William Wilberforce 1779 Book condensed: Ch III Sect III

Chapter III Section III

Why it is reasonable to direct these emotions to an unseen God.

Our objector, even when forced to admit that it is reasonable to feel love, gratitude, joy, hope and trust towards Jesus falls back on the claim that it is still not reasonable to feel these for a God we cannot see.

The objector will say things like: “seeing is believing”. But that does not mean we cannot believe without seeing, just that seeing is a powerful thing. Our human minds are more complex than that.

For instance, “Reason” does not control our feelings. Now the proper objects of various feelings are as follows: excellence of love, expectation of good for hope, apprehended evil of fear, other people's misfortune and suffering of pity. Are these emotions controlled by our reason weighing up the object? No! For example take pity. A moving novel, even when we know it is fiction can arouse more feeling in us than a dry account of a real battle. Again we react more to one murder nearby than to a massacre of thousands in a distant country. So our objector is on shaky ground the moment they try to equate rational thinking and emotions.

Again “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. We know that when a person we love is removed from sight, we do not cease to love them, quite the reverse. Lots more examples could be cited, but the principle is that we can feel emotions about beings we cannot see.

To turn the tables on the objector, what factors do strengthen our emotional attachment? Knowing about them, certainly, but even more knowing them. I mean if someone says how wonderful a person is who we have barely met we may be impressed but we do not become as attached to them as we do to a maybe less “wonderful” person that we have come to know really well.

So what does all this say about God and us? It says that people who make the effort to know about God from the Scriptures and to know God personally in their daily lives can feel love, gratitude, joy hope and trust in a way that the objector who has not bothered to try either of these things cannot understand. So the message to the objector is: “taste and see that the Lord is good”.

“But let us turn our eyes to Christians of a higher order, to those who have actually proved the truth of our reasonings; who have not only assumed the name, but who have possessed the substance, and felt the power of Christianity: who though often foiled by their remaining corruption, and shamed and cast down under a sense of their many imperfections, have known in their better seasons, what it is to experience its firm hope, its dignified joy, its unshaken trust, its more than human consolations. In their hearts, love also towards their Redeemer has glowed; not a superficial and unmeaning (think not that this could be the subject of our praise) but constant and rational, resulting from a strong impression of the worth of its object, and heightened by an abiding sense of great, unmerited and continually accumulating obligations; ever manifesting itself in acts of diligent obedience, or patient suffering. Such was the religion of the holy martyrs ...”