Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/41

Rh Kant, Darwin and many others were not mere accidents, but that they appeared when they did because of a peculiar fitness. God may have chosen them before they were born, as Jeremiah thought that he was chosen, to be rulers in the lives of men and transformers of civilization.

Especially would God need help in revealing his character and man’s highest interests to men. He could not reveal himself to men through nature, through the sun, the earth, the ocean, or the winds, for these are abstract aspects of his life, and when so taken are impersonal. Being a person he could only reveal himself through men, and through men only as they became like him in character, like him in their fundamental interests. It should be obvious then, that revealing his life to men would be a slow and tentative process, a process in which many men of great insight would be used to rule in the lives of a people selected because of their possession of promising attitudes.

As a matter of fact, the ideas of God most commonly held in the highest civilization of the present time had their genesis in the lives of the people of Israel. And the ideas of God achieved by the people of Israel had their genesis in the lives of leaders of great insight who appeared among them at critical times and taught them ever newer and better ideas of God. These ideas they committed to writing, and the literature known as the Old Testament was the result.

These scriptures may express numerous ideas and hopes now believed to be false. But, even so, without these false notions of God and human life, better ones could not possibly have been developed. The false must be transformed into the truer, and while the process of transformation was going on, the energies that were manifest in the false ideas and acts would be becoming able to put forth, like an embryonic growth, new ideas and acts. Only through the death of the old life, now become, from being what was as a nourishing and protecting set of leaves, or perhaps a hard shell and a prickly rind, mere refuse, could the new and better life be created. With all their false notions, to those who have characters which admit of their seeing the good attitudes, these scriptures are believed to reveal, as through a glass darkly, the character or will of God and the highest interests of men. The moral and religious ideals developed in the lives of the Jewish people have entered as the most vital and all pervading elements into the civilization that is being worked out by and for men.

But these scriptures express ideas chiefly, and but partial ideas, of the character of God, and the nature of man’s fullest interests. Ideas, however, are but a source of the life overtly lived, a nourisher and a means of the fullest living. God could only