The Christian's God certainly is not remote; he is all men's lover and father and they are all his beloved and his sons. The philosopher's God is sometimes made blankly, abstractly, identical with us, and then we may ignore him; because a blank identity simply is, as conceived in thought, and like the alien God it means nothing for us. But more often nowadays the philosopher's God is like the Christian's in that he both transcends his universe and indwells it; for the philosopher has begun in good earnest to reckon with life and with science and human experience at large. God indwelt Jesus Christ, and he knew God as lover and father both. He spoke as though God had communicated himself to him in a fulness we do not know among ourselves. There was an identity of will, it seems, recognized by him, between himself and God, and an identity of reason and knowledge. And if God is Spirit and Lord and Giver of life, then, if the prophet was right, in this identity by fulness of communication, this personal coalescence of reason and will, God, very God, gave himself to very man, and very man entered into personal union with very God. The transcendent God indwelt the man, was immanent within him as the man's own self; and the man's own self was lifted up into the self of God. The intercommunication of person with person, which we see as the prerogative of persons, was complete.
We have confessed this to be the goal of human endeavour; let us allow ourselves to think that in regard to us it may be the goal, also, of divine endeavour, and that in the man who offered no opposition to God it was attained. As long as we do not indulge in the secret materialism of regarding a person as a thing producing knowledge or activity, instead of as being that knowledge and activity, we shall have no difficulty in recognizing the fact that where knowledge and will in two persons coincide, there also the persons coincide. We shall be able to see that a man is identical with God, in the only sense identity can have for personal beings, when he fully knows the mind of God and his will is bent on the same ends as the will of God. Then this man is both man and God in one, for God indwells him by that activity which he truly is.
If we object, as we frequently do, that no man can fully know the mind of God, we must tell ourselves that if a man knows the essential, permanently valuable truth of life which wise men have ever sought as wisdom, then all that is worth while in knowledge, all that upon which parts and kinds of 'knowledges' must be built up, is his, included within his Weltanschauung, his living view of the world. The principle, the ground, of all truth, and therefore of all knowledge, he knows and has.
We think of the writer of the Fourth Gospel giving us, as a prayer of Jesus, the aspiration that 'they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.' He has the goal of our endeavour in plain sight; he must have felt that impulse of the spirit towards it which is not exhausted, never can be exhausted, by any one man.
CHAPTER VI
Thy judgment is in the mute pain of sleepless love;
In the blush of pure hearts;
In the tears of the night of desolation;