As Pantheism = exclusive immanence = God imprisoned, so Deism = exclusive transcendence = God banished. Ethical Monism holds to the truth contained in each of these systems, while avoiding their respective errors. It furnishes the basis for a new interpretation of many theological as well as of many philosophical doctrines. It helps our understanding of the Trinity. If within the bounds of God's being there can exist multitudinous finite personalities, it becomes easier to comprehend how within those same bounds there can be three eternal and infinite personalities—indeed, the integration of plural consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man; see Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, Feeling and Will, 53, 54.
Ethical Monism, since it is ethical, leaves room for human wills and for their freedom. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond and introduce into creation a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. So there has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally joined to God. As humanity is created in Christ and lives only in Christ, man's self-isolation is his moral separation from Christ. Simon, Redemption of Man, 339—“Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.” All men are naturally one with Christ by physical birth, before they become morally one with him by spiritual birth. They may set themselves against him and may oppose him forever. This our Lord intimates, when he tells us that there are natural branches of Christ, which do not “abide in the vine” or “bear fruit,” and so are “cast forth,” “withered,” and “burned” (John 15:4–6).
Ethical Monism, however, since it is Monism, enables us to understand the principle of the Atonement. Though God's holiness binds him to punish sin, the Christ who has joined himself to the sinner must share the sinner's punishment. He who is the life of humanity must take upon his own heart the burden of shame and penalty that belongs to his members. Tie the cord about your finger; not only the finger suffers pain, but also the heart; the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Since human nature is one of the “all things” that “consist” or hold together in Christ (Col 1:17), and man's sin is a self-perversion of a part of Christ's own body, the whole must be injured by the self-inflicted injury of the part, and “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). Simon, Redemption of Man, 321—“If the Logos is the Mediator of the divine immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation—i.e., the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations react on him who is their constitutive principle?” A more full explanation of the relations of Ethical Monism to other doctrines must be reserved to our separate treatment of the Trinity, Creation, Sin, Atonement, Regeneration. Portions of the subject are treated by Upton, Hibbert Lectures; Le Conte, in Royce's Conception of God, 43–50; Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 297–301, 311–317, and Immanence of God, 5–32, 116–153; Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 574–590, and Theory of Reality, 525–529; Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, 2:48; Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:258–283; Göschel, quoted in Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:170. An attempt has been made to treat the whole subject by A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 1–86, 141–162, 166–180, 186–208.
Part III. The Scriptures A Revelation From God.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.
I. Reasons a priori for expecting a Revelation from God.
1. Needs of man's nature. Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.
A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.
(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs: “Renown is loud,” he says, “and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift. … The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.” Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil. … To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance. … If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.”
(b) Versus Socrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths: “Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.” Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the