Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876Flint, Robert
Religion
Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876
Flint, Robert
Theism
Prof. Wace, in the second course of his Boyle Lectures--Christianity
and Morality (1876)--has exhibited, with considerable detail, and in
an ingenious and eloquent manner, the testimony which conscience bears
to a personal God, a moral Creator, and a moral Governor. A glimpse
of his general idea may be obtained from the following words: "In our
endeavour to trace in the conscience, and in the personal experience
of individuals, the roots of our faith in a God of infinite power,
wisdom, and goodness, we have now advanced two considerable steps
beyond our first and simplest sense of right and wrong. We have seen
that this sense, when allowed to speak with its full imperative and
personal force, arouses in us, as it aroused in the Psalmist, a sense
of our being in contact with a personal and righteous Will. This
conviction necessarily involves, as it involved in the writer of the
139th Psalm, the further belief that an authority which has this claim
upon our obedience in every particular of our conduct, in all our
thoughts and acts, must at the same time be the author and source of
our whole constitution; that the righteous eyes which now penetrate,
whether through darkness or through light, to the very depths of our
souls, must also have seen our 'substance, yet being imperfect,' and
that in their book must all our members have been written. If it be
the imperative and paramount law of our nature to obey our conscience,
and to make moral perfection, or spiritual excellence, our ultimate
aim, we cannot but conclude that our whole nature, and the whole order
of things in which we are placed, is in the hands of a moral power;
and that, as we are fearfully and wonderfully made for righteous and
reasonable ends, it must be by a righteous and reasonable Will that we
are made. The conscience of man must never be omitted from our view of
the design of man; and it is only when we contemplate the adjustment of
his whole nature to the purposes of the loftiest moral development,
that the argument from design acquires its full strength.... The
apprehension of a Power which establishes righteousness as the law of
life, involves also the conviction that it is able to enforce that
law, and to render it finally and everywhere supreme. The conviction,
indeed, is one of faith and not of demonstration; and the Scriptures,
no less than life, are full of instances in which this faith is
tried by the bitterest experience. Even prophets, as I have before
observed, are at times driven to the cry that 'the law is slacked,
and that judgment doth never go forth.' But the deepest instincts and
necessities of conscience forbid the toleration of any such instinct of
despair. If right were not essentially and ultimately might, I do not
say--God forbid--that it would not still claim the supreme allegiance
of the soul; but life would be a bitter mockery and an inexplicable
cruelty. Not merely to be under an imperative law to pursue that
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