indecision will at once be dispelled. Some perplexity may remain; there may still be many a flaw in the edifice of your theology; but the centre will be certainty, for the centre will be Jesus Christ; and whatever may be the difficulties and doubts which shall assail you, conviction, once acquired, shall never fail you. In order to confirm your assurance in presence of the difficulties of thought, you will seek Jesus Christ, you will, live with Jesus Christ, and in the experiences of this communion with Him you will find the continually strengthened conviction of the reality of the salvation He has offered you.

"To arrive at conviction in religious matters," says M. Henri Meyer, "is a task which no one should shun. . . . Solid religious convictions are rarely met with in the Protestantism of the day. The want of conviction is our great weakness and our imminent peril; uncertainty, doubt, is the worm which lies at the root of the tree and causes it to decay. . . . Our Catholic brethren establish their faith on the infallibility of the pope. Let us establish ours on this rock-the infallibility of Christ."1

CURRENT AMERICAN THOUGHT.

RECENT PANTHEISTIC EVOLUTION. By Rev. JOHN JALLING, S.J. (American Catholic Quarterly Review).—In accordance with the principles of pantheism, pantheistic evolution assumes the self-existent being as infinite, spiritual, eternal, unchangeable, and at the same time characterizes it as finite, imperfect, material, and subject to endless changes. Such a conception is a caricature of the Godhead. Pantheistic evolution also involves all the incongruities which are intrinsic to the general idea of evolution. For, according to it, the self-existent Being is self-evolving. Though admitted to be infinite, it is supposed to grow and develop constantly to ever greater perfection. This is apparent from its relationship to nature. The ever-changing universe is not merely an external manifestation of God or an effect produced outside of Him. It is His own being, His own life, His own power and activity. Growing by an ever-continuous differentiation to the fulness of beauty and perfection, the world is nothing less than the Deity unfolding its own being by immanent operation.

But if a process of evolution is going on in God, He must be conceived as determinate and indeterminate at the same time. According to pantheistic views, He may not be so utterly indeterminate as matter or abstract being is; still, indeterminateness must be in His nature, at least to such an extent as is to be removed from Him by evolution from all eternity. But at the same time, He is also fully determinate by virtue of His very essence. He is Self-existent, He is essentially the Infinite Spirit. But both these attributes are repugnant to evolution. If God is fully determinate by His own essence, a gradual transition from indeterminateness to determinateness is out of the question. If He is indeterminate, He cannot determine Himself by His own activity.

Pantheism is absolutely incompetent to explain the process of evolution, to prove either its starting-point or its final result, either its laws or its different stages. It begins with the cause, which, though first in the order of being, is last in the order of cognition. The explanation which it offers is a process from the unknown to the Translated by Ph. G. Adair.

known. Pantheistic evolutionists imagine that, by evolving the world from Himself, God evolves Himself and reaches the climax of perfection as a germ attains to its specific size and shape by developing organs and members. But the very supposition of a possible growth is a palpable denial of infinity; and therefore this position is wholly untenable.

Is the world into which God should evolve finite or infinite? Does it contain all things that are possible, or only some of them? Dr. Martineau is of opinion that it is finite, and that God passes from the indeterminate to the determinate by defining which out of all the possibilities are to be realized. But no view more inconsistent with evolutional principles could be espoused. A finite world cannot render the First Cause infinitely perfect. The determination on only some possibilities must be conceived as free or as necessary. It cannot be free; for in that case the evolutionists would, consistently with their principles, have to regard the world as the work of an arbitrary will. Nor can it be a necessary act of God. There is no conceivable limitation of His power to some possibilities.

Consistently, pantheists must admit the world to be infinite; that is, to possess all possible perfections and to include all possible beings. But the world is not and cannot be infinite. Pantheists admit the world to be finite at every particular moment of its existence; but they regard it as infinite in the whole course of its successive evolution. But the whole series of the forms successively produced must be finite, because the infinite cannot rise from finite parts-least of all, if these parts do not even coexist. And it is impossible to assign a reason for any particular form of the whole series.

Pantheism is not an explanation of unity. True, its theory appears to reduce all things to absolute oneness, since it teaches that God is all, and all is God. It would be a perfect unity if it were real. But it is not the kind of unity which we perceive in this visible universe. And the pantheistic theory does not explain that unity which, in reality, exists in nature-a unity in a variety of things distinct from one another. The unity it substitutes is the plainest impossibility. The infinite and the finite; the perfect and the imperfect; the simple and the compound; the active and the passive; the cause and the effect,―cannot be identical. The self-existent cause, reduced to absolute oneness with the finite world, is the aggregate of all possible contradictions and absurdities, which cannot be admitted as real existences without the complete stultification of reason.

Examine the ultimate source from which pantheists derive all being and all perfection. Though self-existent, it is imperfect and undeveloped, not actually perfect, but only tending to become so by further evolution. Its progress is extremely slow and uncertain. There is no prospect of its attaining to consummation. The self-evolving deity of pantheists may very well be likened to Sisyphus, who is always heaving the stone uphill, only to see it roll back into the valley. If God is all, He is not distinct from matter. Philosophers cannot lift matter above the lowest degree of being, nor can they rid it from certain properties intrinsic to it. And if God is identical with matter, the varying properties of matter must be applied to Him. God reaches the highest perfection in man, and therefore all the properties peculiar to mankind must be associated with Him; all ignorance and stupidity, all vice and error. And all belong to Him in the ultimate period of evolution, when He approaches the climax of perfection.

In most of the recent pantheistic theories, such as those of H. Lotze, Dr. Martineau, and Professor Schurman, God is represented as the world-soul, though not as if He and the visible world were two different components of one whole; the one a bodily

substance, the other a Divine spirit, each with its own distinct though incomplete reality, yet so united as to complete each other in one perfect nature. But nothing could be more inconsistent with monism than such a view. And, in fact, no theory, whether ancient or modern, has advanced a dualism of this kind under the garb of monism.

Are any of the absurdities involved in pantheistic evolution avoided by this latest conception of the world-soul? Certainly, the universal Deity is not thus cleared from incongruous attributes. Nor is this new theory an interpretation of the universe. Evolution is not explained. Cosmic unity is not accounted for. The nature of the universe and its component parts is not unfolded. Emanation is no expedient to unriddle the perplexities of pantheistic teaching. It leaves the conception of the Deity full of self-contradictions. Some have tried to prove that emanation is a real development by comparing it to the diffusion of bodies, or to the division by which germs increase. But no increase from without is possible in God, since, by the theory, there is absolutely nothing the being and existence of which is not derived from Him. Emanation, therefore, is a process essentially different from organic growth.

One other point demands attention. It is the new departure taken by some Protestant theologians for the purpose of disentangling emanative evolution from its difficulties. Denying creation out of nothing, they regard the world as having emanated, not from the nature, but from the will, of God. The theory, in order not to part with a personal Deity, seems to suppose that the Divine will gives issue to the world, not with necessity, but with freedom. But the intelligence that produces the world by a free act of the will must be conceived as completely developed. The world, if an effluence of free will, does not constitute, but presupposes the evolution of the Deity.

Evolution, according to its recent conception, is a necessary process. There is no creation by arbitrary will, but creation only by law. But let the world be an emanation from free will, then there is no longer necessity; then things come into existence, grow and combine, by an act which evolutionists term arbitrary. Therefore emanation from the free will of God is incompatible with the modern idea of evolution. And it is inconsistent with the denial of pantheism. If it maintains that God created the world out of nothing, and that produced things are distinct in being from Him who is self-existent and infinite, it is plainly theistic. If, on the contrary, it does away with creation out of nothing, and takes the things that make up the universe for parts and modes of the Divine nature, it is unmistakably pantheistic.

ATHANASIANISM. By LEVI L. PAINE (The New World).-What really is Athanasianism? and would Athanasius himself recognize many of his modern disciples? The Nicene theology was the product of three centuries of controversy and growth. But this evolution, in its further history, suffered one great break. A radically new epoch in the development of the Trinitarian dogma was begun by the North African Augustine. He gave a new turn to the doctrine of the Trinity, by which the way was opened for the Sabellianizing tendencies which have infected Western theology to this day. Augustine must not be classed with Athanasius and the Greek Fathers. He was not a Greek scholar. His philosophical ideas were drawn from Western Neo-Platonic and Stoic sources rather than from the pure Eastern fountains of Plato and Aristotle. Properly, the history of Trinitarianism divides itself into two distinct chapters-the Greek Athanasian and the Latin Augustinian.

The Old Testament is strictly monotheistic. The idea that a Trinity is to be found there is utterly without foundation. The monotheistic tradition is continued

into the New Testament. For the beginnings of Trinitarian theology we must look to St. Paul. He nowhere gives a full metaphysical statement, and it is not clear that he had developed any precise theological doctrine of the Trinity. Two points stand out clearly. 1. St. Paul remained a firm adherent of the Jewish monotheism. 2. St. Paul distinguished Christ from God, as a personal being, and regarded Him as essentially inferior and subordinate to the absolute Deity. He never confounded Christ with God Himself. The central feature of St. Paul's Christology is its doctrine of Mediatorship. This is a theological advance on the Messianic doctrine of the synoptic Gospels. St. Paul gives no evidence of acquaintance with the Logos doctrine; but he anticipates it by putting Christ above all human beings.

From beginning to end, Greek theology is distinctly monotheistic. The Father is God, in the primary and supreme sense. Christ as Son is God only in a derived or secondary sense. The doctrine of Christ's Mediatorship was the new truth of Christianity. Around it early controversies arose, and here began a Christological evolution which became the central factor of Greek ecclesiastical history through its whole course. It divides into four sections or stages, represented by the names of St. Paul, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Athanasius.

The Logos doctrine has no Jewish ancestry. It is essentially a mediation doctrine. It is based on the idea of a Divine transcendence, and of a cosmological void needing to be filled between the absolute God and the world. Three points are noticeable, which became fountain heads of tendencies that were finally to change the whole current of theological thought, and to substitute for the Pauline Christology something radically different. 1. The Logos doctrine emphasized the superhuman or Divine element in Christ's nature. When Jesus Christ was identified with the Logos, His whole being was transcendentalized. He was no longer the Son of man, but the Son of God, and even a quasi-Divinity. 2. The Logos doctrine, in its assertion of Christ's Mediatorship, emphasized the subordination element which characterizes St. Paul's theology, and tended to magnify it. It is the essence of the Logos doctrine that the Logos mediates between what is higher than itself and what is lower. 3. The Logos doctrine may be true, but, if so, its truth is metaphysical, not historical. In a single point the Johannine Christology advances beyond the Pauline. St. Paul has a transcendental view of Christ as the "form" and "image" of God; but the Fourth Gospel develops a metaphysical unity between the Father and Son, which is foreign to St. Paul. There is a marked resemblance between the Logos doctrine of the Fourth Gospel and that of Justin Martyr.

In the hands of Origen, the Logos doctrine suffered two amendments. The first is his view of the eternal generation of the Son. The second is the strict subordination of the Son to the Father. He insisted on the difference of essence. The Son was truly begotten of the Father, but His nature was different, since He lacked the attributes of absoluteness and self-existence, and derived His being from the Father's will. So Origen paved the way for Arius.

We are thus brought to the great crisis in the development of the Greek theology, and to the epoch of Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. Historically and critically, Athanasianism is simply a revolt from the subordination tendency, when carried too far. Arius had stretched subordination to its furthest point. Athanasius reduced it to a minimum. The term homoousios becomes the turning-point of the Nicene epoch. To Athanasius it meant that the Son was truly Son, not putatively or adoptively, and that, as true Son, He was of the same generic nature as His Father, and so equal to the Father in all Divine attributes. He was ready to accept the term homoiousios if it was explained to mean a likeness of essence in kind, which would allow that the Son

as a real Son, and derived from the Father His essential qualities. The Trinitarianism of Athanasius was radically Origenism. The Logos doctrine, in its Origenistic form of eternal generation and derived subordination, forms the backbone of the Nicene Christology. The difference between Origen and Athanasius is largely a matter of words. Yet Athanasius took one long step forward. He reduced the subordination of the Son to its lowest possible terms. He was ready to call Christ God. The object of dread ever present to the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers was the spectre of tritheism. In Athanasian Trinitarinism three points are to be noted. 1. Athanasius never confounds the one God with the Trinity. The Three Persons are not one Being. 2. The Logos becomes endowed with His mediating function by virtue of His Sonship; but this Sonship is an eternal relationship. The real Sonship is what he means by homoousios. 3. Athanasius strongly opposes the doctrine of one personal Being in three modes of revelation and activity. Athanasius held to a Trinity of Three Personal Beings. He held the Second Person to be the true Son of God, of the same nature with the Father, and therefore not a creature. He saved himself from tritheism by the doctrine of one Supreme Cause. He says the Son is interior and proper to the Father. This doctrine of the interiorness or coinherence of the Son in the Father has been misapprehended by Augustinian theologians. Athanasius does not mean by homoousios "numerically one in essence."

MAN'S CONCEPTION OF GOD FROM AN HISTORICAL STANDPOINT. By JOHN W. SMITH, LL.B. (The Biblical World).- How should we account for the universally prevalent disposition or inclination on the part of man to worship? Some say man's conception of God is an inheritance derived from an original and primitive direct revelation; others, that the idea of the existence and attributes of a Supreme Being resulted from a process of pure reasoning on the part of man. Others attribute the idea solely to observation of nature, its beauty, its grandeur, its harmony, its laws. Others maintain that the idea of God is inconceivable, unknowable, and that man's conceptions on the subject are mere chimeras, and worship, in all its forms, a superstition. Others plead that religion is inherent in man, and is in him a mode of action, a potential energy, quite as much as the forces and powers are inherent in material substances.

The time has been when the name of God was regarded as too sacred to be pronounced by mortal lips. But if the heavens declare God's glory, it cannot be sacrilegious to inquire into and examine the impress that God has left on man. If man is the image of God, and we take into consideration his accomplishments thus far, and the possibilities of the future, with all nature and its laws at his command, it may be that he will be regarded in coming ages as the best and highest revelation of God.

Thanks to the patient and scholarly investigation of the nineteenth century, we are now enabled to read the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that actuated men in remote antiquity, long ages before Abram left Ur of the Chaldees. Exploration, archæology, philology, psychology, ethnography, mythology, and folk-lore have carried us back to the formative periods of the civilized races of men, and opened up to us vast treasure-houses of information stored when Europe was a wilderness and America unknown. And thus we are brought face to face with, hear the voice of, and learn the thoughts and yearnings of, man far back towards the infancy of the human race. The law of progress, development, or evolution has a harsh and grating sound for those who entertain the traditional idea of a prehistoric and primitive special revelation at a time when mankind are supposed to have lived in a state of simplicity and moral rectitude, constantly in communion with God. But we can trace man from a