Page:Literature and Dogma (1883).djvu/60

 history and earliest utterances, under the name of Eloah, Elohim, The Mighty, there may have lain and matured, there did lie and mature, ideas of God more as a moral power, more as a power connected, above everything, with conduct and righteousness, than were entertained by other races. Not only can we judge by the result that this must have been so, but we can see that it was so. Still their name, The Mighty, does not in itself involve any true and deep religious ideas, any more than our Aryan name, Deva, Deus, The Shining. With The Eternal it is otherwise. For what did they mean by the Eternal; the Eternal what? The Eternal cause? Alas, these poor people were not Archbishops of York. They meant the Eternal righteous, who loveth righteousness. They had dwelt upon the thought of conduct, and of right and wrong, until the not ourselves, which is in us and all around us, became to them adorable eminently and altogether as a power which makes for righteousness; which makes for it unchangeably and eternally, and is therefore called The Eternal.

There is not a particle of metaphysics in their use of this name, any more than in their conception of the not ourselves to which they attached it. Both came to them not from abstruse reasoning but from experience, and from experience in the plain region of conduct. Theologians with metaphysical heads render Israel's Eternal by the self-existent, and Israel's not ourselves by the absolute, and attribute to Israel their own subtleties. According to them, Israel had his head full of the necessity of a first cause, and therefore said, The Eternal; as, again, they imagine him looking out into the world, noting everywhere the marks of design and adaptation to his wants, and reasoning out and inferring thence the fatherhood of God. All these fancies come from an excessive turn for reasoning, and from a neglect of observing men's actual course of thinking and way of using words.