T| Each life lies overshadowed, enfolded, embosomed in the Spiritual Whole which is God ; eternity is our home ; we " cannot drift beyond His love and care " ;
The eternal God is thy refuge,
And underneath are the everlasting arms.
That is the Gospel of the transcendent God. Within each life the divine Spirit dwells ; the divine eternal Life is present, lifting us up to the heights, bringing our visions to pass, urging us to be "perfect even as your Father is perfect"; a Spirit guiding us "into all the truth," as a lamp within the breast; the promise and potency of all we long and pray for as dearest and most
ZECHARIAH n. 4, 5 409
precious ; the pledge of immortality amid mortality, of abundant life through every tribulation, and out of any death. That is the Gospel of the divine immanence.1
^J Conscience, as we all know, is liable to perversion, to morbid exaggerations, to partial insensibility, to twists and crotchets of all sorts, and itself needs correction by various external standards. Conscience, therefore, can never be our supreme and absolute guide. . . . That individual and immediate guidance, in which we recognize that " the finger of God is come unto us," seems to come in as it were to complete and perfect the work rough-hewn by morality and conscience. We may liken the laws of our country to the cliffs of our island, over which we rarely feel ourselves in any danger of falling ; the moral standard of our social circle to the beaten highway road which we can hardly miss. Our own conscience would then be represented by a fence by which some parts of the country are enclosed for each one, the road itself at times barred and narrowed. And that Divine guidance of which I am speaking could be typified only by the pressure of a hand upon ours, leading us gently to step to the right or to the left, to pause or to go forward, in a manner intended for and understood by ourselves alone.2
TJ The Deism that is now passing away said, God is not here, God is beyond — beyond everything we know. He is outside of His universe. He is in the region of the unknown; in the emptiness beyond. He does not declare Himself in nature nor in history. And having defined Him negatively as against the finite, we naturally, nay inevitably, pronounce Him to be unknown. Of course, if thus conceived, He is unknown and unknowable; the very hypothesis places Him beyond the knowable. Then we condemn reason for not being able to know what we have just defined as unknowable.
Now, however, owing in part to our great poets, who are also our greatest philosophers, such as Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson, owing to Goethe and the great philosophical idealists, we are revising our view of God ; we are feeling our way towards the conception of God as immanent in nature and in the mind of man. We are admitting the natural and moral universe into the witness-box to strengthen the testimony of the sacred Book ; and once more we are venturing to say that " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork."
It seems to me that our most recent theology in doing this is simply rising to the demands that the religious spirit has always
1 E. W. Lewis, in Getting Together, 78.
2 Caroline Stephen, Quaker Strongholds, 81.
410 THE CITY WITHOUT WALLS
made. For, of course, the task of theology is only to interpret religion, to explain man's relation to his God ; and theology is as different from religion itself as astronomy from the stars. The starry system is a fact ; astronomy is the attempt at the explana- tion of it. Keligion is also a fact, the living force in history; theology is the explanation of that fact, or the attempted explana- tion. Now the religious spirit always gives genuine significance to the notion that God is omnipresent ; for the trustful spirit finds God everywhere. Yea, it finds God in the midst of the sorrows and the disasters of life, even amongst the tragedies of sin. And when theology rises to the dignity of its task it also will seek God everywhere. If it does not it is not faithful to the subject which it is its problem to explain.1
1 Sir Henry Jones, Social Powers, 102.
A Brand Plucked out of the Fire.
Literature.
Alexander (W. L.), Eechariah's Visions and Warnings, 37.
Banks (L. A.), The Sinner and his Friends, 292.
Godet (F.), Biblical Studies : Old Testament, 18.
Moore (E. W.), Life Transfigured, 129.
Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, iv. 361.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Morning by Morning, 332.
Stewart (J.), Outlines of Discourses, 176.
Williams (T. R.), The Evangel of the New Theology, 191.
Wright (C. H. H.), Zechariah and his Prophecies, 45.
Christian World Pulpit, xvi. 166 (G. T. Coster).
Church Pulpit Year Book, 1909, p. 20.
Churchman's Pulpit : St. Peter, St. James, xv. 3 (J. Stalker), 6 (J. R.
Woodford). Homiletic Review, xxxiv., No. 3, 237 (B. D. Thomas). People's Pulpit : Selected Volume, No. 45 (A. G. Brown). Preacher's Magazine, iv. 41.
A Brand Plucked out of the Fire.
And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary. And the Lord said unto Satan, The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan ; yea, the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee : is not this a brand plucked out of the fire ? — Zech. iii. i, 2.