The Hidden Presence

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Feb 4, 1904

“The Hidden Presence”

IN a recent number of The Outlook (New York) there appeared an editorial with the heading, “The Hidden Presence.” It is worthy of some attention as indicating with much clearness the trend of the “New Thought” movement. The first sentence of the article is this: “We fail to find God because we do not look for him in the right place.” After speaking of the common tendency to confine God to the remarkable and striking displays of his power, it says further: “The Scripture writers did not any less believe in God’s presence in the commonest phenomena of nature. In truth the commonest phenomena of nature are as great manifestations of his power and presence as those which impress us as unique.” As illustrating and enforcing the meaning of this statement, quite a long quotation is then made from Psalm 104. Then comes this further declaration concerning the presence of God: “As he is in all the common phenomena of nature, so he is an inspiring, guiding, protecting, redeeming presence in all the experiences of men; not more the God of the poet or the prophet than of the shopman or the day-laborer. . . . What Jacob said when he awoke from his dream of the celestial ladder to find his head pillowed on the stones, we might all of us say at all times: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’”

Applying the same method of interpretation to the teaching of the Scripture concerning human conduct in general, it says: “We have an idea that only the extraordinary, the uplifting, the celestial movements of our minds are

divinely inspired; but this was not the conception of the sacred writers. The secret and source of all life is God; he is over all and in all; in him we live and move and have our being. All human activities of every kind have the source of their power in the infinite and the eternal. . . . Let us not, then, wait for the extraordinary to bring us the revelation of God’s presence. We are to look for him not without, but within. . . . Every voice of conscience summoning to virtue or restraining from vice, saying, Thou shalt, or Thou shalt not; every regret for a misspent past, . . . every inspiration to a higher, nobler, and better future, calling from the heights above, Follow thou me—yes, every incentive to generous or unselfish service and self-sacrifice for another, every impulse toward humanity, of pity for the sorrowing, or of mercy for the erring, is the voice of God speaking within us. Nay, more than that; all the common operations of our mind are, if we do but recognize it, witnesses to his presence from whom comes all our life, and by whom, if we will but allow it, all our life may be both guided and strengthened. To commune with ourselves is to talk with God.”

This article is a good illustration of the method of interpreting and applying the Scriptures which is in vogue in many quarters to-day. It is that mixture of truth and error, and that mingling of Scripture teaching with the assertions of a speculative philosophy which appears to prove the presence of God as very real and very near to every one of us, while in reality it sets aside the true God altogether, and substitutes in his place that false conception of God which ends in making each one a god unto himself. While in the outward form of its statements and its reasoning it ostensibly makes God the upholder and the director of all things and all persons, it in reality dethrones the true God, and deifies impulse and those mental processes which it transforms into “spiritual consciousness.” While it apparently lifts all the common experiences of life to a high spiritual plane, it really eliminates the truly spiritual experience altogether by breaking down the distinction between the natural man and the spiritual man, by making the conduct of every man inspired and directly controlled by God in him, and by asserting for every man, regardless of his personal attitude toward God, the same experience of the presence of God within him. The logical result of all this misleading philosophy is that man becomes God, but this final step in the logic is usually not stated in direct terms. Not so, however, in the case of this article. It does not hesitate to declare in plain language the legitimate conclusion from its “philosophy and vain deceit,”—“To commune with ourselves is to talk with God.” Here is revealed openly and baldly the inevitable result of that professedly Christian teaching which is based upon the creed of God in man as revealed in those mental and physical experiences which are common to all men. It dispenses with the atonement as unnecessary. It belittles all those great truths which center in the cross of Christ. It ends in the universal salvation of all men by making every man as God, and consequently his own savior. But this is heathenism.

The very title of this editorial, “The Hidden Presence,” is suggestive of the fact that this modern teaching concerning the being and nature of God which is set forth as “The New Thought” is simply a variation of the Chaldean idolatrous worship, that paganism which has been preserved for centuries in the creed and ritual of the papacy. In such doctrine as this apostate Protestantism is showing its identity with “the mystery of iniquity.” This is made clear by a consideration of the simple facts in the case. The god of the ancient Chaldean mysteries was Saturn. “Saturn and Mystery are both Chaldean words, and they are correlative terms. As Mystery signifies the hidden system, so Saturn signifies the hidden god.” The papacy has perpetuated this pagan perversion of the truth in its form of service. “In the litany of the mass the worshipers are taught thus to pray: ‘God hidden, and my Saviour, have mercy upon us.’ Whence can this invocation of the ‘God hidden’ have come, but from the ancient worship of Saturn, the ‘hidden god’?” And now this same pagan notion is being brought forward by a degenerate Protestantism as “The New Theology.” That these three presentations of this conception of “the hidden god” are simply different phases of one and the same root principle is shown by the fact that they all arrive at the same conclusion. They exalt man in the place of God, they put humanity in the place of divinity, and they make each man his own savior. Here is the foundation of every heathen religion.

It is manifestly a Scriptural teaching that the true God hides himself. “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.” But in the true revelation of this same God man is humbled in the dust, God is exalted, and the only way of salvation is shown to be through faith in the man Christ Jesus, who is “Emmanuel, . . . God with us.” This is the difference between Christianity and the heathenism of every age.