We answer: God is Life, Love, Truth, Intelligence, Mind, Substance, and Spirit. The Fatherhood and Motherhood of the Spiritual universe and man. We use the term Motherhood, because in our finite sense we regard the mother co-relative and co-equal with the father. God being all, embodies both relations. It is declared of him in the sacred Scriptures: "Thou art God." Ah! who can sound its depths?
The Master fittingly exemplified the power of God when he made nugatory the material law through the law Spiritual, whereby he turned the water into wine, walked the wave, healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead, and in his last act, the ascension, made manifest the nothingness of matter by making it give place to Spirit; disappearing from mortal sight, and being clothed upon through the eternal law of Spirit—God.
Thus we learn, through the light of the power of Christ, as exemplified in his demonstrations, to discern a faint foreshadowing of the almightiness of Spiritual law.
Dr. Channing, when discoursing upon this subject, asked this question: "What do we mean when we call God our Father? Does this term imply nothing more than that he created us? Do we mean that he gives us bodies and the pleasures of sensitive existence? These he gives to the bird and insect; but the Scriptures nowhere call him their parent. No! it is clear that this word expresses a Spiritual relation; it declares God's connection with man. Truly God is the Father of those, and of those only, whom he has created in his own image; whom he has gifted with a spirit like his own; whom he has created for the end that they may approach him in his highest attributes. To be a parent, is to communicate a kindred nature, and to watch over, educate and guide this nature to its perfect development. And herein we realize the parental relation which God sustains to us to be infinitely higher than to any other thing which he has made."
The divine fatherhood implies that we are to know and understand ourselves to be identical sons and daughters of God.
I know some professed Christians are educated in the belief that God is a personality, which admits of individuality, limitations, and circumscription, thus disallowing God's omniscience and omnipresence, which is only the prerogative of Spirit, which hath not form, and therefore cannot be personal, in the sense in which personality is understood. But, says an enquirer, God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life,—which is suggestive of body. Yes; but when we search more carefully for the truth of creation, we learn that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and gave them dominion over every living thing. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the hosts of them, and God rested on the seventh day, from all the work which he had made." We are therefore led to understand, that God s work of creation was accomplished prior to the formative period; that God is spirit; and his universe and man are spiritual,—He having created every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew.
We believe the creation and formation to be entirely different things. We learn from the narrative that every beast of the field and every fowl of the air was formed out of the ground, as was man, all having been before created. We have only to add, as regards the formation and process thereof, that it is yet unsolved, but of God and his relation to man, his idea and crowning work of creation, we claim to have clear evidences gained from his word and our own experience, that God is a Spirit and man is spiritual, though it does not so appear to finite sense, neither can it, but when the Infinite is understood, it will appear through the transparencies of Mind.
Dear little birds! do they fume and fret
About the seasons, dry or wet?
Do they worry about the winter to come,
That shall drive them away from their
Northern home?
No! They do their duty, and sing their son g
And trust in Providence all day long.
It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anybody but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
