ARIANISM AND MODERN THOUGHT. 147 
Arianism are the scientific and the social. Summing these up 
for present purposes, we are abandoning the deistic and the 
despotic conceptions of God which held the field till lately. 
The old conceptions of a great engineer and of a despot in 
heaven still linger in the backward forms of belief, and among 
the backward followers of all beliefs; but we are coming more 
and more to see that God works directly in common things, and 
that He is more a Father in heaven who guides His erring 
children than a king of heaven dispensing arbitrary rewards and 
punishments. 
Now all the Arianizing forms of thought in past ages and in 
our own entirely depend on these cbsolete conceptions. It 
must be allowed that the modern conception of natural law 
may be fitted in to the deistic view; for (if taken in a certain 
way) it destroys the possibility of direct divine action in the 
world. But then (if taken in the same way) it equally destroys 
the historical facts which are as vital for Arianism as for 
orthodoxy. Nor can the Arians bring back divine action into 
the world by the help of a mediator, for such mediator will 
have divine work to do, and therefore must be divine. There 
is no escape from the argument of Athanasius, that if a divine 
Person is needed to create, a divine Person is equally needed to 
restore. Yet on Arian principles the mediator cannot be 
divine. Hence those who hear this way commonly go further, 
and altogether deny any divine action in the world. They 
forget that law, like force, accounts for nothing without an 
intending will behind it. But setting aside these confusions 
of thought, natural law is nothing more and nothing else than 
a symbol of our own, which sums up the action of that will, 
so far as it is at present known to us. Hence anything super- 
natural must be absolutely natural, and everything natural 
must be supernatural. The two are co-extensive and form one 
organic whole, so that the sharp separation of the kingdom of 
nature from the kingdom of grace required by the deistic 
systems 1s a vain imagination. 
Even more significant and emphatic are the indications of the 
social development. We note first that men have formed their 
conceptions of God and of His kingdom by idealizing earthly 
rulers and earthly states. Thus the quarrels of tribes and cities 
are reflected in the anarchy of polytheism, and it was under 
the shelter of the Roman peace that the unity of God became 
the belief of the civilised world. Ezekiel’s conception of the 
future is an idealised kingdom of Judah, and there is likeness as 
well as contrast in Augustine’s parallel of the Roman Empire 
