Spirit, than has been recorded in any sacred book of the Orient.

It appears to us that it is a terrible experience to live without faith in the one God. It stirs the most earnest missionary spirit, to enter by sympathy into the consciousness of those multitudes in the great Eastern world who have not yet fully learned the monotheism of science or the monotheism of religion. A student of Asiatic thought has said: "Faith in the unity of law is the foundation of all science, but the average Asiatic has not this thought or faith. Appalled at his own insignificance, amid the sublime mysteries and awful immensities of nature, the shadows of his own mind become to him real existences." "Just so far as Christianity has accustomed the world to its radical doctrine of a changeless and omnipotent God, it has given to science an undecaying basis and impulse." Students of Japan have seen what a poisonous and corrupting element in Japanese life has been the rude pantheism which branches out into polytheism and idolatry. The scientific education which that wonderful people has welcomed has done much to remove the incubus, to replace and refill the mind," but "for the cultured, whose minds waver and whose feet flounder, as well as for the unlearned and priest-ridden, there is no surer help and healing than that faith in the Heavenly Father which gives the unifying thought to him who looks through crea-* tion."

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Now Christianity, we believe, has a perfect theism with which to emancipate the bewildered intellect, and more than this it has a loving God with whom to satisfy the restless and sin-burdened heart. Doubtless the doctrine of the divine unity is not the exclusive possession, nor the original discovery of Christian teachers. Rude sorts of monotheism are discoverable in the ancient faiths of Japan and China. The testimony to the existence of a vague primeval monotheism, Egyptian, Vedic, Zoroastrian, Chinese, Mexican, is neither slight nor weak. There is certainly a very ancient Hellenic belief in the unknown God whom Paul unveiled at Athens, the God "whose foot-prints have been found on the shifting sands of remote history." The early poetry of Greece is not lacking in glimpses of a supreme spiritual Zeus "before the ideal had been degraded by the mythmaking fancy." In the Varuna of the Hindu hymns we have what has been termed the earliest picture of the unknown God. But how different is the occasional, unstable monotheism which in later Hinduism becomes pantheistic and polytheistic

from that proclaimed to Israel, "The Lord our God is one Lord." Christian theism, wherein the divine unity is warmed by an indwelling Fatherhood, is in vivid contrast with the cold and stern Deity of the Greek philosophers, too cold and stern to be the God of the multitudes and lacking the highest ethical elements "even unselfish love and child-like purity." Zeus the father of the Greek gods, is far from being the loving Father of all men. The philosopher Lotze deemed the God-consciousness of the classical world as a rivulet matched with a rushing river, by the side of the God-consciousness of the Hebrew, and when we reflect that Jesus purified and perfected even the best knowledge of God which came to the prophets, we recall the observation of Pascal, that "Christianity is so divine that another divine religion was only its foundation." "The Old Testament knew God as the Father of a nation, Christ knew Him as the Father of the individual soul."

Still we make a mistake to under-rate that knowledge of the Divine Nature which the whole providential training of Israel was designed to give. The stirring and eventful history which is the back-ground of the Old Testament revelation was God's school for the chosen people, to lift them from the grossness of idolatrous worship into true conceptions of Himself and especially of His unity and spirituality. God meant something great and wonderful, not only for Israel, but for universal humanity, when He called Abraham and from him raised up a peculiar people; when He brought Israel out of idolatrous Egypt, when He led them forty years through Arabian sands that they might forget the fascinations of Egyptian polytheism. He meant something by the decree that every male Jew should wear between his eyes and bind upon his hand and write upon the posts of his house and the gates of his city, the sublime declaration, "The Lord our God is one Lord." Deep down beneath the seven-fold ruins of Jerusalem lie to-day the foundations of that temple in which was no graven image or painted Deity such as Egypt and Athens adored, but in whose holiest sanctuary void of light and empty of human contrivance, the High Priest communed with the one invisible Jehovah. Providence never took so much pains to teach any other lesson as that of the divine unity; the schooling lasted two thousand years from the call of Abraham to the destruction of Jerusalem. When the house of Jacob deserted the God of Bethel, He brought down upon it the flails of Egypt and Babylon. From the Nile and the Euphrates He

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summoned His ministers of correction, and frightened eyes saw the vales about Jerusalem which had been polluted with heathen altars, bright with the scarlet shields of Assyrian horsemen. The Holy City was laid in heaps, and in long captivity Israel relearned the lesson which Abraham and Moses and David and Jeremiah had taught, which Jesus reaffirmed in Judea, and Paul reproclaimed in the commercial and intellectual capitals of Greece.

All the natural attributes which belong to a true conception of the Deity have found in the Old Testament their grandest expression; and the higher elements of the divine nature, His righteousness and mercy burn like a line of fire through the Hebrew Scriptures. And many highest conceptions of the supreme splendor of the Divine Personality and righteousness have grown up under the fervent teachings of lawgiver, and psalmist and prophet. The ancient Scriptures employed all earthly types and relationships to actualize and illuminate our conceptions of Him in whose mind all earthly phenomena lay as ideas before the world came into being. According to Biblical theism God is a person, and not Matthew Arnold's "stream of tendency." Doubtless, personality in God does not denote being with the limitations of human personality, but for popular speech any other representation is excluded. "God cannot be thought of as a personality by the side of others, but as the personality embracing all other personalities in conscious freedom." And we do not spiritualize our conception of Him by thinking of the God-head as a vague something diffused through the universe, reaching on through immensity, not altogether here nor altogether there, but pervading all things like a subtle other. If this be true then only an infinitesimal part of God can be in one place at a time. God is divided if partly here and partly a thousand miles away. But spirit cannot be divided. It is the Biblical representation that God is wholly present everywhere. God is immanent in Nature, as well as transcendent, above nature. To the Christian theist, as to the Hindu pantheist, the world is transfused with God like a globe of crystal in which the light dwells. The universe, as one has said, "is a handful of dust which God enchants," a thought which has inspired all the greater poets. Martineau has written that "beneath the dome of this universe we cannot stand where the musings of the eternal mind do not murmur round us and the visions of His loving thought appear." "Nature," as Emerson says, "is too thin a veil, for God is

all the while breaking through." Human life and all life are too wonderful for us to keep out of them God," the mysterious magic that possesses the world." Our modern studies have shown us the omnipresence of thought and adaptation in the universe, so that we look upon the earth as having apparently been made to be a school-room, a workshop, a home, a temple for man. We look upon the universe and find intelligent order everywhere apparent. We perceive that the idea of each created thing must have existed before the thing itself came into being as it did in all probability through that process which we call evolution, a doctrine which, as Professor Drummond has well said "has not affected except to improve and confirm it, the old teaching that all things have been created on a plan.' The presence of mind is manifest in the numberless adaptations everywhere discoverable, and the deeper we go in order to inspect the beginnings of life, the more startling are the disclosures of divine activity and intelligence. God is evidently directing the movement and development of the original cells out of which spring oaks, oxen, olive trees, the rose, the lion, the vulture and all the marvels of organized existence, weaving the various tissues of this living tapestry. An everywhere-present God is essential to the carrying on of universal life, spanning the clouds with rainbows, painting a thousand landscapes on the wings of butterflies, marshalling the hosts of the suns, directing the infinite armies of the atoms. The universe is one blazing wheel within other blazing wheels, all rushing with inconceivable rapidity and testifying by the omnipresence of motion to the omnipresence of that mind that created and upholds all things, and without whose continued activity, the very thought of universal motion is inconceivable and inconceivably absurd.

Modern Science, the handmaid and helper of Christian Theism, presents also to our attention the fact of the universality of law, the want of caprice in the motions of the universe, the undeviating submission of all things to intelligent regulation so that the winds do not blow without method, nor the waves roll disobedient to the divine mathematics. But law is inconceivable except as the working of a willing mind. Self-made or self-executed it is an absurdity, as much so as a proposition made to an organ that it should compose and render the Hallelujah Chorus or any other great piece of music; so that when we have extended the domain of law so as to embrace the rushing and shining host of the stars, and when we have found law everywhere executed, we have only announced the

omnipresence of Him who said to Jeremiah," Am I a God at hand, and not a God afar off? Do I not fill Heaven and earth?" And furthermore wide and careful observation brings before us the omnipresence of conscience, the solemn fact that the moral law cannot be escaped, that though we may put oceans between us and courts of justice, infinite space cannot separate us from conscience. Neither Heaven nor hell nor the uttermost part of the sea is beyond the immediate action of the moral law. There are great distinctions such as right and wrong expressed in all languages, perceivable in all nations. Men everywhere are under obligation to choose what is good and to shun what is evil, and they have felt that in their moral choices they have had the approval or disapproval of some one above themselves. What is the explanation of these facts and convictions? If you ask History, she answers, God. Pointing to the smoke of countless sacrifices and to unnumbered temples of worship, she declares that men have deemed themselves accountable to a Supreme Being whose approval they desired, whose disapproval they feared. The moral law written on the human heart is one of the sources and occasions of all religion. If you ask Philosophy what it means, she repeats her sublime axiom that every effect must have an adequate cause. The moral law is a stupendous effect, and only the rudest materialism denies that it points, together with all lower effects, to a Great First Cause, for whose existence, as Herbert Spencer affirms "we have a greater degree of evidence than for any other truth whatsoever." If you make your appeal to the moral sense itself when touched by the feeling of guilt, you find an answer in the penitential psalms of all religions, or in the words of remorseful David, "Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned." It is sometimes said that God is in the world, but it is truer to say that the world is in God, for in Him we and all things move and have our being, and thus the universe becomes what Sir Isaac Newton called it, "the vast sensorium of Deity," with God vital and throbbing in every part of it.

The enlightened Christian has no need to seek refuge in pantheism to find the teaching which brings God home to his daily thought and life. The immense and continued fascination of pantheistic systems has been vividly apparent in India. When Gautama Buddha rejected the doctrine of God or gods, and substituted law in their stead, when he emptied the Hindu pantheon of its divine intelligences, he sounded the deathknell of Buddhism for the land of its birth. It has been said