assumption that the sole purpose of religion must be to give a divine sanction to man's moral duties. (18) He maintains that there can be no duties towards God, distinct from those which we owe towards men; but that it may be necessary, at certain times and for certain persons, to give to moral duties the authority of divine commands. (19) Let us hear then the philosopher's rational explanation, upon this assumption, of the duty of Prayer. It is a mere superstitious delusion, he tells us, to consider prayer as a service addressed to God, and as a means of obtaining His favor. (20) The true purpose of the act is not to alter or affect in any way God's relation towards us; but only to quicken our own moral sentiments, by keeping alive within us the idea of God as a moral Lawgiver. (21) He, therefore, neither admits the duty unconditionally, nor rejects it entirely; but leaves it optional with men to adopt that or any other means, by which, in their own particular case, this moral end may be best promoted; as if any moral benefit could possibly accrue from the habitual exercise of an act of conscious selfdeception.

The origin of such theories is of course to be traced to that morbid horror of what they are pleased to call Anthropomorphism, which poisons the speculations of so many modern philosophers, when they attempt to be wise above what is written, and seek for a metaphysical exposition of God's nature and attributes. (22) They may not, forsooth, think of the unchangeable God as if He were their fellow man, influenced by human motives, and moved by human. supplications. They want a truer, a juster idea of the Deity as IIe is, than that under which He has been pleased to reveal Himself; and they call on their reason to furnish it. Fools, to dream that man can escape from himself, that

human reason can draw aught but a human portrait of God! They do but substitute a marred and mutilated humanity for one exalted and entire: they add nothing to their conception of God as He is, but only take away a part of their conception of man. Sympathy, and love, and fatherly kindness, and forgiving mercy, have evaporated in the crucible of their philosophy; and what is the caput mortuum that remains, but only the sterner features of humanity exhibited in repulsive nakedness? The God who listens to prayer, we are told, appears in the likeness of human mutability. Be it so. What is the God who does not listen, but the likeness of human obstinacy? Do we ascribe to him a fixed purpose? our conception of a purpose is human, Do we speak of Him as continuing unchanged? our conception of continuance is human. Do we conceive Him as knowing and determining? what are knowledge and determination but modes of human consciousness? and what know we of consciousness itself, but as the contrast between successive mental states? But our rational philosopher stops short in the middle of his reasoning. He strips off from humanity just so much as suits his purpose; "and the residue thereof he maketh a god; "1-less pious in his idolatry than the carver of the graven image, in that he does not fall down unto it and pray unto it, but is content to stand off and reason concerning it. And why does he retain any conception of God at all, but that he retains some portions of an imperfect humanity? Man is still the residue that is left; deprived indeed of all that is amiable in humanity, but, in the darker features which remain, still man. Man in his purposes; man in his inflexibility; man in that relation to time from which no philosophy, whatever its pre

1 Isaiah xliv. 17.

tensions, can wholly free itself; pursuing with indomitable resolution a preconceived design; deaf to the yearning instincts which compel his creatures to call upon him. (23) Yet this, forsooth, is a philosophical conception of the Deity, more worthy of an enlightened reason than the human imagery of the Psalmist: "The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and His ears are open unto their prayers." 1

Surely downright idolatry is better than this rational worship of a fragment of humanity. Better is the superstition which sees the image of God in the wonderful whole which God has fashioned, than the philosophy which would carve for itself a Deity out of the remnant which man has mutilated. Better to realize the satire of the Eleatic philosopher, to make God in the likeness of man, even as the ox or the horse might conceive gods in the form of oxen or horses, than to adore some halfhewn Hermes, the head of a man joined to a misshapen block. (24) Better to fall down before that marvellous compound of human consciousness whose elements God has joined together, and no man can put asunder, than to strip reason of those cognate elements which together furnish all that we can conceive or imagine of conscious or personal existence, and to deify the emptiest of all abstractions, a something or a nothing, with just enough of its human original left to form a theme for the disputations of philosophy, but not enough to furnish a single ground of appeal to the human feelings of love, of reverence, and of fear. Unmixed idolatry is more religious than this. Undisguised atheism is more logical.

Throughout every page of Holy Scripture God reveals himself, not as a Law, but as a Person. Throughout the

1 Psalm xxxiv. 15.

breadth and height and depth of human consciousness, Personality manifests itself under one condition, that of a Free Will, influenced, though not coerced, by motives. And to this consciousness God addresses Himself, when he adopts its attributes as the image under which to represent to man His own incomprehensible and ineffable nature. Doubtless in this there is much of accommodation to the weakness of man's faculties; but not more than in any other representation of any of the divine attributes. By what right do we say that the conception of the God who hears and answers prayer1 is an accommodation, while that of Him in whom is no variableness nor shadow of turning2 is not so? By what right do we venture to rob the Deity of half His revealed attributes, in order to set up the other half, which rests on precisely the same evidence, as a more absolute revelation of the truth? By what right do we enthrone, in the place of the God to whom we pray, an inexorable Fate or immutable Law? a thing with less than even the divinity of a Fetish; since that may be at least conceived by its worshipper as capable of being offended by his crimes and propitiated by his supplications?

Yet surely there is a principle of truth of which this philosophy is the perversion. Surely there is a sense in which we may not think of God as though He were man; as there is also a sense in which we cannot help so thinking of Him. When we read in the same narrative, and almost in two consecutive verses of Scripture, "The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man that He should repent;" and again, "The Lord repented that He had made Saul king over Israel:"3 we are imperfectly con

1 Psalm lxv. 2; St. James v. 16. 2 St. James i. 17. 31 Sam. xv. 29, 35.

scious of an appeal to two different principles of representation, involving opposite sides of the same truth; we feel that there is a true foundation for the system which denies human attributes to God; though the superstructure, which has been raised upon it, logically involves the denial of His very existence.

What limits then can we find to determine the legitimate provinces of these two opposite methods of religious thought, each of which, in its exclusive employment, leads. to errors so fatal; yet each of which, in its utmost error, is but a truth abused? If we may not, with the Dogmatist, force Philosophy into unnatural union with Revelation, nor yet, with the Rationalist, mutilate Revelation to make it agree with Philosophy, what guide can we find to point out the safe middle course? what common element of both systems can be employed to mediate between them? It is obvious that no such element can be found by the mere contemplation of the objects on which religious thought is exercised. We can adequately criticize that only which we know as a whole. The objects of Natural Religion are known to us in and by the ideas which we can form of them; and those ideas do not of themselves constitute a whole, apart from the remaining phenomena of consciousness. We must not examine them by themselves alone: we must look to their origin, their import, and their relation to the mind of which they are part. Revealed Religion, again, is not by itself a direct object of criticism: first, because it is but a part of a larger scheme, and that scheme one imperfectly comprehended; and secondly, because Revelation implies an accommodation to the mental constitution of its human receiver; and we must know what that constitution is, before we can pronounce how far the accommodation extends. But if partial knowledge must not be