Is There a God? 27 he can and does entertain ideas and cherish feelings that have at least no direct connection with the senses, and can originate thoughts, emotions and volitions that have not been excited by external objects. And as to knowing God, Christian ex- perience attests the truth of Scripture when it says that this knowledge is no figure of speech or illusion of the mind, but a sober reality. I t is as certain as language can make it that Abraham and Jacob, Moses and Joshua, Samuel and David, Isaiah and Jeremiah, had no doubt whatever that they knew God and were known of Him; and multitudes of Christians exist to-day whom it would not be easy to convince that they could not and did not know God, although not through the medium of the senses or even of the pure reason. 2. I t takes for granted that things cannot he adequately known unless they are fully known. This proposition, how- ever, cannot be sustained in either Science or Philosophy, in ordinary life or in religious experience. Science knows there are such things as life (vegetable and animal), and force (electricity and magnetism for example), but confesses its ignorance of what life and force are as to their essence—all that is understood about them being their properties and effects. Philosophy can expound the laws of thought, but is baffled to unriddle the secret of thought itself, how it is ex- cited in the soul by nerve-movements caused by impressions from without, and how it can express itself by originating counter movements in the body. In ordinary life human be- ings know each other adequately for all practical purposes while aware that in each there are depths which the other cannot fathom, each being shut off from the other by what Prof. Dods calls “the limitations of personality.” Nor is the case different in religious experience. The Christian, like Paul, may have no difficulty in saying, “Christ liveth in me,” but he cannot explain to himself or others, how. Hence the inference must be rejected that because the finite mind cannot fully comprehend the infinite, therefore it cannot know the
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker