CHAPTER V

DOMESTIC THEOLOGY: III. THE MANIFESTATION OF GOD

LL our knowledge of the being and of the nature of God is brought forward into clearness and assurance by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

The love and power and will of God are made manifest in the world about us, in the long experience which is recorded in history, and in the course of our individual lives. These are fair premises from which to deduce conclusions. They are the natural evidences of religion. These revelations, however, disclose God as the sun is seen through clouded glass. God is revealed, but somewhat uncertainly and dimly. It is even possible, if one will, to

maintain that this is a bad and malignant world, and that the Supreme Power under whose direction human life proceeds, is indifferent or careless or hostile. These are the inferences which are readily drawn from the facts when calamities come upon communities, or when disease or bereavement visits the individual. We need, therefore, a more substantial evidence, a more satisfactory and certain interpretation of the meaning of the world. We need a clearer sight of God than we get of the sun through clouded glass.

But suppose there is in the clouded glass a single clear place; through that we look and see the sun. There shines the real sun. Even now we are not beholding the sun in its perfect beauty; it is too remote for that. Even the telescope gives us only a sight of the sun which is but a glimpse of its actual glory. Still, this is a true sight of the sun. Glimpses such as this are given us in the lives of all good men and women, and in

our own ideals of what is fine and worthy and noble. When the prophet Hosea, in the midst of his domestic tragedy, suddenly said to himself, "It must be that God loves His sinful people at least as much as I love my unfaithful wife in spite of her unfaithfulness," he argued reasonably from himself to God. It is plain, the moment we think of it, that God is all that we are at our best, and more infinitely. The fatherhood of God implies all that is contained in our best fatherhood and motherhood and inconceivably more also. The idea that any mother loves her unworthy son more than God does, is absurd on the face of it. Our affection, then, is a revelation of the divine affection. So it is with our ideals of what is just and reasonable and right.

Then we advance to greater clearness when we consider the best persons whom we know and of whom we read in history,the saints in the calendars, in the histories, and in those calendars and histories which

are kept only in our memory. We may say to ourselves and to our children in the consciousness of excellence like this, "Here is a sight of God. You ask what God is like: He is like such and such a person whom you admire and love, differing only as the sun differs from the candle."

The next advance toward the knowledge of God is to perceive Him in the best of all men, in the flower and ideal of the human race. I mean, of course, in Jesus Christ. In Him our humanity is lifted up into divinity, because in His perfection God is perceived with a new vision. We understand without argument that whatever else and beyond the Maker of the world may be, He is like Christ. Christ interprets to us the moral possibilities of God. Since He lived and taught and died, our idea of God has been greatly changed and enlarged and bettered. We did not know what virtues were inherent in humanity till He showed what a man might be by

our sight of Him. And thus He revealed God. In Him, as in a clear place in the clouded glass, clear as crystal, we see God. The knowledge of Him is, for all the purposes of religion, the knowledge of God. When we would think the truest thoughts of the love and will of God, we think of the manifestation of that love and will in Jesus Christ.

For example, the idea of the self-sacrifice of God comes into human thought with Jesus Christ. The idea of the power of God is common in all religions; and the Old Testament religion maintained also God's tender care for man. But there was a certain withholding of Himself, a certain detachment between Him and us. Most religions have believed in the jealousy of God. He is afraid, they said, that we shall somehow get too wise and strong for Him. Thus even in the beginning of the Bible, He turns our first parents out of the Garden lest they eat of the tree of life and live