h do right?" How else has God's
command to the old Jews any meaning, "Be ye holy, for I am holy?" How
else have all the passages in the Psalms, Prophets, Evangelists,
Apostles, which speak of God's justice, mercy, faithfulness, any honest
or practical meaning to human beings? How else can they be aught but a
mockery, a delusion, and a snare to the tens of thousands who have found
in them hope and trust, that God would deliver them and the world from
evil? What means the command to be perfect as our Father in heaven is
perfect? What mean the words that we partake of a divine nature? How
else is the command to love God anything but an arbitrary and impossible
demand,--demanding love, which every writer of fiction tells you, and
tells you truly, cannot be compelled--can only go forth toward a being
who shows himself worthy of our love, by possessing those qualities which
we admire in our fellow men? No. Against such a theory I must quote, as
embodying all that I would say, and corroborating, on entirely
independent ground, the Scriptural account of human morality--against
such a theory, I say I must quote the words of our greatest living
logician. "Language has no meaning for the words Just, Merciful,
Benevolent" (he might have added truthful likewise) "save that in which
we predicate them of our fellow creatures; and unless that is what we
intend to express by them, we have no business to employ the words. If
in affirming them of God we do not mean to affirm these very qualities,
differing only as greater in degree, we are neither philosophically nor
morally entitled to affirm them at all . . . What belongs to" God's
goodness "as Infinite (or more properly Absolute) I do not pretend to
know; but I know that infinite goodness must be goodness, and that what
is not consistent with goodness is not consistent with infinite goodness.
. . . Besides," he says--and to this sound reductio ad absurdum I call
the attention of all who believe their Bibles--"unless I believe God to
possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a
degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God's veracity?
All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God's attributes
are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes. If,
instead of the 'glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the
excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exis