By Rev. David James Burrell, D.D., L.L. D. Minister of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City.
The man who does not know God has not begun to live. He may eat and drink, make merry, accumulate a fortune or wear a crown; but he has not entered into that better life of high hopes and noble purposes and aspirations which make us worthy of our Divine birthright. For “this is life enternal, to know God.”
To put ourselves into just relations with God is literally a matter of life or death. All the ologies are worth mastering but Theology is indispensable. We must know God.
But where is He? “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! Behold, I go forward but He is not there, and backward but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand so that I cannot see Him!” The horizons recede as we approach them, and the darkness thickens as we grope like blind men feeling their way along the wall.
There are three roads which are vainly trodden by multitudes who pursue this holy quest. Each of them is marked, “This way to God”; and each of them is a cul de sac or blind alley, which leaves the soul still groping and crying, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!”
The first of these paths is Intuition.
There are no natural atheists. All are born with an indwelling sense of God. We do not enter on conscious life like the inferior orders; but “trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home”. In regions of darkest paganism there are traces of two innate convictions; namely, a Divine birth and a sinful alienation. Hence the universal spirit of unrest so pathetically expressed by Augustine: “We came forth from God, and we shall be homesick until we return to Him.”
No doubt there have been some who, with no light but that which shines along the pathway of Intuition, have made the acquaintance of God; but the vast multitude have simply arrived at idolatry. They have made unto themselves gods “after the similitude of a man”; gods, like the Brocken of the Harz mountains, projected on the skies. An idol is a man-made god. It may be carved out of wood or conjured out of the gray matter of the brain; but all gods, whencesoever they come, are idols, except the one true God.
The second pathway of the God-seekers is Reason.
Here we come upon the philosophers and those who travel with them. This also leads to disappointment; as it is written, “The world by wisdom knew not God”.
The golden age of philosophy in Greece followed close on the decay of the Pantheon. It was when the people had lost confidence in their idols and the cry was heard, “Great Pan is dead!” that the Groves and Gardens and Painted Porches arose on the banks of the Ilyssus. The thoughtful men who assumed the name philosophoi, that is, “lovers of wisdom”, were all seekers after God. The Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics and Peripatetics all hoped to discover Him by the light of reason. How vain the quest!
When Simonides was asked for a definition of God, he required some weeks for meditation and then answered, “The more I think of Him, the more He is unknown!” The innumerable gods and altars of Athens had been laughed out of court; and the results of philosophic inquiry were recorded on that other altar which succeeded them, “To the Unknown God”.
The stock in trade of the philosophers of Athens was precisely that of the philosophers of our time. It consisted substantially of four arguments, to wit:
(A) The ontological argument; to the effect that the being of God is involved in the idea of God. This is good as far as it goes, but it falls vastly short of demonstration; and in any case it reaches no conclusion as to the character of God.
(B) The cosmological argument, which reasons from effect to cause and expresses itself in the epigram ex nihilo nihil fit; “out of nothing nothing comes”. This is equally inconclusive, since the necessary Somewhat to which it leads is but the merest shade of the shadow of a god.
(C) The teleological argument, which proceeds from design to a designer; carrying with it a strong presumption as to infinite wisdom but taking little or no cognizance of the moral nature of God.
(D) And the anthropological argument, which infers the moral nature of God from the moral nature of man. This goes further than the others; nevertheless it is so far from being final proof in the mathematical sense that one may reasonably question whether any truth-seeker was ever really convinced by it.
These are the arguments which have been used by philosophers from time immemorial; and little has been added in the process of the passing years. The result, as a whole, is melancholy failure. The world by its wisdom, that is by the exercise of its unaided reason, has simply reached Agnosticism; it has not “found out God”.
Not to those who deem them themselves wise, but rather to the simple whose hearts are open Godward, comes the great revelation. It is one thing to know about God and quite another to know Him. John Hay knew all about President Lincoln from his boyhood up; little “Tad” had no such information, but he knew his father, knew him through and through. The eyes of Faith see further than those of reason. Wherefore Jesus said, “Except ye become as a little child ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God”.