it is not, in its own phrase, congenial with a substantial morality.

There come many ages and intervening crises in the slow and long advance of humanity before the words are realized and received: Not here nor at Jerusalem; they that worship the Father shall worship him in spirit and in truth.

There is in the revelation of the Christ the goal of religion and philosophy. They become one in their realization in the life of the spirit, one in the realization in the life of humanity of truth and freedom.

UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVELATION OF GOD.

THIS revelation is the revelation of God; it is from God, but primarily it is of God.

It is the divine self-revelation. In it God reveals himself. It is the revelation of his own being and will.

It is not a being which is abstract, and a will which is void of self-determination; it is a being which is real, and a will which is real and is realizing itself in the world.

All that God is he imparts, he reveals. He is no more a distant being, that man cannot approach him; he is not an inaccessible being, that man cannot find him; he is not an unknown being, but what he is he has made known.

This is not the revelation of an abstract universum, which then is apprehended only as the collocation of the transient forms of the finite world; it is not an indeterminate something in us not ourselves; it is not an unknown, to which the continuous and ultimate relation of man, or of a being like man, must be one of nescience; but what God is he has made known to man.

The revelation of God in his personality, in

his spiritual being and spiritual relations, is not of and in the physical process of the world. The physical process is the other than the spiritual, and in its relation with God is only known through the mediation of the spirit, and its characteristic is that it is constantly passing and is to pass away. It is the transient, the finite, that seems always, in its unrest and advance, to be striving to reach the infinite. There is in this revelation the recognition of the finite limitations of nature, and of the conflict in nature, as it bears in itself the reconciliation of the spirit.

There are, in the process of the physical world, the signs and the correspondences with the revelation of God, but they have the characteristic of the finite in its transience. There are signs as of beauty in the flower and of light in the sun, but it is with unceasingly passing forms, as with the flower that fades and the sun that sets. There are signs of deeper significance, as in the relations of a father and son and brother, and these are existent in the physical process of the world, but are taken up and transmuted through the mediation of the spirit, and have an ethical actualization in the moral order of the world. Thence, in the development which brings to time increasingly its fullness, there is the revelation of God and his righteousness in the moral order of the world. But this order in the family and the nation is other and higher than the physical process of the world.

This is the revelation of one who was before all worlds; who says, before the foundations of the world were laid, I am; but it is not the revelation of one who is in identity with the physical process of the world.1 It is the revelation of God in his separateness from the world, before the reconciliation of the world unto himself; it is the revelation of God in his distinctness from humanity before the manifestation of his oneness with humanity. In the physical process there is sequence, but there is not progress; there is necessity, but there is not freedom. In the historical process there is progress and there is freedom, however slow may be the development, but that is in the life of the spirit. Thus necessity is transmuted into freedom, and sequence becomes progress. The process of the physical

1 We have a revelation in our own nature. On this revelation the church of the future must establish its claims to acceptance." (Gould, Origin and Development of Religious Belief, vol. ii. p. 10.) This is not strictly true. It is not strictly in our nature; it is of God, in the Christ, the Son of God who has become the Son of man, and in the relation of the Christ with humanity, and through the mediation of the Spirit; and on this the Church is built.

This is not the revelation of one who is in identity with nature, but this is the revelation of God, who is one in the final realization of the ideal with nature, not one with the process where all forms are transient through their subjection to conditions of time, but one with nature in the realization of the perfect reconciliation.

For this conflict is not the evidence of a dualism, though of itself it would be, and in nature through the physical process there is no evidence of reconciliation. But this reconciliation is revealed, and working in and through all things; it is the revelation of God recon ciling the world unto himself.

world is that of necessity; this does not preclude the will; the antithesis is not between necessity and freedom. While the act of sheer necessity is in itself unfree, there is an element of necessity in the freedom of the will. This element is taken up and transmuted, to use again the illustration. drawn from society, as the will of man in the beginnings of its freedom and in every advance toward freedom recognizes its oneness with law : the state has its advancement in the oneness of law with liberty, and in the institution and recognition of law liberty may be attained. This physical and historical process does not, therefore, in the least preclude the will of God, in whom is perfect freedom, by whom all things subsist, and from whom all things proceed, and to whom all things come, whose will in its self-determination has its perfect realization, from manifesting itself in the coming of the kingdom of the spirit, in which the normal course is disclosed in its end, in the coming of life out of death, and in the realization of the perfect freedom of man.

The struggle which goes on in nature is carried up into the spiritual. Thus the ascent of man and his advance is through conflict, in the realization of an ideal end in freedom; and that which is animal in its impulse and is reckless of any relation beyond its own advancement is overcome, and this struggle through its transmutation into the conflict and endeavor of man toward the