Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
“It is the suggestion of the Infinite that makes the line of the
far horizon, seen over land or sea, so much more impressive than
the beauties of any limited landscape.” In times of sudden shock
and danger, this rational intuition becomes a presentative
intuition,—men become more conscious of God’s existence than of
the existence of their fellow-men and they instinctively cry to
God for help. In the commands and reproaches of the moral nature
the soul recognizes a Lawgiver and Judge whose voice conscience
merely echoes. Aristotle called man “a political animal”; it is
still more true, as Sabatier declares, that “man is incurably
religious.” St. Bernard: “Noverim me, noverim te.” O. P. Gifford:
“As milk, from which under proper conditions cream does not rise,
is not milk, so the man, who upon proper occasion shows no
knowledge of God, is not man, but brute.” We must not however
expect cream from frozen milk. Proper environment and conditions
are needed.
It is the recognition of a divine Personality in nature which
constitutes the greatest merit and charm of Wordsworth’s poetry.
In his Tintern Abbey, he speaks of “A presence that disturbs me
with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something
far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and
in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking
things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”
Robert Browning sees God in humanity, as Wordsworth sees God in
nature. In his Hohenstiel-Schwangau he writes: “This is the glory,
that in all conceived Or felt or known, I recognize a Mind—Not
mine, but like mine—for the double joy Making all things for me,
and me for Him.” John Ruskin held that the foundation of beauty in
the world is the presence of God in it. In his youth he tells us
that he had “a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of
nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest—an instinctive awe
mixed with delight, an indefinable thrill such as we sometimes
imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit.” But it
was not a disembodied, but an embodied, Spirit that he saw.
Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, § 7—“Unless education and culture
were preceded by an innate consciousness of God as an operative
predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture
to work upon.” On Wordsworth’s recognition of a divine personality
in nature, see Knight, Studies, 282-317, 405-426; Hutton, Essays,
2:113.
C. That he who denies God’s existence must tacitly assume that existence
in his very argument, by employing logical processes whose validity rests
upon the fact of God’s existence. The full proof of this belongs under the
next head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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