Anthropology (continued) – Anti-Libanus

Anthropology (continued)

There can be no transition from the one to the other. The "gulf" remains in spite of all attempts to bridge it. Strong supporters of Darwinism have acknowledged this. Thus Dr. A. R. Wallace, though vigorously maintaining the "essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammals and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes," discards theory that "man's entire nature and all his faculties, moral, intellectual, spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in lower animals"--a theory which he considers unsupported by adequate evidence and directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts (Darwinism, 461; Natural Selection, 322 ff).

(5) Transitional Forms Absent.

The absence of transitional forms is another difficulty which strikes at the very root of Darwinism. Zittel, a paleontologist of repute, endorsed the general opinion, when in 1895 at Zurich he declared, that the extinct transitional links are slowly not forthcoming, except in "a small and ever-diminishing number." The derivation of the modern horse from the "Eohippus," on which great stress is sometimes laid, can hardly be accepted as proved, when it is maintained by scientists of equal repute, that no "Eohippus," but Palaeotherium was the progenitor of the animal whose ancestry is in dispute. And as for man, the discovery by Dr. E. Du Bois, in the island of Java, of the top of a skull, the head of a leg bone, few teeth of an animal supposed to be a man-like mammal, does not convey the absolute proof demanded. From the very first, opinion was strangely divided among naturalists.

Virchow doubted whether the parts belonged to the same individual, and considered Du Bois' drawings of the curves of a skull-outline to prove the gradual transition from the skull of a monkey to that of a man as imaginary. Of twenty-four scientists, who examined the remains when originally presented, ten thought they belonged to an ape, seven to a man, seven to some intermediate form (Otto, Naturalism and Religion, 110). At the Anthropological Congress held at Lindau in September, 1899, "Dr. Bumiller read a paper in which he declared that the supposed `pithecanthropus erectus' is nothing but a gibbon, as Virchow surmised from the first" (Orr, in The Expositor, July, 1910).

4. The New Evolutionism:

Evolutionism apparently is undergoing a great change. Among others Fleischmann, and Dennert in Germany have submitted Darwinism to a keen and searching criticism. The latter especially, as a scientist, raises a strong protest against the acceptance of the Darwinian theory, He closes his researches with the remarkable words: "The theory of descent is accepted by nearly all naturalists. But in spite of assertions to the contrary, theory has not yet been fully (ganz unzweifelhaft) proved. .... Darwinism on the other hand, i.e. the doctrine of natural selection through struggle for existence, has been forced back all along the line" (vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, 120). With equal vigor Professor Hugo de Vries, of Amsterdam, has recently taught a "theory of mutation," a term applied by him to "express the process of origination of a new species, or of a new specific character, when this takes place by the discontinuous method at a single step" (Lock, Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, 113). New species, according to De Vries, may arise from old ones by leaps, and this not in long-past geological times, but in the course of a human life and under our very eyes. This theory of "halmatogenesis," or evolution by leaps and not by insensible gradations, was not unknown to scientists.

Lyell, who was a slow convert to Darwinism, in his Antiquity of Man, admitted the possibility of "occasional strides, breaks in an otherwise continuous series of psychical changes, mankind clearing at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason of man." Even Professor Huxley, one of the staunchest supporters of Darwinism, acknowledged that "Nature does make jumps now and then," and that "a recognition of the fact is of no small importance in disposing of many minor objections to the doctrine of transmutation" (Orr, God's Image in Man, 116). Less conciliatory than either De Vries or Huxley is Eimer, who, while repudiating the "chance" theory of Darwinism, sets against it "definitely directed evolution," and holds that "natural selection is insufficient in the formation of species" (Otto, Naturalism and Religion, 174). Evidently the evolution theory is undergoing modifications, which may have important bearing on the interpretation of the Mosaic narrative of creation and especially on the descent of man. Man may therefore, from a purely scientific point of view, be an entirely new being, not brought about by slow and gradual ascent from a simian ancestry. He may have been introduced at a bound, not as a semi-animal with brute impulses, but as a rational and moral being, "internally harmonious, with possibilities of sinless development, which only his free act annulled." If the new theory of "mutational" evolution be accepted, the scriptural view of man's origin will certainly not be discredited.

5. Evolution and Genesis:

This much may fairly be granted, that within certain limits Scripture accepts an evolutionary process. In regard to the lower animals the creating (Genesis 1:21), or making (Genesis 1:28), is not described as an immediate act of Almighty Power, but as a creative impulse given to water and earth, which does not exclude, but rather calls into operation the powers that are in the sea and dry land (Genesis 1:11,Genesis 1:20,Genesis 1:24 the King James Version): "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass .... Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature." It is only in the creation of man that God works immediately: "And God said, Let us make man in our image .... And God created man" (Genesis 1:26,Genesis 1:27). The stride or jump of Lyell and Huxley, the "halmatogenesis" of De Vries are names which in the simple narrative disappear before the pregnant sentence: "And God said." Theologians of repute have given a theistic coloring to the evolution theory (compare Flint, Theism, 195 ff), inasmuch as development cannot be purposeless or causeless, and because "Nature is but effect whose cause is God." The deathblow which, according to Professor Huxley, the teleological argument has received from Darwin, may after all not be so serious. At any rate Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson) in 1871 before the British Association openly pleaded for "the solid and irrefragable argument so well put forward by Paley .... teaching us, that all living things depended upon an everacting Creator and Ruler." See EVOLUTION.

VI. Primitive and Present Conditions of Man: Antiquity of Man.

1. The Time-Distance of Man's Origin:

The newer anthropology has carried the human race back to a remote antiquity. Ordinary estimates range between 100,000 and 500,000 years. Extraordinary computations go far beyond these numbers. Haeckel, e.g. speaks of "Sirius distances" for the whole evolutionary process; and what this means may easily be conjectured. The sun is 92,700,000 miles away from the earth, and Sirius is a million times as far from us as we are from the sun, so that the time-distance of man from the very lowest organisms, from the first germ or seed or ovule, is according to Haeckel almost incalculable. The human race is thus carried back by evolutionists into an immeasurable distance from the present inhabitants of the earth. Several primeval races are by some declared to have existed, and fossil remains of man are supposed to have been found, bringing him into touch with extinct animals.

The time-computations of evolutionists, however, are not shared by scientists in general. "These millionaires in time have received a rude blow, when another Darwin, Sir G. H. Darwin of Cambridge, demonstrated that the physical conditions were such that geology must limit itself to a period of time inside of 100,000 years" (Orr, God's Image, etc., 176). Professor Tait of Edinburgh limited the range to no more than 10,000,000 years and he strongly advised geologists to "hurry up their calculations." "I dare say," he says, "many of you are acquainted with the speculations of Lyell and others, especially of Darwin, who tells us, that even for a comparatively brief portion of recent geological history, three hundred millions of years will not suffice! We say, so much the worse for geology as at present understood by its chief authorities" (Recent Advances in Physical Science, 168). Recently, however, attention has been drawn to new sources of energy in the universe as the result of radio-activity.

Duncan, in The New Knowledge, contrasts the old conception, according to which God made the universe and started it at a definite time to run its course, with the need, which though it does not distinctly teach, at least is inclined to maintain, that the universe is immortal or eternal, both in the future and the past (p. 245). If this view be correct the Darwinian "eons" of time may be considered restored to the evolutionist. On the other hand it appears that Lord Kelvin seriously doubted the validity of these speculations. Professor Orr writes: "In a personal communication Lord Kelvin states to me that he thinks it `almost infinitely improbable' that radium had any appreciable effects on the heat and light of the earth or sun, and suggests it as `more probable that the energy of radium may have come originally in connection with the excessively high temperatures' produced by gravitational action" (Homiletic Review, August, 1906).

2. Antiquity of Primeval Man:

In regard to primeval man there is no agreement among scientists. Some, like Delaunay, de Mortillet, Quatrefages, believed that man existed in the Tertiary; while others, such as Virchow, Zittel, Prestwich, Dawson, maintain that man appeared on the scene only in the Quaternary. As the limits between these periods are not well defined a decision is by no means easy. Even if man be found to have been a contemporary of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, the inference from this fact would be equally just, not that man is as old as the extinct animal, but that the animal is as young as man and that the period assigned to these fossil remains must be brought considerably nearer to present-day life.

3. Various Calculations:

Calculations based on the gravels of the Somme, on the cone of the Tiniere, on the peat-bogs of France and Denmark, on fossil bones discovered in caves of Germany and France, on delta-formations of great rivers like the Nile and the Mississippi, on the "kitchen middings" of Denmark, and the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, must be carefully scrutinized. Sir J. W. Dawson, a geologist of great repute, has made the deliberate statement, that "possibly none of these reach farther back than six or seven thousand years, which according to Dr. Andrews have elapsed since the close of the boulder-clay in America," and that "the scientific pendulum must swing backward in this direction" (Story of the Earth and Man, 293). The "ice-age," formerly hypothetically calculated, has latterly been brought within calculable distance. G. F. Wright, Winchell and others have arrived at the conclusion that the glacial period in America, and consequently in Europe, does not lie more than some eight or ten thousand years behind us.

If such be the case, the antiquity of man is brought within reasonable limits, and may consequently not be in contradiction to the Biblical statements on this point. If the careful and precise calculations of Dr. Andrews on the raised beaches of Lake Michigan are accepted, then North America must have risen out of the waters of the Glacial period some 5,500 or 7,500 years ago; and if so, the duration of the human period in that continent is fixed and must be considerably reduced (Dawson, Story, etc., 295). One of the latest deliverances on this subject is that of Professor Russell of the University of Michigan (1904), who maintains that "we find no authentic and well- attested evidence of the presence of man in America either previous to or during the Glacial period." He is confident, that "all the geological evidence thus far gathered bearing on the antiquity of man in America points to the conclusion that he came after the Glacial epoch." Where all is vague and experts differ great caution is necessary in the arrangement of dates and periods of time. If moreover a comparatively rapid post-glacial submergence and reelevation is accepted, as some naturalists hold, and man were then on the earth, the question may fairly be asked, whether this subsidence did not "constitute the deluge recorded in that remarkable `log-book' of Noah preserved to us in Gen" (Dawson, op. cit., 290).

4. Chronology:

The chronology of ancient nations--China, Babylon, Egypt--has been considered as subversive of the scriptural view as to the age of the human race. But it is a well-known fact, that experts differ very seriously upon the point. Their calculations range, for Egypt--starting from the reign of King Menes--from 5,867 (Champollion) to 4,455 (Brugsch), and from 3,892 (Lepsius) to 2,320 (Wilkinson). As to Babylon Bunsen places the starting-point for the historic period in 3,784, Brandis in 2,458, Oppert in 3,540--a difference of thousands of years (compare Bavinck, Geref. Dogmatik, II, 557). Perhaps here, too, future research will bring the scientific and the Biblical view into fuller harmony. At any rate, Hommel's words on all these calculations require careful study: "The chronology for the first thousand years before Christ is fairly fixed: in the second thousand BC some points seem to be fixed: in the third thousand, i.e. before 2000 BC, all is uncertain." In this connection it may be mentioned, that attempts have frequently been made to cast discredit on the chronology of the early chapters of Genesis. Suffice it to say that the calculations are based on the genealogies of the patriarchs and their descendants, and that the generally accepted dates assigned to them by Archbishop Ussher and introduced into the margins of some editions of the Bible are not to be trusted. The Septuagint differs in this respect from the Hebrew text by more than 1,500 years: precise chronological data are not and cannot be given. The basis of calculation is not known. Perhaps we are not far wrong in saying that, "if we allow, say, from 12,000 to 15,000 years since the time of man's first appearance on the earth, we do ample justice to all the available facts" (Orr, God's Image, etc., 180). See CHRONOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

5. Man's Primitive Condition: That all these discussions have a bearing upon our view of man's primitive conditions can easily be understood. According to Scripture man's destiny was to `replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over fish, fowl and every living thing' (Genesis 1:28), as God's steward (oikonomos, Titus 1:7), as fellow-laborer with God (sunergos, 1 Corinthians 3:9). Hence he was placed by God in the garden of Eden (gan be`edhen; Septuagint paradeisos tes trophes; Vulgate paradisus voluptatis, "paradise of delight"). The situation of that garden is carefully described, though the proper site remains unknown (Genesis 2:14,Genesis 2:15). Some, like Driver, consider this an ideal locality (Genesis, 57); others take a very wide range in fixing upon the true site. Every continent has been chosen as the cradle of the race--Africa, among others, as the home of the gorilla and the chimpanzee--the supposed progenitors of humanity. In America, Greenland and the regions around the North Pole have had their supporters.

Certain parts of Europe have found favor in some quarters. An imaginary island--Lemuria--situated between the African and Australian continents--has been accepted by others. All this, however, lies beyond the scope of science, and beyond the range of Scripture. Somewhere to the east of Palestine, and in or near Babylonia, we must seek for the cradle of humanity. No trace of primeval man has been found, nor has the existence of primeval races been proved. The skulls which have been found (Neanderthal, Engis, Lansing) are of a high type, even Professor Huxley declaring of the first, that "it can in no sense be regarded as the intermediate between Man and the Apes," of the second, that it is "a fair, average skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage" (Man's Place in Nature, 156, 157). Of the Lansing skeleton found in Kansas, in 1902, this may at least be said--apart from the question as to its antiquity--that the skull bears close resemblance to that of the modern Indian. Even the skull of the Cro-Magnon man, supposed to belong to the paleolithic age, Sir J. W. Dawson considers to have carried a brain of greater size than that of the average modern man (Meeting-Place of Geology and History, 54). Primeval man can hardly be compared to the modern savage; for the savage is a deteriorated representative of a better type, which has slowly degenerated.

History does not know of an unaided emergence from barbarism on the part of any savage tribe; it does know of degradation from a better type. Whatever view we take of the original state of man, the following points must be borne in mind: we need not suppose him to have been a humanized ape, rising into true manhood by a slow and gradual process; nor need we picture him either as a savage of pronounced type, or as in every sense the equal of modern man, "the heir of all the ages." Scripture represents him to us as a moral being, "with possibilities of sinless development, which his own free act annulled." There the matter may rest, and the words of a non-canonical Scripture may fitly be applied to him: "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of His own eternity" (The Wisdom of Solomon 2:23, the King James Version). See also PSYCHOLOGY.

LITERATURE.

Darwin, Origin of Species, Descent of Man; Lock, Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, etc.; A. R. Wallace, Darwinism, Natural Selection; Sir J. W. Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, Origin of World according to Revelation and Science, Meeting-Place of Geology and History; R. Otto, Naturalism and Religion; Cambridge Memorial vol, Darwin and Modern Science; J. H. Stirling, Darwinianism; J. Young, Evolution and Design; J. Orr, God's Image in Man; J. A. Thomson, Bible of Nature, Darwinism and Human Life; Weismann, Essays on Heredity; Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatik; Van Leeuwen. Bijbelsche Anthropologie; Laidlaw, Bible Doctrines of Man; O. Zockler, Vom Urstand des Menschen; A. Fleischmann; Die Darwin'sche Theorie; E. Dennert, Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, Bibel und Naturwissenschaft; Huxley, Man's Place in Nature; Herzog, RE, articles "Geist" and "Seele"; Driver, Genesis; Delitzsch, Genesis; Dillmann, Die Genesis, etc., etc.

J. I. Marais

Anthropomorphism

an-thro-po-mor'-fiz'-m:

1. Definition of the Term

2. Old Testament Anthropomorphisms

3. In What Senses an Anthropomorphic Element Is Necessary

4. Anthropomorphism and the Exigencies of Human Thinking

5. Anthropomorphism and Theism

6. Symbolic Forms of Thought

7. Philosophic Pantheism

8. Anthropomorphism and Personalized or Mediated Knowledge

9. From Greek Polytheism to Modern Ethical Monotheism

10. Greek Thought

11. Anthropomorphism of Israel

12. Twofold Nature of the Anthropomorphic Difficulty

13. Need of Rising Higher

14. God in Christ the True Solution

1. Definition of the Term:

By this term is meant, conformably with its etymological signification, i.e. as being in the form or likeness of man, the attribution to God of human form, parts or passions, and the taking of Scripture passages which speak of God as having hands, or eyes, or ears, in a literal sense. This anthropomorphic procedure called forth Divine rebuke so early as Psalms 50:21: "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."

2. Old Testament Anthropomorphisms:

Fear of the charge of anthropomorphism has had a strangely deterrent effect upon many minds, but very needlessly so. Even that rich storehouse of apparently crude anthropomorphisms, the Old Testament, when it ascribes to Deity physical characters, mental and moral attributes, like those of man, merely means to make the Divine nature and operations intelligible, not to transfer to Him the defects and limitations of human character and life.

3. In What Senses an Anthropomorphic Element Is Necessity:

In all really theistic forms of religion, there is an anthropomorphic element present, for they all presuppose the psychological truth of a certain essential likeness between God and man. Nor, perfect as we may our theistic idea or conception of Deity, can we, in the realm of spirit, ever wholly eliminate the anthropomorphic element involved in this assumption, without which religion itself were not. It is of the essence of the religious consciousness to recognize the analogy subsisting between God's relations to man, and man's relations to his fellow. We are warned off from speaking of "the Divine will" or "the Divine purpose," as too anthropomorphic--savoring too much of simple humanity and human psychology--and are bidden speak only of "the Divine immanence" or "the Divine ground of our being."

4. Anthropomorphism and the Exigencies of Human Thinking:

But these speculative objections really spring from a shallow interpretation of the primary facts of human consciousness, which, in the deepest realm of inner experience, claims the indefeasible right to speak of the Divine nature in human terms, as may best be possible to our being. The proper duty or function of philosophy is to take due account of such direct and primary facts of our nature: the basal facts of our being cannot be altered to suit her convenience.

5. Anthropomorphism and Theism:

If we were to interpret the impalpable and omni-present Energy, from which all things proceed, in terms of force, then, as Flake said, "there is scarcely less anthropomorphism lurking in the phrase `Infinite Power,' than in the phrase `Infinite Person.'" Besides which, the soul of man could never be content with the former phrase, for the soul wants more than dynamics. But if we have ascribed to God certain attributes in keeping with the properties of the one Protean force behind all nature-manifestations, it has been to help purge our conception of God of objectionable anthropomorphic elements. The exigencies of human thinking require us to symbolize the nature of Deity in some psychical way whereby He shall have for us some real meaning; hence those quasi-personal or anthropomorphic forms of expression, which inhere in the most perfected conceptions of Deity, as well as in the crude ideas of unreflective spiritism. And if all anthropomorphism could be dissipated by us, we should in the process have demolished theism--a serious enough issue for religion.

6. Symbolic Forms of Thought:

Even speech has been declared to be a sensuous symbol, which makes knowledge of God impossible. To such an extent have the hyper-critical objections to anthropomorphism been pressed. Symbol of the Divine, speech may, in this sense, be; but it is a symbol whereby we can mark, distinguish or discern the super-sensible. Thus our abstract conceptions are by no means sensuous, however the language may originally have set out from a sensuous significance. Hence, it would be a mistake to suppose that our knowledge of God must remain anthropomorphic in content, and cannot think the Absolute Being or Essence save in symbolic form. It is a developmental law of religion--as of spirit in general--that the spiritual grows always more clearly differentiated from the symbolic and sensuous. The fact that our knowledge of God is susceptible of advance does not make the idea of God a merely relative one. God's likeness to man, in respect of the attributes and elements essential to personal spirit, must be presupposed as a fundamental reality of the universe. In this way or sense, therefore, any true idea of God must necessarily be anthropomorphic.

7. Philosophic Pantheism:

We cannot prove in any direct manner--either psychological or historical--that man was really made in God's image. But there is no manner of doubt that, on the other hand, man has always made God in his (man's) own image. Man can do no otherwise. Because he has purged his conceptions of Deity after human pattern, and no longer cares much to speak of God as a jealous or repentant or punitive Deity, as the case may be, it yet by no means follows that "the will of God" and "the love of God" have ceased to be of vital interest or primary importance for the religious consciousness. All man's constructive powers--intellectual, aesthetical, ethical, and spiritual--combine in evolving such an ideal, and believing in it as the personal Absolute, the Ideal-Real in the world of reality. Even in the forms of philosophic pantheism, the factors which play in man's personal life have not ceased to project themselves into the pantheistic conceptions of the cosmic processes or the being of the world.

8. Anthropomorphism and Personalized or Mediated Knowledge:

But man's making of God in his (man's) own image takes place just because God has made man in His own image. For the God, whom man makes for himself, is, before all things, real--no mere construction of his intellect, no figure or figment of his imagination, but the prius of all things, the Primal, Originative Reality. Thus we see that any inadequacy springing out of the anthropomorphic character of our religious knowledge or conceptions is not at all so serious as might at first sight be supposed, since it is due merely to the necessarily personalized or mediated character of all our knowledge whatsoever. For all our experience is human experience, and, in that sense, anthropomorphic. Only the most pitiful timidity will be scared by the word "anthropomorphism," which need not have the least deterrent effect upon our minds, since, in the territory of spirit, our conceptions are purged of anthropomorphic taint or hue, the purer our human consciousness becomes.

9. From Greek Polytheism to Modern Ethical Monotheism.

To say, as we have done, that all knowledge is anthropomorphic, is but to recognize its partial, fallible, progressive or developmental character. It is precisely because this is true of our knowledge of God that our improved and perfected conceptions of God are the most significant feature in the religious progress of humanity. Only in course of the long religious march, wherein thought has shot up through the superincumbent weight of Greek polytheism into monotheism, and emerged at last into the severely ethical monotheism of our time, has religion been gradually stripped of its more crude anthropomorphic vestments. It cannot too clearly be understood that the religious ideal, which man has formed in the conception of the Absolute Personality, is one which is rooted in the realm of actuality. Not otherwise than as a metaphysical unity can God be known by us--intelligible only in the light of our own self- conscious experience.

10. Greek Thought:

It is a mere modern--and rather unillumined--abuse of the term anthropomorphic which tries to affix it, as a term of reproach, to every hypothetical endeavor to frame a conception of God. In the days of the Greeks, it was only the ascription to the gods of human or bodily form that led Xenophanes to complain of anthropomorphism. This Xenophanes naturally took to be an illegitimate endeavor to raise one particular kind of being--one form of the finite--into the place of the Infinite. Hence he declared, "There is one God, greatest of all gods and men, who is like to mortal creatures neither in form nor in mind."

11. Anthropomorphism of Israel:

But the progressive anthropomorphism of Greece is seen less in the humanizing of the gods than in the claim that "men are mortal gods," the idea being, as Aristotle said, that men become gods by transcendent merit. In this exaltation of the nature of man, the anthropomorphism of Greece is in complete contrast with the anthropomorphism of Israel, which was prone to fashion its Deity, not after the likeness of anything in the heavens above, but after something in the earth beneath. Certain professors of science have been mainly responsible for the recent and reprehensible use of the term, so familiar to us, for which we owe them no particular gratitude.

12. Twofold Nature of the Anthropomorphic Difficulty:

The anthropomorphic difficulty is a twofold one. Religion, as we have just shown, must remain anthropomorphic in the sense that we cannot get rid of imputing to the universe the forms of our own mind or life, since religion is rooted in our human experience. As we have already hinted, however, religion is in no worse case in that respect than science. For nothing is more idle than the pretension that science is less anthropomorphic than religion--or philosophy either--as if science were not, equally with these, an outcome and manifestation of human thinking! It is surely most obvious that the scientist, in any knowledge of reality he may gain, can, no more than the religionist--or the metaphysician--jump off his own shadow, or make escape from the toils of his own nature and powers. For knowledge of any sort--whether religious or scientific or philosophical--a certain true anthropomorphism is necessary, for it is of the essence of rationality. Nature, of which science professes a knowledge, is really a man- made image, like unto its human maker. Say what science will, this is the objectively real of science--a cognition which, critically viewed, is only subjectively valid. There is no other way by which science can know the being of the world than after the human pattern. It is, however, a serious issue that this human element or factor has often unduly penetrated the realm of the Divine, subordinating it and dragging it down to human aims and conceptions.

13. Need of Rising Higher:

Hence arises the second aspect of the anthropomorphic difficulty, which is, the need of freeing religion from anthropomorphic tendency, since it can be no satisfactory revealer of truth, so long as its more or less unrefined anthropomorphism contracts or subjugates reality to the conditions of a particular kind of being. It is perfectly clear that religion, whose every aim is to raise man beyond the limitations of his natural being, can never realize its end, so long as it remains wholly within the human sphere, instead of being something universal, transcendent, and independent. This is precisely why religion comes to give man's life the spiritual uplift whereby it rises to a new center of gravity--a true center of immediacy--in the universe, rises, indeed, beyond time and its own finitude to a participation in the universal and transcendent life of the Eternal. It does so without feeling need to yield to the anthropomorphic tendency in our time to attribute a necessity in God for an object to love, as if His egoistic perfection were not capable of realizing love's infinite ideal in itself, and without dependence upon such object.

14. God in Christ the True Solution:

We affirm that God in Christ, in revealing the fact of the likeness of man being eternal in God, disclosed the true anthropomorphism of our knowledge of God--it is with respect to the essential attributes and elements of personal spirit. It is easy to see how the early ascriptions to God of the form and members of the human body, and other non-essential accompaniments of personality, arose. The scriptural representations as to God's hand, eye, and ear, were declared by Calvin to be but adaptations to the slow spiritual progress of men--an infantile mode of talk, as Calvin puts it, like that of nurses to children. But we have got finely clear of essential anthropomorphism, if, with Isaiah 55:8, we fully recognize that God's "thoughts are not" our "thoughts," nor God's "ways" our "ways." LITERATURE.

E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, 1893; J. Martineau, A Study of Religion, 1889; J. Fiske, The Idea of God, 1901; J. Orr, God's Image in Man, 1905; D. B. Purinton, Christian Theism, 1889; J. Lindsay, Recent Advances in Theistic Philosophy of Religion, 1897; Studies in European Philosophy, 1909.

James Lindsay

Anti-Libanus

an-ti-lib'-a-nus. See LEBANON.