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CHAPTER II.

THE PROBLEM OF GOD.

1. The necessity of the theological question. — The demand that we shall be positive, scientific, or un-metaphysical in our thinking, reaches its climax when we approach the problem of the divine government of the world. If a scientific theory of morals is not based upon the doctrine of moral freedom, still less does it rest, we are told, upon a doctrine of God; if a rational psychology is illegitimate, still more obviously so is a rational theology; if metaphysics in general is ruled out as unscientific, then theology, which is metaphysics run wild, is a fortiori condemned. The command, "Be un-metaphysical," is, more closely interpreted, the command "Be un-theological." The entire argument of contemporary Agnosticism and Positivism is to the effect that God is either the unknown and unknowable, or the most unreal of all abstractions, the merest fiction of the human imagination. The phenomenal alone is real and intelligible. The noumenal is either unreal, or, if real, unintelligible. Let us be content, then, with the relative and phenomenal, the positive reality of experience, whether that experience be intellectual or moral.

It is customary with scientific and Evolutionary moralists, even with those who, like Mr Stephen, profess Agnosticism, to correlate man with nature, and to seek to demonstrate the unity and continuity of his life with

that of the physical universe. This is, of course, a metaphysical endeavour, and if its legitimacy is not open to question, I do not see why the effort to correlate the life of man with that of God should be pronounced illegitimate. If morality has natural sanctions, why should it not have divine sanctions? Metaphysics is essentially and inevitably theological; if we cannot exclude metaphysics, we cannot exclude theology. If we must ask, What is man's relation to nature? we must also ask, What is his relation to God? It is probably fear of theology, rather than fear of metaphysics, that inspires the Agnostic and Positivist ethics. Nor is the fear unreasonable, considering the views of morality which have been inculcated in the name of theology, the supernatural machinery that has been called into play to execute the sanctions in question, and the terms of hell' to which theologians have often striven to reduce the life of man. Such views are the expression of crude thought and blind dogmatism; they are not entitled to the proud name which Aristotle claimed for his first philosophy' or metaphysics, the name 'theology.' No less unworthy is it to employ the conception of God as a mere refuge of ignorance; the deus ex machiná is as unwarrantable in ethical as in

natural philosophy. The will of God' is not to be invoked as a mere external authority, to spare us the trouble of discovering the rationale either of nature or of morality. God must be rather the goal than the startingpoint of our philosophy. To see all things in God' would be to understand all things perfectly; to see anything in that Light would be to see all things as they truly are. Yet we cannot rest content in any lower knowledge; the world and life remain dark to us until they receive that illumination.

The Agnostics invite us to follow with them the well trodden paths of moral and religious faith, of practical or ethical belief. Indeed the deepest motive of modern Agnosticism, as it originated in Kant, was the preservation

imagination, it is a world in which that life cannot continue to live. It has been said that if there is no God, we must make one; but a God of our own making is no God. If the moral and religious ideal is a mere ideal, the shadow cast by the actual in the sunshine of the human imagination; if the ideal is not also in very truth the real; if the good is not also the true, the reality of man's spiritual life is destroyed, and its foundations are sapped. Man cannot permanently live on fictions; the insight that his deepest life is but "the baseless fabric of a vision' must bring with it, sooner or later, the downfall of the life thus undermined. Agnosticism, if it is true, must carry with it the ultimate disappearance of religion, and, with religion, of all morality higher than utility. For we cannot permanently separate the ethical and intellectual man. His nature and life are one, single, indissolubly bound together; and ultimately he must demand an intellectual justification of his ethical and religious life, a theory of it as well as of the world of nature. The need of ethical harmony must make itself felt: a moral being demands a moral environment or sphere. The attempt to divorce emotion and activity from knowledge is a psychological error of a glaring kind. Our life is one, as our nature is one. We cannot live in sections, or in faculties. Temporarily and in the individual, an approximation to such a divorce may be possible, but not permanently or in the race. The practical life is connected, in a rational being, with the theoretical; we cannot be permanently illogical, either in morality or religion. The postulate of man's spiritual life is the harmony of nature and spirit, or the spiritual constitu tion of the universe.

2. Agnosticism and Positivism.-If we ask, then, Where is the source of ethical enthusiasm to be found? the answer of the scientific or un-metaphysical philosopher is: Either in the unknowable Absolute, or in that phenomenal

moral reality which we know, in the ethical life of humanity. The former is the answer of Agnosticism, the latter is that of Positivism. The first answer is purely negative, and does not carry us far. According to this view, morality is not, any more than any other phase of human experience, a true exponent or expression of ultimate Reality. If it has any positive meaning, it is simply that the real is not the phenomenal, that phenomena or facts are but the appearances of a deeper Reality. It is indeed a most important truth, that the universe is not a mere flux or process, a stream of tendency which tends no whither, but that it has an abiding meaning. Neither is the universe a sphinx, on whose dead expressionless face we must for ever gaze without a suggestion of a solution of the riddle of the earth. If the meaning of things is one which we can never hope in any measure to decipher, then for us there might as well be no meaning at all. And as for the needed moral inspiration, an unknown quantity can hardly be the source of inspiration. One can hardly wonder at Mr Harrison's travesty of the Agnostic's prayer to his unknown God: “O anth love us, help us, make us one with thee!"

If the Agnostic sends us to an unknown and unknowable Absolute for the inspiration of our moral life, the Positivist bids us see in that never-ceasing human procession, of which we ourselves form such a humble part, the object of reverent adoration, and draw from the sight the moral inspiration which we need. Comte and his followers would have us, in this day of the intellectual majority of the race, dethrone the usurper gods of its theological and metaphysical minority, and place on the throne the true and only rightful God-the Grand Être of Humanity itself. In our weakness, we may cast ourselves upon its greater strength; in our foolishness, upon its deeper wisdom; in our sin and error, upon its less erring righteousness. Nay, we can pray to this 'mighty mother' of our being; we are her children, and