Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/85

Rh represented God as perfectly benevolent. In the Old Testament he is described as just, but at the same time terrible and pitiless against the wicked; and at least one form of modern Christianity, Calvinism, takes a view of the Divine character which it is impossible to reconcile with infinite benevolence. Moreover, if almost all theologies have introduced what we should ascribe as miracle, yet it would be very incorrect to class many of them in this respect with that current view of Christianity, which represents God as demonstrating his existence by occasional interruptions of the order, otherwise invariable, of Nature. Probably, in the majority of theologies, no other law of Nature, except the will of God, is recognized; miracle, when it is introduced, is not regarded as breaking through any order; the very notion conveyed by the word supernatural is unacknowledged; miraculous occurrences are not distinguished from ordinary ones, except as being rarer, and not distinguished from rare occurrences at all. To an ancient Jew probably an earthquake and the staying of the sun on Gibeon were occurrences of precisely the same character and not distinguished as they are in our minds, the one as rare but natural, the other as supernatural and miraculous. All that was miraculous might have been removed from the creed of an ancient Jew without shaking his theology. Two out of the three propositions, then, are not necessary to the theological view of the universe. But surely the third is. Surely all theology implies that a Personal Will is the cause of the universe. I cannot admit even this. In the first place it is a very shallow view of theologies which represents them as having in all cases sprung from speculation about causes. Undoubtedly we can trace this speculation in our own religion. The phenomena of the world are accounted for very manifestly in the book of Genesis by the fiat of a Personal Will. But this is not at all an invariable character of theology. The Deity of a thing is often regarded in theologies not at all as the cause of it, but in quite another way, perhaps I might say as the unity of it. No one has ever supposed that the Greeks regarded Poseidon as the cause of the sea. Athena seems to have been suggested to them by the sky, but she is not the cause of the sky. And it would be easy to conceive a theology which did not occupy itself at all with causes, but which at the same time conceived the separate phenomena of the universe, or the universe itself altogether personally

May we, then, alter the proposition thus—instead of saying. It is characteristic of the theological view of the universe to suppose a personal will or wills to be the cause of all phenomena, may we say, Theology invariably conceives the universe under the form of personality, a personal will being assumed as either the cause or the law of phenomena? Even this would be to go too far. Personality is only known to us as belonging to human beings. Personality is properly the abstraction of the qualities common to man, woman and child. Of these one of the principal is what we call the will.