THE REAL GOD."

My subject is "The Real God," or, in other words, the reality of God, and my design is, if possible, to show in what sense God may be, to us a reality, a real force or being, a "living God." My object is not to discourse of the gods which are actual and real to men, for then I must speak of pleasure, of wealth and fame, of success and victory; for these are the deities that men truly and daily worship. There is an everlasting difference between the deity that is professed and the God that is adored, between the God that we write the name of in our creed and the God that we worship in our hearts, between the God of theology and the God of life. Many a man's God is the very opposite of what he says it is. He will talk to you about his deity, will define it, and describe it in well considered terms, will tell you how it differs from the deity held by his neighbours; but follow the course of the man's life, consult the drift of his motives and impulses, see what it is that sways his desire, and you will find that it is some mean thing, some idle, grovelling passion that he would be shocked at if it was fairly presented to him.

No faith has a great practical value that is not in some sense real. The faith in God must be real, if it is to prevail. The popular faith is real. The mass of mankind truly believe in a living,

This Essay, circulated as a pamphlet in the United States, is here printed for English readers by authority of the Author.

operative, personal deity. They cannot speak intelligently of him; they cannot define him; they cannot give reasons for the faith that is in them; they can follow no line of argument in demonstration of his existence; but yet there is an instinctive, awful feeling of his actual presence in the world, which controls, regulates, and predetermines human life. That this is so need not be argued. It is too evident to be doubted. Go among simple men and women of all classes, search the by-ways of life, and you will find a steadfast simplicity of goodness, sincerity, honesty, and veracity which can be accounted for, not on the theory of intuitive knowledge, not on the theory of an instinctive faith in God, but as a sense, a feeling, an impression that, outside of themselves, outside of the working world, there is a power which thinks, feels, purposes, and impels the world towards certain ends of its own. God becomes unreal when life ceases to be simple; when men, engaged in business, completely absorbed in terrestrial affairs, lose the sense of mystery that embosoms and exalts human life; or, it may be, when they are engaged in intellectual pursuits, in the study of science or literature ; then, engrossed in themselves, interested in the workings of their own minds, they forget the overarching reality that holds them and everything in its place. The unreality of God haunts the working mind. You find it in cities, where men are busy with their own affairs. You do not find it in the country, where men are natural, thoughtless of themselves, and earnest in their service of

others; where they lay aside their vanity and conceit.

Men in all ages have insisted on having, not a speculative, but a living God. The evidences of this are before us. Superstition, that grim, gaunt, awful thing that we speak of, sometimes in the language of horror, sometimes in terms of contempt, is, when duly examined, an effort to realize God, to make divine things palpable, tangible,—to give them a local habitation and a name. Superstition takes its colour from the mind that entertains it, from the fears or hopes, hates or loves, that see a horrible ugliness or an immortal beauty in the immediate world of matter. Sometimes it is horrible, as in India, sometimes it is lovely, as in Greece; but, whether hideous or charming, it is an attempt to detain the fugitive spirit of the law that bathes and governs the world. All men are superstitious; and they will be, to a certain extent, to the end of time; for superstition, shading off in infinite degrees as it does, reaches the lowest, but does not leave the highest intelligence.

Idolatry is another effort to realize or make palpable divine powers; to make God an actual living being. The world is full of idols, horrible idols, some of them ghastly, stained with blood, but all in their way symbolical. The deities of Greece were idols none the less for being models of beauty to all time. The image which one sets up in his mind when he undertakes to conceive of deity is an idol. It cannot be seen or touched; still it has its outline to the thought; it is palpable to the intellectual apprehension. The real secret

of idolatry is doubtless this, that the idol expresses what the unaided mind cannot grasp. The idolator does not necessarily worship the image; he adores the idea behind the image. At last, perhaps, he comes to worship the image, but only at last. This he did in Pagan times. This he does in Christian times. The ordinary Catholic worships the picture of the Virgin as devoutly as the ordinary Greek or Roman worshipped his block of stone. The intelligent Catholic sees the spirit behind the picture and bends before that.

The Ark of the Covenant, which we read of in the Old Testament, was a symbol intended to localize deity. If we know anything about the deity of the early Hebrews, and I confess we know very little, perhaps nothing at all,— that conception, without regard to its date, was the purest, the noblest, the highest ideal, on the whole, that has ever been entertained by any considerable number of the human family, a highly intellectual conception of a deity without form or substance, having no abiding place, fashioned after the image of no created thing, whether orb of heaven or monster of the deep, beast, insect, man, creeping thing or imaginary being, offspring of fear or fancy; but it has never been possible for a race of men for any length of time to entertain an intellectual conception of deity. The Ark of the Covenant was an attempt as innocent as could be made to localize and domesticate the impalpable. It was a wooden box of ordinary fashion and regular dimensions, furnished with conveniences for handling and

carriage, all but devoid of ornament; yet the people became accustomed to look upon it as a divine symbol. Where it was, there was' Jehovah; where it went, there Jehovah went. In the course of time the lowest, the vulgarest superstition gathered upon it. To lose it was to lose the support of deity; to possess it was to have the living deity in the midst of the people.

Pass now to the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. That, again, was an attempt to realize the godhead, to take the divine being out of the vast bleak space of the heavens and make Him a man. The Christ was "God with us," Emmanuel; he was the word become a man, the whole of deity in the human form, walking about in the streets of cities, sitting at meat in human dwellings, talking with men and women as a friend, sympathizing with them in their sorrow, curing their diseases, raising up their dead. This was the thought that gave vitality to the early Church. Around this central conception the modern Church gathers. The jealousy that the Trinitarian even to-day has of the Unitarian is founded upon this belief that the incarnation must contain the whole of God. The Christ must be verily God with us, not an archangel, not a spiritual creature of even the highest rank, but the infinite, the omnipresent, the omniscient, the perfect wisdom and love, the fulness, the All in All,-this, nothing else, and nothing less. The Trinitarian charges the Unitarian with dividing the godhead, letting the divine essence depart and become once more a film in the air. There is no longer, he says, a real

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