J. D. Robertson, The Holy Spirit and Christian Service, 57—“Emerson says that the gate of gifts closes at birth. After a man emerges from his mother's womb he can have no new endowments, no fresh increments of strength and wisdom, joy and grace within. The only grace is the grace of creation. But this view is deistic and not Christian.” Emerson's saying is true of natural gifts, but not of spiritual gifts. He forgot Pentecost. He forgot the all-encompassing atmosphere of the divine personality and love, and its readiness to enter in at every chink and crevice of our voluntary being. The longing men have to turn over a new leaf in life's book, to break with the past, to assert their better selves, is a preliminary impulse of God's Spirit and an evidence of prevenient grace preparing the way for regeneration. Thus interpreted and yielded to, these impulses warrant unbounded hope for the future. “No star is ever lost we once have seen; We always may be what we might have been; The hopes that lost in some far distance seem May be the truer life, and this the dream.”
The greatest minds feel, at least at times, their need of help from above. Although Cicero uses the term “regeneration” to signify what we should call naturalization, yet he recognizes man's dependence upon God: “Nemo vir magnus, sine aliquo divino afflatu, unquam fuit.” Seneca: “Bonus vir sine illo nemo est.” Aristotle: “Wickedness perverts the judgment and makes men err with respect to practical principles, so that no man can be wise and judicious who is not good.” Goethe: “Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers.” Shakespeare, King Lear: “Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?” Robert Browning, in Halbert and Hob, replies: “O Lear, That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear.”
John Stuart Mill (see Autobiography, 132-142) knew that the feeling of interest in others' welfare would make him happy,—but the knowledge of this fact did not give him the feeling. The “enthusiasm of humanity”—unselfish love, of which we read in “Ecce Homo”—is easy to talk about; but how to produce it,—that is the question. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 61-94—“There is no abiogenesis in the spiritual, more than in the natural, world. Can the stone grow more and more living until it enters the organic world? No, Christianity is a new life,—it is Christ in you.”As natural life comes to us mediately, through Adam, so spiritual life comes to us mediately, through Christ. See Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 220-249; Anderson, Regeneration, 51-88; Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 340-354.
3. The Efficient Cause of Regeneration.
Three views only need be considered,—all others are modifications of these. The first view puts the efficient cause of regeneration in the human will; the second, in the truth considered as a system of motives; the third, in the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit.
John Stuart Mill regarded cause as embracing all the antecedents to an event. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, 12-15, shows that, as at any given instant the [pg 815]whole past is everywhere the same, the effects must, upon this view, at each instant be everywhere one and the same. “The theory that, of every successive event, the real cause is the whole of the antecedents, does not distinguish between the passive conditions acted upon and changed, and the active agencies which act upon and change them; does not distinguish what produces, from what merely precedes, change.”
We prefer the definition given by Porter, Human Intellect, 592—Cause is “the most conspicuous and prominent of the agencies, or conditions, that produce a result”; or that of Dr. Mark Hopkins: “Any exertion or manifestation of energy that produces a change is a cause, and nothing else is. We must distinguish cause from occasion, or material. Cause is not to be defined as ‘everything without which the effect could not be realized.’ ” Better still, perhaps, may we say, that efficient cause is the competent producing power by which the effect is secured. James Martineau, Types, 1: preface, xiii—“A cause is that which determines the indeterminate.” Not the light, but the photographer, is the cause of the picture; light is but the photographer's servant. So the “word of God” is the “sword of the Spirit” (Eph. 6:17); the Spirit uses the word as his instrument; but the Spirit himself is the cause of regeneration.
A. The human will, as the efficient cause of regeneration.
This view takes two forms, according as the will is regarded as acting apart from, or in conjunction with, special influences of the truth applied by God. Pelagians hold the former; Arminians the latter.