A Personal God by T. L. Cuyler, D. D.

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 11, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 10.

A Personal God.

By T. L. Cuyler, D. D.

Positivism tells us that God is abstract and general; it calls us to worship "a being immense and eternal—Humanity." But when we attempt it, our adoration fixes itself upon a single person, the best and highest we have known, and we escape from the cold inanity of an abstract worship to the warm arms of a personal love. Pantheism tells that he is everything, the one eternal substance which appears as conscious in our thought and as unconscious in nature.—Hegel. But we can no more worship this than the leaf can worship the tree on which it hangs, than the wave can worship the ocean out of which it rises and into which it sinks. Agnosticism tells us that he is unknown and unknowable, "the Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness."—Matthew Arnold. But behind the power we seek the will from which it flows, behind the law we seek the Giver, behind the moral distinctions we seek the Maker in whom goodness, holiness, and truth are forever embodied. Thus, from all these vague abstractions the soul flies, by a natural instinct, to the God of the Bible. He is revealed as the Creator who called all things into being by his word, the Preserver who controls and directs all things by his will, the Redeemer who bends in love and pity above the world, seeking to save it; a God with a heart, who can hear us when we cry, and forgive us when we confess, and bless us when we come to him; a Father, waiting for his lost and wandering children, and rejoicing when they return to him. This is he who hath made us for himself, and in whom alone our unquiet hearts can find rest. Christianity satisfies us only because it is the revelation of a person by a person to a person. John 1:18.—T. L. Cuyler, D. D.