I have to do first of all with Mr. Van Der Donckt's premise—"the simplicity or spirituality" of God.
So far as it is possible to make language do it, the gentleman teaches that God is "pure being," "most [therefore absolutely] simple—not compound." He is not only infinite, then, but infinity. It follows that he is without quality, other than being—mere existence—"I Am Who Am;" without attributes; not susceptible of division, or of relation; for if he possessed quality or attribute or was susceptible of division or of relation, his absolute simplicity—that tremulously precarious thing on which, according to Mr. V.'s philosophy, his very existence and all his excellence depends—would be destroyed. It was doubtless these considerations that led the Church of England—which, by the way, is at one with the Roman Catholic Church in the doctrine of God—to say of the "one true and living God," that he is without body, parts or passions.[A] With which also the Westminster Confession of Faith agrees, by saying: "There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible," etc.[B]
[Footnote A: Bk. Com. Prayer, Articles of Religion, Art. 1.]
[Footnote B: Westminster Confession, Art. 2, Sec. 1.]
The German school of philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which ends in inevitable agnosticism, went but one step further than these creeds; a step made inevitable by the creeds themselves. The creeds postulate God as "pure being"—"existence" "the one who could not not exist," Mr. V.'s interpretation of "I Am Who Am." But "existence," says Fichte, "implies origin," and "God is beyond origin"—i. e. beyond "being," "existence." Schelling reached substantially the same conclusion when, by a pathway but little divergent from that followed by Fichte, he was led to regard God as neither "real or ideal;" "neither thought nor being." While Hegel, by similar subtleties, established the identity of "Being and Non-Being." This German philosophy, which but extends the philosophy of the orthodox creeds to its legitimate conclusion, leaves us with the paradox on our hands of regarding God at once as the most real existence, and as the most absolute non-existence. The conclusions from the premise are just; and Mr. V.'s "most simple," "infinite being," he who is "pure existence itself," vanishes amid the metaphysical subtleties of the learned Germans.[A]
[Footnote A: "Existence itself, that so-called highest category of thought, is only conceivable in the form of existence modified in some particular manner. Strip off its modification, and the apparent paradox of the German philosopher becomes literally true;—pure being is pure nothing. We have no conception of existence which is not existence in some particular manner; and if we abstract from the manner, we have nothing left to constitute the existence. Those who, in their horror of what they call anthropomorphism, or anthropopathy, refuse to represent the Deity under symbols borrowed from the limitations of human consciousness, are bound in consistency, to deny that God exists; for the conception of existence is as human and as limited as any other" (Limits of Religious Thought, Mansel, pp. 95, 96).]
Let us examine the effect of this Deity-destroying postulate in England. Mr. Van Der Donckt's "Infinite being," "most simple or not compound," is identical with the "absolute," the "unconditioned;" the "first cause," hence the "uncaused." These terms, it is well known, Mr. Herbert Spencer seized upon, in his volume on "First Principles," and ran them down to logical absurdity, showing them to be "unthinkable," and that ultimate religious ideas (arising from the postulates of orthodox creeds) lead to the "Unknown!" In reaching this conclusion he was wonderfully helped by Henry L. Mansel, some time Dean of St. Paul's, who in his celebrated Bampton Lecture arrives at substantially the same conclusion—with an exception to be noted later.[A] Indeed, so nearly at one are the churchman and the philosopher, in their methods of thought, in their deductions, that the latter reaches his conclusions from the data and reasoning of the former, whom he quotes with approval and at great length. I select from these writers a few typical passages tending to show the absurdity of God's "simplicity," or "spirituality," as held by Mr. Van Der Donckt, reminding the reader that Mr. V.'s "Infinite Being," "most simple or not compound," is identical with the "absolute," "unconditioned," the "first cause," the "uncaused" of both Mr. Mansel and Mr. Spencer.
[Footnote A: Page 109.]
Mr. Spencer, after showing that the First Cause cannot be finite, nor dependent, reaches the conclusion that it must be infinite and independent; and then proceeds:
But to think of the First Cause as totally independent is to think of it as that which existed in the absence of all other existence; seeing that if the presence of any other existence is necessary, it must be partially dependent on that other existence, and so cannot be the First Cause. Not only, however, must the First Cause be a form of being which has no necessary relation to any other form of being, but it can have no necessary relation within itself. There can be nothing in it which determines change, and yet nothing which prevents change. For if it contains something which imposes such necessities or restraints, this something must be a cause higher than the First Cause, which is absurd. Thus the First Cause must be in every sense perfect, complete, total; including within itself all power, and transcending all law. Or to use the established word, it must be absolute.[A]