God in His Essence and Attributes

J. N. Darby.

 

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What is fundamental in speaking of attributes, is inherent in the very term itself. It is not the being in its essential nature, even though always found there, but what is rightly attributed to the being as such; and in speaking of God this is not without importance; and the difference will be found very simple. Attributes are relative; hence God, who is absolute, cannot be spoken of as being the attribute itself. It is only a character which belongs to Him. God is something in Himself. But He is also something in relationship to other things when they exist or are supposed to exist. The attributes may be a necessary consequence of what He is, and I suppose in God always are, but they are not what He is Himself.

Further, no attribute can be rightly appropriated to God, which removes Him from His place as God, in necessary and absolute supremacy. The Being to whom I attribute it is gone if I do so. God cannot be the object of judgment, or He has wholly lost His place as God; yea, he who judges sets himself up in His place, and puts God in subjection to him. Evidently He is thus no longer God. Cicero says in the de Officiis, "Quasi material . . . subjecta est veritas." Now this evidently God can never be, for my mind is here supreme, and God subject to it. This is at once the pride and the folly of man. This is what modern Rationalism (and I suppose the mind of man has always so acted) calls the supremacy of conscience, by which revelation and everything else is judged of. But if conscience, as my action and judgment, is supreme, there is no God at all. A God who is not alone supreme, is no God.

Has man, then, no thought of God at all? Not so. He cannot judge by his mind, but he has the knowledge of good and evil - conscience. It may be corrupted, perverted, hardened, but he makes the difference of right and wrong. Scripture shews us he got this by the fall, and so as under sin. Still it brings in God, saying "The man is become as one of us, knowing good and evil." It is not a law, a rule from without, imposed, but what is intrinsic (in man). He says, That is a good thing, that a bad one; and he concludes at once, God cannot approve a wrong thing, nor condemn a good thing. A man may, from passions, education, habit, have a very wrong measure of right and wrong; and demon-gods may make him put evil for good, and good for evil; but he makes the difference, and the sense of right or wrong in itself leads him to attribute right to God, and not wrong. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

2 But this right and wrong is connected with obligation, and is measured by relationships. I owe to a father, a husband, my neighbour, what belongs to that relationship: so to God. That is, the unperverted sense of right and wrong puts God in His place, does not judge Him. It is not an idea formed, but a relationship recognised, and hence subjection. Thus Adam lived in peace before the fall. Divine supremacy and authority was there, and owned, and then with knowledge the relationship was transgressed.

But supposing this sense of right and wrong in man, and that it is connected with the relationships in which we stand, I do hold that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity, because I intrinsically know right and wrong, but right and wrong being apprehended in the relationship, God is supreme to my mind; that is the first of rights. He is God, as much as my father is my father, and I own subjection to Him as God. I do say, He must be righteous, for that is the ｅxpression of acting on what is right and good in the relationships in which He has placed others, as far as consistent with supremacy and righteousness. But this is not supremacy of conscience, as if I were judge, and my measure of right and wrong, or my discernment of it perfect; but that I do conclude from right and wrong abstractedly to right in God, but at the same time to supremacy and perfection as the point I start from. one must not confound the measure of right and wrong with the sense of it. To speak of the supremacy of conscience, is to assume that its measure is perfect and adequate, not obligation under it. When I judge God or any one, I take a measure to judge by, and may misjudge from the state of my own mind. That is not conscience. Conscience with God recognises authority also over it, and supreme authority, or God is not recognised at all, and that is simply atheism. What these modern infidels claim - is to make their consciences the measure of right and wrong. This is false and grossly pretentious, and destroys the nature of God, and right as regards Him.

But we have already got into the discussion of relative qualities in God. This is what supposes other things besides the absolute being. If God is righteous, though He be so, He must be so towards others; it is relative. There are two words applied to God, which reveal His nature - Love and Light - and only these two. They affirm what He is in nature - not any attribute. Love is goodness, but in supremacy; for, in its abstract nature goodness is identified with supremacy, for it must be free. It is in this it is different from desire, even when it is a holy desire.

3 Love is used, I know, in human language for desire, in the best and most amiable sense. But though the same word be used in the sense of an inferior to a superior, or even an equal, this is in connection with a motive - is moved.

But love, as goodness itself, is blessed in itself and free in its actings, unless want or misery draw it out; but it has not a motive which characterises it by its object. This is always the case in desire, even when it is in no way evil, but has the character of affection. In ordinary desires it forms so far the character; money, power, pleasure, give their character to the man who seeks them; but though love be used as to them, it is evidently in a lower sense, and, where desires are, the desired object so far rules over us. Where love exists in a divinely-formed relationship, it is, or may be a just affection. I say, "may be," because it may run into a mere desire and be idolatry, and the relationship falsified. But when rightly in exercise, save as man in certain aspects represents God, it looks up, and characterises the person in the affection. It is conjugal, filial, and the like. A husband and a father in certain respects represent God in those relationships, and so far it partakes of what He is. But in the closest relationship where it is not this, it has the character I speak of: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

But God suffices to Himself, and goodness makes Him infinitely happy in Himself. For goodness is happy if it has no object, though happy in goodness when it is exercised towards one. Hence it is free, because it suffices for itself. Hence though, in certain relationships, man may be the image of God, yet as he cannot suffice to himself, and so be free and sovereign, he is not said to be love, though he is to walk in it. He is as to any right state subject and recipient. The divine nature is in the Christian, and he loves; still "we love because"!

4 But we are light in the Lord. The purity of nature which belongs essentially to God is made ours in the new man; as far as it acts in us it manifests everything around us in its true character. Christ was love in the world, and the light of the world. He is the measure of both for us. It is a blessed thing that the two essential names of God should be the ｅxpression of the new man in us; only, as we have seen, we are not said to be love. But that which is the nature of God characterises us, and makes us to enjoy Him, and to act according to that character here through grace.

These, as I have said, are not attributes. Attributes are ideas which we attach to God in connection with what is outside Himself, though belonging necessarily to Him as God. He is omnipotent, omniscient, supreme; even righteous, holy; these, though more connected with His nature, are relative terms. I must think of God's dealings and claims to call Him righteous. He judges of something when He is righteous, only it affirms He always judges right. To call Him holy, I must think of evil which He rejects. Hence He is not called righteousness and holiness, but righteous and holy. What He says is truth, but He is not truth. Truth is what is rightly affirmed of something else. But God is not affirmed of something else. We can say Christ is the Truth, because He does tell exactly what everything is - what God is, perfect man is, and by contrast what evil man is, what the world is, who is its prince. Through Him all is exactly brought out in its true character. Hence we say, God in Himself is absolutely Love and Light - the last expressing perfect purity (invisible in itself), and manifesting everything as it is before God, and shewing the way before us: and God is righteous, holy, omniscient, omnipotent, supreme, and the like - all of which are relative terms - the former moral, the latter natural attributes.

Righteousness is perfectness in, or consistency with the relationship in which anyone stands; evil and good being known. Holiness, the aspect of heart, which intrinsic purity of nature bears towards other things, according to their character. We may speak of things as holy when entirely set apart to God, and separated from all profane use; but properly it applies to persons expressing their abhorrence of evil and delight in that which is pure and good. God is holy in Himself, abhorring evil and delighting in what answers to His perfect nature. The creature can only be holy as separated to God in what He is in His perfectness, because its nature can have no true and perfect object but Him, and its object gives its character to a nature in a creature, and holiness is the ｅxpression of a nature, not the obligation of a relationship. We are holy as far as every movement of thought answers to the impress and character of God, having Him for its object. Anything taken up in itself, apart from Him, is necessarily independency and sin. So far God is set aside. We have no object which makes the heart right but Him. Although we cannot leave God out as the author of, and as giving authority to, the relations in which we stand; yet, as we are placed in certain relationships, righteousness has somewhat more extensive range, though as a sanction God must be brought in. But whenever a relationship owned of God exists, it is unrighteous not to act up to it: not to be faithful to obligation in it.

5 Now God, as righteous, maintains judicially every obligation which any relationship imposes on us. But first and above all, relationship to Himself according to His supremacy and moral nature; this is the basis and stay of every other. only Christianity has brought out a second and more perfect measure of this. It recognises what is due from man according to the measure of man, his obligations in the place he is in towards God and his neighbour. Of this the law is the perfect measure, God making allowance for ignorance of the measure.

But besides this, God Himself has been perfectly glorified by the blessed Lord. All that He is, where sin gave occasion to the full revelation of all that He is, has been glorified in Christ, and a new ground of relationship formed according to what He is, based on what Christ has wrought. Hence man is in the glory of God, and God's righteousness is displayed in that.

Judgment is based on the actual obligations founded on the relationship in which man is. Acceptance goes much farther, and is according to the worth of the Lord's work; we are made the righteousness of God in Him. But God in righteousness maintains all the relationships in which man stands according to His will.

It is well also to distinguish between the righteousness of God in government, and the immutable character of God, according to which we must stand before Him, if in His revealed presence. His revealed requirement of righteousness forms, with long patience exercised on His part, through goodness, the basis of His righteous government, never to be fully revealed until Christ comes; partially displayed in Israel, where needed to maintain the recollection of it everywhere; and in a signal way in the flood which closed the old world.

6 But standing before God fully revealed, supposes not our obligations to Him in government exercised to maintain His authority, and the natural sense, or revealed rule of right or wrong, but fitness for His own presence. This is in Christ only. This is fully revealed in Christianity alone, and wrath from heaven in connection with it; Rom. 1: 1-20.

When I speak of what is holy, it is not judicial authority, as in the case of righteousness, but what purity of nature abhors and rejects, or delights in. Righteous and holy are the attributes which attach themselves to the moral nature of God and His supreme authority.

But there is that in God, the sense of which is with difficulty lost in man, though he be without God in the world. This has turned the sense of a being above himself, perfect in knowledge and power, a Supreme Being, into what is the fruit of imagination or servile dread - Mythology and Fetishism. The visible powers of nature were deified, because a God was wanting for the heart. The legends of ancient days were turned into myths of the gods. Terror told of a revengeful power, and a world of retribution loomed to an unsatisfied conscience. Man would animate planets, because they moved without him: he would have poetical lusts in superficial and self-satisfied Greece; more calculated sobriety in Egypt, a sunny south of gods, and northern immensity of giants, and storms, and mountains in Scandinavia; or seek to solve the mystery of good and evil in Ahriman and Ahurmazdha in Arva, or revel in monstrous reveries in India. Cruelty and poetry might divide the world under the name of gods, but behind all there was everywhere Tertullian's "Testimonium animae naturaliter christianae," an "unknown God" - a Brahm, the origin of all things, a primeval source or power.

In Fetishism - degraded into a dread of some terrible unknown power, which priests used for their own purposes; in more cultivated religions, kept as the secret mysterious knowledge belonging to them, or to the initiated only, while the vulgar were kept in play with the more convenient everyday materials of popular mythology - the gods and goddesses of nature and imagination; yet still, though inconsistently, clothing them with attributes and powers which, if true, could only belong to one supreme God. And this was so true, that each local mythology had this twofold character, and that, even to particular cities.

7 In India, in the sects of Vaishnavas and Saivas, and one supreme God above the rest, the idea of God, and attributes of supremacy, omniscience and omnipotence, ran through all, however confused and inconsistent. These attributes were symbolised, too, as in the winged bulls, and lions, and men of Assyria - symbols recognised in Scripture; with this immense difference, that in heathen symbols, save in the vague idea of divinity, God was thought of no further than the attributes or symbols.

In Judaism, these formed but the throne of a known God who sat above them; the clearest ｅxpression, on the one hand, of the mind of man losing itself without God in knowledge it could not retain or carry, and on the other, of the clearness of the revelation which made one true God known.* Supremacy, omniscience, omnipotence, attach themselves necessarily to our idea of one God the moment the thought takes a definite form, and the attributes involved in them are not lost in mythological associations.

{*See the beginning of Ezekiel: God was seated above these figures. The extreme perverseness, and I must add, superficiality of man's mind and infidelity are shewn in Max Muller's "Science of Religion," and such-like works, licensing and promoting mythology, because it had the thought of God behind it all, as if it were the ｅxpression of it; whereas it was the gross departure of man's mind, when he had it, to degrade the idea of God when he had departed from Him; and that in connection with the basest defilement and cruelty, so that God in His true nature and conscience were alike lost - morally gone - though neither could be destroyed.}

In heathenism, where these activities are attributed to subordinate energies, the one original God was mere abstract, inert godhead - abstract existence.

In India, sole existence, sometimes springing into activity of thought and desire, all which became creation, including the gods, and was Maia, or Illusion, and returning into abstract godhead again, when Brahm's occasional activity ceased.

Modern Materialism does little more than substitute scientific activities of nature for poetical activities, and is worth about as much; for after all, we must want a cause. Phosphorus may put activity into the brain, not moral thought; but what puts activity into phosphorus, or gives it this mental character? Indeed, wherever I find a regular difference in a like agency, I find a difference-maker! The tubers of a plant, which convert the elements of the same soil into a geranium or an oak, force on me the conviction of design and mind.

8 I do not connect omnipresence and eternity as attributes with God, not because they may not, in an ordinary sense, be said to be so; and Scripture itself so speaks practically, and it always speaks practically, because truly; but that in our minds they are connected with time and space, which do not apply to God. There is no time when God is not; no place where His eye and hand, to use human language, are not. "I AM" is the proper ｅxpression of His existence. While time rolls on "I am" remains unchanged, and when time has rolled away "I am" subsists the same. It can hardly be called an attribute. This being understood, we may speak of eternal as a natural attribute of God.

As to omnipresence, God has no more to do with space than with time. He has created all things in a way apprehensible thus to us. In this creation nothing escapes Him. He is, morally speaking, omnipresent. He is not of, or in it, but pervades it. He is "through all"! He upholds everything, as He creates everything. He is not morally concerned in any motive (save as working in man in grace), but not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him.

Omnipotence is involved in this - the power to do whatever it is His will to do. Omniscience is involved in it also. Did not God know all things, He could neither know what to do rightly, nor judge morally. Supremacy is involved in our very idea of God as one, and active in power. They are inherent in our idea of God, and (when once the heathenish additions of what are confessedly imaginations are removed) cannot be separated from the idea of God. That which it is important to get fast hold of is, that there is a will in God. No moral being can be without it; a will guided by righteousness and holiness, and to which omnipotence and omniscience are subservient, but which is the source and origin of all that exists outside Himself, not of its state, for moral beings have a will, but of its existence.

He is a Creator. I do not say that simple existence can be proved to be a matter of creation by logical deduction. But simple existence is an abstraction. Man sees trees, planets moving; in a word, evidence of design, and that, which has been so often argued, involves a designer. The distinct knowledge of a Creator is a matter of faith. Yet if man does suppose the abstract existence of matter without a cause, he violates the first principles of necessary thought. He is accustomed to see man form many things out of comparatively formless matter, so he has an idea of this latter. But if he begins to think of why anything existed, he cannot avoid the thought of a cause. Why, implies it? and I can say Why? and it is my nature to say Why? I am so constituted as to look for a cause. I may not be able to define cause,* nor can I conceive creation; but I cannot conceive, on the other hand, a thing existing without it. My mind may be inert, and so far take what exists as I find it; but as soon as it is in activity, it looks for why a thing exists. The same thing proves I cannot know a first cause, but only that there must be one. I cannot conceive a thing existing without a cause, therefore I say there must be one. But a first cause means what exists without one. That is, I cannot conceive it. Hence, too, I cannot conceive creation, though I know there must be a Creator. It is merely saying, I am a creature, and must think in the order of my being.

{*A cause, I apprehend, is power producing from a will working somewhere. I say "somewhere," as school-men speak, there is a "cause causata," and "causa causans."}

9 Goodness or love, omniscience and omnipotence, involve in them perfect wisdom; only all this supposes a God, with a free will to exist, before any attribute can be assigned to Him. If not free to act, omniscience and omnipotence are simply null.

One class of philosophers - unable as we are, in the nature of things as creatures, to conceive a creation (for the creature must think in his own order, that is, creature order; he can no more have an idea of creation than create - power is not in him), judges "Ex nihilo nihil fit."* For him it is true; but it is only the great fallacy, common to philosophy, of taking our capacity of thought and action as the measure of what may be, which is simply absurd. It is our measure as to power, be it of thought or action; we must think or act according to our nature, and can think no more as to forming ideas. But it is wholly false if it deny the consciousness of what is above us and applicable to us receptively. We may be acted on mentally and physically by that which is no possessed power in us. Active power or capacity for it is not the measure of receptivity.

{*Out of nothing, nothing is made.}

10 Further, I may negatively be conscious of the necessity of a thing of which I can form no idea, because it is beyond my order of being. Thus I naturally ascribe an effect to a cause, a power producing it. I see a thing becomes, begins to exist, as it is before me; I at once ascribe it to some cause. I am so formed as to suppose a why? It cannot be without some cause. It is not a formed idea of what the cause is, but the conviction that there must be one. It appears to me as an effect, and effect contains the idea of a cause in it. Hence I believe in creation. Not that I form an idea of it, but that negatively it cannot but be.

I have already said, the nature of the proof demonstrates that I cannot form an idea of the thing proved in itself. But there is clearly seen eternal power and godhead. And here note that creative power involves eternal power, for all begins by creation, and all creation begins. But what creatures must be, that is, exist absolutely without a beginning. "I am," therefore, or absolute existence, is the one just revelation of God as such.

We have thus one personal God - "I am," supreme, absolutely free, omniscient, omnipotent, wise, the Creator. These are, so to speak, natural attributes; moral ones are righteous, holy, good; known to man not by ideas or thinking, which is impossible, for then man's mind would be at least the equal of God, that is, He would not be God at all; but by conscience, or the knowledge of good and evil, the proofs in the creation around us of creative power and wisdom, and in spite of the undeniable, utter degradation of man, in corruption and violence, and the monstrous deities into which he had merged it, the idea of God, the abiding sense of unity, supremacy, absolute godhead, everywhere found.

If Jupiter be suckled by a goat in Crete, the idea of supremacy remains. If Krishna lives with the milkmaids, in time he is an incarnation of Vishnu, and Vishnu is Brahm, the rest Maia or Illusion. The gods are mortal; God is not. It may be Bathos, or Silence, or as unknown as you please, when the feeble mind of man tries to have a formed idea; but before it acts, behind the gods of imagination or lusts or fears, there is not only godhead, but one God. The Manitou of the Indian, the eternal being before Ahurmazdha, was active for good, or Ahriman, to spoil his work.

11 And remark here, that where ideas flow from a relationship in which we exist, which belongs to our nature in its original constitution, it may be by thinking and imagination, education, habit in religious things, priestcraft, be perverted, falsified, degraded (and the mind with it), or reasoned against from the inadequacy of the mind to master it as an idea; but the roots of it are in the nature. To have it falsified, there must be something to falsify. "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." Hence, prone as the human mind is to indulge its imagination, stop short of God whom it fears, and have gods and idols which it can manage after its own lusts and thoughts, yet, when the truth of the relationship is brought out, the soul recognises it.

The unity, supremacy, omniscience, omnipotence, of God, and our responsibility to Him, are owned, when divine revelation has brought them out, as the only truth, by all. I do not mean by that, that the mind of man cannot or does not seek to disprove it, and have no God at all, because it does not like one, does not like responsibility, and likes to be supreme - at least to have no one above it. But this is an effort, and an effort whose effects never last with the masses; that is, with man according to nature - an effort, too, always connected with oppression or violence and profligacy, as in the fall of the Roman Empire and in the French Revolution. Morality must disappear; for there can be no morality without responsibility, and responsibility without God is impossible. For to whom am I responsible if there be not one above me? Responsibility refers to relationship, and all relationship, even human, is founded on relationship to Him. Without Him self-will acts; each one will have his own, and man becomes a mixture of the devil and the brute, or is kept down by power because it must be, or worse; while power in result will cultivate superstition, because of its sway over men's minds. And, indeed, where faith or revelation does not give a true sphere outside self, man cannot rest in self, and he will make a false one. Hence, under Satan's power, the religions of the world.

Revelation, in making known the true God, meets - not the knowledge, but the wants of the human mind. It is the witness of its own truth, because it meets and clears out those springs in the soul which were the subjective adaptation to the relationship in which it stood in truth with God; and the objective revelation perfectly meets them, fits in, and so far God is known.*

{*Hence, where revelation exists, God is owned where there is no true conversion. Hence the superiority morally of Protestantism (which owns the true revelation, and uses it personally) to Popery, which has set up a mythological system of saints, etc., and established a priesthood, which is always, and must be, if God be not known directly and immediately. In Protestantism the conscience has to say to God immediately as revealed: in Romanism not - the priest is a director.}

12 If we take Scripture, we find there the attributes of God - the one true and only God - shine out, and in every page, with unclouded lustre. He is one, supreme, the Creator of heaven and earth, of all things; knows all things. If we go to heaven, He is there; to hades, He is there (Jer. 23: 24); can do all things. His eye and presence are everywhere; He is the eternal God; He is righteous and holy ; His goodness is over all His works. The cravings of the heart of man are met with the clearest and fullest revelation of God. I refer to the Old Testament, because there God, as such - the one true God - is fully and specially revealed in contrast with idols and man's imaginations. It is its special, direct revelation, with the law of His mouth - though promises and prophecies accompany it.

The New fully confirms it, I need not say; but there is a much fuller revelation in the Father sending the Son for the accomplishment of His ways in grace, and this characterises it. He does not give a revelation, He is revealed. Hence, though of course the attributes remain true, it is not attributes which characterise it, but what He is - light and love; righteousness and holiness necessarily coming in - but His own. Not the requirements of man's for Him, which quite alters the character of them as revealed. In the Old we could say, "The righteous Lord loveth righteousness." "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Now, He - Christ - is our righteousness; we are made the righteousness of God in Him. It is in the New Testament we find God revealed in Christ as light and love, and we, "light in the Lord," and partakers of the divine nature, have to walk in the light, and know, through the redemption that is in Christ, that perfect love that casts out fear.

This is more than attributes, as we have said, though it confirms, is in a certain sense the source of, and makes us to know them all, and give each its own and full place.

The Most High

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I have been looking into the force of the Hebrew words for most High. That it ultimately refers to God in the millennium as the supreme God then manifested, to the exclusion of what is false, is evident. This is the force of the word - one who, to the exclusion of and superiority over all others, holds the place of the one true God, but exalted as supreme in government. Jehovah is, as we know, the God who is in relationship with Israel, but He is the supreme God, the Most High. The full statement of the title, and the time of taking it, is in Genesis 14: 19, 20, 22. Israel's enemies are entirely discomfited, and delivered into his hand, and the heir of promise blessed of Him who possesses heaven and earth. He is supreme, and has taken all things into His possession.

Still God is, of course, always such, and referred to in trial as the one who will set all right. When the Lord is just coming into the world to set all in order, the question is raised, Where is the secret place of the Most High? Where is He to be found as a protection? Whoever finds Him will have the protection of Abraham's God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the place of promise. Jehovah is it, the God of Israel. And in fact the full divine care of the supreme God, the God of promise, is found, possessor of heaven and earth, revealed in connection with the Melchisedec priest.

Hence, too, when Nebuchadnezzar is restored from a state that represents the character of the empires which began in him, he owns the Most High; Dan. 4: 25-34.

In the Psalms the use of it is frequent. In Psalm 21 it is connected with the royalty of Christ as the glorified Man and King. His hand will find out all His enemies and by the favour of the Most High He will not be moved. In Psalm 46 God is again in the midst of His people on Messiah's triumph (Psalm 45). The tabernacles are those of the Most High. His power is fully displayed in the earth, Jehovah being with Jacob. So more fully as to the world in Psalm 47. In Psalm 50 Most High is connected with the judgment of God in power. In Psalms 9, 10, 55, and 57, it is calling upon Him in this character by the remnant when in distress, the first of the two latter speaking of the distress, the second of the delivering supremacy over all the earth. Psalm 73 is the first of the third book, and the power of the Most High despised by the adversaries; but, going into the sanctuary, their judgment is discovered. The years of the Most High are remembered in Psalm 77, His way is in the sanctuary and in the sea; not looking to heart-failing in man, but to Jehovah, the Supreme, who accomplishes His good pleasure. In this and the next it is Jehovah's right to this name, as in all the history of Israel. For this is all Israel. Psalms 82 and 83 are both judgment at the close, and in the fullest way to recognise that Jehovah is the Most High over all the earth. Psalm 91 has been spoken of. Psalm 92 is the same perishing of the enemies, and exalting the true David. Psalm 97 is expressly as Jehovah reigning, and as Most High over all the earth, and exalted above the gods when He comes to judgment. In Psalm 107 it is Israel re-gathered, who celebrates God's government, and His chastisement for their rebellion against Jehovah who is the Most High.

14 We have the Most High in Daniel 7, though in most of the occurrences it is in the plural for "high" or "heavenly places." There its connection with God's title, and making good His dominion, and this connected with Israel, is evident. Thus, though Jehovah is looked back to in self-judgment in the history of Israel, as Psalms 56, 57, 73, 77, yet the force of the title is evident.

A few words on the Trinity

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The application of numerals to divine or any moral being is absurd.* We do not mean the same thing by unity in figure and in minds. But I deny that God was, or ever could be, fully revealed as one. He is one; but He never was revealed as one. He was revealed to be one in contrast with a multiplicity of gods. But when revealed to be one, He was not fully revealed. He existed always in trinity in unity - not that I pretend to fathom this, but I know it, because, when fully revealed, He is so revealed. When He was revealed as one, He did not suffer Himself to be approached, carefully shewed this, dwelt (as so made known) behind the veil. In a word, He used various sensible figures to shew that He was not known, that the true light did not shine, and that the way into the holiest was not yet made manifest.

{*This refers to ideas opposing the Trinity as set out in Scripture.}

But when He does reveal Himself, the Son is on earth, yet in the bosom of the Father. He is the image of the invisible God. He that has seen Him has seen the Father. The light of God was in the world, but man did not see or comprehend it. The revealed one, the Father, was known or to be known in goodness by the Son. Though the invisible God was made known by Him who was His image, yet if He had ceased to be invisible, Christ would have ceased to be a special revealer and image. If He had not perfectly shewn and revealed Him as really manifested (that is, if He had not been God), no love, goodness, forbearance, patience, power - no revelation would have been. If He had not been Son, He could not have revealed the Father to us as such.

But this is not all. The darkness comprehended not the light. The Holy Ghost became power (when the needed work was done to put us according to God's holy and righteous nature into that place, without which He would not have been so known, that is, in truth) to give competency of apprehension, and to reveal, not as object but as communicating power, having quickened us so as to have a capacity to apprehend. I am not saying this by mere deduction, but from the revelation of God.

Without the Trinity love was not known, righteousness, holiness - the spiritual nature of God and purity as such. That is, He never was revealed as He is and always was. All the true nature of God, that is, what He is, without the Trinity is unknown. The Father wills; the Son quickens whom He will; but because we have separate wills, why necessarily have the Father and the Son? The Spirit distributes to whom He will; but this is not separate from the will of the Father and the Son. They have not the same counsel but one counsel, mind, purpose, thought; yet they act distinctly in the manifestation of that counsel. The Father sends the Son, and the Son the Spirit. Yet when the Son comes, He is not thereby separate from the Father. "The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." So He casts out demons by the Spirit of God; yet He casts them out. There is unity in all that constitutes oneness when we speak spiritually - not unity as one by arriving at the same things, or union, or by being united, as we are by having only one Spirit dwelling in all, but - by being one in eternal being; so that all else flows from that one will and counsel, yet so as that distinction in action in that will is revealed to us: not distinct will, but distinct willing.

16 Not that I have the least pretension to fathom this divine mystery where all are God, all one God, God all three; yet the Father is revealed, the Son reveals, the Holy Ghost quickens and makes known. The Son who reveals is not different from the Father whom He reveals, or He would not reveal Him. By the Spirit who quickens and makes known, we are born of God and know God dwelling in us. He reveals Him to us by His own presence and is in every way the power of God, active in the creature.

Nor could the creature reach to God; or God would not be God. It is simply impossible; for if finite reach to infinite, there is neither finite nor infinite. And the infinite God could not, as such, reveal Himself to a finite creature. Nor is this mentally true only; for if God in His glory had done so, the creature could not have existed before Him. So if morally revealed (that is, as righteous and holy, and simple glory, that is, "in essential glory"), man could not have stood before Him. There was contrariety morally. Not even love would do; for what was it to man as he was? No link, no desire, and, if man was a sinner, no fitness in the simple display of it.

But in the Son by the Holy Ghost, by the work of Christ and the operation of the Holy Ghost, God is revealed; and in the love of the Father, righteousness and holiness are maintained and glorified, with capacity of communion in enjoyment of both the Father and the Son and intelligence of all these ways conferred by the presence of the Holy Ghost.

17 Hence, while John says God so loved the world, we find, whenever he speaks of grace and power bringing man into the knowledge and enjoyment of God, he speaks of the Father and the Son, adding afterwards in the words of Christ the presence and work of the Comforter. John is the one who speaks specially of the revelation of God, not of the presentation of man to God, though he does this; as Paul also speaks of the revelation of God, but specially of man's presenting to God.

Thus we see that there could be no full revelation of God, but through the Son by the Spirit, and thereby of the Father. The full revelation of the one God is only thus - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This, this only, is what the one God is, one identity of will and being, so that they are essentially one and one only, yet distinct in willing and acting (and we can distinguish them in willing and acting: hence we commonly speak of persons), yet never willing or acting but in the common will and unity of nature.

I fear much human language on this. But I affirm that the only full revelation of the one true God is the revelation of Him in the Trinity. Our prayers rise up the same. Through Him (Christ the Son) we have access by one Spirit unto the Father.

The Absolute

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There can be no absolute knowledge in man by his own reason, but only relative. God only is absolute; all other existences can be only relative, because there is only God absolute.

There is that which is next to it - the "I," which is out of time and space, and by its nature as such precludes relation; but it does not make the "I" absolute. First, there is no consciousness of absoluteness in it, though it helps one to the idea from the negation of relationship, while a negation is not a notion of the thing contradictory of that denied. But, further, consciousness (or the "I") is corrected by perception; for I perceive other things - not the "I." Be they ideas or things, it is all one, they are not the "I"; and the "I" becomes relative, is not absolute, existing in itself or infinite. The "I" is not "I am." "Am" is affirming something about "I": and as man I get into relativeness at once. When one says "I," infiniteness is excluded as time; but when the "I" reflects on itself, there is (I do not doubt) the consciousness that it is not absolute but dependent, has a source or cause, cannot say "being," though it can say "am" - not "becoming" (that is false) but "am." If I say "being" in any other sense than "am," I make myself God, as "I am." But, not being, I have to inquire what I am becoming, because what is not absolute has possibility of change: and what has possibility of change in becoming has necessity of becoming to be, that is, though existing, is not absolute, but flows from and depends on an absolute Being.

If it be inquired, if my relationship even with perceived things denies my absoluteness, has God not relationship with what exists, with me? None but what is the fruit of His own will. I am necessarily in relationship with what has caused me to be, by reason of which I have become, or with things which exist without my will. I am in relationship according to my being; I exist in that condition: God does not. He may form such relationships; but they are the fruit of His will; and His being remains in its own absoluteness. I have no doubt that man has an intuitive consciousness of relationship, and of relationship to a superior Being, independent of himself, with whom he is in relationship, though his ideas of that Being may be utterly false and corrupted; but that which is false and corrupted is in his natural intuition. Mind cannot know God, because relative cannot know absolute. But if imagination works, it corrupts the intuition mythologically. If mind works, it shews by its efforts its incapacity to reach what it is; but both the mythology and the efforts shew that there is the intuitive idea which sets the imagination and mind respectively in movement. But there is more than this. The immensely wider extent and preponderance of superstition, the rareness and shortlivedness of mental rejection of God theoretically, prove the power and strength of the intuition above mere mind. This may despise in its pretentiousness the intuition of a Being above us on which we are dependent; but the intuition is master of it always. Indeed, in detail the strongest minds are therefore grossly superstitious, because the want of the soul has not through the mind its natural pabulum.

19 Hence Renan and Scherer are perfectly right when they say, "all is relative"; and perhaps even when they say, "all [save the 'I'] is relation." Even what the "I" is, is entirely relative. But it is because they are wholly ignorant of God, who alone is absolute.

That science is become history is true, because thought has run itself out to the conviction of its incompetency, and can only relate what it has been thinking with a partial point of truth in it, but not the truth, of which the mind is incapable and owns itself such by making history of science. That this is all that can be, it is incompetent to say. It can only say and does admit that this is all it is competent for; because it cannot go beyond itself, and, being only itself cannot say of itself that there is nothing else which is competent, or that in some other way it cannot be arrived at or received. I admit and accept of its confession of incompetency.

Scherer reduces man to the lowest estimate of judgment of God and good. "Le vrai n'est plus vrai en soi" (the true is no more true in itself): a ridiculous sentence, because "le vrai" then cannot be. "Le vrai, le beau, le juste meme se font perpetueilement . . . ils ne sont autre chose que l'esprit humain." (The true, the beautiful, the just reproduce themselves perpetually: they are nothing but the mind of man). - (Revue des deux M., Feb. 15, 1861.) Now this is a statement that no nature can be, in apprehension or being, above man; or else "le vrai, le beau, le juste," may be "vrai, beau, juste en soi." Nor is this all. As to man they are relative, because he is so; yet, if there be a superior relation to one who is absolute, there is a fixed "vrai, beau, juste" morally in relation to Him, because He is the Absolute. It is simply a total denial of God or anything beyond the changing states or apprehensions of man; and makes man the end and beginning of himself; for if there be another thing or being to which he is in relation as end or beginning, there is as regards man a fixed measure of true, beautiful, just. So that this is merely the declaration that there is no relation beyond self; for if man is the measure and changes, it is simply self. This is philosophy.

20 Now I admit the partial truth (with a cloud of thoughts about it in philosophising), of which modern philosophy can only give a history, being, even as to this partial truth, past the power of conceiving truth. But progress is questionable. one man reasons from perceptions and sensation to prove God, another from final causes, another from intuitions, another from an innate perception of the absolute. All are true as a subjective, intuitive, or intellectual necessity; but they never reach objective knowledge either way: and man vacillates between all of them and arrives at - concludes - nothing! But the want and the craving do prove the truth, not of what the object is, but that there is an object - an unknown one. It is the "unknown God." You cannot know, but you cannot dispersuade that there is something to know. Hunger is not food, or the knowledge of food as possessed; but it is an undeniable proof to the hungry (take it as reasoning or want) that there is food to be known. And this moral condition is because man, in whose nostrils was breathed the breath of life from God, is thus in nature formed for God, and has not God.

Thus, when men have made the Logos the human mind or the human reason - the impersonal reason - with a vast system of philosophy to give it a body, there is a germ of truth; for there is that spirit in man which comes from the inbreathing of God originally. Yea, in wretched Pantheism there is a germ of truth; for God is above all and through all. All too live and move and have their being in Him. By Him all things consist. But where God is not known objectively, this centres in self: "Ils ne sont autre chose que l'esprit humain" (the most degraded of sentences); and centring in self is the perfection of degradation. But all these germs of truth, the truth (the word of God) gives us as certain truth in two words without the cobweb spinning of philosophy which proves its incompetency, the mind of man vacillating between systems formed from their germs without the true object of them; for that is philosophy.

21 But the truth does more; it gives us their true object as beginning, present fulness, and end, with the assurance of knowing as we are known, knowledge being now in part. And it takes us out of self by an object. And now see the divine wisdom with which this is done. I want the absolute but cannot have it, because I am in a relative condition; yet, if I have it not, I am reduced to what "n'est qu'humain" - self occupied with self. In Christ I have the absolute become relative, giving me the absolute goodness in coming into relation, perfect love and perfect light. But I have it more fully. I have the truth as to everything from the supreme God to sin, the world, the devil its prince, death itself and the dust of death with triumph over it. If I can see, I have the perfect "vrai, beau, juste"; and if not, I have it relatively to me - to man. But now I have it maintained to my soul in God, in Christ's life as perfect man relatively to God, and to the whole character of God in the atonement on the cross. I get absolute moral attributes glorified in God at the cost of abnegation of self in man (that is, in man who was the Son of God), love, righteousness, majesty, and truth. God was glorified in Him.

Thus I have the absolute in qualities maintained for my mind - my moral mind - in the cross, and self absolutely gone in man; I have the absolute in good become relative, so that my heart can and does know and delight in it. Could God's ways be more perfect or more wise?

Wise philosophy objects to this display of God's absolute character at Christ's expense, not seeing that it is the additional beauty and moral excellence of His giving Himself - the moral perfection of man, as absolute as what is relative can be, and absolute in Christ because He could give Himself. "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again," yet this, that it might be perfect in man, obedience to His Father - "this commandment have I received of my Father." But how can philosophy understand this? "Ils ne sont autre chose que l'esprit humain"; that is, self varied in its hopeless efforts to enlarge but never getting out of self. We cannot but in a subordinate sense give ourselves, because we are relative: we are not our own; for what is relative is bound to conformity to that relation. But, God having revealed Himself in Christ in grace to us, the discovery of this supreme relationship in absolute claim does free us from all others and lead us to give up self in all things in which it is sought, while sanctioning the relationships in which God had originally placed man, or to which he is rightly subjected as being of God Himself, such as magistracy, etc. Yet these may be given up (I mean natural relationships as connected with self) by a superior motive, the divine object taking possession of the soul in active love to others.

22 How admirable and divine the whole scheme is! The very wants suit, taking man out of self by the absolute become relative and perfection in the relative toward God and toward man, while the absolute is maintained to our souls in every sense by the sacrifice of Christ and man's perfect abnegation of self in the same to glorify God. The result is man dwelling in God (and God in him) and that in glory; this last known only in hope through positive revelation, yet felt to be necessary because of the preparation laid for it (see beginning of John 17), the rest enjoyed now, though this could only have been by divine actings (and we have it by divine communication as to truth and power, which is another subject), but when known, enjoyed as known truth in itself. He that believes not has made God a liar; he has not believed the record or testimony; but he that believes on the Son of God has the witness in himself.

But if all be relative and relation, according to logic by the doctrine of excluded middle there must be an absolute. Not that this makes us know anything but that there must be the thing. For the truth of excluded middle is, I suspect, always simply that the term is really a negative or involves one - that is, proves that there is an intuitive consciousness that there is the thing negatived, not that we know it, and I suspect is never true but in the case of the absolute. Thus, if I say, It is good or bad, it is only if I view the term absolutely that I can say so. It is a colour, therefore not white or black, both which negative absolutely all colour. It is when a term implies that it embraces in its nature all but its opposite. Both need not (indeed cannot) be absolute, but one must be; and the reasoning is always from the non-absolute to the absolute, which can exist without anything else existing. Nothing else can; for a thing, not being absolute, is in relation. It is simply therefore the proof of the intuition of the existence of the absolute.

23 It is a mistake to suppose that metaphysical scepticism denies the certainty of knowledge within the sphere of knowledge. It only affirms that the finite cannot know the infinite - that no conclusion is the truth, because it is not the knowledge of God. Truth is what is told, not what is concluded; and hence, as to what is beyond physical fact, it must be a revelation. once God is admitted, certain abstract general conclusions can be drawn because they are involved in the meaning of the word; they are merely the ｅxpression of the relation. But they are not the truth, because this speaks of fact. Now it is not necessarily a fact that the relation subsists intact, and that man has not denied it: Christianity teaches that he has. At any rate, it is not proved he has not - yea, it may be proved he has. For fatalism and the moral immutability of man are absurdities. Our will is at work. Nor does the unchangeableness of general laws as to facts or results touch the question of will. If it proves motives, it proves a will to be moved: of this I have spoken elsewhere. Until a will be denied, it cannot be denied that a given state in relationship may be departed from. Hence even right conclusions as to the relationship are not necessarily the truth, though they be right. Indeed all the effort to insist on general laws is the revolt of man's heart against the relation with God being according to what we are, and the unwillingness to admit we have broken it.

I do not enter on the proofs of general laws from without, because physical general laws do not touch the question. That man acts by a will, without contradicting them, is evident; yet as to him all depends on what his will was. He builds or does not build a house: gravity and every other law remains the same. But he may have been selfish, or unjust, or generous in doing it, whether they be or not. I think my nature as ideally abstract as most philosophers'; but this does not affect the question whether there are divine facts which meet these ideas, and whether they are not the just idea for which God formed as so having them. Thus, supposing man God's image in his constitution, the ideas flowing from this would not be the source or end. But God (or the revelation of God as being the truth) the cravings of a dependent creature sought after, but heeded not. Yet it is equally true, whenever he pretended to have anything to meet the wants or to form a system by them without God, he was in open rebellion by independency. And this is what shews the fulness of simple Christianity (which totally rejected, as evil, heathenism and philosophy), and yet the measure of truth but real departure from God of the Clements and Origens, [that is, the so called "fathers,"] who accepted these cravings as part of the truth. They were not, though the truth met them when not simply lusts. Christ alone is the truth; His word is, because He is as He said, "altogether that which I also say to you," John 8: 25.

24 I do not lose sight of the absolute in speaking of absolute qualities: if I have one, I have the other; and what is relative is, if simple, absolute as a quality. In common use it is found by negation of what is or of variety. Some words or qualities are only relative. Still, when truly known, they become absolute. Thus "heavy" is simply relative; but when I know it, it is attraction: if there were none, it is absolutely negative in respect of weight; and as weight is relative, I can conceive its absence, because its presence is not necessary; for it is a relative quality. Absolute Being is God alone. But, taking man as a centre, we may speak practically of certain things as absolute when they are negative.

The great blunder of Schleiermacher, and the source of the worst infidelity now, is that he has taken the Holy Ghost's work in us - very likely in himself - for intuition, or specially collective Christian consciousness. He made divine teaching, in which case it is real, to be a title of human judgment on what the Holy Ghost gave. This is, I suspect, the key to the whole system, itself probably the fruit of Kantian philosophy and its offsets. The whole hangs on the church's not believing in the positive operation of the Holy Ghost. For all that Scherer and Bunsen, etc., pretend on their best side is simply Schleiermacher. Thus the Bible is Christian consciousness then: we judge it by Christian consciousness now. Hence it is, as Scherer says, the mere history of partial apprehension of truth; and of course, as every philosopher trusts himself, we judge scripture. That is, there is no revelation; for revelation must have authority or is false. Be it that the church was before the New Testament and the latter written for believers; yet the question is not thereby touched, whether it was not written by the power and direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost to give certainty and a divine record of those things in which they had been instructed. If the consciousness of believers was there, it was not to reproduce this but something else. It was to confirm and correct theirs by a divine statement of it, and give a sure record of that divinely-taught truth. Thus its being given to believers is, as far as it goes, a proof that it was not merely the ｅxpression of religious consciousness as then developed.