The redemption of every creature. The final cause of the world manifest in the redemption The relation of the redemption to eternal life. The communion of earth and heaven. The death of the Christ brings to life its infinite signifi- PAGE The going away of the Christ, the manifestation and re- The Scriptures; the record of the revelation of God. The Scriptures; the difference, in their method, from The Sacraments; the manifestation of the character and The coming of the Spirit; the Lord and Giver of Life. The law of Christ, the law of humanity. The foundation of human society. The references to the Scriptures are in a few instances nec MONTROSE, SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY, PENN. UNIVERSITY CALIFORNIA THE REPUBLIC OF GOD. CHAPTER I. THE BEING OF GOD. THE being of God is the precedent and the postulate of the thought of God. It is the ground in man of his conscious life. From the beginning, and with the growth of the human consciousness, there is the consciousness of the being of God, and of a relation to God. Man is conscious of the being of the external world, and lives and acts in this consciousness, and the being of the external world so comes to be apprehended by him. And, further, man is conscious of the being of God, and lives and acts in this consciousness, and the reality of the being of God so comes to him. We cannot deduce the being of God from the existence of the world, nor the eternal from the temporal, nor the infinite from the finite; and yet the temporal has its ground in the eternal, and the finite in the infinite. The eternal is not the continuation of the temporal, nor the infinite the extension of the finite, and God is not the sequence nor the limitation of the world. In this process of the consciousness of the being of God, man does not start from the finite existence which is within the conditions of space and time, that which consequently is placed.1 Being is of itself, in finite conditions, a vacant phase of thought. It is not that we have to ask its application, as derived from the finite existences, to God. The notion of God is derivative from the being of God. It is not necessary to supplement the notion of God with the empty category of being as derived from finite conditions.2 1 "We must find something like God before we reach God, or we shall not in our thoughts attain unto him." (Bascom, Philosophy of Religion, p. 74.) It is necessarily the reverse of this. We know God, and then we find that which in a higher or lower measure is like him. 2 Kant (Werke, vol. i. p. 90) does not prove the difference between being and notion. It is assumed in a popular way, but it is a phase of thought which applies only to imperfect or incomplete things. Thus, in society the state advances in its normal process into the realization of the idea of the state, and the course of the physical world may be a development, after its germinal or radical type, through the succession of its forms. But this process does not pertain to the being of God. He is not the sequence of an evolution, though his manifestation may be through the process of an evolution. God is the perfect being, and incompleteness does not attach to him. If Kant's postulate is correct we can know nothing of God; we can make up various notions about God, but that is not to say that The being of God is not an attribute which is to be appended to some abstract notion of reality, or of the sum of all realities, or to the notion of perfection, and if it were in this constructive method to be thus apprehended, it would have the place of an attribute and not of the subject. Thus it is not necessary to the knowledge of the being of God to assume that it is one among several objects of immediate intuition; nor that it is a requisition of the emotions, -the requirement that there shall be placed before them the highest end; nor that it is arrived at, as a conclusion, through the formulas of logic. The knowledge of God thenceforth, in this process of consciousness, comes through experience. It is the experience of the individual and the family and the nation in the life of humanity. The being of God is the primal truth. It is primitive in human thought: there is nothing before it nor apart from it, from which it is to be derived. Thus the being of God has not its foundation in the life of humanity, but humanity has its foundation in the life of God. Theology has not its ground in psychology. The idea of God is in and with and through the these notions are so, nor is the existence of God implied by them. See Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, vol. ii. p. 214. being of God. The idea and the being of God are one. In Him is the oneness of the ideal and the real. It is only in and from the being of God that we discern the infinite and the eternal in their realization.1 The infinite is not subject to the conditions of the finite, nor the eternal to the conditions of the temporal. In the physical process we can attain only to the negative infinite, the temporal and spatial infinite, that is, the quantitative infinite. The imagination is dissatisfied with this, and passes beyond it, but only through its ideal qualities. That the conditions and conclusions of thought are not the same in the finite - the temporal and spatial is no argument against this position.2 66 1 It has been said of one form of the ontological argument, “It infers the being of God from the ideal necessity of being to the conception of infinite attributes. It thus accepts a connection of ideas as a proof of facts." (Bascom, Philosophy of Religion, p. 60.) This is critical of a merely formal process of thought that assumes "infinite attributes," and then assumes being" also, as an attribute that is attached to them through a "connection of ideas." But in the ontological argument strictly there is no "connection of ideas" assumed. For the idea and the being of God are one, and it is only in and from the being of God that we discern what are called his "infinite attributes." "the con Again, it is not from the notion of a perfect being ception of infinite attributes" that the reality of being is deduced, for the argument does not assume an attribute of perfection to which existence is to be appended, and if existence be an attribute or perfection of God it must take the place of an attribute and not of the subject. 2 The ontological argument of S. Anselm, as it has been represent ed in the interpretation of a school of formal logic, has for its postu |