" VOLUNT.A.S DEI."
THE author of "Pro Christ° et Ecclesia " is too well known to need our praise. He is always sure of a large audience. His last book, however, " Voluntas Der (Mac- millan and Co., 5s. net), will make, we think, a more circum- scribed appeal than his previous ones, because it is more definitely theological, less discursive, and more closely argued. A large number of religious-minded people find it dull to read arguments in proof of that of which they are already convinced ; a large number more have convinced themselves that no proof of that which they long to be assured of will ever be found; only a small number remain who can find delight in the present volume.
Our author, without giving adherence to any one party in the Christian Church, comes much nearer to Orthodoxy than do many of those who yet call themselves Christians. He maintains not only that God is and that He is good, but that He became incarnate in a sense so far-reaching as to startle the most convinced.. We are not interested to analyse the arguments by which he arrives at these conclusions; it is with his deductions from them that we propose to concern ourselves ; for it is these deductions which form the most original and thought-provoking portion of the book. Let us take, first of all, the problem of pain. On this subject our author has some new suggestions to make. He scouts the notion not only that pain has any connexion with punish- ment, but also that it is in any sense an instrument of Divine discipline. The best people suffer most—that he lays down as an axiom. "As sympathy is characteristic of the highest and most sensitive natures it involves the keenest suffer- ing, suffering being always proportioned to the power of the nature to suffer." It follows, he continues, that suffering cannot exist for the discipline of the sufferer. The capacity for pain is the test of worth. If we find the quality of sympathy in men who seem otherwise degraded we recognize that there still exists in them something of the highest humanity. "It is the one attribute that seems to redeem the meanest life, a quality we can almost worship." But it is a quality which makes pain inevitable. The man whom all men recognize when they come to a certain stage of civilization as pre-eminently good suffered pre-enii- nently. It follows, in our author's eyes, that "God's is the greatest pain in the universe." This stupendous dogma lies, he thinks, at the very root, not only of Christianity, but of theism. "If God suffers not, Our Lord is no revelation of Him ; nor is it possible to conceive the Creator as having the relation of Father to His creation, nor would it be possible for many of us to remain theists, for if the Creator be faithful to His creatures it must be true that in all their afflictions He is afflicted ; if He be not faithful He is not the Christian God." To our reason such a theory makes little appeal, but it does, we must agree, make an appeal to the heart of a nature impossible to analyse. It is indisputable that the sympathy of man makes pain bearable. If the whole world were happy with the exception of one person, who was picked out among many happy brethren to bear the average human lot, he would, we believe, die of agony of mind. It is a fact that when we suffer the thought of those who are suffering more does give us relief, and it is thinkable that sympathy increased to the nth degree might neutralize pain altogether. That in the con- sideration of Divine pain consolation dwells is proved by the devotion to the Crucifix experienced among Catholics. On
the other hand, there is something in the idea of a God who is eternally in pain which shocka the average man who feels in himself an innate longing for joy and peace of mind—and who seeks them—or thinks he should seek them—in union with God. Frankly, the notion is anthropomorphic, but is not anthropomorphism part of the Christian revelation ? Our author thinks it is. "Humanity has always flourished bestunder the notion that Deity was very closely allied to humanity. Wherever invisible Deity is not conceived of as suffering, wherever man ceases to identify God with human weal, wherever man conceives that he cannot hurt or help God, there, I think, it will be found that, whatever the concomitant intellectual brilliancy, human progress is in a eta-de-sac." It is certain that Buddhism and Hinduism do not make for human progress. The ancient mythologies of Greece and. Rome produced a greater people.
To the Christian conception of God man cannot come by the guidance of pure intellect, this author admits ; but he objects utterly to the theory that the man who relies upon his reason alone and neglects his intuitions has any claim to a special degree of honesty. "It is quite as honest for a man to adhere to what satisfies his emotional and volitional nature, although his reason be dis- satisfied, as to adhere to what merely satisfies reason, while the rest of his nature cries out against it." In proof of his point he appeals to common experience—to an experience we think no man will deny. "A man with healthy emotions and healthy will assimilates, on the whole, as much general truth as a man with little of these, but with a keen reason." The God, he maintains, of whom in his belief most men have experience, to whom at crises of their lives they appeal, is not an in- describable and impersonal force, but a Being who has a like- ness to man. Is this experience a negligible quantity in the study of theology ?
Pushing the doctrine of intuitional religious knowledge very far, our author tells us : " The creative intelligence must have what we may call telepathic) communication with every grade of life so far as each grade of life is capable of responding to that creative intelligence." This opens an immense field of
speculation. Is it possible that an animal has any religious emotion, anything analogous to our "God consciousness "? Is he conscious of a sympathy coming from the outside to ease his pain? No suggestion of an answer is to be found in these pages. It is our author's pleasure to set us thinking
and to leave us thinking.
In this book we find a description of what would seem like a personal experience. It is told impersonally, as though it were common. There are, we are told, as though it were an indisputable fact, "a great unnumbered multitude" of "silent, unobtrusive folk" who feel hero in this world what can only be called "the fullness of joy."
"Within their hearts is an ever-growing persuasion that joy unspeakable surrounds them in the unseen and still awaits their ultimate discovery. They will refer to this authority or that as the basis of their belief, but the fact that, while it grows year by year more strong, more pervasive of the whole sphere of their consciousness, it remains outwardly incommunicable, is perhaps an indication that its true source cannot be cited among religious authorities on earth."
But are there many people in this enviable state of mind? If so, how is this fact to be reconciled with the theory that the highest natures suffer most? We confess we cannot tell. In a chapter headed "Salvation by Joy" an attempt is made to unify the startling antitheses here put before us, but
without success. Nevertheless it is impossible to deny that both ideas find some sort of response in the mind of the reader, though they be logically incompatible, and though the sensations of spiritual happiness thus strikingly set down are surely rare.
When our writer comes to practical matters we are again sometimes at a loss to understand him. He dwells at length on the extent to which the Beatitudes have been disregarded; he is certain that in meekness lies a power which is divine. The logical outcome of his argument is non-resistance ; yet he will not go right up to the logical conclusion. In the survival of the fittest, gentleness, he declares, plays the largest part. The meek, he believes, do inherit the earth. The love and self- sacrifice shown by all animals towards their offspring servo him for an argument to prove nature not essentially cruel— not essentially "red in tooth and claw." We must no doubt put aside logic when we consider the most fundamental truths which underlie our lives—a conclusion which tempts us some- times to a further one, that we must put aside metaphysical books.
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