nature and attributes; you are asserting, for instance, that there is something God-like in energy, in unselfishness, in self-sacrifice. You are acknowledging that, just as in nature, so also in the social life of mankind, the essential character of God is revealed. We know indeed, that it is not otherwise that the idea of the moral nature of God has gradually come to be what it is to-day. The Hebrew prophet who, by long pondering on the evils of society, discovered fresh aspects of duty, or, by studying the history of his race, came to discern a moral tendency in the story of mankind, thereby enlarged the conception of God to which his fellow-countrymen had attained. And so, to-day, whenever we discover some new aspect of virtue in men, unthought of before, our idea of God, the Supreme Goodness, is enriched; whenever we trace some new connexion between actions and their results in history, whether of nations or of individuals, our knowledge of His methods is extended. We cannot speak of the knowledge of God which has come to men through social experience, and through history without reminding ourselves of Him in whom for nineteen centuries has been seen the supreme revelation of what goodness means, and so has been acknowledged as the supreme revelation of the character and nature of God. His life was one in which each detail of thought and speech and action revealed a love which was stronger than sin, and stronger than death. We cannot expect, and we do not need, teaching about the moral nature of God that goes higher than that; we are content henceforth to say that God is Love. And so the Word had breath, and wrought In loveliness of perfect deeds. It is worth while, in this connexion, to call attention to a strange misreading of the facts which is occasionally met with. Some people speak as if the Christian begins by believing that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to men, and therefore goes on to acknowledge that love like His is the summary of human duty. This may in fact be a correct account of the order of experience in certain cases; but when it is so the belief is perilously unstable, like a pyramid that rests for a moment on its vertex. The account of the truest Christian experience reverses this order, both for logic and for psychology. It is because men have reached, in their moral evolution, a stage at which they are able to recognize love when they actually see it in living expression -as the last word in the perfection of human character that they confess that in Jesus there has come to them a revelation of the Divine. The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ is not so much a source from which ethical consequences flow as a summary statement in religious language of an ethical position already achieved.1 There is a third way in which the knowledge of God may come to us-a way which is no doubt involved in greater or less degree in all that has already been said, but which, because it is not restricted to that, needs to be considered separately. The inner spiritual life of man, the processes of his reason, his efforts to understand and harmonize his manifold experience—these present to him a new set of ideals, and so bring him once more into relation with the principle of all life and being. The thoughts of different men are not all on the same level, but there is one respect in which the thinking of the plain man and that of the philosopher are alike. The statesman pondering over the intricacies of the problem of 1 I have tried to develop this thought in a University Sermon preached at Cambridge in October, 1921 (see The Interpreter for Jan. 1922, pp. 10–14). Ireland, the father of a family thinking out the best plan for conveying his party to the sea-side, the astronomer scrutinising the evidence for the existence of island universes, the economist trying to unravel the complexities of the European situation, the doctor grappling with the obscurity that shrouds some new disease, the cook trying to understand the behaviour of an unfamiliar oven, the historian attempting to reconstruct the conditions of life in a by-gone age,-all these in their diverse tasks are aware of a certain standard to which the process of their thinking is ever trying to conform, the standard of consistency with fact, the ideal of truth. In many cases, indeed, the thinker is hardly aware of the search for truth as a search at all; truth seems a matter of obviousness and common-sense, and the uncertainty and the provisional character of much of our knowledge are not perceived. Perhaps it is when the difficulty of discovering truth is felt most keenly that the compulsion of the quest is strongest. But in greater or less degree the ideal of truth is recognized by all men as one of the fundamental things, fundamental like beauty, fundamental like love. It is an aspect of the eternal reality to which we give the name of God. And if truth is an element-an essential element —in the nature of God, then the search for truth is a search for God. From this point of view all true knowledge is knowledge of God; and a certain living English dramatist was not talking nonsense or speaking irreverently when he once declared, in answer to an objection, that all his plays were about God. But if our knowledge implies some form of contact between ourselves and God, then it is a twosided relation, and can be regarded from either point of view. God can be known to us only by His own active co-operation; and the doctrine of inspiration represents one of the attempts that have been made to express the fact that all our knowledge results from God's revelation of Himself. What I know is what God has revealed to me. Unless I am inspired I can know nothing at all. That, you will say, is not what the churches mean by inspiration; and you are quite right. The churches have often thought that they best fulfilled their mission by teaching men to take a restricted view of God's relation with the working of man's brain. They have conceived of inspiration as something that operates only in the region of experience, which is called religious in the most specialised |