Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/277

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No. 3.]
THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF AUTHORITY.
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all degrees of unreason as well as of reason. It is not, even as a totality, the perfect, but a process towards the perfect. Nothing ultimate or infallible can be looked for in this temporal process, nor, on the other hand, can it be looked at apart from its ultimate and essential destiny. There may be three false verdicts as to creation: all things are divine; nothing is divine; some things are divine. The last has been the contention of abstract supernaturalists. They pervert the church doctrine of the God-man, into an assertion that the man Jesus, in his state of humiliation (kenosis), was only veiled deity and deny that he "increased in wisdom and stature" to his full-orbed Divinity at the Ascension. Much of the lately prevalent orthodoxy has run through the gamut of excluded heresies, especially those of Doketism and Monophysitism. Again, it has applied its abstract canon to the Bible and the church, seeking to take them out of the realm of the historic process, thus going as wide of the mark as those who find no visible historical continuity in the church, and no record of authoritative revelations in the Bible. Such abstract views are accountable for much of current scepticism. The state is jure divino. "There is no power (civil), but of God," yet Christians have long since ceased to stamp any one form as ultimate. The church is jure divino, yet with pulse-beat of historical continuity it can claim finality in no one partial form. The church is never wholly holy and never wholly whole or catholic. It is expanding into catholicity, growing up into the holiness of its Holy Spirit. So, too, of prophets, lawgivers, the moral sentiment of the community, the fixed laws of a social state, — none of these are ever ultimate or infallible (ecclesiastical anathema, or civil proscription to the contrary), because they are only parts of a great process that is moving on in and through temporal, transitory forms, returning them in enriched educated form whence they sprang. Nothing finite can be ultimate, nor can it be at all without being in some way a member of the larger process towards the ultimate.

Pantheism, which identifies the immediate actual forms of existence with the divine, is even more unphilosophical than the supernatural form of rationalism, which says that only some