p. 149There is one difficulty I strongly feel on the subject of God. It is practical more than the theoretical, and I daresay it has more to do with my own mental incapacity than with the subject itself. Still it is a real difficulty and sometimes even a distress to me.
What is it?—It is difficult to express. It has to do with realizing God. I can recognize supreme intelligence, both in creation and in the Bible; but I am baffled in every attempt to connect this intelligence with personality. I seem to glory in the wisdom of the universe without being able to love the Father as a Being. I do not know that you can catch my thought.
I catch it entirely. It is one that occurs in a more or less distinct form to every thinking mind.
It is connected with another phase of the subject which I often find myself busy with, viz., the perfect passivity of Nature. Although everything is so wisely contrived, there is no sign of the participation of a living intelligence in their operations. Everything p. 150 works so mechanically, so regularly, by such fixed and unvarying law—that it is difficult to conceive of a personality having to do with the system in any way. It is exactly like machinery; and we know that machinery in no way depends upon the co-operation of personal intelligence external to itself, provided all its parts are perfect. I wish we had such tokens of God’s relation to His works and superintendence of them, as we see in the case of a great factory and its proprietor. It is hard to believe in a Divine management of the world and in the Divine direction of our own lives, in the absence of every indication that would shew it.—I grant it would not only be hard: it would be impossible to conceive of the Divine relations of the universe if there were a total absence of indication of their existence.
Do you think you see indications?—I go further than that; the indications are demonstrations. Our very senses are compelled to surrender to them when they are fully displayed.
I am glad to hear you speak with such cheery confidence. I wish I could feel the same positiveness.—It is a question of mental sight. As the proverb goes, “Seeing is believing.”
Mental sight is the difficulty.—True: but difficulties are sometimes artificial. Let us take the first of the two points you mentioned first: your recognition of intelligence, but inability to connect it with personality: your glorying in wisdom without being able to love the Father as a Being. Have you clearly formulated to your own mind what you mean by “intelligence” and “wisdom”?—I don’t know that I have, beyond the idea of intelligence and wisdom characterizing the arrangement of things.
The terms imply the adaptation of means to ends, p. 151 do they not? And therefore the operation of intelligence in making the necessary adjustments.—They imply that the means are adapted to the ends; but I do not know that they just tell us how the adaptation has been made.
If they tell of intelligence, they must tell of one who is intelligent. How can you have intelligence without a being who in intelligent? The very first ingredient in the conception of intelligence is the existence of a being to possess the power or attribute of intelligence.—Yes, as a matter of words that seems so.
But is it not so as a matter of fact? Can intelligence exist apart from personality? (Hesitates)
You hesitate. What is intelligence? Is it not the discernment of the relation of things—the power to conceive, contemplate, and desire results, and the power to employ means to bring them about?—As applied to man, that is undoubtedly true.
But if that be the nature of intelligence, it must be true in its application to every order of being. There cannot be intelligence without a conscious personality to be intelligent? If you think there can, you must have a different idea of intelligence from what you have yet expressed, or, I may add, than you can express. Perhaps you will try again. Can you give any definition of intelligence that will exclude personality as its basis?—The quality of intelligence might exist in a made thing without personality residing in the thing.
It would not be intelligence, would it, but the stamp of intelligence? Could the intelligence exist in the thing without first existing in the maker? Besides in the real sense, there is no intelligence in the thing. A cleverly constructed toy, for example, p. 152 would not be intelligent, but the fruit of intelligence in its maker. An intelligent toy would be one that could exercise intelligence; could there be such a thing?—No, I suppose not.
An engine is a triumph of intelligent skill; but there is no intelligence in the engine. It is a mere adaptation of parts effected by intelligence outside of itself. Now if the universe shews, as you admit, the stamp of intelligence, must there not be an intelligent Being somewhere who has had to do with it?—But my difficulty is in applying the idea conveyed in the word “being” to God. When I speak of a being, I think of a creature of limited parts like man, or an animal of some sort. I cannot apply this idea to a being that holds all others.
No: you cannot apply such an idea of “being” to God; but there is nothing to debar the right idea from being applied. Being is existence. There are various kinds of existence, and all existence is real. Air is existence, water is existence, light is existence.
But you would not call God a Being in that sense?—Only in the sense that He exists as really as they. The difference is as to nature of existence. There is a first existence that lies at the root of all existence, and this is God; and it is a manifest necessity in His existence that there must appertain to Him that ability to contrive and execute wisely, of which we see the results in all other existences. Why should there be any hesitation in recognizing that intelligence in Him in which the whole universe is an expression; and how can you have intelligence without personality?
There is force in the way you put it; but the difficulty seems to remain.—The difficulty is purely the result of our own smallness and not of the subject itself. Man is an intelligent person. He might be p. 153 a person without intelligence, but he could not be intelligent without being a person. Why should we limit our ideas of intelligence and personality to a being so limited and weak as man? If these two attributes can be associated with a frail and corruptible organism such as he is, it ought to be an argument for a far higher association, instead of suggesting that they are limited to him. The unity of the stupendous universe involves the conclusion that it is the workmanship of a Supreme Person and though we more easily think of man than of God as a person, it is the mere result of our familiarity with man. It is not that “the glory of the incorruptible God” in any way naturally excludes it. In fact, if you remove personality from God, you obliterate God; for the essential idea of God as revealed (and necessitated by the constitution of Nature), is that of one supreme and all-wise, and all-powerful Person, out of whose irradiant energy, as the first substance, all things have been formed. When you feel the idea to be too great for realization, remember that it is the sensation of mortal weakness and limitedness, and not the necessary quality of the subject itself. The fact is there, whether we can carry it or not. Facts exist in themselves without reference to human capacity to march abreast of them. In this connection, one of the first achievements for man in a successful search for wisdom is to know that he is very small and weak, and that all his powers are derived from a Source which is eternal and self-subsisting.
It must be so; it must be so. You were to say a word on the other point, the absence of apparent participation on the part of God in the carrying on of creation.—We must reserve that to our next meeting.