6. The Validity and Content of the Doctrine of the Fatherhood of God

CHAPTER VI THE VALIDITY AND CONTENT OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD IN the last chapter we have traced the process by which the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, supreme in the New Testament, was replaced for a thousand years by that of His sovereignty, and have watched its gradual reappearance since the Reformation, till at the opening of the twentieth century it has once more secured general recognition, and bids fair to become what it originally was the determining principle of living Christian theology. This prospect will be fulfilled or not, according as it is or is not possible to give such living expression in terms of the Fatherhood of God to the many-sided aspects of truth which have found utterance in the theological systems of the past, that not only shall there be no loss, but that each aspect shall find a higher, and all together shall find a more comprehensive and harmonious, statement as an expression of the Fatherhood of God, than is possible under any other conception. So far as the Fatherhood of God is the watch word of a prevailingly sentimental religion which seeks to antagonise and to exclude the severer elements of Christian theology instead of to include them in a higher and more satisfying whole, it will fail to satisfy the consciousness of the more virile, whether within the Christian Church or outside it. It must find due place for the sterner as well as for the more sympathetic features of Christian teaching, if it is to be true to Divine revelation, or to meet the needs of the human mind and heart.

We come, therefore, now to the last and most difficult stage of our inquiry. We have to examine the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, and to find out whether it is thus comprehensive; whether, that is to say, it gives so final a prin ciplefor the interpretation of the nature of God, as revealed in His relationships and dealings with mankind, as that by it all the characteristic experiences of Him, which have in all times been vouchsafed to men, are explained. We must therefore, in the first place, subject the doctrine to closer examination, in order to ascertain what is meant by it and involved in it, how we have come by it, and to what extent it represents not the mere poetry of religious sentiment, but the truth, valid for the reason in construing the ways of God. In short, we must determine whether the Fatherhood of God is a principle of theological interpretation at all.

If the result of this preliminary inquiry be satisfactory, we must then, in the second place, pass under general review the main facts of the Divine manifestation in creation and in redemption, in order to see how far they are an expression of the Fatherhood of God, and how they should be stated in its light. It will be neither possible nor necessary to make this survey an exhaustive inquiry into all the doctrines of the Christian faith. It will be sufficient if we can attain to a general point of view, from which the main facts and the dominant truths may be regarded. The concluding portion of our investigation may therefore, perhaps, be most conveniently considered under three heads, namely, the consti tution, the redemption, and the consummation of the world.

These will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. Our first concern is with the validity and content of the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God.

Before entering on this subject, a preliminary word must be said as to the great importance for all the interests of religion whether spiritual, rational, or apologetic of attaining to as adequate a conception of the relationship of God to men and to the w’T orld as is possible. And this is all the more important in dealing with our subject, for the very attraction of the Fatherhood of God, to many minds, is that it seems to promise a relief from the strict inquiries and the fixed definitions of formal theology. Men are apt often to attribute the weariness caused by more or less artificial schemes of theological thought to theology in itself, and to deprecate all attempts at system, not only out of compassion for the weakness of the flesh, but for the sake of the freedom of the spirit. It is true that the theological faculty is not universal, even among sincerely religious people, any more than the purely scientific interest is prevalent with all those who are practically familiar with the phenomena dealt with by any particular science. The majority are content to accept, to enjoy, and, in a measure, to conform themselves to the message of the gospel as it has reached them. But the human mind, as such, can never be thus content. In the most earnest and thoughtful there will always be the necessity of seeking a complete reflexion in thought of what is presented in experience. Such will ever attempt to piece together their various partial experiences in a systematic whole, and, above all, to find such a statement of the nature of God and of His relationships to the world as will furnish a complete explanation of His dealings with man, and of man’s life both in itself and in its relations to the universe. That great necessity spiritual as well as intellectual is the ultimate justification of theology as a formal science.

Hence those have been in error who, for various reasons, have mourned the passing of the simple and practical temper of primitive Christianity, and have treated the rise of theology as an unfortunate necessity, occasioned by the assaults of paganism and the self-willed errors of heresy. The stage in which Theology arranges her possessions in order to make them look more attractive to those without, or in more combative mood seeks in her armoury to find weapons by which to strike confusion into the armies of the aliens, is transitory, and seldom, if ever, leads to any decisive victory. The real work of theology is within and after all this. While the polemic divines man the walls of the theological Jerusalem and hurl argumentative challenges at the hosts around, within the city there rise up from time to time men gifted with prophetic vision, who give such positive, luminous, and inspiring utterance to the truth, that the nobler and deeper mind of the Church awakens to find a new satisfaction, because it is explained to itself and all things are explained to it. A universe of higher and broader truth is revealed, in which the antagonisms of the past are reconciled, and the fighters on the walls suddenly find that their occupation is gone, because a peace is established which they did not foresee, and which they did comparatively little to secure.

Such is the effect upon his age of the great theologian who gives the rationale of faith for which his age has waited; who furnishes such an account of the religious relationship, and of all that is involved in it, that the more thoughtful of the times “ find places to walk “ in it. The distinctive spiritual and practical impulses of a great and progressive age tend to produce such theologians. When they appear, they do indeed so absorb the life of their age that theypartake of its limitations; but, subject to that drawback, in evitable in an orderly development, they sum up the noblest results of their times, and furnish the starting-point for still further advance when the world is ready for it.

According as this work of theology is effectually done or not, according as it shows a grasp strong and comprehensive upon all the facts Divine and human, as expressing the Divine held in true relation and in right proportion, will be its beneficial effect upon practical religion or the reverse. It is quite true that the great inspirations which lead men to further and fuller realisation of Divine truth spring out of influences much deeper, and therefore more vital, than formal theology, and that such theology is great only in so far as it gives utterance to such influences. Yet even here the very forms in which the theology is expressed are of great practical effect. Our historical study has shown us, for example, how profoundly practical religion was influenced in regard to the Fatherhood of God by the form in which the doctrine of the Incarnation was presented by Athanasius, and by that in which the doctrine of the Trinity was set forth by Augustine. It is true that these great thinkers did but give classical expression to the growing tendencies of their times. But they developed and stereotyped these tendencies, and with such effect that throughout the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the Father hood of God was never thought of except in relation to the Eternal Son, and even in regard to Him assumed the dreariest metaphysical sense; and that Dante, though his poetry is steeped in the love of God, could not find the obvious expression of that love in Fatherhood, because his theological teachers had hidden it from his eyes. And what is imme diately apparent in so outstanding an example is equally true in the obscurer realms of Christian life. The formal theology, which seems to slumber in massive volumes read by only the few, conies down from the shelves to colourcate chisms, to provide the intellectual framework of sermons, to set bounds to the spontaneous outpourings of devotion, and to shape the temper with which Christian men regard the strivings of their age. Hence those who have been the apostles of new religious movements, and in so doing have stirred the depths of human spirits out of the depths of their own experience of God, have been compelled to become formal theologians, first wrestling in argument, as did Luther with the “ Aristotelians “ and as did Wesley with the Calvinists, and then quietly constructing a reformed theological fabric in which the new experience of God could live, and yet could live as a fulfilment of the old. Theology is to practicalreligion, save in rare creative moments, what the trellis-work is to the vine: the religion goes along the lines prepared for its direction. And if a comprehensive theological statement is necessary to religion, it is equally so to reason, the restlessness of which dogmatists condemn when it demands ampler scope than their formularies have provided for it. Reason is indeed to be suspected and condemned if by it is meant the conceited effort to be self - sufficient and the measure of the universe. But it represents the noblest attributes of man and pays the highest tribute to God, if by it is meant, as should be the case, the humble, yet resolute and confident, attempt to explore the truth of the world, in order to secure inward harmony and the insight necessary to outward advance.

There is no greater danger than that our conception of God, of His nature, and of His relationship to the world, should be unable to find room for what our reason assuredly discovers to be true in fact or aim. Reason, always active, is most alert in the greatest periods of history. Then it inevitably happens that the new discoveries of reason are brought to the old interpretations of theology. And when reason becomes possessed of truth of which the current theology takes no notice (and this is too mild a statement of what is often the case), then first unrest, and internal division. The new reason, in the flush of its victory, counts for more than the old theology, and, unless some reconciliation takes place, the discoverer becomes, in many respects, the victim of his discovery. Then, in consequence of the discovery, a process of criticism of the old dogmatic forms is set up, till that which is exclusive in them unable to contain and unfit to give expression to the fulness of ascertained truth has to give way, probably after much battling and many inconclusive results. The strife is only ended when theology once more, born anew and become prophetic, gives triumphant evidence that it has assimilated the new material of reason, because the latter was always akin to the substance of the original and vital faith. And thus the theological effort, after a completely har monious conception of God and of His relationship to men, has the highest apologetic value; indeed, from this point of view, there is little else that is worth while. The completest statement of the truth is its fullest vindication. The world of life is “ exceeding broad,” and, since every part of itproceeds from God, therefore every part is in its degree necessary for the full interpretation of God. That conception of God, therefore, will satisfy men ultimately as true, which, while meeting the highest needs of the spirit, can stretch with the least strain to all the parts of life, and involves the least amount of inner contradiction. There is the greatest need to me of a conception of God in His relationship to me which corresponds to, includes, and explains my whole consciousness of Him, of myself, and of my manifold relations to the world. His relationship to me explains all the rest, and, though it may be for ever impossible thoroughly to explore it, yet my life will advance towards perfection only in so far as I reverently seek to do so. The measure of my success will be the measure of my inward peace and harmony, of certainty and wholeness in moral action, of confidence in faith. The knowledge of God so understood is power; it advances with the insight of faith; it proves its truth by showing itself as life and strength and peace.

We are to endeavour to show that the Fatherhood of God, as revealed in and by our Lord Jesus Christ and verified by believers in Him, is this supremely satisfying truth, that it is the final and all-comprehending revelation of Him to men.

We must begin by defining what we mean by the Father hood of God. For this purpose, words may be quoted which the present writer has used elsewhere. The Fatherhood of God “ necessitates our conceiving of the creation of mankind as the calling into existence by God, out of His own life, of beings at once kindred with Himself, and having a distinct individuality of their own. But this, so far from exhausting what is meant by Fatherhood, touches only its surface. The calling into existence of such beings kindred with Himself, yet having personal independence is motived by the love of God; introduces them into a world, a home, of love, which environs their whole life; and has, as its end, that fellowship of mutual giving and receiving, that most intimate communion, which can only be between those who are spiritually akin, a fellowship which it is the object of fatherly education to perfect. The motive as love, the end as fellowship, the method as the education of the home, all these are set forth when we speak of the Fatherhood of God.” l The Fatherhood of God represents, above all, a spiritual and moral relationship; that spiritual and moral relationship rests upon a natural basis as its necessary condition; and that natural basis springs from, has its essence in, and is shaped by the fatherly love which gives it being. The doc trine of the Fatherhood of God sets forth the spiritual rela tionship in which He stands to them, the ends involved in that relationship, and the methods by which alone these ends can be brought about. To all these, love, creating for its own fellowship, is the key. But it would be impossible to realise these spiritual ends in the life of love and by the 1 Fernley Lecture on The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, pp. 226, 227. training of the home, unless the natural basis on which all rests were that of kinship between God and man a kinship which can only be the result of a fatherly love which gives the motive and fixes the ends of creation, and constitutes the nature of the man created.

We may illustrate our definition of the Fatherhood of God by contrasting it with two other conceptions in frequent use, that of God as Maker/ so far as the origin of man is concerned, and that of God as sovereign, so far as His authority and control over man, when made, are concerned.

We must subsequently discuss more fully the relations be tween Fatherhood and sovereignty; but meanwhile, in order to a clear understanding of what is meant by the Fatherhood of God, they may be set side by side. The term Maker is frequently used to set forth the relationship of God to the world. The phrase Man and his Maker is by no means uncommon. While it may be connected equally well with either the doctrine of the Divine Creator in the Old Testament, or with that of the Divine Artificer in Greek philosophy, it expresses most clearly the external and mechanical conceptions which characterised the theism of the eighteenth century. Taken in its Old Testament sense, the term is of great significance and importance; though in the Scriptures it by no means stands alone. There is here, indeed, an example of the way in which certain conceptions, which have a real, if a subordinate, office in setting forth Divine truth, and are kept in their place and balanced by other conceptions in Scripture, are often torn from their context, and pass into a popular and exclusive use, which makes them ultimately a hindrance rather than a help to the knowledge of God. The term carries us back to that most important epoch in the history of revelation, when the Hebrew prophets, above all the author of Isa. 40-66, confronted those who either had no theory on the matter, or for whom both gods and men were alike products of something impersonal and unspiritual which lay behind them, and proclaimed that God is one, and that He is the voluntary source of all that exists, that men are in no sense independent of God, and that He is in no sense dependent as they are; but that they, in common with the universe, owe all that they are to the creative wisdom and might of His mind and will. But it does not follow that because this is a most important relative truth, therefore the term selected for this particular purpose gives an adequate account of the motives and methods of creation, or of the relations in which the Creator stands to the created. Indeed the contrary is the case. To say that God is our Maker/ or even our Creator, gives no account whatever of His motive, suggests the fashioning of an external product, and leaves that product, comparatively speaking, unrelated to God; although, doubt less, the saying of Genesis, that man was made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26, Genesis 1:27), as well as the whole spirit of the Old Testament, go to correct the one-sidedness of the term as commonly used. Confining ourselves as in considering this term we ought to do to the origination of man, the conception of Makership, as applied to God, fails to render complete service to spiritual thought, by reason of three defects namely, its inability to explain the Divine motive of creation, to exhibit the method of creation as vital, and to make manifest that its result affords in itself the possibility, on the ground of kinship, of spiritual fellowship between the Maker and the being who is made. The term still conveys an important truth, but the whole truth can only be seen when it is set back in its proper place in a higher and larger whole. In contrast with this limited conception, the doctrine of the Fatherhood declares that God is Maker because He is love, that He makes by the impartation of Himself, and that, because of that self-impartation, He makes beings who are kindred to Himself.

So, again, when we pass from the origination of man to the government which maintains and orders his being for its appointed ends. Here the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God succeeds to that of His Makership. But the doctrine of Divine sovereignty simply declares the absolute authority of God in commanding and His irresistible power in controlling man’s life; this authority and power being based upon the perfection of His character, upon His creative act, and His sustaining providence. Here, again, all is true; and there are occasions when the whole emphasis may, for the time, be naturally and fitly, or even necessarily, laid upon these aspects of the relationship of God to men.

But, again, sovereignty must fall back into its proper place as an aspect of a larger whole. And, again, the doc trine of the Divine Fatherhood comes in with its richer content to fill up that which is lacking in a conception which, while true, is yet incomplete. The doctrine of the Father hood lays the foundation of the Divine authority, not only in the perfection of God and in His creative act, but upon these as united in giving existence to a kindred nature, whose life consists in growing up into the perfection of its Source. It can be brought to that perfection only under the guidance and authority of that Source; but the all-important truth is that that authority is not external, alien, or abstract; that it does not magnify itself by exacting the mere submission of those who are under obligation to obey it; but that it is an authority of which love is the origin and motive, and of which more abundant life is the outcome an authority which attains its goal, if not in being superseded, at least in being hidden from sight, because, in the full maturity of the nature it has trained, law has attained its end in theperfected life of love. When the Fatherhood of God is thus introduced to in terpret His sovereignty, then the methods of the Divine authority must needs be seen to be those “ educational methods of the home,” by which alone can fatherly authority of this kind attain its ends. Such methods represent not a mere external theory and practice of Divine education.

Like all the methods of the home, they are instinct through out with the self-impartation of the father in the reinforcement of the life of his child. A method there is, but one which is the fulfilment of the faint promise contained in the training of the best earthly fatherhood; a method of which every part is a grace, and every grace the outpouring of the very life of the Father, upholding, training, and perfecting into fellowship with Himself the life of those who are to be His sons. So much may serve for the illustration of our definition. In the next place, we must ask in what way the Father hood of God, as thus denned, is so presented to us as to become the constitutive principle of our thought about God in His relationship to mankind. In answer to this question we must recall what the earlier stages of our inquiry suf ficiently established: that the foundation of the doctrine is wholly experimental, and according to the completeness with which the original experience is reproduced is the survival, in any full sense, of the doctrine. The apprehension of the Fatherhood of God adequately conceived rests upon the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and upon the verification of that revelation in the hearts of His followers, through the presence of the Spirit of adoption, crying Abba, Father.”

Further, when we go behind the letter of our Lord’s revelation, we discover that that revelation, in turn, is the result of our Lord’s perfect personal apprehension of the Father hood, owing to His unique consciousness of being God’s Son. Our Lord was not a winged messenger from heaven bearing a dogmatic proposition that God is Father, and leaving it, authenticated by external signs, for believers to verify. He grew up as a man, who was yet the “ only-begotten of the Father “; His consciousness and His course were from first to last inspired and guided by the experience of the love of His Father. His whole life was a response to it. It is out of that marvellous apprehension of Fatherhood and Sonship, unshaken by all that seemed superficially to contradict it, that the revelation of God’s Fatherhood comes to us as the supreme truth which expresses all that God is and all that He will be to mankind in the Son of Man, who is the Son of God.

It is from this unique and all-determining consciousness of Christ, extended to believers in Him, that the New Testament writers carry away the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God so that it becomes an independent and general propo sition, embodying the highest truth as to His mind and heart and will towards mankind, since the possibilities of their nature are determined by their relationship to the eternal Son of God. Just in the same way, as we have seen, 1

1 Chapter IV. did the doctrine of Jehovah’s universal sovereignty, as Lord of the whole earth, spring forth in Old Testament times, from the conscious experience of His Lordship over Israel, and over every member of the sacred community. Thus, inevitably, the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood is appar ently cut from its roots in spiritual experience and made a universal and abstract proposition, although its ultimate justification must continue to lie in its experimental source.

And, when this general proposition has been reached, it must be examined and tested, like any other general proposition, in the light of the spiritual and natural facts of the world by the exercise of human reason. It must be shown to be more fully adequate than any other conception to set forth the complete truth of God’s character, to explain the secret of man’s nature, and to set forth the relations between both, than any other doctrine that can be named. In the realm of Christian dogmatics, with which alone we are here concerned, it must establish this in regard to the facts of Christian faith and experience; in the realm of apologetics it must patiently face the complex phenomena of the world, and show that in the Fatherhood of God notwithstanding any appearance to the contrary we have yet the surest clue to the mystery of all things. In this process, indeed, lies the proof of the truth of the doctrine, if proof be the right word. The evidence is this, that the consciousness of the Fatherhood of God was the characteristic experience of the supreme spiritual personality the world has ever seen or will see; that that experience is shared by men according as they enter into oneness with Him; and that the full apprehension of the Fatherhood completes all other experiences of God, deepening, fulfilling, explaining them, and giving an added fulness of life and power for thought and action to all who accept it; that it is possible to take every other conception of the relations of God to men which can be offered, from the lowest to the highest, and to find all subsumed under the Fatherhood, all completed and harmonised in it, while, on the other hand, it can be subordinated to no other. It is in this completing, including, and harmonising power of the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, as compared with any other, that the evidence of its truth and of its supremacy consists.

But, when all this has been laid down and admitted, it yet remains to ask what measure of validity for thought has the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. It may be the best and highest conception we have, or can have; but to what extent does it set forth the real truth? Does it belong only to the language of religious emotion? Or is it simply a loose external analogy, which has, at the utmost, poetic and not philosophic worth? Our answer is, that it is much more than this; but that, in contending that it is much more, it is necessary to begin with an assumption and to end with the acknowledgment that the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, as figured out by human analogies, must, in most important respects, fall short of the full Divine reality.

We must begin with the assumption that human relation ships are grounded in and reveal the Divine; that the whole creation is a giving forth according to the measure of every part into creaturely manifestation of that which is inmost in God. This involves not merely the individual existences and phenomena, but also the relationships which unite them in the systematic whole of the universe, and without which they would not be what they are; for it is as impossible to find or to conceive an individual except in relationships, as it is to find or conceive relationships without individuals to sustain them. And this seems to carry with it one further proposition, namely, that the manifestation of God is fullest and most trustworthy in that which is highest, most distinctive, and of the greatest worth in created life. This is undoubtedly an assumption, but it is one which is natural, and indeed necessary, if any rational explanation of the universe is to be given at all. Agnosticism is, theoretically, the refusal to accept this assumption; practically, it results in a so - called interpretation of the world by that which is earliest in evolution and lowest in phsenomenal relationships, instead of by that which is final and highest. The cause of such agnosticism is rather spiritual and moral than intellectual.

It arises from the failure inwardly to maintain thetranscendent worth and meaning of personality against the mere vastness and force of the outlying universe. This assumption, which is necessary to any satisfying world-explanation, has been instinctively made by the naive consciousness of the past, and has been confirmed by all truly religious minds above all, by that experience which completes and interprets them all, the spiritual consciousness of our Lord Himself.

Hence, if the principle thus assumed be correct, then not only on account of our Lord’s testimony, but also by reason of the part which paternity plays in the world of life and especially in its higher spiritual developments, we are driven to conclude that no other relationship can compare with Father hood as supplying a clue to that which is ultimate in the motive, method, and end of creation. Certain it is that men can never pass beyond it, for the conceptions of the human mind are inevitably limited by the relationships of which it has had or can have experience; the only question being, whether those relationships, as they progressively unfold their meaning, are a manifestation of world - explaining truth.

Equally certain is it that every other relationship is inferior to that of Fatherhood, having a narrower content, a less vital significance, and therefore a lower spiritual worth. And this will be still clearer if we remember that in using father hood as a human relationship to set forth the Divine, we must transcend the earthly division of parentage between the father and the mother, and endeavour to base our conception of the Divine Fatherhood upon the comprehension in a larger whole of all that is most glorious in fatherhood and most gracious in motherhood. Holy Scripture itself encourages us to do this when it conveys to us the Divine assurance: “ Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee” (Isaiah 49:15). Our confidence in making this assumption is still further strengthened if there are eternal relationships in the God head, which are the archetypes of Fatherhood and Sonship.

It will be urged, later on, that the condition of God’s Father hood towards mankind is to be found in the truth of the testimony of the New Testament, that the Divine Sonship of our Lord on earth is the revelation of original relations in the Godhead, constituting an eternal society of life and love.

We may therefore sum up by saying that if those relation ships of the Godhead be inmost and eternal, if creation be the uttering of that which is inmost in the Godhead, if, moreover, the relationships of God to man must be those of life and love, and not mechanical (for mechanism can never explain a creature who is not mechanical), then for ever the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood must be our surest guide to ultimate truth. Of course, being manifested in creaturely and finite forms, it can only be an imperfect clue to what is involved in the relationship of God to men. Yet, with all its imperfections, it is more than a poetic figure. It is the final message of a revelation in creation, which everywhere enthrones love as the secret of life.

Yet it is equally necessary to acknowledge the inherent imperfections even in fatherhood, as it can be realised by men, to set forth the relationship of God to mankind.

Another quotation from the work already cited may perhaps be permitted. “ So far as Fatherhood is concerned, the following differences (and more might be named) show how immeasurable is the interval between the heavenly Fatherhood and its earthly type. The human nature which the earthly father transmits to his child and shares with him, is derived by both equally from God. The individuality of the child is impervious to the earthly father. The father’s authority is delegated by God, is exercised within narrow limits, and is justified only so far as it answers to the law of God; and, in like manner, the child’s duty of obedience is limited by his relationship to God and to the objects of His law. The sphere of the common life of father and child, and its conditions, is limited; it is independent of the father’s will, its laws are beyond his control. The supremacy of the earthly father wanes before the growing maturity of his child. Above all, an offence either of father or child against the other is, in addition, a sin against God, and sin can be committed against God alone.” l To speak more strictly, the conception of fatherhood by which human imagination is limited fails to set forth, 1 The Spiritual Principle, of the Atonement, pp. 239, 240. firstly, the absoluteness, and, secondly, the immanence of God. In the first place, it fails to set forth the absoluteness of God. The human father, by the exercise of certain powers delegated to him, comes to enter into a relationship which he did not constitute, which is external to himself, and which he cannot control. Father and son, in human life, become such in a relationship the nature and limiting conditions of which belong to the universe before, above, and after theirparticular realisation of it. But God, as the Father, while a party to the relationship which He constitutes and into which He enters with His creatures, is more: how much more it is difficult to set forth and impossible to realise without becoming as God. He is not merely a party to the relation ship; He constitutes it out of His own life. He is that underlying reality which conditions all earthly life and all human fatherhood. The man who, as a centre of individual and independent life, enters into the filial relationship with God is not independent of Him, in the sense that an earthly son becomes independent of an earthly father. In a mystery which we cannot fathom, because we are men and not God, God, who constitutes out of the essential reality of His own life the fatherly relationship between Himself and his children, bestows independent creaturely life, with all its responsibilities, upon those who enter into the relationship, without breaking off that life from Himself, or putting it outside Himself, in the sense that one human being is outside another. He would cease to be God were this to happen.

Difficult as it may be to conceive, yet it is true that while God respects the personality He creates and the relationship He sets up, while He makes each man the possessor, within limits, of that responsible power of choice and will by which alone he becomes man, yet the whole of this creaturely personal existence never becomes an external fact to which God merely accommodates Himself. It remains an issue of His own life, while, notwithstanding, it is endowed with a personal independence (to use a somewhat unsuitable word) which He steadfastly maintains.

Hence, in the second place, as of the absoluteness of God, so of His immanence. God is immanent in man, whereas human fatherhood does but foreshadow immanence, without, under creaturely conditions, being able to complete it. There is a nature common to the earthly father and son which often makes the son approach to a repetition of the father, and which normally puts him in specially close sympathy with his father. Yet the personalities are distinct, and lie outside each other. But as the heavenly Father constitutes out of His own life the filial relationship and the creature who enters into it, so He fills both with His presence.

Hence the incompleteness of the earthly embodiment of Fatherhood. Yet, even in this respect, the emphasis which human fatherhood lays upon affinity, upon reproduced likeness and vital sympathy, makes it the best guide to knowledge of the relationship of God to men. The perfect indwelling of God represents the ideal fulfilment of what is shadowed forth, so far as finitude will permit, in typical earthly fatherhood and sonship. Immanence must needs carry with it affinity, likeness, and sympathy; and these, on the other hand, are the indispensable conditions of that full immanence which is possible only to God, and, in the case of God, is only complete so far as the spiritual and moral nature of man is entirely conformed to Him. Here we strike on that greatest mystery of created life which is yet the surest and least controvertible fact, that the immanence of God, by which alone can physical existence and the laws of intelligence be explained, can only be completed in the realm of the Spirit by the overcoming of a divergence of desire and will from Him which, while it may be theoretically inexplicable, is indubitably real. With these two qualifications, then, the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God must be pronounced to be a valid guide to thought. A subsidiary question here arises. To what extent can and ought the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God to be applied to explain the motives and method which ruled in the creation of all that is beneath man? It is a need of thought to find, despite all breaks, a consistent whole, alike in the causes and in the effects, which make up the universe. Is our ultimate explanation of the inferior phenomena of the universe to be mechanical, or at most physical, while we reserve spiritual forces for those creatures who can adequately respond to them? Of course it goes without saying, that the degree of fatherhood is measured by the possibility of sonship, and that therefore, in the full sense of the word, fatherhood can only be manifest when personality appears. And yet our Lord laid stress upon the universality of a fatherly care for the whole creation, which was manifested according to the grade and worth of every order in it. “ Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29).

There is therefore a manifestation towards the whole creation, from the lowliest to the highest, of that spirit of love which is perfectly revealed in the Divine Fatherhood; and, answering to it, there is a creaturely response according to the dignity and worth of each order of being in creation. We may at least conclude, in the light of the Fatherhood of God, that there is one creational method throughout the universe, the method of self-impartation on the part of God, who bestows on all His creatures, by a graduated advance, their existence, their essence, and ultimately their individuality; and that this method completes itself in securing that measure of creaturely fellowship and co-operation with God which cor responds with the degree of His self-impartation to each.

We come now to consider the content of the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. What is revealed to us when we are commanded to pray, “ Our Father which art in heaven “?

1. In the first place, the essential teaching of the doctrine is, that love is supreme in the character of God, and is the ultimate motive of His action; that His nature is to bestow Himself in a rich self-impartation, the satisfaction of which lies in the return of those to whom He gives Himself to fellowship with Him in the life and joy of His own perfection. When we say “ God is Father,” we say “ God is love.” A controversy has been carried on since scholastic times as to whether there is one principle in the nature of God and determining His action, or whether there are several. In particular, are love and holiness, or perhaps righteousness, independent of one another and separate springs of the Divine action? Opinions have been much divided on this very abstruse subject; but the balance has hitherto been in favour of the separateness of the Divine attributes, which have distinct functions, and limit one another, though of course working in ultimate harmony, because subject to the Divine will. This conclusion has been adopted recently by Dr. W. N. Clarke in his Outline of Christian Theology. He distinguishes between holiness and love, though he dwells upon their close connexion. “ God would not be holy,” he says, “ if He were not love. Love is an element in the perfect goodness that is to say, love is an element in holiness.” l And, later on, he remarks: “ Love, we know, is a main element in the character which holiness requires Him to act out. Or, in other words, holiness requires God to act as love. The action of love is a part of the action of holiness.” 2 Here, then, love is treated as one distinct element in the character of God, and as subordinate to the holiness which is the source and sum of all His perfections, including love. This conclusion seems to be the reverse of the truth as it is set forth in the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, and still more in the revelation of the eternal life of the Godhead as a triune fellowship of love. And yet, in deciding this, it is necessary to take due account of the complexity of the fact. In reality, while love is, in one respect, the simplest as well as the greatest thing in the world, it is also the most complex, and it is necessary to fix the relations between the three great attributes love, holiness, and righteousness. We must begin by defining what we mean by each. Love is the motive to self-impartation in order to the establishment of a spiritual fellowship. Holiness is the name for the infinite sum of the Divine perfections, regarded as being unapproach ably perfect. Eighteousness represents that in the character of God which causes Him to maintain and vindicate His own perfection, and therefore also to maintain and vindicate the integrity of the law of life which proceeds from Him. To the love of God both His holiness and His righteous 1 I.e. p. 99, sixth edition. 2 I.e. p. 100. ness are essential. Both within His own eternal life and in His self-manifestation to creation God possesses and maintains His own distinctive characteristics, His “ thisness,” if the word may be allowed, all that makes Him this and not that constitutes His perfection and holiness. In order that God may he love, it is essential that He should be and should guard what alone can be love. Therefore that He is love involves necessarily that He is holy and righteous; that is, that He should have the eternal perfection of nature, without which love is impossible, and that He should rigorously guard it.

All this is apparent in human life, which reflects the Divine. The more distinctive and typical the human personality, the complete! the love. The possibility of love and the many-sided richness of character, the worth of its “ thisness,” grow side by side. Perfect love is only possible where it can manifest itself in and through a perfect character. It is only the dim prophecy of love, touching as it often is, which is manifested in the lower creation. We must come to man, and to spiritual man, before we can find the conditions in and through which love works and can show what it is. And, having the character which is capable of love, it is necessary at all costs to defend it. Above all, that is to say, we must be righteous; for love is destroyed when character perishes, and when the loving subject becomes the tool of the loved object. In order to be love, therefore, it is necessary that God should realise that perfect holiness in and through which alone can love be manifested in all its fulness, and that His righteousness should guard the integrity of all who enter into the relationships of love, and not least the integrity of the source of love, Himself. To this extent the three attributes, love, holiness, and righteousness, are distinct in function. But this does not imply, nor even permit us to conclude, that these three can be separated even in thought, much less in reality. Still less does it warrant us in dethroning love from its primacy in the Divine nature and making it but a single star in the constellation of Divine glory. It is impossible to think of attributes manifesting themselves on inde pendent lines without a centre and unifying source. And either love must be that unifying source or bare will. And loveless will is unworthy of being worshipped, and cannot realise itself in what is worshipful. Further, it is impossible to advance from an isolated perfection to a principle of selfimparting manifestation. Indeed the conception of isolated perfection is unthinkable and irrational. Perfection, so far as it resides in persons, is not an abstract quality, but a response to, a life in fulfilment of, relations. Without those relations it could not exist, and it is the nature of the relations which determines the perfection rather than the reverse. And that which creates the relationships in which perfection may manifest itself is love. Surely this holds good of God, and especially if it is a fact that the Godheadsubsists in a Triune Society of love. In that case, it is certain that the Divine holiness exists and is manifested in eternal relationships, and that those relationships are constituted by the love that determines and maintains all the perfections which give effect to the life of love. All these are simply the conditions under which love can subsist in its perfect fellow ship of life. Thus, for those who hold the truth of the holy Trinity seriously, and therefore consider all questions as to the Divine nature in its light, it would seem more rational to argue that since God exists eternally in the relationships of love therefore He must be holy, than to attempt to proceed by defining His attributes to the inference, which no such definitions can justify, that He exists in an eternal society of love. That this has not been realised is due to the faulty procedure of theology since the distinction between natural and revealed theology was introduced. A complete doctrine of the nature and attributes of God has been laid out and established; and only when this has been completed inunalterable lines has the doctrine of the Trinity been introduced in such a way that, while it is the distinctive revelation as to the Godhead made in Christianity, it has often had no more influence upon the doctrine of God than a mere afterthought.

Directly, therefore, we call God “ Father “ we pass away from what can be defined by its own perfection, if there be any such being, and, while recognising the separate aspects and offices of love, holiness, and righteousness, give the primacy to love.

2. But, in the second place, the Fatherhood of God conveys the truth that love reigns; that the Father, because He is the source and end of the life He constitutes, is sovereign. In fact, when the sovereignty of Fatherhood is carefully considered, it casts all other sovereignty into the shade, not only by reason of the greatness of its motives, but also because of the awfulness of its sway.

Speaking generally, it may be said that the only perfect fatherhood is kingly, and that the only perfect kingship is fatherly. Each is perfect only so far as it includes the other. The primitive history of mankind is hidden in great obscurity, but it would probably be correct to say that developed fatherhood and developed kingship made their appearance together. The moment when fatherhood passes from being a mainly physical to being a predominantly moral relationship, is the moment when its true kingliness appears; and the beginnings of wider sovereignty lie in parental and patriarchal rule over, first, the family, then the tribe, and, lastly, the association of tribes with their foreign admixtures, treated expressly, however, as having entered into relations of family and kinship.

Hence, even among men, no authority is so perfect and absolute as that of typical fatherhood. And in two ways.

Firstly, because the supremacy of love secures that thesubstance of fatherly law corresponds to the nature and promotes the well-being of the child. And, secondly, because of the practical omnipotence by which the father secures respect for his commands. And this is, above all, true of the absolute and immanent Fatherhood of God. It should go without saying that the Divine authority is not lessened because of the fatherly motive w r hich inspires it, nor because a fatherly and vital relationship gives the ground for it and lays down the ends it seeks to attain. The very perfection of the fatherly motives and ends, as well as the immanently vital nature of the relationship, are the guarantee of the absolute sovereignty which gives effect to them. For the authority of God is not a mere external authority of laws imposed upon men from without. The law of the Father is, by reason of His immanence, within us and around, our very life, the foundation of our nature, which in idea and principle is a manifestation of the Father. Therefore there is within us, in what we call the laws of our nature spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical and around us in our environment, in the largest meaning of that word, a self-asserting and natural law of our being, which is at the same time the principle of God’s Being. And this law represents Fatherhood both conditioning and inspiring our being, that we may be guided to perfect life. The Fatherhood of God therefore means the Father regnant. The emphasis must be laid in turn both upon the subject and upon the adjective. It is the Father who reigns.

Therefore His law is a law of grace and love from beginning to end. Even that which is sternest in its nature and administration is ordained in the interests of love and life. And the Father is regnant; for He calls into existence, constitutes, and maintains a world which is absolutely and irrevocably controlled by His own perfection, and controlled in the interests of that spiritual life which love creates and would perfect. Love reigns, therefore, by law in the interests of life. Hence he who runs counterto the fatherly prompt ings and ends of life must needs feel the pressure of the kingship which has constituted his nature after this fashion, and no other. Law springs out of life, and life out of love, and law inflexibly upholds the ends of love.

Thus Fatherhood and sonship explain the meaning of the sovereignty of God. When this relationship is fully under stood, it supplies the means of harmonising the two great opposing principles of Calvinism and Arminianism, which in opposition become one-sided and even false. The Calvinist principle made the glory of God supreme, but conceived that glory as consisting in determining as He would the destinies of His creatures, and, at least apparently, sacrificing them to secure its ends. On the other hand, the Arminian principle, that God’s end is, above all, the well-being of His creatures, if it magnified the benevolence of God, did so in a way which went far to treat God as a means to His creatures end. It is when the full meaning of Fatherhood and sonship is realised, and when it becomes the principle by which we interpret the dealings of God with men, that we can perceive the real unity of the two ends. The glory of God is the supreme principle; but it is the glory of the Father, and the glory of the Father consists “ in bringing many sons to glory.”

We can magnify God’s authority only in the free response to it that finds our own well-being in conforming to its laws, which are those of life and love.

It is this essential spirit of true religion which is so imperfectly recognised by all teachers who do not apprehend how essential to its highest forms is the experience of personal fellowship with God. For example, Mr. F. H. Bradley finds the secret of religion in this, namely, “ That it lies generally there where we feel that our proper selves in comparison are quite powerless or worthless. The object over against which we find ourselves to be of no account tends to inspire us with religion.” l Later on he speaks of “ moral prostration “as implied in all religion, though he points out that for moral prostration a perfect object is necessary, else the very fear would be mixed with contempt or dislike. Such a description of religion, while it contains certain true elements, ignores the filial spirit which enters into the prostration of true worship, and causes that the worshipper, in knowing himself to be of no account, learns that he is of every account to God. Thus prostration before the infinite Perfection is fol lowed by exaltation; the worshipper hears the Divine command, “ Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak with thee” (Ezekiel 2:1). And yet his obedience to the uplifting word is not the contradiction, but the perfection, of humility. In the light of what has been said as to the relationship of Fatherhood to sovereignty, this seems the most fitting place to lay down that the Fatherhood, with its correlate of Sonship, is the highest term given in the Christian religion for the interpretation of the world. The Bitschlian school is unanimous in laying stress upon the conception of the “ kingdom of God “ as the supreme term by which the Christian religion is to be understood. Christianity, according to this view, is, above all, the means for bringing about on 1 Afliearance and Reality, p. 439. earth the kingdom of God, and in proof of this proposition stress is laid upon the prominence, in our Lord’s teaching, of the doctrine concerning the “ kingdom of God,” or the “ kingdom of heaven.” Kaftan, in his work on The Truth of the Christian Religion, lays down two alternatives for the interpretation of Christianity. The first is the Logos idea, which ruled the earlier Christology of the Church, and by the use of which Kaftan in common with the other Kitschlians considers that the Church went astray. The second alternative is that of the kingdom of God, to which, as being the conception of Christ, we are invited to return, and in giving effect to which Christianity will find its appointed task. It is pointed out that the conception of the Logos is, above all, intellectual, and lays the main stress upon the conception that Christ is the revelation of Divine truth, the Season, and the Word of God; whereas the conception of Christ as being the supreme agent for realising the kingdom of God on earth, with its order of righteousness, is, above all, moral.

Kaftan further points out how, as we have already seen, 1 the emphasis laid on the Logos idea threw the Incarnation into the shade, making the eternal Logos, and not the his toric Christ, the subject of supreme concern for Christianity. On the other hand, the conception of the kingdom of God as to be realised on earth is, he contends, above all, the true account of the historic religion brought about by the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the flesh. 2 The subject might be discussed in relation to the fads of Christianity in the next chapter, but it is more intimately connected with the living ideas of Christianity, and there foremay more fitly be considered here.

It is sometimes replied to these arguments that Christ’s doctrine of the kingdom of God was only provisional, that it was a necessary but temporary accommodation to Jewish modes of thought, and forms the transition from the Old Testament to that final teaching of Christianity by the

1 Chapter V.

2 See Kaftan, The Truth of the Christian Religion (Eng. trans.), i, especially pp. 89 and 97. apostles, which only became possible when our Lord had finished His redemptive work. 1

Such an answer is in many respects unsatisfactory. It is for many reasons impossible to treat our Lord’s teaching as merely provisional, even though we may hold that its meaning could only be completely unfolded by His Spirit after His work had been fulfilled. So extreme a contention, even if some countenance seems at first sight to be given to it by St. Paul, obviously contradicts the most explicit teaching of St. John. The historic revelation given by our Lord must be held to be the authoritative germ from which all subsequent Christian teaching has sprung, however greatly it may have been developed by the subsequent history and by the spiritual influence of our Lord. Nor was it an accident that the conception of the kingdom of God was prepared for the use of Christ when He came. Finally, our Lord, while adopting the conception, transformed it, as we have seen, 2 by revealing the Divine Fatherhood of the heavenly King. But in reality the alternative offered by Kaftan is false and misleading. Neither the Logos idea nor that of the kingdom of God is the highest concept for the interpretation either of Christ or of His religion. Each falls into its place as part of the larger and higher whole of Sonship, corre sponding to the Fatherhood. If the Logos idea accentuates the revelation of truth, and that of the kingdom the attainment of spiritual and moral ends, the higher concept of Sonship places foremost the fellowship of love and life. But that fellowship involves subordinately that the Son should be the Logos, revealing the Father, and also that He should reveal Him not only in word, but in realising the kingdom of His Fatherhood first in Himself and then in the world. To attach all importance to the conception of the truth, is to end in abstractions and in a prevailingly intellectual type of religion. To give weight only to the conception of the kingdom, is to be lost in a historical process, and to narrow religion to moral and social enthusiasm. In the former case, thought, 1 See, for example, a striking letter from the late Dr. Dale to Mr F H Stead, The Life of E. W. Dale, p. 665.

2 Chapter III. in the latter will, becomes the distinctive characteristic of God. In the result, man loses his individuality, if the revelation and reception of truth be exclusively dwelt upon. He becomes too much a mere means to an end, if the realisation of a future kingdom be alone insisted upon. But all is brought into order and proportion when Fatherhood and Sonship are treated as the highest and determining principles. Then the Incarnation becomes all-important as the living manifestation of an eternal relationship; then the Son eternally and tem porally utters in His filial life the Divine truth, and realises the Divine will. Then Christ is seen to be the living embodiment both of the truth and of the kingdom, while He enables men to apprehend the truth and to promote the kingdom, according as, through His Spirit, the life of sonship brings them into fellowship with the Father.

Since, therefore, the Divine Fatherhood comprehends sovereignty, men become the subjects and servants of the kingdom in so far as they become sons. As the Fatherhood is the explanation and motive of the Kingship, so is the sonship the explanation and motive of the kingdom. The Fatherhood then issues in sovereignty, but is the supreme term by which the sovereignty is interpreted, supplying its motive, method, and end.

3. In the third place, this regnant Fatherhood is the source of all the other functions which can be ascribed to God, and explains them.

Those functions may be brought under a twofold division, on the one hand, Kevelation, perfected in a self-communication of God which leads to salvation; on the other, Lawgiving, which is completed in judgment.

It is impossible here to deal with these two subjects exhaustively, but an indication may be given of the relation ship in which they stand to the Divine Fatherhood, and the light it sheds upon them. In the first place, as to Revelation, it may confidently be said that only by following the lines of the Fatherhood of God can a rationale of it be found.

Dogmatic theology, influenced by an exclusive conception of God’s Makership, often pursued the mistaken course of supposing that man was created a complete and self-contained being, and that then steps had to be taken externally to put him in communication with the Author of his being. More or less cogent reasons were urged to prove the antecedent probability, that God would not leave His creatures to perish in ignorance of His will, and evidences were collected to show that, as a matter of fact, He had not so left them.

But, satisfactory as all this might seem, it suggested as many difficulties as it solved. The gulf of externality, which had been artificially set up between God and man, could only be bridged by anthropomorphic images which failed to stand the test of more philosophic examination. The history of revelation became inexplicable; and men urged the question, to which no satisfactory answer could be given, why revelation could not have been given complete at once, and in some external form which would have compelled universal assent.

And, finally, revelation as thus conceived found no room for the richness of that human content which marks it through out the Holy Scriptures, and was hardened to connoting simply the communication of infallible dogmas about God, authoritative commands from Him, and predictions of His future dealings, which could not have been humanly foreseen. No doctrine of God’s sovereignty, as such, can overcome the insuperable difficulties thus raised. But once accept the doctrine of the absolute and immanent Fatherhood of God, and all becomes immediately clear. God and man are not merely external to one another; revelation is not an abstract gift, separate from the vital spiritual processes by which man comes to his maturity.

Above all, revelation is not primarily the communication of abstract propositions as to the nature and will of God, or as to the nature and duty of man. Revelation is fundamentally the self -manifestation and impartation of God in and to men who are so vitally akin to Him, so entirely constituted by Him and filled with His presence, that the very individuality which distinguishes them from Him is, above all, a power to recognise and to obey Him. The revelation of God and the spiritual development of man are woven together in vital texture; God’s fatherly nature being to impart Himself in ever fuller measure to the heart of man, till knowledge is completed and issues, step by step, in conformity of character to Him, and man’s nature being so intrinsically filial that it grows only by apprehending and responding to the truth of God. In that vital process of Fatherhood and sonship, all propositions to guide the mind as to the nature of God, and all precepts to govern their conduct, are implicitly contained. But they issue from a source deeper than the intellect, and it is the reality beneath and within them which causes them to be believed and obeyed.

Thus another difficulty is at once solved. If revelation be the natural and vital unfolding of the Father in and to the apprehension of His sons, then we have the means of fusing what otherwise lie apart and out of harmony God’s revelation of Himself to men, and man’s discovery of God. Revelation is a gift; but it also involves a discovery. For example, what Isaiah learned as to God, he learned because God taught him; but God taught him only because he was so quickened spiritually, morally, and mentally that he made discovery of the truth, in which and by which his spirit lived. To divide between moments and acts of Divine revelation and moments and acts of human discovery about God, is unsatisfactory, however true it may be to distinguish between the first entrance of new knowledge and the examination by which its full content and consequences are afterwards explained.

Man has been active at the moment of his greatestreceptivity; and it is well if he continue receptive throughout his researches into that which he has received. The two sides, however, are brought together when Fatherhood and sonship are called in. The revelation of the Father is the condition of all true life in those who are made for sonship. This revelation must always come first. But it is not external. It is made in, to, and through the filial life, which is constituted and perfected by it. Thus every revelation becomes a discovery, and every true unfolding of individuality in man becomes a new faculty for apprehending and setting forth some aspect of the truth of God.

Secondly, side by side with revelation, perfected in in spiration, goes Lawgiving, completed in judgment.

Only a word is necessary about the lawgiving, for it is obvious, from what has been said about the righteousness and the sovereignty of God, that it consists in the laying down of those vital conditions in the nature of things which are essential to the life of love, and in bringing them home to the conscience of man as commands which carry with them the sense of obligation to fulfil them. The law, grounded in the life of God, conditions the life of man, and through that life reveals itself to and instructs the conscience. But the judicial function, which completes the legislative and satisfies justice, needs more detailed consideration in relation to the Fatherhood of God. It is often treated as being the detached servant of justice considered as a selfexistent abstraction. And this tendency is strengthened by the use of language about “ the demands of justice,” and so forth. The true meaning of such language must be considered in Chapter VIII. in connexion with the Atonement. From the standpoint of Fatherhood, however, the judgment which satisfies justice is simply the executive, or retributive, action which secures the ends of love; the ends, therefore, of that holiness which is, as we have seen, the indispensable condition of love. When we say that God must be just, we should mean that, as the condition of His being love, He must maintain the integrity and consistency of His own holy character, and therefore must maintain the consistency and integrity of that constitution and order of the universe, especially of the free personalities in it, which proceeds from Him, and has no other nature and end than to manifest Him and to respond to Him. God cannot maintain the integrity of His own character, and therefore of His love, under the conditions of Creatorship, without upholding and enforcing the integrity of the creaturely life which He has originated. The two are one. Men may appear able to maintain the integrity of their own character, while indifferent to the conduct of their fellow-men. But the appearance is deceptive; for, directly other men are brought into immediate contact with me in the complex and manifold relations of life, I can only maintain the integrity of my character by demanding and enforcing, to the utmost of my power, integrity in them. There is no surer way of losing character than the cowardice which shrinks from demanding character in others. But if the maintenance of human integrity is bound up with the attempt to maintain the integrity of society throughout all therelationships of life, how much more must this be true of God, in whom all men “ live, and move, and have their being “! The Fatherhood, therefore, which is immanent and regnant, which constitutes the ends and guides the processes of life to their goal in love, must assert itself to maintain and enforce its own integrity not as a mere indwelling possession, which is impossible, but as the bond of life and order among all created beings. It must therefore, when the mystery of free will and sin has introduced variance from the Divine purpose and nature, manifest itself in that retributive action which visits upon men their departures, not from abstract law, but from the law of God’s Being and their own.

Thus all true Fatherhood Divine still more than human has its judicial side. It may be in abeyance, or it may come forward into sharp and even exclusive manifestation.

Yet, even when it is sharpest and most exclusive, it is if true to its office dominated by the fatherly motive, and exercised simply to vindicate and to secure the integrity of the family bond, in the sacred interests of life and love. To sever at any time the claims of justice from the interests of life and love, is to destroy justice by perverting it tounreason and cruelty; and, on the other hand, nothing can make justice so rigorous and unsparing as the fact that the safe guarding of life and love is committed to its care.

If this be anything like a true account of Fatherhood in relation to sovereignty and judgment, it is proved how eminently comprehensive and virile the Christian conception of the Divine Fatherhood becomes. It is not a doctrine for sentimentalists, the watchword of a recoil from the rigours of undue theological severity. It bears within itself the substantial truth of that sterner teaching purged from that which is irrational and cruel, disproportionate and unspiritual. When this is appreciated, the Fatherhood of God is seen to bear within itself, in the fulness of its comprehensive meaning, all that the sentimental, intellectual, and ethical elements in religion can rightly seek. The heart which yearns for love, the intellect which seeks in life the expression of Divine truth, the character which demands theful filment of righteousness, all find their true satisfaction. And all can find it only in unison, and in the vision of the Father hood which brings about their unison. Keligious thought and life, founded upon any one of these, in isolated exaggeration, becomes one-sided heresy, and ultimately destroys itself by irrationality and insufficiency. This is equally true of sentimentality, intellectualism, and rigid moralism. Only the Fatherhood of God, truly apprehended, preserves the truth, unites the strength, and satisfies, in its Divine harmony, the claims of all three.

4. Once more, the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God makes good the worth to God of mankind, guarantees the individuality and permanence of the individual, and lays down the principles by which the relations of the individual to society must be for ever immanently controlled. It is the only doctrine of the relationship of God to mankind which can in itself afford guidance as to any of these. Historically, it has been just in proportion as the doctrine of the Divine sovereignty has verged towards that of Fatherhood that the sense of the worth of the individual, apart from the community, and of his permanence that is, his immortality has dawned on man. That man is dear to God, and that once dear to Him he is eternally dear, is a truth which is only brought home and sustained fully by the Fatherhood of God, and, where this is not fully realised, by the supremacy of fatherliness in the conception of God. The evidence of immortality will never stand mainly in the nature of man, but ever in what is known of the nature of God. A relationship of Divine sovereignty over men does nothing to assure men of their permanent significance.

They may be simply instruments of the Divine will, flung aside when their work is done. But if Fatherhood and sonship be the key to man’s being, then it is the assurance of his well-being both here and hereafter. For then each in dividual is a concern to God, and a concern, not as a mere instrument or means, but as an end. The purposes of God are concerned not with what is wrought out through man, but primarily with what is wrought out in man. In be coming himself, man serves the ends of God; and those ends are preserved only by the preservation of the men in whom they live in the spiritual realisation of abiding sonship. And the Fatherhood of God, taken in conjunction with the sonship of man, and therefore with his individual worth and permanence, supplies the means of interpreting and directing the common life of men. The universal Fatherhood of God, towards each man and towards all men, constitutes the organic ground of human society. The sons of God are bound together by nature in a community of love, for the fulfilment of which both the individual worth of each man and the social end of all true action must be held in equal balance. The brotherhood of man does not depend upon, though the development of its consequences may bepromoted by, the theoretic recognition of it. Its foundation lies deeper than man’s knowledge of it. The conditions which make a community possible, and which for ever interrelate the progress of the individual and that of the community, lie in the immanence of God, who, as Father, constitutes the life of men in love. That God is in each and also in all as an “ energy of love,” which having gone forth from Him returns in a filial and social nature, is the truth which explains the common life and fellowship of men. In the life of men, as in that of God, love is complex as well as simple. It holds together the seemingly opposite poles of self - fulfilment and self - bestowment, each being realised only through the other. Leaving for a while the exceptional cases where these principles appear to clash, the two are generally and of necessity balanced in the true human life, which demands alike true social relationships for self-realisation, and the realisation of the individual in order to the well-being of society. Man’s life, because of its ground in love, consists in self -bestowment; but it must needs be that he have something of his own to bestow, for in the absence of it the possibility of love is destroyed. But love must have the first place, and he who bestows himself best, by realising in service the gifts which have been bestowed on him by God, will, in so doing, come to the best and fullest individuality.

Such appears to be the general content of the Father hood of God.

We come now to the further but necessary inquiry: What are the eternal conditions in the life of God which make His Fatherhood and its supremacy towards His creatures possible? It is impossible that we should completely reach the truth on this subject by unaided speculation, though even speculation has made a fair guess in searching into the problem. But at least, if the eternal reality be manifested, reason will be able to recognise its correspondence with and explanation of the temporal facts.

It is clear, then, that the Fatherhood of God was first revealed in any full sense to mankind in the personal consciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ. As He experienced it and set it forth, it was not something which came into being.

It was the unique and original relationship in which God stood to His only-begotten Son. In St. John’s Gospel we learn that this original relationship is eternal, and that it is completed by the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. It is this threefold relationship which the doctrine of the holy Trinity endeavours to set forth. As we look into the essential meaning of the mystery of the Divine life thus revealed, it supplies exactly those conditions which solve the problem how God, because of His Fatherhood, can call into being a potentially filial world. To be Creator means to be Father, to be Father means to be Love. And, before God could act as Love in time, He must have existed as Love in eternity. But love is social. It can only exist in the society of personal and adequate objects.

There can be no love without fellowship; no fellowship without persons. A being who could exist in eternal solitude must be loveless; and it is impossible for a being complete in loneliness to become love. Therefore the doctrine of the holy Trinity is not a bare and unrelieved mystery. It shows how the nature of God is eternally such that it can give existence to creatures originated in, by, and for the Divine love and for its fellowship. It may well be that the term “ Persons “ is insufficient, and by reason of finite and, still more, of modern associations unsuitable to set forth the three Subject-objects of the Divine fellowship. Those who contem plate the mystery of the conjoint immanence of God and the distinct personality of man should be helped thereby as far towards a conception of the existence of a Trinity in unity in the Godhead as it is possible for the finite mind, at least on earth, to arrive. And if so, then it comes about that the doctrine of the Trinity, which, as revealed, rests upon the historic manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, becomes for thought the fundamental condition by which the relations between the manifested Christ and God, and between mankind and God, can be discerned by reason to be possible.

If, then, the Godhead exists in the eternal fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we have to ask whether the relationship of.Fatherhood towards man repre sents that of the Godhead as one, or that of the Father in the holy Trinity alone. What is the relationship of each of the three Persons to man and to the Fatherhood in which God stands to man?

Undoubtedly the Father, known and revealed by the in carnate Son, is treated by the New Testament as the first Person in the holy Trinity. The Son is the eternalmanifestation and reflexion of the Father, and it was through Him and in Him and to Him, according to the New Testament, that the world was created. His Sonship is the type, the ground, and the means of man s. Once more, the Holy Spirit is the Divine Agent by whom our spiritual life in the Father and the Son is realised.

Are, then, these complex facts of man’s Divine relation ship all to be included under the conception of the Fatherhood of God? And if so, in what way? We have seen in the previous chapter that Augustine brought about a great change in the way in which this matter was conceived by the theology of the Church. Up to his time great stress had been laid upon the distinctive relations in which the three Persons of the Trinity stand to man; and so distinct a primacy was given to the Father, as the eternal Fount of the Godhead, that no share in the Divine Fatherhood towards man was left to the Son or to the Holy Spirit. Augustine, hi his earnest endeavour to sweep away everything which could give an appearance of subordination to the Son, practically ignored the distinctive relations of the three Persons of the Godhead to man, destroyed the primacy of the Father in the Divine dealings with mankind, and, confining the Trinity to the inner life of the Godhead, substituted sovereignty for Fatherhood in its external manifestations.

Between these two views we have to seek a solution which does more complete justice to the teaching of the New Testament and to the facts of Christian experience. The following statement may perhaps serve towards this end. The Godhead exists in the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The source is in the Father; yet He never became Father, but is so eternally, His Father hood being in relation to His Eternal Son. Fatherhood, then, is the determining relationship within the Godhead; but this involves neither essential inferiority nor subsequent or created existence in regard to the Son. Proceeding from the realm of the Divine life in this eternal fellowship, the life of the Godhead is reflected in the creation which God calls into existence, and in such wise that what the three Persons of the holy Trinity are eternally to one another is manifested in their several offices, first of all, in creation, and afterwards in redemption. The Father is the originating source of love, creating beings made in and for love; destined, therefore, for that sonship in which alone the life of creaturely love can be fulfilled. The Son reveals this purpose of love, and becomes the ground of its realisation, so that in Him and through Him and to Him are all things, receiving by their relationship to Him the communication of the fatherlypurpose and the filial impress which enables them to respond to it. This work of the Son in revealing and realising the fatherly purpose of God, by calling into existence in union with Himself a filial world, is effectuated by the Holy Spirit, who secures by His own inspiration the filial response by which men cry, “ Abba, Father.” It is thus that creation and redemption generally have resulted from the triune co-operation of the Godhead in love. By offices which manifest the peculiarity of their distinctive life in the Godhead, the three Divine Persons have given effect in creation and redemption to a purpose which is supremely fatherly. They have given effect to it in constituting, redeeming, and sanctifying the nature of sons; in eliciting a filial response to God, not only in word but in deed, not only in deed but in a nature signed within and without with the characters of sonship. Thus the triune action of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit manifesting the eternal love which was the motive of creation, and producing a world of created love to correspond to the love of the Creator has given expression to the Fatherhood, which is eternally supreme in the Godhead, and prepared the filial response which alone corresponds to it.

Therefore we must couple the full view of the triunity of the Divine action, which Augustine had, with a more complete conception than he had, of the way in which all that action conspires, as the New Testament teaches us, to implant and to complete the nature and life of sons, and therefore by consequence to reveal the supremacy of the Fatherhood, which is the only foundation and source of the life of sons. Thus the whole triune manifestation of God, while it appears divided as we look separately at the distinctive work of each Person, by characteristics peculiar to each, so that we come to the Father, in the Son, and ly the Spirit, yet is fatherly. Hence the Fatherhood, which is the eternal source of the relationships within the Godhead, pervades the action of the Godhead as He manifests Himself in the world of creation, and gives its characteristic, in the life of sonship, to the whole created life, which issues from and corresponds to the Fatherhood of God. Thus a carefully conceived view of the triunity of the Divine nature and action, so far from setting aside the Fatherhood of God and substituting sovereignty for it, as did the theology of Augustine, only serves to bring out into stronger relief how entirely God, in the unity of the three Persons of the Godhead, is fatherly, that men may become sons. And this, not because the Son and the Spirit can themselves be addressed as Father, but because it is theirs to manifest the Father in creation and in redemption, and to secure the filial response to Him.

One other subject remains to be investigated, in order to complete our survey of the doctrine of God, revealed by His fatherly name. It is the relativity of the name and of the relationship, and what is involved in that relativity, as compared with an absolute. There are two classes of names given to God, those which set forth what He is to His creatures, and those which attempt to set forth what He is in Himself. When we call Him “ the Father,” we obviously use a name belonging to the former class. The same is true of the name Jehovah, if we understand it as “ He that causes to be.” Even if it be taken to mean “ He that is what He is,” yet that self-determined consistency refers, not so much to His own interior life as to the unchangeableness of His purposes as embodied in the covenant with His people.

When, however, we take the name “ God “ and define it by an enumeration of Divine attributes, we are endeavouring to obtain a name for what the Divine Being is in Himself in dependently of His relations to His creatures. The same is perhaps true of the Hebrew name “ Elohim,” though in that case imperfectly; for the perfection of God in Himself is set forth by means of the reverent fear and worship which that perfection produces in His creatures. Is it, then, any disparagement of or sign of incompleteness in the name, Father, that it is relative? The answer to this question must be reached by considering how we arrive at any professedly absolute name or definition of God.

Directly we reflect on the subject, it becomes evident that any such result is simply an abstraction from what God manifests Himself as being to the mind, heart, and conscience of mankind in relationship to Himself. The human mind has no power even to conceive the nature of any being, except so far as it manifests itself in relationship to it. It may even be concluded that that which stands in no possible relationship to man through the order of the universe is unreal. If, then, our conception of God and of His perfection be, in any true sense, knowledge, it must be because He stands in such relations to men that through them He discloses, if not the whole of His perfection, at least so much as the human mind is capable of apprehending. Although the absoluteness and immanence of God involve that He transcends and embraces the relationships into which never theless He enters, yet only in and through the relationships into which He condescends to enter can He be known, and only by those who correspondingly stand in thoserelationships to Him. The revelation so given may and does enable men to attain a more or less satisfactory description of God as the all-perfect Being, and to fill out the positive content of what is called perfection. Yet the source of the whole description is to be found in the revelation which God has given of Himself in and through real relations, as being, for example, perfectly loving, righteous, wise, and mighty.

What, then, we conceive God to be in Himself is simply a summing up of that which He has shown Himself to be to us, to our fellows, to our ancestors, and, above all, to the great spiritual teachers of mankind.

It was the fashion of a certain school of religious philo sophy in the middle of the nineteenth century to disparage our knowledge of God, because it is and must be relative.

Groping after the truth that God transcends and Himself constitutes the relations into which He enters, Hamilton and Mansel denied to man all real knowledge of God, because knowledge implies a relation, and God is absolute, that is, free from all relations. The doctrine of philosophical Agnosticism, as set forth by Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and others, is the direct result.

Closer examination reveals the confusion, and indeed absurdity, of this view. What is an absolute Being? Cer tainly in the finite world the nearer the approach to unrelatedness the nearer we come to nothingness, and in the spiritual life to idiocy. The higher a being rises in the scale of existence, the wider, more intimate, and more complex become the relationships into which he enters. Indeed greatness may be defined as the result of an exceptional capacity for relatedness; whereas to escape from relatedness is to vanish into nothingness, so that the logical “ It is “ is equivalent in existence to “ It is not.” Hence bare and unrelated Being, so far from deserving to be arrayed in the robes of superstitious reverence, is beneath regard. Bare being existing outside all relationships and incapable of revealing itself in relationships is something in the world of logic, but nothing in the world of reality. It would not be to the glory of God that He should be absolute in this sense.

He must have an object adequate to Himself and reveal Him self to that object, even if the process takes place within His own all-comprehending life. His glory is to exist in all those relationships to creation by which He makes Himself known as love; though it must ever be borne in mind that, unlike what is the case with His creatures, these relationships are constituted by Him and not for Him; that therefore He is, though we cannot comprehend it, the relationships themselves, as well as what He manifests in them. To speak of God as “ the Father,” therefore, sums up the highest and fullest knowledge of Him. The name stands for the whole of that manifestation in love in which is contained the revelation of all that He essentially is. But if the universal Fatherhood of God sets forth His relationship to mankind, how are we to deal with the difficulty that it is not correlative in the world as we find it with an equally universal realised sonship? In the New Testament, God, as we have seen, is set forth as the universal Father; but men are not treated as in equal actuality God’s sons, even though they may be so potentially. A distinction is made according as the Spirit of God’s Son does or does not cry in their hearts, “ Abba, Father! “ And the history and experience of the world shows us many good men the form of whose religion has not been completely filial, and many bad men who have persistently violated, in temper and conduct, all that could have made them such. How then, in the first place, is God the Father of one who does not respond to Him as son, whether through imperfection of spiritual appre hension or through deliberate sinfulness? And in what ways, if God be Father to such, does the lack of filial response affect the manifestation of His Fatherhood to them?

1. As to the first question, that of the existence of the Fatherhood towards those who fail to give a filial response, the answer must be given that the only Fatherhood of God to mankind of which the New Testament knows anything has its ground in the relationship of mankind to the Eternal Son. The Fatherhood of God is therefore towards the human race as having the ground of its being, the law and life of its nature, in the Eternal Son. The Son therefore lays down the original constitution and determines the final possibilities of human nature. According as men stand in their normal and complete relationships to Him who is “ the way, the truth, and the life,” they “ come unto the Father.”

Hence the universality of the Fatherhood of God does not depend upon, or involve, an equally universal actual realisation by men of the life of sonship. The Fatherhood exists towards the Son as the ground of human life, the law and end of human being. It exists towards mankind as eternally and ideally grounded in the life of the Son of God.

It finds its manifestation in and to a human nature the fundamental lines and the spiritual possibilities of which have, owing to its constitution in the Son of God, the filial impress. Thus the filial life, when completely realised in mind, temper, and conduct, is seen to be the fulfilment of original possibilities, the satisfaction of original needs, which express the essential characteristics of human nature as such. That nature is completely realised only in believers in Christ, and in proportion to the perfection of their faith is itperfected in all its aspects and effects. And in them their highest attainment is simply an approach to the mind and life of the incarnate Son, the ground, the means, and the type of their sonship, and is brought about by the indwelling of His Spirit. Thus the eternal and adequate fact corre sponding to the universal Fatherhood of God is not its more or less perfect realisation in this or that man, but the fellowship of the Son of God as the eternal Head of the human race, its representative before God, the source and principle of its spiritual and natural life. Towards Him the love of the Father goes forth eternally in its fulness, and towards the race in Him; while the full manifestation of that love be comes the portion of each human individual, just when and so far as he enters in the Son into the full realisation of that life of sonship which alone is truly life. The Fatherhood of God, therefore, does not become such towards the individual man at the moment when he enters into the consciousness of sonship. It is simply realised by him. From the very first the dealings of God have been a manifestation of fatherly love towards the whole human race, and towards every member of it who in turn appears to occupy his place in it. This manifestation goes far beyond all human analogies, because fatherly love, with the life and law proceeding from it, does verily form the very nature of the human race by virtue of its creation in and by the Son. The Father fills, rules, and quickens all nature in the Son.

It is what it is only because of the eternal Fatherhood and Sonship, the reality and presence of which is the underlying fact of all human, and of all other than human, existence, however imperfect at any moment in any man may be the conscious realisation of it. This ultimate fact therefore determines the whole course of human history, so that it necessarily becomes an increasing manifestation of fatherly love, securing the response of human sonship.

2. We come on, then, in the second place, to themanifestation of the Fatherhood of God, where the filial response is incomplete or non-existent. In considering this, it is necessary to remind ourselves how all-inclusive is the relation ship of Divine Fatherhood. We have seen that it comprises all the offices in which God has been experienced as standing to men, whether as Sovereign, Revealer and Saviour, Lawgiver and Judge. All these have their motive, unity, and end fixed in the love of the Father, who creates and redeems men that they may enter into His fellowship. We must remember, further, that the Fatherhood is a vital and immanent, not merely an external, fact. And, once more, we must bear in mind that it is possible for human experience and life, implicitly or explicitly, to read into concepts as to the relation ship of God to mankind, by way of description, much that is not contained in their strict definition. The formularies, and even the spontaneous utterances, of religion are not a perfect guide to its intrinsic spirit.

Let us take, first, the case of those whose hearts, as the saying is, “ are right with God,” but who, through the various limitations of human individuality, and through these as further limited by the conditions of a particular stage in the world’s history, or an imperfect ecclesiastical environment, do not predominantly and completely apprehend the relationship realised by religion as that of Fatherhood and sonship. And let us start from the conclusion that such a failure of appre hension is a falling short of the Christianity of the New Testament, and involves certain spiritual as well as intel lectual shortcomings and disadvantages. Such, for example, has been more or less, and with many subordinate variations, the condition of spiritual apprehension in Old Testament, in mediaeval, and in Puritan times. In these cases God, who by hypothesis is perfectly Father to men, has been appre hended by them as sovereign, and responded to rather as loyal servants than with the full intimacy of sons. On the other hand, cases must equally be borne in mind where senti mentality has apprehended and responded to a conception of the Divine Fatherhood, which has excluded many elements which are essential to its full truth.

It is necessary here to confine our inquiry within the bounds of Hebrew and Christian history. But we must not forget the wider divergences which present themselves directly we enter the greater sphere of comparative religion, even when we exclude such forms of non-Christian religion as have evidently proceeded from perversions of the religious sentiment accompanying moral and mental deterioration. Though it is impossible here to discuss these, the considerations by which we deal with the difficulty raised by phases of Christian thought and life are in principle relevant to the religions which lie beyond, when they are not such as must be dealt with patho logically, and throw a measure of light even on this latter class. The truth of the matter is, that the types of spiritual apprehension which have characterised stages of religious history or sections of the Christian community, do specially realise some real aspects of the Fatherhood of God and do respond to them, although such apprehension and response in various degrees fall short of the “ breadth and length and depth and height,” and therefore, by reason of incompleteness, tend to one-sided exaggerations. The one-sided limitations of men mean more than a defect which leaves all else unaffected.

They involve the positive development into a specialised and peculiar individuality of that which is present and active.

Such characteristic peculiarities of temperament, accentuated by historic epoch and spiritual environment, mean a special sensitisation in some directions and the lack of it in others.

They involve, therefore, a peculiar power to apprehend and to respond to certain aspects included in the Fatherhood of God, and the inability to apprehend and respond to certain others equally present in the complete reality. But it is not sufficient to point out that human defects involve a positive and distinctive determination of human character and of its spiritual apprehension, and that that distinctive peculiarity makes men sensitive to particular aspects of the Divine Fatherhood. It must further be urged that God ordains that it should be so, and that His own manifestation of Himself is determined in order to satisfy the particular spiritual condition of those to whom it is made, in order to enable them to fill their place and discharge their office in the gradual evolution of the world’s life. And it must further be admitted that general advance may, at least sometimes, only be purchased by particular retrogressions. This is involved in the vital process of the world, and the revelation of God to and in men conforms itself to this fact. The defects, for example, in Augustine’s theology, from the standpoint of a complete rendering into thought and life of “ the truth, as truth is in Jesus,” were the conditions under which alone could a living and effective message from God go forth to Eoman and mediaeval life, taking into account their inherent and inevitable imperfections. And substantially the doctrine set forth despite exaggeration and shortcoming does declare something which is permanently true of the Divine Fatherhood and vitally part of it. The same explanation holds good in the classic example of Puritanism, with its one-sided insistence on the sovereignty of God, accompanied by a virility of purpose and action which wrought out our modern liberties. And what is true of stages in the world’s development is equally true of survivals and reactions. In the case of true and faithful men, limited by their own individuality and not sinning against light, these represent a fatherly accommodation on the part of God in manifesting to men such aspects of His Fatherhood as they are capable of apprehending and responding to. And the explanation is completed by the statement that the experience of God and of the life of salvation commonly surpasses the forms in which it is expressed; that, for example, except in periods when the sense of guilt rested heavily upon men’s consciences, and rightly so, there has seldom been a time when the doctrine of God’s sovereignty did not convey much of His fatherliness as well as that particular function of it, and when the response of service was not essentially inspired by what was really, if not consciously, the spirit of sonship.

3. We come on, then, in the third place, to the consideration of the case where, in addition to imperfection of spiritual apprehension, there is present an actively bad will, either selfishly set upon its own ends, irrespective of the will of God, or even in marked hostility to what is known to be right, and, in the extreme case, to what is clearly recognised as being Divine. Such is the condition of human nature as under the bondage of sin. This fact of sin is at once the most obvious and terrible of facts, and the most difficult to explain. It represents the power of the finite individual to rise up in rebellion against the absolute and perfect life which conditions the whole. It is the contradiction of God in a world filled by the Divine Presence and grounded in the life of the Eternal Son. And yet the hostility must never be explained away as only apparent, for to do so is to out rage the spiritual consciousness in order prematurely to resolve an intellectual difficulty.

Immediately the bad will appears, it obviously puts its possessor in an altogether new relationship to the Fatherhood of God. We are not concerned here to discuss all the consequences to the individual, or to the race, of the entrance of sin. Suffice it to say that we have here a refusal to recognise alike the loving Source, the absolute authority, and the beneficent end of the Divine law, and consequently a refusal to respond with trust and loyalty to the Divine Fatherhood.

Yet that refusal does not set it aside. The external law, which conditions man’s life, and even the immanent law, which ordains the outlines of each man’s nature, is still fatherly. Yet the manifestation of the Fatherhood of God to such a man is shut out, and, because shut out, is turned to wrath; for the wrath of God is simply the love of the Fatherhood denied its purpose by rebellion.

What must happen has been made clear by what has already been said as to the holiness and righteousness of God. The very fatherliness of the Divine authority is the cause of its destructiveness where the sinful will is present; for man sins, and may contract the invincible habit of sinning, against his own nature, which is the presence within him of the Father in the Son. The man who sins against his own nature, which is in reality God’s life within him, is smitten by that very nature, which, being God’s life, is yet God’s love, and is invincible. A man cannot destroy himself peacefully in this universe. The whole, which runs up into him, takes vengeance on him; but that vengeance is explained by the fatherly love of God, manifested in the filial ground of human nature, which was created in the Eternal Son. If the Fatherhood of God were destroyed, so would be the penalty of sin; for sin is the refusal of a son to be a son, and the consequent loss of his sonship, in a universe where there is no place for anything but sonship. Take away the Fatherhood of God as the explanation of men’s being, and the world is reduced to spiritual chaos, in which anything may happen, including that the sinner should escape scot free. But once believe that God is eternally and universally Father, in such wise that the lines of true life are irrevocably fixed by His nature, and then, as we are taught in the Book of Proverbs, the man who hates wisdom the wisdom of appre hending and corresponding to the eternal and Divine conditions of his own spiritual being loves death (Proverbs 8:36). In loving death and making himself one with it, he is destroyed by those very forces of life which are within him as well as without. And yet the irresistible might of those forces, and their inexorable certainty, are directly due to the Fatherhood of God.

We have now reviewed the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, so far as it directly relates to His nature and His relationship to mankind. Our account, however, would not be complete did we not consider it as a means of interpreting the world and life, and as a guide to the true ideals of human conduct and training.

1. In the first place, it may be laid down that the truth of the Fatherhood of God supplies the most effectual means for harmonising the various aspects of the world, and espe cially of human life, in a consistent whole. In particular, it enables thought both to recognise and to transcend the distinction often presented to us between nature and the supernatural outside man, and between nature and grace within him.

Let us consider, first, the general distinction between the natural and the supernatural. When we conceive nature as contrasted with the supernatural, we represent to ourselves a system of fixed forces operating under laws supposed to be in themselves universal and inflexible; and we imagine this system to exist independently of the higher conditions and objects of spiritual and moral life. Nature, as thus defined, is what is left of the universe when that which is spiritual and moral has been subtracted from it. We are not here concerned with those who deny the existence of the supernatural altogether. Then when nature has been thus conceived as a system lying below spirituality and morality, and in itself cut off from them, it is treated as the counterof the supernatural, and attempts have to be made to set up again the relationship which has been broken, and to settle the terms on which the natural and the supernatural coexist. In fact, however, what we have set up, and now try to harmonise, is an artificial and unreal, and therefore, if treated too seriously, a misleading contradiction. We know, and can know, nothing of such a purely physical and non-spiritual world. It does not exist. To suppose that it could, is, in thought, to expel God from the world, which He constitutes and fills, and to treat the residuum by what are no other than materialist principles. Even so far as we ourselves are concerned, we know nothing of any universe which is not a whole presented in and to a spiritual consciousness if nothing more than the consciousness of the man who perceives it, is influenced by it, and responds to it. So far from it being easy in thought to detach this consciousness from the whole and then to suppose that it remains as before, it is much easier philosophically to preserve the spiritual and to blot out from our conception of reality the purely physical and natural, which is its instrument, than the reverse. For purposes of analysis, we may abstract any part of the undivided whole of the universe, may fix our attention upon it, and draw inferences as to it. We may separate man from nature, and both from God. Further, it is essential to personal life to distinguish itself from the impersonal, or the incompletely personal, and relatively instrumental, and, similarly, to sepa rate in thought the world from God. But the world, thus regarded in isolation, never did or could really exist in this isolated state. It subsists only in the spiritual, which is God; it unfolds its meaning only in and to the spiritual, such as men. The universe never did exist, or can exist, in any part, except as an object for, as an instrument and abode of, the Divine consciousness, as God proceeded to realise in time His eternal spiritual purpose. Therefore, when we take nature and set it over against the supernatural, as though it were enclosed apart from it, while our action may be justified by some immediate interest of thought, yet the separation has no final validity, and must eventually be transcended by a reflexion which unifies the whole.

Thus the greatest thinkers have insisted that the super natural is in reality the largest nature, and that what we commonly call nature is but a province of it; and, in the case of miracles, they have argued that what seems to contradict the customary order of the part belongs to and serves the larger order of the whole. The principle which has been behind this explanation has been that, while for practical purposes men may set up a restricted conception of nature, and may refuse to contemplate any power of modification, yet such insistence is simply the irrational emphasis which sets up an artificial abstraction, and treats it as the substance, while the rest of reality is but shadow. Of course it is possible to fall into the other extreme.

We may select the so-called supernatural aspects of existence and life, and may so concentrate attention upon them as to ignore the more mundane elements of reality. To do so is to fall a victim to an irrational pietism, which is capable of taking as its standard of belief the principle, “ Credo quia impossibile,” and of ignoring, in its practical interests, whole departments inseparably bound up with the complete wellbeing of human life. In either case we are pressing to the extreme of an impossible division what, for certain purposes, is a useful distinction in thought. Within our experience there is no supernatural without the natural, and no natural without the supernatural. The conclusions drawn from either part, when isolated in thought from the whole, must be revised by a diligent effort to set back the part once more in the whole, and to treat it as an aspect which is qualified by the whole to which it belongs.

Under the conception of the Divine Makership and sovereignty, the mind may rest in the conception of the two parts as external to one another, and as possibly in collision. And thus both theoretic and practical error may be promoted by an inadequate conception of the relationship of God to the world. The Fatherhood of God, properly understood, both compels and enables us to conceive the universe of truth and life prevailingly from the standpoint of wholeness, and not from that of division.

2. Substantially, the same explanation applies to the distinction between nature and grace, especially when these are viewed as “ states “ in which men live. We have seen that the doctrine of Augustine practically took as its startingpoint the conception of mankind as totally ruined and morally helpless because of sin, but yet as possessed of a self-contained nature, which was complete for secular purposes, being of course derived from God as Creator and, so far as really existent, good. 1 To this ruined and secular nature there carne from the Divine and supernatural realm the sudden and effective succour (adjutorium) of grace, which, as a forth-putting of the power of God, set this spiritually and morally helpless being on his feet. We have seen how this account is explained by Augustine’s own experience, and by the conditions of the age in which he lived. It is also not internally consistent; for though man is treated as complete for natural and secular purposes without the gift of grace, yet Augustine in his City of God traces the evil social and political consequences of the Fall from God in the spiritual world, and foreshadows the downfall of the secular order, as based on self-will, by the judgment of God. This can only be conceived, on reflexion, as taking place because such a secular life is really unnatural, and therefore, in God’s world, ultimately impossible.

Yet, whatever inconsistencies may exist and admissions may be made, the impression conveyed by this doctrine of human nature is that of a race, complete for the ends of secular life, yet helpless so far as spiritual life is concerned, until a special intervention of God takes place on behalf of this man or that, that intervention taking the form of the exercise of power. This explanation is indeed true to certain aspects of Christian experience, and has a relative validity. But it is only relative, and it is in many respects fundamentally incomplete. In particular, though there is in many respects an irreconcilable opposition between the doctrine of grace as the unconditioned exercise of Divine power and that of grace as conditioned by sacraments, yet, conceived simply as dynamic, there is a close connexion between Augustine’s view of the nature and exercise of grace and the magic view of mediaeval times. This general account, with whatever minor modifications it

1 As has been seen, Augustine took so poor a view of ordinary secular existence, that efficiency for its purposes signified little to him. And of course this view of secular apart from spiritual efficiency cannot be carried out consistently. It appears in a more practicable, though not more really satis factory, form in the doctrine of Aquinas. See p. 216. may be presented, rests upon a totally impossible basis. It is impossible to harden and round-off human nature into a complete whole minus all spiritual parts and to call it man, without turning the fact of salvation into anunaccountable miracle. If a complete man can be found who is yet purely natural and enclosed in a secular whole, how does he become raised to the power of a Divine life? Both parts of the doctrine are faulty, the account of sinful nature as secularly complete, and the account of grace as mere dynamic, coming to enlarge and transform this nature from without. And the mistake arises once more from pressing a distinction of thought till it becomes an impossible chasm in life.

It was in respect of this error that Wesley and his co-workers in the eighteenth century did the greatest service in setting forth the true character of grace and its relationship to nature. The main features of the Augustinian view lived on in Calvinism, though in some respects modified by the doctrine of justification by faith. On the other hand, the typical Anglican of those degenerate days seemed scarcely to recognise grace and the supernatural at all, save as the fading glory of a departed day. Generally speaking, it was sufficient for him if men lived blameless lives under proper moral instruction, and with due observance of the rites of the Church. The essential doctrine of Wesley was that of the universal love of God as the supreme fact concerning human life a fact which carried with it the assurance that all men, however sinful, were called to, might be rendered capable of, and could only be completed in, the life of God’s sons. Thus every one to whom Wesley or his followers preached was not merely fallen from Divine sonship, but one still made and destined for the sonship from which he had fallen, incomplete without it, and yet able by the help of the Spirit of God acting through the revelation to his heart of the universal love of God to return, in and through Christ, to the wholeness of nature which he had lost by sin. And, in preaching this, Wesley no more trifled with the reality and heinousness of the Fall and of sin than did the Calvinists. On the contrary, his emphasis on human freedom enabled him to emphasise the guilt of sin to a far greater extent than could the Calvinist with his belief in the eternal and absolute decrees of God. From the Methodist view thus set forth it is possible at once to advance to a view of the relations of the “ state “ of nature to that of grace, and to a view of grace in itself which preserves the truth in the Augustinian view, while ridding it of its one-sided incompleteness.

Under this larger Methodist conception the state of grace is simply the state of human life completely realised, or on the way to complete realisation, in all relationships, Divine and human. It is the completed manhood of those who have been set in those true and normal relations to God which have been disturbed and atrophied by sin. Until that completeness Godward is brought about, it is impossible for a man to be complete for any purpose or in any relationship of his life. There is no complete secular life with the Divine relationship blotted out. It is impossible to separate human nature into two divided capacities, one for God and the other for the world, and to hold that one may be complete while the other is incomplete. And what is impossible in regard to the individual is also impossible in regard to the community.

It is impossible to construct and maintain a Godless civilisation, and it is equally impossible to construct and maintain a “city of God” in indifference to what is taking place in secular society. There is but one complete human nature, namely, the filial, which must be completed and manifested in all the relationships of human life. Of that completely filial nature all human life is either the promise or the decay. Only this fulfilled manhood has the key to any and every part of human life and its relationships, heavenly or mundane.

When, then, from this completed whole of a normal human life the relationship to God is abstracted, there is no longer a real man left, any more than when the supernatural is abstracted and so-called nature only remains, this is the real universe. Of course it may be done for particular purposes, and in the case of particular objects or particular men. It is possible to single out a block of granite and to treat it as representing an unspiritual and lifeless world, leaving out the fact that it lies in the bosom of the earth, and that the earth lies in the bosom of heaven and of God. So it is possible to single out sinful men in whom the spiritual relationships are deformed or unfulfilled, and to treat them as representing human kind, leaving out of account the fact that such a human kind, unredeemed by God and therefore unredeemed by the presence of His saints, has never existed, and never can exist, in the world. Such a procedure, though necessary for certain purposes and in a measure true, cannot be pressed to a rigorous interpretation of what human life essentially is, or be justified by the history of what human nature has actually been. To press such a proceeding too far, is to set up a self-contained whole of human nature in which it is theoretically impossible to find an avenue for the approach of God. It is implicitly to deny the Divine Fatherhood, which needs as its condition a nature that makes sonship possible and that can be redeemed for it. Salvation, then, into a state of grace is simply the realisation of that completeness for all human uses in and through the Divine for which human nature was planned by God. Our Lord’s saying, “ That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit “ (John 3:6), may be objected, as pointing to the possible existence of two types of men, distinct and self-contained, one of which is competent for the purposes of fleshly, and the other for those of spiritual, life. But it must be remembered that neither “ flesh “ nor “ spirit “ can be treated as a synonym for man; for man is obviously the union of both, though on the side both of the one and of the other there may be defects verging upon the total extinction either of the one or the other.

Moreover, our Lord Himself, as we have already seen, 1 recognises certain men as being “ of the truth,” antecedent to their coming to Him, and as the cause of their coming. An antithesis is set up between what we owe ministerially to the fathers of our flesh and what we owe to “ the Spirit,” or, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, to the “ Father of spirits “ (Hebrews 12:9).

1 Chapter II, p. 22. And we are told that, in the case of sinful men, what causes them to live as “ spirit “ is nothing less than rebirth; as distinct a new beginning as is physical birth. But we must always remember that physical analogies, owing to their necessary limitations, can only imperfectly set forth the higher realities of the spiritual world. And thus, while we not only recognise but insist that human nature under sin has become such that in order to complete it in the realisation of Divine relationships it must pass through a spiritual experience so decisive as to be called in St. John “ rebirth “and by St. Paul “ resurrection,” we must not exaggerate what is meant till we fall into contradiction. Moreover, in order to a birth there must be some one ready to be born; for a resur rection to take place there must be some one to be raised. And thus we must not so strain our Lord’s words as either to suppose that a man can be complete for the purposes of secular life without spiritual aptitudes or affinities, or to treat spiritual birth as possible without a spiritual nature, derived from “ the Spirit,” as the antecedent condition of its possibility. And this brings us to the new conception of grace as the Methodist movement enables us to understand it. Harm has been done, notably by Augustine, in identifying grace too completely with the category of cause, understood as effectuating power. The text which has just been considered attributes the new birth to “ the Spirit,” and the Spirit has much larger content than mere dynamic. It includes it, of course, but it in cludes it as the natural and subordinate consequence of the manifestation of the glory of God, in truth and grace, to the spirit of man, resulting in his awakening. The power of the Spirit, which enables men to attain to the full actuality of Divine sonship, is the outcome of the manifestation of God to every faculty of their spirit, as love, truth, and life. “ I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father except by Me,” our Lord said at a later time. Christ supplies to the man who listens to His voice and enters upon Him the guidance and support, the illumination and quickening, which enable him to apprehend and to return the love of God. This apprehension and response is the coming to the Father by Him. And the whole process sums up the phsenomena of the new birth, and contains the secret of the power which occasions it. Regeneration is not the working of an irrational power upon men’s lives, whether with or without conditions. It arises through a gracious apprehension of “ the truth, as truth is in Jesus,” which awakes by the Spirit the cry of joyful recognition, “ Abba, Father! “ and thus once more fulfils that normal Divine relationship without which man is ruined for all the functions and ends of true, that is, “ eternal “ life, whether Godward or manward, whether in time or for eternity. This is what the early Methodists meant by describing their new experience as a “ stepping into liberty.” The phrase set forth the buoyancy, the spiritual power, the sense of heirship, which belong to those who come to realise their sonship. The true expression of that “ liberty “is the humble, yet commanding, entrance into all the relation ships of a complete human life, for the first time possessing it, because possessed of all the fulness of the Divine life. The whole is explained, and can only be explained, by means of the Fatherhood of God, and of the implicit sonship of man, which redemption restores and fulfils.

If all this be true, it follows that human life is completely realised only as a whole laid out on harmonious lines; that nature is built on the lines, exists for the ends, and fits in as part of the whole, of grace. There can be no intrinsic opposition between the two. The statement that God began in nature what He completes in grace, which may be taken as, roughly speaking, a true account of the history, means that, as is the case with all true development, the nature of the end governs the beginning, and is immanent in it; that the grace which crowns man’s life in completely realised spiritual relationships gave law to the first creative act which destined man for this fulness of life, implanted its possibilities within him, and so fitly framed together all the powers of his nature that each has its place temporal or eternal in the ordered whole of a Divine life.

Since sin entered into the world, a crisis there is in man’s life. On the human side it is expressed by the term conversion, on the Divine by that of regeneration. But beneath the crisis can be seen the underlying continuity. That which is born, as part of nature, is carried up, preserved, and completed in that which is born anew. Both the crisis and the continuity must equally be borne in mind. Here we have to do, however, not so much with the abnormal, introduced by sin, as with the normal as it is completed in perfect saintliness. And this presents a perfect harmony between all that is of nature and all that is of grace; between all that consists in Godward and all that consists in rnanward relationships. Of course our human nature, as it at present exists, is so far removed from the ideally normal that there are in it varying displacements and exaggerations, defects and excesses, which destroy perfect harmony and proportion between all the parts and the whole. But this does not prevent us from discerning behind the manifold human deformities of imperfect and sinful character, with all their unruliness and disorders, a perfect answer to the Divine Fatherhood in human sonship as possible. And this perfect answer is to be gained, not by suppression but by expression, by the completing and perfecting of every part.

Even the abnormal is not for the most part corrected by being suppressed, but by being brought to occupy its right place and proportion, neither more nor less, in the completed whole of all-round human life. The work of Christian education and discipline is so to correct the abnormalities introduced by sin, by both its hereditary and its individual effects, as to give expression to this Divine whole of human life. There are cases of spiritual pathology where our Lord’s precept, “ If thy right hand offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee,” etc, must be followed. But the main stress must be laid upon the cure of human nature, by calling it forth in all its parts under the influence of a faith which realises the full meaning of the filialrelationship to God in Christ. Thus all prevailingly ascetic views of the Christian life, which have aimed at reaching its perfection by the mortification or maiming of any of the faculties, relationships, or interests of human life, have, in their various ways, offended against the supreme truth of the spiritual life. They have erred by an exaggeration which has made of a limited and prudential precept an absolute and unconditional duty, if the highest Christian life is to be attained.

They have confounded powers with the abuse of them, have severed the supernatural from the natural, and have set up a false ideal of saintliness as consisting, not in completed man hood, freed from unspirituality and excess by the perfect development of the supernatural relationship controlling every part, but in an attenuated life caused by the elimination of functions and interests which are all necessary to the complete manifestation and maintenance of human nature. In the light of the Fatherly and filial relationship as originating and presiding over the whole development of human life, all such prescriptions for the advancement of Christian life stand condemned. Of the truth of this judgment the life of Christ is a convincing proof. Both His conduct and His teaching were entirely free from the ascetic spirit. He shows the absolute agreement between the eternally Divine and the normally human life, for He reveals God by fulfilling manhood. He has contact with life at every point, without losing, but, on the contrary, completing His spiritual command over the whole. He manifests a liberty which proceeds from perfect purity of heart. His life is a perfect and orderly human development, in which family and friendly affection, respect for worldly order, recognition and service given to all human needs, are displayed. The life of Christ, while in a sense a life of self-renunciation, is, above all, a life of self-fulfilment. The self-renunciation consists in His complete self -surrender to His Father’s will; and this is the condition of His own and of all human selffulfilment, by reason of the filial life, which is the very essence of true human nature. Directly the filial nature is treated seriously as the inmost reality of truly human life, it becomes clear how grievous is the mistake which sets up self-renunciation and self-fulfilment as contradictories. Self-renunciation then becomes the denial of things to oneself for denial’s sake, self-fulfilment the grasping of things for oneself for the sake of having them. And each of these contraries is false. True self -fulfilment in human nature is fulfilment as God’s son; and to be God’s son means the absolute surrender to our Father, as the secret of the unfolding of a life which in surrender to the Father is fulfilled in every part.

Thus our Lord finds a heritage even in the sufferings which form the most difficult problem in human life; and St. Paul, truly in accordance with the mind of Christ, says, “ Let us glory in our tribulations “ (Romans 5:3). Herein is the final and most difficult test of the wholeness of human life and of the harmony of all its parts.

Only the doctrine of Fatherhood and sonship as the guide to all parts and experiences of human life can explain this vital wholeness and harmony above all, this fulfilment only through perfected self -surrender. If the conception of God’s relationship to man be that of the artificer to his work, or the sovereign to his subject, it is at least possible to imagine distinctness and even incongruity between the various elements of human life. Above all, it is possible to imagine a possible contrariety between the life of the Creator and that of the creature, the interests of the one not being those of the other. It is that conception which has sometimes in spired mad rebellion against God, when the idea of His sovereignty has been so magnified as apparently to threaten the life of His creatures. That which saves from all such exaggerations is to see in the positive life of Jesus the revelation of life in its perfect harmony, wrought out under the sense of the Fatherhood of God and in filial response to Him; to understand also that that perfect revelation is the revelation of truth for the whole world, at once making all true human nature a seamless robe woven out of the life and love which are the truth of God. The Fatherhood of God and the filial nature of man being, then, the ultimate truth, we get the ideal of perfect Christian life as consisting in the complete expression of a life which is founded in self-devotion and issues in self-fulfilment. Such a life finds room in the manifold richness of spiritual life for the cultivation and exercise of all the natural powers, and makes the true Christian ideal not incompatible with generous culture. Of course, culture is not Christianity. Within certain limits, culture may be without moral goodness, and spiritual and moral goodness may be without culture. But it is easy to exaggerate this, until it sets forth a falsehood rather than the truth. A very real moral element enters into all true culture. The sustained effort of the human mind to arrive at the knowledge of truth or the perception of beauty is not merely intellectual, but involves, to a certain and it may be to a considerable degree, the exercise of moral faculties. When a child diligently learns his lessons, he receives thereby not merely intellectual culture, but moral discipline; not, indeed, sufficient for all the purposes of common life, still less for all the purposes of Christian life, but still much more than a merely intellectual exercise. On the other hand, the full realisation of saintliness involves thoughts about God and true thoughts about Him. In so far as the thought of God is inadequate or erroneous, some damage, at least, is done to the spiritual life. To deny this is to deny altogether the influence of Christian truth upon Christian character. Therefore, even in saintliness, all else being equal, the more the intellect is trained and furnished with adequate data to form true conceptions of God, the better; and thus an intellectual element enters into all true religion.

Further, if true religion is to manifest all its beauty and power, it must be completely abreast of the general progress of the world. The intellectual element in it must keep pace with the growing and widening experience of mankind, the whole of which is providentially intended to throw its measure of light upon the character and ways of God. An intellectually belated religion is never the highest expression of Christianity to any age. Especially is this the case when, as generally happens, this belatedness is due not merely to intellectual but also to moral causes, as, for example, indifference to, prejudice against, cowardice in facing, new issues raised by the progress of the world. To this extent, at least, do moral and intellectual elements connected with culture run up into godliness.

It is this presence of intellectual and moral elements in their religious faith which has made the most conspicuous saints of history its prophets. Of course this does not alto gether hold of the more modest forms of saintliness which have shed abroad the radiance and graciousness of a devoted Christian life. Yet, even in the case of such, part of their power to reach and influence the heart of men has come from the fact that, at least in their great spiritual conceptions of God, they have not been behind their times. The elements of truth in genuine religion, and its influence in producing truthfulness, would suffice to secure this. But the most influential saints have had the power to express in word and deed the highest knowledge of God available in the age wherein they lived. And if the power to think those thoughts of God, which are in keeping with the true progress of the age, is an element in the highest religious life, then, all other things being equal, these thoughts of God will be more adequate, according as they are influenced by many-sided knowledge of the times.

Hence the serious mistake of those Christians who think to serve the cause of Christ by disparaging ordinary knowledge and education, and who treat the full realisation of human life in all its powers as though it had nothing to do with religion. Certainly these things are not religion in them selves, but they have much influence upon our power to apprehend, in all their fulness, the ways of God. And the richer and fuller human thought and culture become, the greater the need so to appropriate all that is best and truest in them, as to show that all these things belong to Christ, who is the truth in all worlds, because all worlds have been created by Him, and in Him, and to Him.

Some consideration must be given, however, to those cases where the full carrying out of the Christian life seems incompatible with the pursuit of culture, where men have to choose, apparently, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfilment.

There are undoubtedly extreme cases where utter self-devotion is carried out at the cost of neglecting the ordinary intel lectual and aesthetic interests of human life, even when an aptitude for them is present, or of denying the ordinary domestic affections. And there are opposite cases, where the pursuit of these may not only make the more heroic tasks of life impracticable, but may involve the denial of inward capacities for undertaking them. The theoretic solution of such extreme cases is pronounced impossible by moralists. 1 The case would be stated, from the standpoint of mere morality, thus. The end of human action is the satisfaction of desire, the endeavour to secure or repeat some experience which promises to satisfy a want; the place of each man in the great hierarchy of human life being determined by the dignity and worth of his prepon derating wants. With some men, more altruistic than their neighbours, the most imperative want is to satisfy the emotion of sympathy, and in order to satisfy it such men may be impelled to extinguish all other tastes and desires. How is a man to decide, when his sympathy impels him to forgo all that would make him intellectually, aesthetically, perhaps socially, a completer man, in order to fulfil some missionary calling, involving the sacrifice of these advantages? May not his greater service be purchased at the cost of that by which he becomes really serviceable? From the standpoint of the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God the problem is stated in a false way, because the starting-point is not that of faith in the primary reality of a direct personal relationship between God and the human spirit. As shaped by the experience of God’s Fatherhood and of man’s sonship, the instinctive deliverance of the religious consciousness is, that life is not to be directed to wards the satisfaction of desires, but towards the fulfilment of what is assigned as the task and duty of life; and that the truest self-fulfilment is the fulfilment of the filial consciousness and character. Doubtless, abstract and lower possibilities may have to be sacrificed, at least for thepresent. Human life is so short, and its opportunities are so limited, that abstract possibilities have to be negatived by every act of choice, and not only in the serious dilemma which we are considering. “ Tempus brevis, ars longa “; and it is impossible for any man to fulfil himself in all the directions for which he has aptitudes, in the short span of threescore years and ten. But no man who is fully animated by the filial spirit can be permanently damaged even though he live his whole life among lepers, and in so doing lose most 1 See, for example, Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. xxv.; Taylor, The Problem of Conduct. of the fruits of whatever liberal education he has enjoyed.

Jhe things forgone are as nothing to the eternal manhood gained. In the gaining of that manhood is the deathless possibility of eventually making up all other loss, for the truly filial mind is ever young and ever growing. The tem porary maiming of lower powers can be repaired in God’s many worlds hereafter, if the essential truth of the filial spirit be preserved and perfected. Moreover, in the moment of critical decision, often impossible on the grounds of theory or calculation (for it is generally beyond a man’s power accurately to assess the serviceableness of his life either in retrospect or in prospect), yet in the faith of Fatherhood and sonship, the crisis is inwardly resolved by the response of the filial spirit to the revelation of the mind and will of God.

There is an inward stirring towards an inward manifestation of the course which will enable God’s will to be fulfilled and His servant’s work to be accomplished. The truly filial heart is not left to go astray; in proportion to the completeness of the response to God, “Not my will, but Thine, be done,” is the guidance to a sure decision, which saves selfcompletion from being selfish, and self-devotion from being permanent impoverishment. A concluding word may be said as to the ideal which the Fatherhood of God affords of the spirit in which human affairs should be administered. Man’s regulative conduct towards his fellows should aim at avoiding alike the rigidity of an authority corresponding to bare sovereignty, and the sentimentality which misrepresents itself as being fatherly.

If our account of the Divine Fatherhood be true, its influence as a guide to human conduct will not encourage softness in policy or administration, either in public or in private affairs.

Authority will be strengthened rather than weakened, while it will be exercised in full regard to the humane ends which it is intended to serve. The perfect union of the virile and the humane is one of the greatest needs, alike in public temper and in government, as well as in private affairs. Our survey of what is contained in the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God is now complete, and we pass on to study its manifestation in the constitution and history of the world.