A ROMAN CATHOLIC ON THE GLORY OF GOD.
ENGLISH Christians of whatever Church would do well to follow Mr. Gladstone's example in visiting Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle last Sunday, and so trying to learn for themselves what people of other Churches really believe on the subject of revelation, and what stress they habitually lay on different parts of their creed. And little as we are able to enter into various elements of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical system, we should say that no theology is better worth the study of Protestants than the Roman Catholic theology, though this can, no doubt, as a rule, be better learned by reading, than by attend- ance at a form of worship so foreign to Protestant ideas as the worship of the Mass. There can be no doubt that wholly in-
commensurable with Protestant ideas as the ecclesiastical prin- ciples of Rome are, no Church is better able to remind us what elements in the original Christian Revelation the modern human- istic conceptions of Christianity are leading us to neglect, than the Church of Rome. We, therefore, welcome heartily a new
series of the Month,—the Roman Catholic magazine,—which seems intended to be made more intelligible to Protestants than Roman Catholic periodicals usually have been. Indeed, the Month now seems intended to interpret, to those of us who care to know them, the Roman Catholics' true religions principles, as well as to interest and instruct Catholics themselves.
In the first number of the new series especially there is an article on " Eternal Punishment and Infinite Love," which ought to have a good deal of interest for all of us who have taken any part in that rather prolonged controversy. It has more in it that is original and striking than anything we have read on this subject for a long time, and though it does not touch the dogma which seems to us most incredible in the usual doctrine,—we mean the absolute close of probation with life, and the refusal throughout eternity of all further chance of repentance to those who did not happen to die in a "state of salvation,"— there is very much in the article to interest and aid us. What the Catholic writer insists upon is precisely that which we Pro- testants, in our excessive, though to some extent perfectly healthy, tendency to keep the humanising side of religion always in the foreground, too often forget,—that though the true end of man is life in God, the whole character of God is not, even in the sense of Christ's Gospel, merged in his love of man ; nay, that the rescue of finite beings from their limita- tions to share in the life of God, however wonderful a sign of the overflow of God's love, cannot be even conceived as interfering with that infinite delight of the Divine nature in itself which belongs to a perfect and self-dependent Being. Thus far we quite go with the Roman Catholic
author of the article. Nevertheless, the present writer has always felt the utmost shrinking from the common theo- logical talk about " the glory of God " which it is the object of this Catholic theologian to justify. To do all things " to the glory of God " is, in some respects, a very unintelligible phrase, and in other respects suggests ideas of God of the despotic and unmoral kind. So far as righteousness and love constitute the glory of God, the habit of insisting on the glory of God as something totally distinct from the glory of righteousness and the glory of love, is puzzling and unfruitful. So far as something else entirely beyond our finite capacities may constitute that glory, it remains a riddle at which it is of no great use for us to attempt to guess. Hence we have always felt the greatest possible suspicion of the phrase, as a bewilder- ing one, at best unprofitable for us, and possibly at least rather metaphorical and Oriental, than moral or spiritual in its origin. And we feel satisfied that even this Catholic writer, who, as we quite admit, has something definite and ennobling in his mind, does not escape this danger of an unmoral and Oriental use of the phrase. For instance:— " Since God loves himself with an infinite love, and all other beings, real or possible, with a finite love, it follows that the interests of all existing things fade away into nothing in the estimate of any well- balanced intelligence, and therefore a fortiori in the estimate of God himself, when compared with the faintest or smallest additional honour, glory, or dignity accruing to the Infinite God. We desire our friends to be honoured and esteemed, we desire to further their interest and their rational desires, in proportion to our love for them ; if our love for them is small, we care but little to promote their plea- sure or their honour ; if we lore them intensely, we are intensely anxious that they should receive from ourselves and others the re- spect, honour, glory, and happiness which is their due. Hence, if we love God with a supreme love, our desire for his honour and glory will be supreme above every other desire."
Now, do we, as a matter of fact, desire the honour and glory of all our friends in proportion to our love for them ? We should say that this is very far from being true, that we often fear glory and honour for those we love best, even when we desire them for the sake of the rest of the world ; and that when we do desire for them honour and glory, we feel the desire much more in proportion to our belief that their honour and glory will conduce to the benefit of the rest of mankind, than in propor- tion to our love for those whose honour or glory is in question. And so, too, we should say that we desire God's honour and glory rather for the sake of man than for the sake of God, be- cause it is good for man to love and honour the perfect right- eousness as he ought, not because it can make any difference to God how few or how many human mites love and honour him. We cannot, of course, fear glory and honour for God, as we sometimes do for men ; but we can feel its absolute indifference to him, except for the sake of his creatures. The intrinsic glory and honour of God are incapable of increase by anything that we can do, or even imagine ourselves doing ; and so far as his glory—that is, the brightness and fame of his goodness—is desirable—which, of course, it is—it is desirable for men's sake, and not for his. Again, our Catholic theologian speaks as fol- lows :— " The relation of. the Infinite to the finite being such as we here describe it, and the honour and the glory duo to the one being thus altogether and utterly incommensurable with that due to the other : the duty, moreover, of the rational creature necessarily being to pro- mote the glory of the Infinite, it follows that any withdrawal by a finite creature of the due honour to the Infinite will be in the eyes of him who judges aright a far worse evil than any possible evil or misery which can befall the finite."
But how can a finite being withdraw, in any real sense, the intrinsic honour and glory of the infinite God ? The thing is impossible. A finite being can, of course, withdraw that in- finitesimal and worthless addition to it which is implied in his own worship ; but that, by the very assumption of the writer, does not add anything appreciable to the intrinsic glory of God, except so far as God has been good enough to desire this individual creature's love and worship. And in that case, the evil consists, not in the withdrawal of glory from God, but in the failure of man to be what, in his goodness, God had desired him to be. We cannot help thinking that this Catholic writer does use this dangerous phrase, "the glory of God," in a sense approaching, at least, to that barren, external, and bewildering use of it in which the old Calvinists so often indulged, when they talked of eternal punishments as conducing to that glory.
None the less, however, we willingly admit that the writer in the Month does bring out with'great force the important truth which, with the growth of secularism and humanism generally, our recent Protestant theology has too much forgotten,—that God being the centre of all things, that very attitude of mind which, in man, is selfishness, is in God simply holiness.
"But there are some human virtues incapable of idealisation inasmuch as they of their very nature connote imperfection. Take for instance, humility, the very root and foundation of human virtue. Humility consists in recognising our proper position as nothing in ourselves, as dependent for all that we have on the Being who made us, who preserves us, who has given us all we have. Humility is im- possible except to the Theist—Aristotle's ideal man, as depicted in the Fourth Book of the Ethics, is utterly wanting in humility. Humility, inasmuch as it implies subjection, cannot be idealised, cannot belong to a Supreme Being. Beautiful as humility is, an humble God is a ludicrous self contradiction. How can He be humble, if He is above all and before all, the cause and origin of all, on whom all depend, their beginning and their end ? Or, to take another example, what virtue is more beautiful than obedience ? It wins the heart of God and man alike ; it is the foundation of every well-ordered commonwealth ; it is everywhere the source of peace and happiness, of order and content. A disobedient child is a bye- word of reproach ; a man who obeys his conscience in all things is a saint ; an army of disobedient soldiers could not stand for an hour against the foe ; a servant who obeys his master, absent or present, is an invaluable treasure. It is the highest praise bestowed on him whom all Christians adore, that he was obedient, even to the death
of the Cross. But though it is a virtue and a perfection in man— nay, in God made Man, it is an absurdity when applied to the In- visible, Infinite God. An obedient God is another contradiction in terms: for whom should He obey who is Supreme above all and before all ? Obedience implies subjection, and the Creator cannot be subject to the creature, the Infinite cannot subserve the finite. Are you, then, I shall be asked, going to inflict upon us a selfish God ? Is not selfishness a quality odious in man, and, there- fore, impossible in the Perfect Being in whose image mau was treated ? The answer is a' sufficiently obvious one. Selfishness, like unselfishness, implies dependence and limitation, and is inapplicable to God. To argue that because God is not unselfish, therefore, He must be selfish, is like arguing that because you cannot term a syl- logism healthy or merciful, therefore it must be unhealthy or un- merciful. It is an old and familiar logical fallacy to assume that if one of two contraries cannot be predicated of any subject, therefore the opposite contrary can be predicated of it. To draw the con- clusion God is selfish from the premiss God is not unselfish, is about as good an argument as to say that because God cannot be obedient . or humble (as we have seen above), therefore He must be disobedient and proud. To be self-centred is in the creature the vice of selfishness —it is a necessary attribute in the Creator."
That is very impressively put, and there can be no doubt that this is what Revelation teaches, from the beginning of the Jewish to the end of the Christian Scriptures. This is what the " jealousy of God " meant to Moses,—a jealousy which was pure holiness, where similar jealousy in man would have been a petty vice. That is what Christ meant by saying that no man who did not hate even his own life for Christ's sake could be his disciple, a statement which would have been monstrous from any but a, divine mouth. The true centre of all things claims everything for itself. That which is not the true centre can claim nothing absolutely for itself which it does not try to drag out of its true place by the claim. We go heartily so far with the Catholic writer. But we cannot see that he advances the question as to the justice or injustice of eternal penalties by the position. When he comes to apply his principle to the matter at issue, he does it as follows :—
" We have now arrived so far as this, that God is a God of infinite love, inasmuch as he loves infinitely his own infinite perfections, that these perfections are the primary, essential, and adequate object of his love ; that his infinite love extends itself to creatures only in a finite manner, and as its secondary, accidental, and inadequate object; that there is no sort of proportion between the love of God for his own perfections and his love for his creatures ; and this disproportion is the necessary consequence of the disproportion in the objects loved ; that God cannot, without forfeiting his claim to be God, take account of the interests of his creatures when it is a question of his own honour."
Well, but there, again, the whole atmosphere is troubled by that word "honour." The divine honour, in any intrinsic sense, can neither be increased nor diminished by anything that happens to man. All external punishments and rewards are inflicted for man's sake, not for God's. As to those essential punish- ments and rewards which necessarily come from the very nature of our own actions, the joy of drawing nearer to God, the despair of knowing that we are going further and farther from him, they may, no doubt, be so essential to human free-will, that there may be no possibility even that God, consistently with his own nature, could reverse the judgment which man, as it were, passes on himself. But whether that be so or not, we cannot see that the honour or glory of God, in the theological sense of this writer, has any- thing to do with the matter. What has to do with it is this,— that as God is the centre of at true life, and as the habits of the will once formed seem to stereotype and intensify them-
selves, it is quite possible at least, that a man who learns to find his happiness in the fiction that he is self-dependent, will
soon find nothing but misery even in the prospect of approach- ing One who must be everything, and who must make him feel that he himself is nothing ; and no doubt a man may thus bring on himself a doom of false life which even Omnipotence could not reverse. But we cannot see that the issue is made any plainer by the figment,—for it is surely nothing else,—that the glory of God is inereased by the inextinguishable misery of a disobedient soul, and would be diminished by any cessation of that misery. We cannot help thinking that when theologians talk of the glory of God, they are very apt to lose themselves in empty metaphor, for which there are no distinct corresponding ideas.
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