We need the walls of discretion and self-control to guide the flaming of our love. The holiness of God is the regulating principle of his nature. The ocean of his mercy is bounded by the shores of his justice. Even if holiness be God’s self-love, in the sense of God’s self-respect or self-preservation, still this self-love must condition love to creatures. Only as God maintains himself in his holiness, can he have anything of worth to give; love indeed is nothing but the self-communication of holiness. And if we say, with J. M. Whiton, that self-affirmation in a universe in which God is immanent is itself a form of self-impartation, still this form of self-impartation must condition and limit that other form of self-impartation which we call love to creatures. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137-155, 346-353; Patton, art. on Retribution and the Divine Goodness, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1878:8-16; Owen, Dissertation on the Divine Justice, in Works, 10: 483-624.

(_d_) From God’s eternal purpose of salvation,—in which justice and mercy are reconciled only through the foreseen and predetermined sacrifice of Christ. The declaration that Christ is “the Lamb ... slain from the foundation of the world” implies the existence of a principle in the divine nature which requires satisfaction, before God can enter upon the work of redemption. That principle can be none other than holiness.

Since both mercy and justice are exercised toward sinners of the human race, the otherwise inevitable antagonism between them is removed only by the atoning death of the God-man. Their opposing claims do not impair the divine blessedness, because the reconciliation exists in the eternal counsels of God. This is intimated in _Rev. 13:8—_“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world.” This same reconciliation is alluded to in _Ps. 85:10—_“Mercy and truth are met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed each other”; and in _Rom. 3:26—_“that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” The atonement, then, if man was to be saved, was necessary, not primarily on man’s account, but on God’s account. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 279—The sacrifice of Christ was an “atonement _ab intra_, a self-oblation on the part of Deity himself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal imperatives of the divine nature which without it must find their satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor, or else be outraged.” Thus God’s word of redemption, as well as his word of creation, is forever “settled in heaven”_ (Ps. 119:89)_. Its execution on the cross was “according to the pattern” on high. The Mosaic sacrifice prefigured the sacrifice of Christ; but the sacrifice of Christ was but the temporal disclosure of an eternal fact in the nature of God. See Kreibig, Versöhnung, 155, 156.

God requires satisfaction because he is holiness, but he makes satisfaction because he is love. The Judge himself, with all his hatred of transgression, still loves the transgressor, and comes down from the bench to take the criminal’s place and bear his penalty. But this is an eternal provision and an eternal sacrifice. _Heb. 9:14—_“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.” Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 215, 216—“Christ’s sacrifice was offered through the Spirit. It was not wrung from a reluctant soul through obedience to outward law; it came from the inner heart, from the impulse of undying love. It was a completed offering before Calvary began; it was seen by the Father before it was seen by the world. It was finished in the Spirit, ere it began in the flesh, finished in the hour when Christ exclaimed: ‘not as I will, but as thou wilt’_ (Mat. 26:39)._”

Lang, Homer, 506—“Apollo is the bringer of pestilence and the averter of pestilence, in accordance with the well-known rule that the two opposite attributes should be combined in the same deity.” Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “Neither angel, man nor world, could stand or can stand one moment in God’s sight without beholding the same in the face of a Mediator; and therefore before him, with whom all things are present, the Lamb of God was slain before all worlds; without which eternal counsel of his, it was impossible for him to have descended to any work of creation.” Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 819—“Creation is built on redemption lines”—which is to say that incarnation and atonement were included in God’s original design of the world.

2. The holiness of God the ground of moral obligation.

A. Erroneous Views. The ground of moral obligation is not

(_a_) In power,—whether of civil law (Hobbes, Gassendi), or of divine will (Occam, Descartes). We are not bound to obey either of these, except upon the ground that they are right. This theory assumes that nothing is good or right in itself, and that morality is mere prudence.

_Civil law_: See Hobbes, Leviathan, part i, chap. 6 and 13; part ii, chap. 30; Gassendi, Opera, 6:120. Upon this view, might makes right; the laws of Nero are always binding; a man may break his promise when civil law permits; there is no obligation to obey a father, a civil governor, or God himself, when once it is certain that the disobedience will be hidden, or when the offender is willing to incur the punishment. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 67—“Mere magnitude of scale carries no moral quality; nor could a whole population of devils by unanimous ballot confer righteousness upon their will, or make it binding upon a single Abdiel.” Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, xvii—“Justice, good, and truth were still Divine if, by some demon’s will, Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed Law through the world, and right misnamed.”

_Divine will_: See Occam, lib. 2, quæs. 19 (quoted in Porter, Moral Science, 125); Descartes (referred to in Hickok, Moral Science, 27, 28); Martineau, Types, 148—“Descartes held that the will of God is not the revealer but the inventor of moral distinctions. God could have made Euclid a farrago of lies, and Satan a model of moral perfection.” Upon this view, right and wrong are variable quantities. Duns Scotus held that God’s will makes not only truth but right. God can make lying to be virtuous and purity to be wrong. If Satan were God, we should be bound to obey him. God is essentially indifferent to right and wrong, good and evil. We reply that behind the divine will is the divine nature, and that in the moral perfection of that nature lies the only ground of moral obligation. God pours forth his love and exerts his power in accordance with some determining principle in his own nature. That principle is not happiness. Finney, Syst. Theology, 936, 937—“Could God’s command make it obligatory upon us to will evil to him? If not, then his will is not the ground of moral obligation. The thing that is most valuable, namely, the highest good of God and of the universe must be both the end and the ground. It is the divine reason and not the divine will that perceives and affirms the law of conduct. The divine will publishes, but does not originate, the rule. God’s will could not make vice to be virtuous.”

As between power or utility on the one hand, and right on the other hand, we must regard right as the more fundamental. We do not, however, as will be seen further on, place the ground of moral obligation even in right, considered as an abstract principle; but place it rather in the moral excellence of him who is the personal Right and therefore the source of right. Character obliges, and the master often bows in his heart to the servant, when this latter is the nobler man.

(_b_) Nor in utility,—whether our own happiness or advantage present or eternal (Paley), for supreme regard for our own interest is not virtuous; or the greatest happiness or advantage to being in general (Edwards), for we judge conduct to be useful because it is right, not right because it is useful. This theory would compel us to believe that in eternity past God was holy only because of the good he got from it,—that is, there was no such thing as holiness in itself, and no such thing as moral character in God.

_Our own happiness_: Paley, Mor. and Pol. Philos., book i, chap. vii—“Virtue is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This unites (_a_) and (_b_). John Stuart Mill and Dr. N. W. Taylor held that our own happiness is the supreme end. These writers indeed regard the highest happiness as attained only by living for others (Mill’s altruism), but they can assign no reason why one who knows no other happiness than the pleasures of sense should not adopt the maxim of Epicurus, who, according to Lucretius, taught that “ducit quemque voluptas.” This theory renders virtue impossible; for a virtue which is mere regard to our own interest is not virtue but prudence. “We have a sense of right and wrong independently of all considerations of happiness or its loss.” James Mill held that the utility is not the criterion of the morality but itself constitutes the morality. G. B. Foster well replies that virtue is not mere egoistic sagacity, and the moral

## act is not simply a clever business enterprise. All languages

distinguish between virtue and prudence. To say that the virtues are great utilities is to confound the effect with the cause. Carlyle says that a man can do without happiness. Browning, Red Cotton Nightcap Country: “Thick heads ought to recognize The devil, that old stager, at his trick Of general utility, who leads Downward perhaps, but fiddles all the way.” This is the morality of Mother Goose: “He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’ ”

E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 160—“Utility has nothing ultimate in itself, and therefore can furnish no ground of obligation. Utility is mere fitness of one thing to minister to something else.” To say that things are right because they are useful, is like saying that things are beautiful because they are pleasing. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:170, 511, 556—“The moment the appetites pass into the self-conscious state, and become ends instead of impulses, they draw to themselves terms of censure.... So intellectual conscientiousness, or strict submission of the mind to evidence, has its inspiration in pure love of truth, and would not survive an hour if entrusted to the keeping either of providence or of social affection.... Instincts, which provide for they know not what, are proof that _want_ is the original impulse to action, instead of pleasure being the end.” On the happiness theory, appeals to self-interest on behalf of religion ought to be effective,—as a matter of fact few are moved by them.

Dewey, Psychology, 300, 362—“Emotion turned inward eats up itself. Live on feelings rather than on the things to which feelings belong, and you defeat your own end, exhaust your power of feeling, commit emotional suicide. Hence arise cynicism, the _nil admirari_ spirit, restless searching for the latest sensation. The only remedy is to get outside of self, to devote self to some worthy object, not for feeling’s sake but for the sake of the object.... We do not desire an object because it gives us pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because it satisfies the impulse which, in connection with the idea of the object, constitutes the desire.... Pleasure is the accompaniment of the

## activity or development of the _self_.”

Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 150—“It is right to aim at happiness. Happiness is an end. Utilitarianism errs in making happiness the only and the highest end. It exalts a state of feeling into the supremely desirable thing. Intuitionalism gives the same place to a state of will. The truth includes both. The true end is the highest development of being, self and others, the realization of the divine idea, God in man.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 96—“The standard of appeal is not the actual happiness of the actual man but the normal happiness of the normal man.... Happiness must have a law. But then also the law must lead to happiness.... The true ethical aim is to realize the good. But then the contents of this good have to be determined in accordance with an inborn ideal of human worth and dignity.... Not all good, but the true good, not the things which please, but the things which should please, are to be the aim of action.”

Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 223—“The Utilitarian is really asking about the wisest method of embodying the ideal. He belongs to that second stage in which the moral artist considers through what material and in what form and color he may best realize his thought. What the ideal is, and why it is the highest, he does not tell us. Morality begins, not in feeling, but in reason. And reason is impersonal. It discerns the moral equality of personalities.” Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 20—Job speaks out his character like one of Robert Browning’s heroes. He teaches that “there is a service of God which is not work for reward: it is a heart-loyalty, a hunger after God’s presence, which survives loss and chastisement; which in spite of contradictory seeming cleaves to what is godlike as the needle seeks the pole; and which reaches up out of the darkness and hardness of this life into the light and love beyond.”

_Greatest good of being_: Not only Edwards, but Priestley, Bentham, Dwight, Finney, Hopkins, Fairchild, hold this view. See Edwards, Works, 2:261-304—“Virtue is benevolence toward being in general”; Dwight, Theology, 3:150-162—“Utility the foundation of Virtue”; Hopkins, Law of Love, 7-28; Fairchild, Moral Philosophy; Finney, Syst. Theol., 42-135. This theory regards good as a mere state of the sensibility, instead of consisting in purity of being. It forgets that in eternity past “love for being in general” = simply God’s self-love, or God’s regard for his own happiness. This implies that God is holy only for a purpose; he is bound to be unholy, if greater good would result; that is, holiness has no independent existence in his nature. We grant that a thing is often known to be right by the fact that it is useful; but this is very different from saying that its usefulness makes it right. “Utility is only the setting of the diamond, which _marks_, but does not _make_, its value.” “If utility be a criterion of rectitude, it is only because it is a revelation of the divine nature.” See British Quarterly, July, 1877, on Matthew Arnold and Bishop Butler. Bp. Butler, Nature of Virtue, in Works, Bohn’s ed., 334—“Benevolence is the true self-love.” Love and holiness are obligatory in themselves, and not because they promote the general good. Cicero well said that they who confounded the _honestum_ with the _utile_ deserved to be banished from society. See criticism on Porter’s Moral Science, in Lutheran Quarterly, Apr. 1885:325-331; also F. L. Patton, on Metaphysics of Oughtness, in Presb. Rev., 1886:127-150.

Encyc. Britannica, 7:690, on Jonathan Edwards—“Being in general, being without any qualities, is too abstract a thing to be the primary cause of love. The feeling which Edwards refers to is not love, but awe or reverence, and moreover necessarily a blind awe. Properly stated therefore, true virtue, according to Edwards, would consist in a blind awe of being in general,—only this would be inconsistent with his definition of virtue as existing in God. In reality, as he makes virtue merely the second object of love, his theory becomes identical with that utilitarian theory with which the names of Hume, Bentham and Mill are associated.” Hodge, Essays, 275—“If obligation is due primarily to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God—willing his good—than there is in loving Satan. But love to Christ differs in its nature from benevolence toward the devil.” Plainly virtue consists, not in love for mere being, but in love for good being, or in other words, in love for the holy God. Not the greatest good of being, but the holiness of God, is the ground of moral obligation.

Dr. E. A. Park interprets the Edwardian theory as holding that virtue is love to all beings according to their value, love of the greater therefore more than the less, “love to particular beings in a proportion compounded of the degree of being and the degree of virtue or benevolence to being which they have.” Love is choice. Happiness, says Park, is not the sole good, much less the happiness of creatures. The _greatest_ good is holiness, though the _last_ good aimed at is happiness. Holiness is disinterested love—free choice of the general above the private good. But we reply that this gives us no reason or standard for virtue. It does not tell us what is good nor why we should choose it. Martineau, Types, 2:70, 77, 471, 484—“Why should I promote the general well-being? Why should I sacrifice myself for others? Only because this is godlike. It Would never have been prudent to do right, had it not been something infinitely more.... It is not fitness that makes an act moral, but it is its morality that makes it fit.”

Herbert Spencer must be classed as a utilitarian. He says that justice requires that “every man be free to do as he wills provided he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.” But, since this would permit injury to another by one willing to submit to injury in return, Mr. Spencer limits the freedom to “such actions as subserve life.” This is practically equivalent to saying that the greatest sum of happiness is the ultimate end. On Jonathan Edwards, see Robert Hall, Works, 1:43 sq.; Alexander, Moral Science, 194-198; Bib. Repertory (Princeton Review), 25:22; Bib. Sacra, 9:176, 197; 10:403, 705.

(_c_) Nor in the nature of things (Price),—whether by this we mean their fitness (Clarke), truth (Wollaston), order (Jouffroy), relations (Wayland), worthiness (Hickok), sympathy (Adam Smith), or abstract right (Haven and Alexander); for this nature of things is not ultimate, but has its ground in the nature of God. We are bound to worship the highest; if anything exists beyond and above God, we are bound to worship that,—that indeed is God.

See Wayland, Moral Science, 33-48; Hickok, Moral Science, 27-34; Haven, Moral Philosophy, 27-50; Alexander, Moral Science, 159-198. In opposition to all the forms of this theory, we urge that nothing exists independently of or above God. “If the ground of morals exist independently of God, either it has ultimately no authority, or it usurps the throne of the Almighty. Any rational being who kept the law would be perfect without God, and the moral centre of all intelligences would be outside of God” (Talbot). God is not a Jupiter controlled by Fate. He is subject to no law but the law of his own nature. _Noblesse oblige_,—character rules,—purity is the highest. And therefore to holiness all creatures, voluntarily or involuntarily, are constrained to bow. Hopkins, Law of Love, 77—“Right and wrong have nothing to do with things, but only with actions; nothing to do with any nature of things existing necessarily, but only with the nature of persons.” Another has said: “The idea of right cannot be original, since right means conformity to some standard or rule.” This standard or rule is not an abstraction, but an existing being—the infinitely perfect God.

Faber: “For right is right, since God is God; And right the day must win; To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin.” Tennyson: “And because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.” Right is right, and I should will the right, not because God _wills_ it, but because God _is_ it. E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 178-180—“Utility and relations simply reveal the constitution of things and so represent God. Moral law was not made for purposes of utility, nor do relations constitute the reason for obligation. They only show what the nature of God is who made the universe and revealed himself in it. In his nature is found the _reason_ for morality.” S. S. Times, Oct. 17, 1891—“Only that is level which conforms to the curvature of the earth’s surface. A straight line tangent to the earth’s curve would at its ends be much further from the earth’s centre than at its middle. Now equity means levelness. The standard of equity is not an impersonal thing, a ’nature of things’ outside of God. Equity or righteousness is no more to be conceived independently of the divine centre of the moral world than is levelness comprehensible apart from the earth’s centre.”

Since God finds the rule and limitation of his action solely in his own being, and his love is conditioned by his holiness, we must differ from such views as that of Moxom: “Whether we define God’s nature as perfect holiness or perfect love is immaterial, since his nature is manifested only through his action, that is, through his relation to other beings. Most of our reasoning on the divine standard of righteousness, or the ultimate ground of moral obligation, is reasoning in a circle, since we must always go back to God for the principle of his action; which principle we can know only by means of his action. God, the perfectly righteous Being, is the ideal standard of human righteousness. Righteousness in man therefore is conformity to the nature of God. God, in agreement with his perfect nature, always wills the perfectly good toward man. His righteousness is an expression of his love; his love is a manifestation of his righteousness.”

So Newman Smyth: “Righteousness is the eternal genuineness of the divine love. It is not therefore an independent excellence, to be contrasted with, or even put in opposition to, benevolence; it is an essential part of love.” In reply to which we urge as before that that which is the object of love, that which limits and conditions love, that which furnishes the norm and reason for love, cannot itself be love, nor hold merely equal rank with love. A double standard is as irrational in ethics as in commerce, and it leads in ethics to the same debasement of the higher values, and the same unsettling of relations, as has resulted in our currency from the attempt to make silver regulate gold at the same time that gold regulates silver.

B. The Scriptural View.—According to the Scriptures, the ground of moral obligation is the holiness of God, or the moral perfection of the divine nature, conformity to which is the law of our moral being (Robinson, Chalmers, Calderwood, Gregory, Wuttke). We show this:

(_a_) From the commands: “Ye shall be holy,” where the ground of obligation assigned is simply and only: “for I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16); and “Ye therefore shall be perfect,” where the standard laid down is: “as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5:48). Here we have an ultimate reason and ground for being and doing right, namely, that God is right, or, in other words, that holiness is his nature.

(_b_) From the nature of the love in which the whole law is summed up (Mat. 22:37—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; Rom. 13:10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”). This love is not regard for abstract right or for the happiness of being, much less for one’s own interest, but it is regard for God as the fountain and standard of moral excellence, or in other words, love for God as holy. Hence this love is the principle and source of holiness in man.

(_c_) From the example of Christ, whose life was essentially an exhibition of supreme regard for God, and of supreme devotion to his holy will. As Christ saw nothing good but what was in God (Mark 10:18—“none is good save one, even God”), and did only what he saw the Father do (John 5:19; see also 30—“I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”), so for us, to be like God is the sum of all duty, and God’s infinite moral excellence is the supreme reason why we should be like him.

For statements of the correct view of the ground of moral obligation, see E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 138-180; Chalmers, Moral Philosophy, 412-420; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 112-122; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:80-107; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274—“The ground of all moral law is the nature of God, or the ethical nature of God in relation to the like nature in man, or the imperativeness of the divine nature.” Plato: “The divine will is the fountain of all efficiency; the divine reason is the fountain, of all law; the divine nature is the fountain of all virtue.” If it be said that God is love as well as holiness, we ask: Love to what? And the only answer is: Love to the right, or to holiness. To ask why right is a good, is no more sensible than to ask why happiness is a good. There must be something ultimate. Schiller said there are people who want to know why ten is not twelve. We cannot study character apart from conduct, nor conduct apart from character. But this does not prevent us from recognizing that character is the fundamental thing and that conduct is only the expression of it.

The moral perfection of the divine nature includes truth and love, but since it is holiness that conditions the exercise of every other attribute, we must conclude that holiness is the ground of moral obligation. Infinity also unites with holiness to make it the perfect ground, but since the determining element is holiness, we call this, and not infinity, the ground of obligation. J. H. Harris, Baccalaureate Sermon, Bucknell University, 1890—“As holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, so holiness is the supreme good of man. Aristotle perceived this when he declared the chief good of man to be energizing according to virtue. Christianity supplies the Holy Spirit and makes this energizing possible.” Holiness is the goal of man’s spiritual career; see _1 Thess. 3:13—_“to the end he may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father.”

Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 272—“Holiness and happiness are two notions of one thing.... Unless therefore the heart of a created being is at one with the heart of God, it cannot but be miserable.” It is more true to say that holiness and happiness are, as cause and effect, inseparably bound together. Martineau, Types, 1:xvi; 2:70-77—“Two classes of facts it is indispensable for us to know: what are the springs of voluntary conduct, and what are its effects”; Study, 1:26—“Ethics must either perfect themselves in Religion, or disintegrate themselves into Hedonism.” William Law remarks: “Ethics are not external but internal. The essence of a moral act does not lie in its result, but in the motive from which it springs. And that again is good or bad, according as it conforms to the character of God.” For further discussion of the subject see our chapter on The Law of God. See also Thornwell, Theology, 1:363-373; Hinton, Art of Thinking, 47-62; Goldwin Smith, in Contemporary Review, March, 1882, and Jan. 1884; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 195-231, esp. 223.

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