Taxes, Spending, and Debt are the Real Issues

Texas Straight Talk
by Congressman Ron Paul

October 16, 2006

In Washington we hear a lot of talk about tax cuts, but the rhetoric does not always match the reality. For most Americans, taxes remain too complex and too high. After the tumult of the upcoming midterm election, it is imperative that Congress gets back to basics and addresses our terrible tax system.

Lower taxes benefit all Americans by increasing economic growth and encouraging wealth creation. I’m in favor of cutting everybody’s taxes – rich, poor, and otherwise. Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother’s payroll taxes by forty dollars a month, or allows a business owner to save thousands in capital gains and hire more employees, the net effect is beneficial. Both either spend, save, or invest the extra dollars, which helps all of us more than if those dollars were sent to the black hole known as the federal Treasury.

Many conservatives have touted the Fair Tax proposal as an issue in the upcoming election. A pure consumption tax like the Fair Tax would be better than the current system only if we truly did away with the income tax by repealing the 16th amendment. Otherwise, we could end up with both the income tax and a national sales tax. A consumption tax also provides more transparency and less complexity. But the real issue is total spending by government, not tax reform. In other words, why change the tax structure if spending stays the same? Once we accept that the federal government needs $2.7 trillion from us-- and more each year-- the only question left is from whom it will be collected. Until the federal government is held to its proper constitutionally limited functions, tax reform will remain a mirage.

I apply a very simple test to any proposal to overhaul the tax code: Does it reduce or eliminate an existing tax? If not, then it amounts to nothing more than a political shell game that pits taxpayers against each other in a lobbying scramble to make sure the other guy pays. True tax reform is as simple as cutting or eliminating taxes. No studies, panels, committees, or hearings are needed. When reform proposals seem complicated, they almost certainly don’t cut taxes. Congress should simply focus on cutting existing taxes and reducing spending, instead of complicated overhauls of the system.

The question to ask yourself is this: What would I do with the money withheld from my paycheck each month? The answer is simple: you would spend, save, or invest the money, all of which do more for the economy and society than sending it to Washington. Thanks to the deception of income tax withholding, however, some people actually look forward to tax time and a much-anticipated refund. Imagine how quickly Americans would demand lower taxes and spending if they had to write the federal government a check each month!

Tax relief is important, but members of Congress need to back up tax cuts with spending cuts- and they need to vote NO on every wasteful appropriations bill until we start over with the federal budget. True fiscal conservatism combines both low taxes and low spending.

Cutting spending would not be hard if Congress simply showed the political will to tackle the problem. I’m not talking about cutting the rate at which government spending grows, but cutting the actual amount of money spent by the federal government in a single year.

If federal spending grows at 5% rather than 7% one year, that’s hardly a great achievement on the part of Congress. The current federal budget of around $2.7 trillion could be cut to $2.5 trillion quite easily. The vast majority of Americans would not even notice. But we must begin chipping away at the federal budget if we hope to address the underlying problem of government debt.

On the Invasion of Private Rights

"The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 October 1788)

Reference: The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek (475); original The Complete Madison, Padover (253)

A Brief Tax History of America

by Charles Adams

This address was delivered at the National Archives on April 12, 1994.

It is more than a pleasure to be here in this great edifice that holds the original documents upon which our Republic was founded. Of all the buildings in Washington – the memorials, the federal offices, the Supreme Court, the White House, the Congress – only the National Archives strike me as a sacred sanctuary. For it is here, above and beyond the world of politics, that the original documents are kept that founded not only our nation, but which have spread throughout the free world as the ideals upon which all free governments are based. The Declaration of Independence belongs to the world as much as it does to us. It marked the death-knell for the divine right of kings everywhere in its day, and in our day it sounds a similar death-knell for tyrants and dictatorships of every kind that seek to rule.

The first thing I did this morning upon entering this great sanctuary was to see the Declaration of Independence. Close observation was not possible because of the barrier that separates the viewer from the green case that houses the Declaration, but I could see "John Hancock" standing out above all the other signatures. He signed the Declaration in large script so the British authorities would not, no, could not, miss his signature. Why did he want to stick his neck out like that? Especially, when one member of the Cabinet, upon reading the Declaration, charged, "They are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we give them short of a hanging!"

John Hancock was probably the leading tax evader in Boston. He was apparently wanted for evading what today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. He was a very successful merchant and importer, his merchant ships arrived almost daily with goods from abroad, and he hadn’t paid H.M.S. Customs its full tax for decades. Today, we would call him a tax protestor and he would have had a red flag on his tax file. Hancock’s bold signature is a clear reminder that America was founded by tax rebels, and their rebellion eventually gave birth to the United States of America.

If you read British history you get a different slant on American history, even today. In my book, For Good and Evil, after I’d read British writers, I said, "Did the mother country, meaning Britain, have a bunch of spoiled brats on her hands who didn’t realize just how well-off they were?" This was perhaps the choicest land on earth. Their sons were not conscripted to fight wars in far away places; they had the protection of the British nation, which was becoming the superpower of that age. They had all the rights of Englishmen. Their colonial charters guaranteed them those rights. They had just about everything going for them; there were jobs for everyone; there was prosperity throughout the land. All the British government wanted from them was to pay a portion of the costs of maintaining the 10,000 British troops stationed in America to protect them from French imperialism. Just recently, the French had been defeated on the Plains of Abraham (in Canada) and driven from the shores of the Atlantic. George Washington fought for the British in those battles and the threat of French imperialism still existed to the West and along the Gulf. So it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect the American colonies to pay for some of the costs for their protection.

This British view justifying taxation upon moral grounds is difficult to refute, and the leading writer of British letters, Samuel Johnson, wrote a small tract, Taxation No Tyranny, which has never been very successfully refuted. The sovereign power of every community, argued Johnson, "has the right of requiring from all its subjects such contributions as are necessary to the public safety and public prosperity."

One British civil servant wrote home that if you talk to an American about providing funds to help defray the costs of British troops stationed in America, he will respond by giving a lengthy lecture on his rights. The chances are that lecture would have been too reasonable.

The British government had serious tax problems at this time. The prolonged war with France had been costly, as all wars are, and to increase taxes at home, in 1764, taxes were introduced on hard cider, the beverage of the common man. Riots erupted in London, excise houses were burned, and the tax was repealed. The Crown then turned to the untaxed colonies. In the House of Commons the question was asked, "Do you think the Americans will resent paying their mite for the protection of the colonies?" No one objected. The Crown then passed the Sugar Act with no dissents.

There were protests from the importers and merchants, arguing that a duty for revenue was illegal, but a duty for regulation was not, such as a heavy prohibitive duty. Thus the higher the tax, the more lawful it was. This kind of bizarre logic didn’t do their cause much good.

The Sugar Act put a tax on non-British goods coming into the colonies, primarily goods from France and The Netherlands. It gave British importers a clear monopoly on trade and, at the same time, would provide some needed revenue. The bad part was the provision that took tax cases away from local courts and transferred them to the Admiralty Courts in Nova Scotia. Local courts had been decidedly pro-taxpayer and had impaired tax collection and smuggling prosecutions. Angry Yankee traders cried "foul," but outside of these smugglers, most of the rest of the colonies didn’t find much fault with the Act.

Revenue was not anywhere near what was expected, so the Crown tried again with stamp taxes that would apply to all kinds of documents, newspapers, etc. No opposition was expected as there had been nothing of much significance to the protest over the Sugar Act. But this was a different kind of tax – it hit everyone, not just the smugglers in New England. Stamp taxes were in use in the colonies as a local revenue measure. They were popular most everywhere in Europe, having been invented at the beginning of the 18th century. It was this tax that prompted Adam Smith’s comment, "There is no act which one nation sooner learns from another than how to drain money from the pockets of the people."

To the surprise and shock of British tax authorities, and even local governors, the colonists reacted with a fury. Even Ben Franklin, at first, applied for the job of stamp tax collector, not anticipating a major rebellion. The colonists called for a meeting of protest, which met in New York, and called itself "the Stamp Act Congress," which was the real birthplace of the United States. Most of the colonies showed up. This congress brought together the squabbling colonies for the first time with a common goal – defeat British efforts to tax the colonies internally.

Benjamin Franklin was sent to London to argue for the repeal of the Stamp Act, as a representative for Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Georgia. He told the Commons that prior to Stamp Act, the colonies loved the Crown and gave obedience to all its laws, and will continue to do so except for any internal taxes, like the Stamp Act. External taxes, like customs, would be accepted, said Franklin.

The Stamp Act rebellion brought trade to a standstill. British exporters went broke; merchant vessels were idle in the harbors in England. Opposition to the tax came from the merchants in Britain, and with that local opposition, plus the rebellion in America, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. There were celebrations everywhere and soon it was business as usual. The Crown, however, wasn’t going to let go of the tax issue, and in their repeal bill they asserted their right to tax in the future, should they so desire.

The British prime minister thought the distinction between internal and external taxes was "perfect nonsense," and frankly, he was right. He then proposed a new tax putting a duty on a number of goods coming into the colonies, since this was, "perfectly consistent with Dr. Franklin’s views when he argued for the repeal of the Stamp Act." In a somewhat divided House of Commons, the Crown adopted some duties on a number of items, including tea. Edmund Burke argued against the duties. He said the Americans wouldn’t accept the tax despite what they had said to repeal the Stamp Act. Burke obviously knew the Americans better than they knew themselves. The Americans had, in effect, left the door open for further taxation and the Crown was quick to seize upon their folly. Talk about putting your foot in your mouth; this was a critical error that would eventually lead to the Revolution.

The Americans immediately started to boycott the goods that carried the new taxes. The Crown had no choice but to repeal these duties, except for tea. This gave rise to the trigger for the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was not the noble deed childhood history books try to depict. Benjamin Franklin acknowledged that this was a wanton destruction of private property and the tea owners should be compensated. It was much more than a tax protest.

British tea had been boycotted since the tax was first introduced. The Americans were big tea drinkers, so a brisk trade in smuggled Dutch tea was rampant throughout the colonies. British tea was nowhere to be purchased. The Crown decided to be clever, they repealed the tax on tea coming into Britain, and put a very small tax on tea coming into the colonies. The result was that the British tea would undersell the smuggled Dutch tea. American housewives would then buy the British tea causing economic ruin to those American merchants caught up in the tea smuggling trade. To make matters even more outrageous, the low-priced British tea was only sold to loyal British merchants. This was the last straw, so to speak.

Seven merchant ships sailed for America loaded with the low-priced tea. When news hit the colonies, threats of violence were passed along to the importing merchants. Four of the vessels returned to England, those for New York and Charleston. But three of the vessels, bound for Boston, entered the harbor, expecting the protection of the British fleet and military forces. The rest is well-known history. The merchants and their supporters, probably not more than a hundred, disguised as Indians, boarded the ships, and tossed the tea in the harbor. The British government reacted with a fury. They closed Boston’s harbor; they adopted a number of oppressive measures that set off the Revolution. The tax rebellion became a full-fledged Revolution, which, historically, was not a rare phenomenon. The French Revolution and the British Civil War are stark reminders of what can happen when tax revolts get out of control, or when governments crack-down on defiant taxpayers.

Edmund Burke, a member of the House of Commons, tried to heal the breach between the mother country and the colonies. In April 1775 he spoke for two or three hours in the Commons to try and make the Crown understand the American point-of-view. He argued that the "fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies" than any place on earth, but that they are devoted to Liberty according to English ideas, and that Liberty, like in England, is centered in taxes more than anything else. His speech failed, as we know, but not even the colonists expressed themselves and their views as well as did this great writer and statesman.

The Revolution started shortly thereafter, and it was a hard and bitter struggle. It was said that in the winter you could find the American army by the blood in the snow from inadequate shoes and clothing. The Americans lost most of the battles, but won the war. They had logistics on their side being 3000 miles from England in a day of only sailing ships.

The war was carried on by the Continental Congress, which gave to the world the Declaration of Independence. They had no reliable source of revenue so they issued paper money called a "continental," which soon became worthless. They did draft a kind of constitution, eventually approved by all the states, called the Articles of Confederation. It was an impressive document. This government could even conduct wars, but it couldn’t tax – that would defeat the very purpose of the Revolution. When money was needed, as it always was, they would ask the states to supply the funds, apportioned among the states by the value of real property. By using real property as a measure of value, they avoided the slave problem. This requisition procedure was copied from the Netherlands. It worked with the United Provinces of the Netherlands, but it didn’t work well with the United States in Congress Assembled. Robert Morris the chief financial officer for the Confederation, summed up the problem with these words: The Congress had the privilege of requisitioning everything and the states had the prerogative of granting nothing. What money the states would grant, and when they would do so, was "known only to Him who knoweth all things."

The government was fast in decline, already bankrupt. In Madison’s writings we sense the urgency of doing something to save the Confederation. Without adequate revenues it was only a matter of time before the nation fell apart, and may even have reverted back to the mother country or ended up like Europe. But an interesting thing happened. Fate stepped in or you could even say Providence. There was a minor rebellion in Massachusetts – the Shays' Rebellion. It wasn’t much more than a riot by hard-pressed veterans and poor farmers wanting to get the attention of the state government about taxes and hard times. Daniel Shays led a group of these dissidents who marched on a federal arsenal. A volley of cannon was fired, the rebels dispersed, and the rebellion was over. But the press picked up the fray and blew it all out of proportion, and even suggested that the national government, if you could call it that, could easily be defeated by the military forces of the City of Genoa. In haste, the states sent delegates to Philadelphia to attend a convention to amend the Articles – a convention that had previously been called, but which was about to die from lack of any attendance. Shay’s Rebellion not only saved the convention, but probably saved the United States of America as well.

When Patrick Henry heard about the meeting in Philadelphia, he commented, "I smell a rat." Many of the Founders did not want any kind of a national government. What they envisioned was a common defence league, like in Switzerland among the Cantons. They greatly feared a central government, and the anemic Congress under the Confederation was just fine with them.

The convention usurped its authority and soon abandoned the idea of amending the Articles. What the Americans really needed was a new form of government, with limited powers to be sure, but with those enumerated powers, to be supreme over the states. There was to be no general endowment of police powers. The United States could only do what it was expressly authorized to do. Even taxing and spending powers were specifically defined.

A British writer some years ago said that never in the course of civilization had there been assembled at one time, in one place, so many men skilled in the art of statecraft. The Constitution they drafted was not a matter of luck. It did involve many compromises, as all government action does. But they were well educated; they knew the classics; and they studied the great political writers of the Enlightenment: John Locke and Baron du Montesquieu were their favorites. William Blackstone's monumental Commentaries were constantly being cited. Even Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was popular among the Founders.

Benjamin Franklin was the senior statesman at the Convention. He didn’t participate in the debates as much as you might expect, but when it was over, he is reputed to have made a very sober observation, with tears in his eyes he said "its complexion was doubtful, that it might last for ages, involve one quarter of the globe, and probably end in despotism."

The main reason for the convention in the first place was to give the Congress the power to tax, and it was generally believed this should be limited to duties on imports. The right to tax without limitation was repudiated by even the most ardent nationalists, like Noah Webster and Hamilton. Hamilton argued successfully against limiting taxes to a single form. If great revenues were needed, as they may be at times, then a single form of tax would be excessive, fostering evasion and hurting commerce. Let Congress have the power to select many different forms of taxation and spread the burdens more equitably. So as you might expect, the first power granted to Congress was to tax.

One thing they didn’t want was a tax system like the one that existed in France at that time. One writer called it the Devil’s tax system, primarily because of all the exemptions and tax immunities that so many classes in France enjoyed. To prevent this, the Framers first put in the condition that taxes had to be "common to all." No one was to be let off the tax hook, French style. This was later changed to require taxes to be "uniform and equal throughout the United States," and that was approved by the delegates. When the approved draft was sent to a Committee on Style, this condition was dropped completely, and we have no explanation for this, especially since it was a committee on style only. Madison then wrote in the draft from this committee, "uniform throughout the United States," and that’s the way it still reads today.

Direct taxes were of serious concern to the Framers. Their great mentor, Montesquieu, copying from Greek and Roman thinkers, wrote that direct taxes were likely to lead to slavery. With almost 3,000 years of history to back this up, the Framers cautiously gave Congress direct taxing powers, but restricted the power to require an apportionment among the states by population. Slaves were a problem, so they compromised and considered every slave 3/5th of a person. When the matter of ratification came up in the many state legislatures, concern about direct taxing powers was expressed by the representatives. Without exception, it was almost axiomatic that direct taxation would only occur during an extraordinary emergency (Madison). A delegate to the Maryland state convention, noted that the federal government must hold the power of direct taxation in reserve, "nothing but some unforeseen disaster will ever drive them [federal government] to such ineligible expedients." At the Convention, Luther Martin seemed to express the universal view that direct taxation "should not be used but in cases of absolute necessity." James Wilson, whom many believe was the primary architect of the Constitution, even eclipsing Madison, said that direct taxes were for emergencies only.

The Framers’ final control on taxation was to control all spending. In this, they showed their genius and realism. Taxes, said the Constitution could be used "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Debts, Defence, and Welfare all began with capital letters. Hamilton, undoubtedly the leading advocate for a strong national government, in The Federalist, 34, said, the Constitution tied up the hands of government and prevented using taxes for any, "offensive war founded on reasons of state." Tax moneys could only be used for Defence, at least that’s what the Framers put in the Constitution. General Welfare meant the opposite of special welfare – but that restriction, like the common Defence restriction has been tossed out the window by national government.

Whiskey Rebellion #1

It is interesting that "white lightning," or "moonshine" has played such an important role in our tax history. I have identified two Whiskey Rebellions, not just one. The first is well known, but not well understood. Hamilton as the Secretary of the Treasury, persuaded the first Congress to adopt a tax on whiskey to help pay for the huge war debt as well as to run the country along with import duties. At that time, there was no tax more hated than excises by both the Americans and the British. It was an extremely unpopular form of taxation, as the ruling Federalist Party was to learn the hard way. A revolt immediately erupted in Western Pennsylvania where whiskey was used as money, more than as drink. Any farmer who paid the tax, had his still shot full of holes by "Tommy Tinker," the name used by the rebels against the tax. Tax collectors were tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, as some of the fascinating etchings from this period show.

Eventually the rebels capitulated and signed an amnesty agreement, promising to pay the tax. President Washington pardoned the few who led the uprising. Historians now know the military force called out to put down the rebellion was unnecessary as the rebels had capitulated beforehand. It was Hamilton’s idea of showing force to strengthen the support for the new national government. In the end, however, when Jefferson came to power, the tax was repealed and the Federalist Party disappeared from history – its demise, undoubtedly caused by its unpopular taxes.

Fries Rebellion

When President Adams replaced Washington, he too as a strong Federalist, introduced the first direct tax, and like the Whiskey tax, it set off another tax revolt, this time in Eastern Pennsylvania. When tax assessors showed up in the various counties, an armed uprising followed. Some of the rebels were put in jail, and an auctioneer named John Fries showed up with a mob and got the men released. Adams called out the militia, Fries was arrested and tried for treason. His conviction and subsequent sentence to be hanged, was overturned by a pardon given by President Adams, against the unanimous advise of his cabinet. Adams felt it was not treason, but just a riot. That unpopular tax, along with the whiskey tax, added to the popular contempt for the Federalist Party.

Hamilton was behind this tax as well as the whiskey tax. Historians have often called him the right man, at the right time, in the right place, in American history. His firm policy to make the country fiscally strong, with sound credit and a sound currency, no doubt justify that observation. But to the Federalist Party, his taxes brought about the total destruction of our first political party, for after the election of Jefferson and the repeal of Hamilton’s taxes, his party vanished forever. Lobbying a tax law through the Congress, as he did so ably, was not the same as taxation by consent, as the Declaration of Independence demanded.

The Tax Road to the War of the Rebellion

The tariff became the primary tool to raise revenue for the federal government, and finally, in 1834, the national debt was paid off. It was long struggle, but with a frugal government, and only one short war, the finances of the federal government were slowly being put in good order.

The tariff had been used for some protectionist purposes in the beginning, but in 1828, northern industrialists pushed through a high tariff, greatly resented by the South. They called it the "tariff of abomination," a biblical term meaning the highest evil. In 1832, when this high tariff continued, South Carolina nullified the tariff as unconstitutional. There was a brief threat of war by President Jackson, but cool heads prevailed, the tariff was to be reduced, and the nullification ordinance passed away.

The hatred for the tariff was universal throughout the South. It made Southerners vassals of the North, being just a sophisticated form of tribute. The argument went like this: The tariff prevented competition from Europe, which meant that Northern industrialists could charge excessive prices for their goods sold in the South, thus shifting a large part of Southern wealth to Northern interests. If the South should chose to buy foreign goods with the high tax, this put Southern moneys into the federal coffers to be spent on Northern projects, in effect another form of tribute from the South to the North. Either way it was an injustice upon the Southern people and their economy.

Compromise, however, prevailed up until 1860 when the new Republican Party held its convention in Chicago which nominated Abraham Lincoln as the Republican candidate for President. The platform of the party included a demand for a high tariff, and when the tariff issue came up before the delegates for approval, there was so much yelling and hoopla, it was "as if a herd of buffalo had stampeded through the conventional hall." The noise of that stampede must have been heard all the way to the Southern States. The Southerners got the message, and while the new Republican nominee for president, reassured the South, time and time again, that slavery was in no danger, no doubt their economy was – with the proposed high tariff. The first thing the Republicans did when they arrived in Washington in March of 1861, was to push through a high tariff, called the Morrill Tariff, the highest in history, with rates of over 50% on many items. This tax, more than anything else, probably made any reconciliation with the seceding states impossible.

In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he made a clear demand on the seceding states of "taxes or war." With slavery he was conciliatory, never even mentioning the Republican demand to end slavery in the territories. He went so far as the state that he had no personal inclination to interfere with slavery. He even said he supported a constitutional amendment (ironically #13) to protect slavery forever in the states where it existed, and that would have included New Jersey, Delaware, and the border states. But on taxes he was committed – there would be no invasion of the South he said, except to collect taxes and recover any federal property. Many Southern newspaper editorials saw this and correctly interpreted this as an appeasement to slavery, but a call for aggression to collect the high tariff on imports to the South. Lincoln and his party had resurrected the old animosity with a new and more severe "tariff of abomination." To the South this came as no surprise considering the platform of the Republican Party adopted in the summer of 1860.

The war, however, got started over another tax matter – the free trade zone in the Confederacy. Lincoln, even if he had been a strong advocate for abolition in the nation, never would have received the support, especially the financial support he got from the banks, Wall Street, and the commercial powers of the North. Abolitionists were a small minority that had been repudiated in all the elections in the North. This war, like so many wars, had economic factors that overpowered all other considerations. What was at stake for the North, was not freedom for the slave, but the prosperity and commerce of the North.

At first, few Northerners saw the danger of a free trade zone in the South. The New York Times, for example, its editorials up until March 20th, proclaimed that the confederacy was no threat to Northern prosperity and commerce. On the 21st of March, after months of taking the opposite view, the economic editor changed his tune dramatically. He argued that the South would destroy the commerce and prosperity of the North with its free trade zone vis-à-vis the high Morrill Tariff. Trade from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia would shift to Southern ports, and it already was doing so, as New York importers saw their trade contracts cancelled and rebooked to New Orleans. The President has got to blockade all Southern ports and bring utter ruin to the confederacy, wrote the chief economic editor of the New York Times. At the same time the leading newspaper in Philadelphia expressed the same view as did newspapers in Boston and elsewhere. The demand for war replaced demands of "letting the South go."

Shortly thereafter, in only a week, Lincoln called his cabinet for advice on reinforcing Fort Sumter. It was almost unanimous that any such show of force would provoke war, and Lincoln then made the decision to do so. As expected, he did provoke a foolish assault on the Fort. The North rallied around the President’s call for 75,000 troops for four months to put down the South. Little did he or anyone know what horrible carnage would be unleashed on the United States, with consequences that have lasted to this day.

In December of 1861, Charles Dickens, who gave us the Mr. Scrooge and scores of marvelous novels and writing still in print today, saw through the Civil War, and wrote this in a weekly London paper, All the Year Round:

So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils.

We can say that the trigger for the Civil War was the press, just as it triggered the war with Spain in 1898 with its cry of "Remember the Maine" In 1861, it was remember Fort Sumter, and remember your prosperity, and what Southern freeports will do to it. What makes the start of the Civil War of especial interest to the economic historian, is not just a single tax factor, like so many other revolutions and revolts, but two tax factors in conflict with each other. It apparently took the two of them – the Morrill Tariff and the free trade zone – to act as the fuse that set off this terrible war and the suffering, carnage, and destruction it brought to the nation, including tragic moral and spiritual tosses as well.

Whiskey Rebellion #2

Few historians take note of Whiskey Rebellion #2 which began as the Civil War ended and raged for almost 40 years, in Appalachia – from West Virginia south to Georgia and Alabama. The heart of the rebellion was probably in North Carolina. To support the war, the North adopted a tax on whiskey, eventually up to $2 a gallon. When the war ended, the tax naturally spread throughout the South and federal tax men, call revenuers, scoured this mountain region to collect the tax. Open war erupted and hundreds were killed, on both sides, as the IRB (Internal Revenue Bureau) came into existence and enforced this hated tax on what was a poverty area of the nation. As one moonshiner said, being led off to jail for tax evasion, "What did my granddaddy fit in the Revolution if it wasn’t to make a little corn licker." Others argued it was an assault on their liberties; they had just as much right to grind corn into mash as they did to grind it into flour to make bread.

The spirit of the assault on these mountain people, and the numerous death that resulted from trying to serve arrest warrants, indicates a kind of savage enforcement of a tax law that has survived to this day. The violence we see from time to time in enforcing federal laws, even misdemeanors, may well be traced to the spirit of enforcement of the whiskey tax in the South among the moonshiners. The Internal Revenue Bureau grew from this small paramilitary operation to enforce the income tax that came some 30 years later, eventually becoming the I.R.S. in our day. The spirit of tax enforcement that characterized that early IRE seems to have infected not only the IRS, but other federal agencies with similar endowments of powers of enforcement. Resistance to the service of any federal warrant justifies deadly force today, as it did during the days of the moonshiners. Waco, Texas, is proof enough of this policy of violence to the disobedient, and Waco is not a rare exception to official policy.

Digging a Ditch for the Rich to Fall Into

The Civil War brought forth the first incomes taxes as both the North and South introduced these forms of war taxation. The modern income tax was invented by the British and it has been quite properly called "The tax that beat Napoleon." But it was a war tax only and as soon as the war ended the British Parliament, against the wishes of the Crown, repealed the tax and ordered all the records to be destroyed. They hated it, but were willing to tolerate the tax as a war – time measure. So in keeping with the British view, these first American income taxes ended shortly after the war. Collections apparently weren’t too successful, at least some writers report that anyone who paid the tax was the laughing stock of his neighbors.

A populist movement developed in the late 19th Century and one of its demands was a tax on the rich via income taxation. In 1894 they had sufficient votes in the Congress plus a Democratic president to put through a peacetime income tax to essentially have the rich pick up the whole tab of running the government. Some excises (like whiskey) remained along with import duties. This first income tax was a low 2%, but it exempted 98% of the nation, which immediately reminds me of President Clinton’s increased income taxes which were also targetted for the rich, the top 2%.

My wife many years ago told me about a Russian proverb she had learned as a young girl which said: "If you dig a ditch for someone to fall into, you will probably fall in yourself." The first income taxes after the Civil War were undoubtedly class legislation against the rich – they were a ditch for the rich to fall into. The rich fought back immediately, challenging the tax on a number of constitutional grounds, two of which stuck. First, it was a direct tax and had to be apportioned among the states; second, it violated the command of uniformity by exempting 98% of the population. There was a dissenting view by Justice John Harlan who gave us the dissent in the segregation case of that era, "The Constitution is color-blind." He argued that the income tax was an excise on earnings, not a direct tax; it did exempt 98% of the people, but that was tolerable; however, if any tax became legislative plunder, under the guise of taxation, the Court would look into that. Exemptions, said Harlan, were most liable to objection.

In the next two decades the proponents for income taxes pushed the 16th Amendment through the state legislatures and by 1916 another income tax law was passed. It was also class legislation against the rich, with progressive rates from 1% to 7%. Most people were exempt and many paid the 1% rate even if not required to do so, believing all citizens have a duty to pay something toward the expenses of maintaining the government.

The problem with trying to soak the rich, from an historian’s perspective, is, it doesn’t work as planned. The rich, going all the way back to the Romans, have had the means to control and evade taxes that got out of line. Howard Hughes paid no income taxes, and his tax planning was quite legal. In the final analysis, the middle class is the only dependable source of tax revenue – and that is a truism tax makers should not forget when they seriously need more revenue. As any tax practitioner will tell you, the richer you are, the easier it is to control taxable income. Going back to Mr. Hughes, in his final years of madness, he neglected to plan for death taxes. He didn't even have a will. So, the tax man had the last laugh as death taxes made up for the income taxes he avoided.

So, in 1916, off we go with the income tax. It’s supposed to solve all our fiscal ills, and it’s supposed to make the rich pick up most of the tab. Of course, as might be expected it didn’t quite do that, and the more the rates were increased, collections didn’t go up for the rich, although they did go up for everyone else. In 1916, with a top rate of 7% the treasury reported 206 people with incomes over one million dollars. Five years later, when the tax rate went up 1100 percent, from 7% to 77%, there were only 21 people with an income of a million dollars or more. What happened? Simple arithmetic shows that 9 out of 10 million-dollar earners had vanished, as if by magic. Well, maybe they moved to some low tax country. We don’t know, but they obviously rearranged their lives or finances so they no longer had million dollar earnings that were taxable. As for a 77% tax rate, I think that’s just plain plunder, or you can call it stealing. It is certainly not in keeping with the ideals of the Framers that taxes had to be "common to all."

You may wonder about progressive tax rates. How are such rates possible when the Constitution commands uniformity in taxation? That issue faced the Court at the turn of the century in an inheritance tax case to raise funds for the Spanish-American War. The Court felt that for inheritance purposes you could have graduated rates based on one’s relationship, like children as opposed to strangers or cousins. But the Court also noted that in other areas, such discrimination could not stand. That was what lawyers call dicta – side comments that are not really part of the issues. But in that case, one Justice spoke out strongly against any tax that was deliberately and intentionally made unequal: Progressive rates violated the command of uniformity and equality in the Constitution. This Justice, David Brewer, is hardly known, even by scholars. In my book you will find his picture. The story behind that picture is interesting. When I called the Curator of the Supreme Court for his picture, they first said, no problem. But after checking their archives, they had never had a request for his picture and all they had was an extremely old negative that had never been developed. So I had them develop it, and there in my book is the only picture of this remarkable justice who stood up for uniformity and equality in taxation.

When the 1916 income tax came before the high Court with a challenge to its progressive rates, Justice Brewer had passed away and the Court dismissed the challenge with not much more than a one liner, even though the leading legal scholars and Law Reviews had zeroed in on this issue as the most important tax issue in the Constitutional history of the United States.

The tolerance for discrimination in taxation by the Courts, contrasts with Chief Justice Warren’s lack of tolerance for discrimination in racial matters. He ruled in the famous Brown case that overruled all racial segregation, that such laws, though supposed to be "separate but equal," were inherently unequal despite all appearances. Yet, with discrimination in taxation, we have a much stronger case. The tax laws are not just "inherently" unequal, they are intentionally made that way, like a few centuries ago when Jews paid four times the tax rates as Christians, and in Protestant countries, Catholics paid twice the rate. The Supreme Court retreated immediately from its unconstitutional ruling in the 1894 income tax case, to the position today, that no challenge to a federal tax law will be taken seriously. Like Pontius Pilate, they have taken "water and washed their hands before the multitude."


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The history of the income tax is an old story, a perfect example of a good tax going bad. In fact, one of the universal factors in tax history is that most all good taxes go bad. The income tax certainly followed that course, especially in the last 30 years. It was initially a tax supported primarily by the duty and honor of all citizens – in short, the income tax was an honor system, which is the only way it will work in a free society. Today, the honor part is gone. Over the past two decades, especially in the Reagan years, the intrusions and spying on citizen taxpayers has reached alarming levels. Thirty years ago nothing was reported to the tax man except the W-2 which allowed a worker to claim a refund. Today, everything of any possible tax nature is reported. Banks photograph everything going through your bank account and hold those photos for Big Brother to see. We have evolved from a nation with a tax system based on honor to one based on espionage against all citizens. But there is hope. President Ulysses S. Grant said that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to strictly enforce it. If that is true, then the Congress has been digging a grave unwittingly for the income tax law over the past 20 years. Let us hope President Grant’s observation comes true.

You could interpret this mass of tax surveillance legislation as the sure sign of a decadent society as compared to our recent ancestors. But the more likely cause is a major cold war type tax rebellion against a tax that is tyrannical and corrupt. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations made some surprising arguments against making tax evasion a crime. He said that the evader is ordinarily an excellent citizen had not the state made a crime which nature never meant to be. He concluded by noting that when there is much unnecessary expense by government and misapplication of the public revenue, the laws that protect it will not be respected.

When popular support for a law, especially a tax law, disappears, the state has to fall back on what the great sage of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu called, "extraordinary means of oppression." That seems to be what we have experienced and are likely to experience in the decades ahead. The likelihood of a major tax change in our society may depend on just how fed-up the people are with the income tax system. With the "evil empire" now gone, tolerance for a bad tax law may completely disappear and a powerful democratic force for change may bring us a new and better tax law. But beware, don’t expect too much, unless someone comes up with a much better mousetrap. And even then, we should remember this poetic couplet of Alexander Pope, written 250 years ago:

Who ever hopes a faultless tax to see,
Hopes what ne’er was, is not, and ne’er will be.

October 7, 2006

Attorney Charles Adams is the author of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, and Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts That Built America. Much of this material and more on this subject can be found in his book, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization.

Copyright © 1994 by Charles Adams

The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

CHAPTER 6

The Self-sufficiency of God

Teach us, O God, that nothing is necessary to Thee. Were anything necessary to Thee that thing would be the measure of Thine imperfection: and how could we worship one who is imperfect? If nothing is necessary to Thee, then no one is necessary, and if no one, then not we. Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us. We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen

“The Father hath life in himself,” said our Lord, and it is characteristic of His teaching that He thus in a brief sentence sets forth truth so lofty as to the transcend the highest reaches of human thought. God, He said, is self-sufficient; He is what He is in Himself, in the final meaning of those words.

Whatever God is, and all that God is, He is in Himself. All life is in and from God, whether it be the lowest form of unconscious life or the highly self-conscious, intelligent life of a seraph. No creature has life in itself; all life is a gift from God.

The life of God, conversely, is not a gift from another. Were there another from whom God could receive the gift of life, or indeed any gift whatever, that other would be God in fact. An elementary but correct way to think of God is as the One who contains all, who gives all that is given, but who Himself can receive nothing that He has not first given.

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself.

Again we must reverse the familiar flow of our thoughts and try to understand that which is unique, that which stands alone as being true in this situation and nowhere else. Our common habits of thought allow for the existence of need among created things. Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself in order to exist. All breathing things need air; every organism needs food and water. Take air and water from the earth and all life would perish instantly. It may be stated as all axiom that to stay alive every created thing needs some other created thing and all things need God. To God alone nothing is necessary.

The river grows larger by its tributaries, but where is the tributary that can enlarge the One out of whom came everything and to whose infinite fullness all creation owes its being?

Unfathomable Sea: all life is out of Thee,
And Thy life is Thy blissful Unity.
Frederick W. Faber

The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.

Since He is the Being supreme over all, it follows that God cannot be elevated. Nothing is above Him, nothing beyond Him. Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent. He holds His position out of Himself and by leave of none. As no one can promote Him, so no one can degrade Him. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power. How can He be raised or supported by the things He upholds?

Were all human beings suddenly to become blind, still the sun would shine by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing to the millions who benefit from their light. So, were every man on earth to become atheist, it could not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.
Almighty God, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God that is precisely what we see. Twentieth century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God. But the truth is that God is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of God’s free determination, not by our desert nor by divine necessity.

Probably the hardest thought of all for our natural egotism to entertain is that God does not need our help. We commonly represent Him as a busy, eager, somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world, but, as said the Lady Julian, “I saw truly that God doeth all-thing, be it never so little.” The God who worketh all things surely needs no help and no helpers.

Too many missionary appeals are based upon this fancied frustration of Almighty God. An effective speaker can easily excite pity in his listeners, not only for the heathen but for the God who has tried so hard and so long to save them and has failed for want of support. I fear that thousands of younger persons enter Christian service from no higher motive than to help deliver God from the embarrassing situation His love has gotten Him into and His limited abilities seem unable to get Him out of. Add to this a certain degree of commendable idealism and a fair amount of compassion for the underprivileged and you have the true drive behind much Christian activity today.

Again, God needs no defenders. He is the eternal Undefended. To communicate with us in all idiom we can understand, God in the Scriptures makes full use of military terms; but surely it was never intended that we should think of the throne of the Majesty on high as being under siege, with Michael and his hosts or some other heavenly beings defending it from stormy overthrow. So to think is to misunderstand everything the Bible would tell us about God. Neither Judaism nor Christianity could approve such puerile notions. A God who must be defended is one who can help us only while someone is helping Him. We may count upon Him only if He wins in the cosmic seesaw battle between right and wrong. Such a God could not command the respect of intelligent men; He could only excite their pity.

To be right we must think worthily of God. It is morally imperative that we purge from our minds all ignoble concepts of the Deity and let Him be the God in our minds that He is in His universe. The Christian religion has to do with God and man, but its focal point is God, not man. Man’s only claim to importance is that he was created in the divine image; in himself he is nothing. The psalmists and prophets of the Scriptures refer sad scorn to weak man whose breath is in his nostrils, who grows up like the grass in the morning only to be cut down and wither before the setting of the sun. That God exists for himself and man for the glory of God is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of God is first in heaven as it must yet be in earth.

From all this we may begin to understand why the Holy Scriptures have so much to say about the vital place of faith and why they brand unbelief as a deadly sin. Among all created beings, not one dare trust it itself. God alone trusts in himself; all other beings must trust in Him. Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the self-sufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of the man.

In His love and pity God came to us as Christ. This has been the consistent position of the Church from the days of the apostles. It is fixed for Christian belief in the doctrine of the incarnation of the Eternal Son. In recent times, however, this has come to mean something different from, and less than, what it meant to the early church. The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the Godhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations attributed to the Deity. The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of the Godhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of Human nature to protect mankind. “Go down,” God told Moses on the mountain, ”charge the people, less they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish”; and later, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”

Christians today appear to know Christ only after the flesh. They try to achieve communion with Him by divesting Him of His burning holiness and unapproachable majesty, the very attributes He veiled while on earth but assumed in fullness of glory upon His ascension to the Father’s right hand. The Christ of popular Christianity has a weak smile and a halo. He has become Someone-up-There who likes people, at least some people, and these are grateful but not too impressed. If they need Him, He also needs them.

Let us not imagine that the truth of the divine self-sufficiency will paralyse Christian activity. Rather it will stimulate all holy endeavor. This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed in its Biblical perspective lift from our minds the exhausting load of mortality and encourage us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor of God and the good of mankind. For the blessed news is that the God who needs no one has in sovereign condescension set Himself to work by and in and through His obedient children.

If all this appears self-contradictory - Amen, be it so. The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known. Then truth which now appears to be in conflict with itself will arise in shining unity and it will be seen that the conflict has not been in the truth but in our sin-damaged minds.

In the meanwhile our inner fulfilment lies in loving obedience to the commandments of Christ and the inspired admonitions of His apostles. “It is God which worketh in you.” He needs no one, but when faith is present He works through anyone. Two statements are in this sentence and a healthy spiritual life requires that we accept both. For a full generation the first has been in almost total eclipse, and that to our deep spiritual injury.

Fountain of good, all blessing flows
From Thee; no want Thy fulness knows;
What but Thyself canst Thou desire?
Yet, self-sufficient as Thou art,
Thou dost desire my worthless heart.
This, only this, dost Thou require.
Johann Scheffler

The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

CHAPTER 5

The Self-existence of God

Lord of all being! Thou alone canst affirm I AM THAT I AM; yet we who are made in Thine image may each one repeat ”I am,” so confessing that we derive from Thee and that our words are but an echo of Thine own. We acknowledge Thee to be the great Original of which we through Thy goodness are grateful if imperfect copies. We worship Thee, O Father Everlasting. Amen.

”God has no origin,” said Novatian and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God.

Origin is a word that can apply only to things created. When we think of anything that has origin we are not thinking of God. God is self-existent, while all created things necessarily originated somewhere at some time. Aside from God, nothing is self-caused.

By our effort to discover the origin of things we confess our belief that everything was made by Someone who was made of none. By familiar experience we are taught that everything ”came from” something else. Whatever exists must have had a cause that antedates it and was at least equal to it, since the lesser cannot produce the greater. Any person or thing may be at once both caused and the cause of someone or something else; and so, back to the One who is the cause of all but is Himself caused by none.

The child by his question, ”Where did God come from?” is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood. Already the concept of cause and source and origin is firmly fixed in his mind. He knows that everything around him came from something other than itself, and he simply extends that concept upward to God. The little philosopher is thinking in true creature-idiom and, allowing for his lack of basic information, he is reasoning correctly. He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts the bent toward origin-seeking so deeply ingrained in all intelligent beings, a bent that impels them to probe ever back and back toward undiscovered beginnings.

To think steadily of that to which the idea of origin cannot apply is not easy, if indeed it is possible at all. Just as under certain conditions a tiny point of light can be seen, not by looking directly, at it but by focusing the eyes slightly to one side, so it is with the idea of the Uncreated. When we try to focus our thought upon One who is pure uncreated being we may, see nothing at all, for He dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. Only by faith and love are we able to glimpse Him as he passes by our shelter in the cleft of the rock. ”And although this knowledge is very cloudy, vague and general,” says Michael de Molinos, being supernatural, it produces a far more clear and perfect cognition of God than any sensible or particular apprehension that can be formed in this life; since all corporeal and sensible images are immeasurably remote from God.”

The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge. We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent and self-sufficient.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.

To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for ”where” has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.

Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely,
Yet sublimely Three,
Thou art grandly, always, only
God is Unity!
Lone in grandeur, lone in glory,
Who shall tell Thy wondrous story?
Awful Trinity!
Frederick W. Faber

It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good - about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularlzation of our religion and the decay of our inner lives.

Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. ”What bearing does this have on my life?” he may ask. ”What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?”

To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene.

The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope,
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan:
The proper study of mankind is man,
if followed literally would destroy any possibility of man’s ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique.

For reasons known only to Himself, God honored man above all other beings by creating him in His own image. And let it be understood that the divine image in man is not a poetic fancy, not an idea born of religious longing. It is a solid theological fact, taught plainly throughout the Sacred Scriptures and recognized by the Church as a truth necessary to a right understanding of the Christian faith.

Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possesses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His own likeness. The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion; and here the teachings of Christianity coincide with those of the more advanced and philosophical religions of the East. Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light. As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.

Not man only, but everything that exists came out of and is dependent upon the continuing creative impulse. ”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made.” That is how John explains it, and with him agrees the apostle Paul: ”For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” To this witness the writer to the Hebrews adds his voice, testifying of Christ that He is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His Person, and that He upholds all things by the word of His power.

In this utter dependence of all things upon the creative will of God lies the possibility for both holiness and sin. One of the marks of God’s image in man is his ability to exercise moral choice. The teaching of Christianity is that man chose to be independent of God and confirmed his choice by deliberately disobeying a divine command. This act violated the relationship that normally existed between God and His creature; it rejected God as the ground of existence and threw man back upon himself. Thereafter he became not a planet revolving around the central Sun, but a sun in his own right, around which everything else must revolve.

A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to Moses: I AM THAT I AM. Everything God is, everything that is God, is set forth in that unqualified declaration of independent being. Yet in God, self is not sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness and truth.

The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood in relation to his own. In all else he may willingly accept the sovereignty of God; in his own life he rejects it. For him, God’s dominion ends where his begins. For him, self becomes Self, and in this he unconsciously imitates Lucifer, that fallen son of the morning who said in his heart, ”I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . . I will be like the Most High.”

Yet so subtle is self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one. His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it at all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing. He is willing to share himself, sometimes even to sacrifice himself for a desired end, but never to dethrone himself. No matter how far down the scale of social acceptance he may slide, he is still in his own eyes a king on a throne, and no one, not even God, can take that throne from him.

Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, ”I AM.” That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience. In the language of evangelism the man who is thus confronted by the fiery presence of Almighty God is said to be under conviction. Christ referred to this when He said of the Spirit whom He would send to the world, ”And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.”

The earliest fulfilment of these words of Christ was at Pentecost after Peter had preached the first great Christian sermon. ”Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” This ”What shall we do?” is the deep heart cry of every man who suddenly realizes that he is a usurper and sits on a stolen throne. However painful, it is precisely this acute moral consternation that produces true repentance and makes a robust Christian after the penitent has been dethroned and has found forgiveness and peace through the gospel.

”Purity of heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard, and we may with equal truth turn this about and declare, ”The essence of sin is to will one thing,” for to set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of Mansoul. This is sin at its evil root. Sins may multiply like the sands by the seashore, but they are yet one. Sins are because sin is. This is the rationale behind the much maligned doctrine of natural depravity which holds that the independent man can do nothing but sin and that his good deeds are really not good at all. His best religious works God rejects as He rejected the offering of Cain. Only when he has restored his stolen throne to God are his works acceptable.

The struggle of the Christian man to be good while the bent toward self-assertion still lives within him as a kind of unconscious moral reflex is vividly described by the apostle Paul in the seventh chapter of his Roman Epistle; and his testimony is in full accord with the teaching of the prophets. Eight hundred years before the advent of Christ the prophet Isaiah identified sin as rebellion against the will of God and the assertion of the right of each man to choose for himself the way he shall go. ”All we like sheep have gone astray,” he said, ”we have turned every one to his own way,” and I believe that no more accurate description of sin has ever been given.

The witness of the saints has been in full harmony with prophet and apostle, that an inward principle of self lies at the source of human conduct, turning everything men do into evil. To save us completely Christ must reverse the bent of our nature; He must plant a new principle within us so that our subsequent conduct will spring out of a desire to promote the honor of God and the good of our fellow men. The old self-sins must die, and the only instrument by which they can be slain is the Cross. ”If any man come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” said our Lord, and years later the victorious Paul could say, ”I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

My God, shall sin its power maintain
And in my soul defiant live!
‘Tis not enough that Thou forgive,
The cross must rise and self be slain.
O God of love, Thy power disclose:
‘Tis not enough that Christ should rise,
I, too, must seek the brightening skies,
And rise from death, as Christ arose.
Greek hymn

The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

CHAPTER 4

The Holy Trinity

God of our fathers, enthroned in light, how rich, how musical is the tongue of England! Yet when we attempt to speak forth Thy wonders, our words how poor they seem and our speech how unmelodious. When we consider the fearful mystery of Thy Triune Godhead we lay our hand upon our mouth. Before that burning bush we ask not to understand, but only that we may fitly adore Thee, One God in Persons Three. Amen.

To meditate on the three Persons of the Godhead is to walk in thought through the garden eastward in Eden and to tread on holy ground. Our sincerest effort to grasp the incomprehensible mystery of the Trinity must remain forever futile, and only by deepest reverence can it be saved from actual presumption.

Some persons who reject all they cannot explain have denied that God is a Trinity. Subjecting the Most High to their cold, level-eyed scrutiny, they conclude that it is impossible that he could be both One and Three. These forget that their whole life is enshrouded in mystery. They fall to consider that any real explanation of even the simplest phenomenon in nature lies hidden in obscurity and can no more be explained than can the mystery of the Godhead.

Every man lives by faith, the nonbeliever as well as the saint; the one by faith in natural laws and the other by faith in God. Every man throughout his entire life constantly accepts without understanding. The most learned sage can be reduced to silence with one simple question, ”What?” The answer to that question lies forever in the abyss of unknowing beyond any man’s ability to discover. ”God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof” but mortal man never.

Thomas Carlyle, following Plato, pictures a man, a deep pagan thinker, who had grown to maturity in some hidden cave and is brought out suddenly to see the sun rise. ”What would his wonder be,” exclaims Carlyle, ”his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free, open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight.... This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all.”

How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with a satiety of wonder. ”It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,” says Carlyle, ”it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it.... We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”

These penetrating, almost prophetic, words were written more than a century ago, but not all the breath-taking advances of science and technology since that time have invalidated one word or rendered obsolete as much as one period or comma. Still we do not know. We save face by repeating frivolously the popular jargon of science. We harness the mighty energy that rushes through our world; we subject it to fingertip control in our cars and our kitchens; we make it work for us like Aladdin’s jinn, but still we do not know what it is. Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper ”mystery.”
The Church has not hesitated to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. Without pretending to understand, she has given her witness, she has repeated what the Holy Scriptures teach. Some deny that the Scriptures teach the Trinity of the Godhead on the ground that the whole idea of trinity in unity is a contradiction in terms; but since we cannot understand the fall of a leaf by the roadside or the hatching of a robin’s egg in the nest yonder, why should the Trinity be a problem to us? ”We think more loftily of God,” says Michael de Molinos, ”by knowing that He is incomprehensible, and above our understanding, than by conceiving Him under any image, and creature beauty, according to our rude understanding.”

Not all who called themselves Christians through the centuries were Trinitarians, but as the presence of God in the fiery pillar glowed above the camp of Israel throughout the wilderness journey, saying to all the world, ”These are My people,” so belief in the Trinity has since the days of the apostles shone above the Church of the Firstborn as she journeyed down the years. Purity and power have followed this faith. Under this banner have gone forth apostles, fathers, martyrs, mystics, hymnists, reformers, revivalists, and the seal of divine approval has rested on their lives and their labors. However they may have differed on minor matters, the doctrine of the Trinity bound them together.

What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous. Everyone who possesses the gift of faith will recognize the wisdom of those daring words of one of the early Church fathers: ”I believe that Christ died for me because it is incredible; I believe that he rose from the dead because it is impossible.”

That was the attitude of Abraham, who against all evidence waxed strong in faith, giving glory to God. It was the attitude of Anselm, ”the second Augustine,” one of the greatest thinkers of the Christian era, who held that faith must precede all effort to understand. Reflection upon revealed truth naturally follows the advent of faith, but faith comes first to the hearing ear, not to the cogitating mind. The believing man does not ponder the Word and arrive at faith by a process of reasoning, not does he seek confirmation of faith from philosophy or science. His cry is, ”O earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar. ”

Is this to dismiss scholarship as valueless in the sphere of revealed religion? By no means. The scholar has a vitally important task to perform within a carefully prescribed precinct. His task is to guarantee the purity of the text, to get as close as possible to the Word as originally given. He may compare Scripture with Scripture until he has discovered the true meaning of the text. But right there his authority ends. He must never sit in judgment upon what is written. He dare not bring the meaning of the Word before the bar of his reason. He dare not commend or condemn the Word as reasonable or unreasonable, scientific or unscientific. After the meaning is discovered, that meaning judges him; never does he judge it.

The doctrine of the Trinity is truth for the heart. The spirit of man alone can enter through the veil and penetrate into that Holy of Holies. ”Let me seek Thee in longing,” pleaded Anselm, ”let me long for Thee in seeking; let me find Thee in love, and love Thee in finding.” Love and faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead. Let reason kneel in reverence outside.

Christ did not hesitate to use the plural form when speaking of Himself along with the Father and the Spirit. ”We will come unto him and make our abode with him.” Yet again He said, ”I and my Father are one.” It is most important that we think of God as Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance. Only so may we think rightly of God and in a manner worthy of Him and of our own souls.

It was our Lord’s claim to equality with the Father that outraged the religionists of His day and led at last to His crucifixion. The attack on the doctrine of the Trinity two centuries later by Arius and others was also aimed at Christ’s claim to deity. During the Arian controversy 318 Church fathers (many of them maimed and scarred by the physical violence suffered in earlier persecutions) met at Nicaea and adopted a statement of faith, one section of which runs:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
The only-begotten Son of God,
Begotten of Him before all ages,
God of God, Light of Light,
Very God of Very God,
Begotten, not made,
Being of one substance with the Father,
By whom all things were made.

For more than sixteen hundred years this has stood as the final test of orthodoxy, as well it should, for it condenses in theological language the teaching of the New Testament concerning the position of the Son in the Godhead.

The Nicene Creed also pays tribute to the Holy Spirit as being Himself God and equal to the Father and the Son:

I believe in the Holy Spirit
The Lord and giver of life,
Which proceedeth from the Father and the Son,
Who with the Father and Son together
Is worshipped and glorified.

Apart from the question of whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, this tenet of the ancient creed has been held by the Eastern and Western branches of the Church and by all but a tiny minority of Christians.

The authors of the Athanasian Creed spelled out with great care the relation of the three Persons to each other, filling in the gaps in human thought as far as they were able while staying within the bounds of the inspired Word. ”In this Trinity,” runs the Creed, ”nothing is before or after, nothing is greater or less: but all three Persons coeternal, together and equal.”

How do these words harmonize with the saying of Jesus, ”My Father is greater than I”? Those old theologians knew, and wrote into the Creed, ”Equal to His Father, as touching His Godhead; less than the Father, as touching His manhood,” and this interpretation commends itself to every serious-minded seeker after truth in a region where the light is all but blinding.

To redeem mankind the Eternal Son did not leave the bosom of the Father; while walking among men He referred to Himself as ”the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father,” and spoke of Himself again as ”the Son of man which is in heaven.” We grant mystery here, but not confusion. In His incarnation the son veiled His deity, but He did not void it. The unity of the Godhead made it impossible that He should surrender anything of His deity. When He took upon Him the nature of man, He did not degrade Himself or become even for a time less than He had been before. God can never become less than Himself. For God to become anything that He has not been is unthinkable.

The Persons of the Godhead, being one, have one will. They work always together, and never one smallest act is done by one without the instant acquiescence of the other two. Every act of God is accomplished by the Trinity in Unity. Here, of course, we are being driven by necessity to conceive of God in human terms. We are thinking of God by analogy with man, and the result must fall short of ultimate truth; yet if we are to think of God at all, we must do it by adapting creature-thoughts and creature-words to the Creator. It is a real if understandable error to conceive of the Persons of the Godhead as conferring with one another and reaching agreement by interchange of thought as humans do. It has always seemed to me that Milton introduces an element of weakness into his celebrated Paradise Lost when he presents the Persons of the Godhead conversing with each other about the redemption of the human race.

When the Son of God walked the earth as the Son of Man, He spoke often to the Father and the Father answered Him again; as the Son of Man, He now intercedes with God for His people. The dialogue involving the Father and the Son recorded in the Scriptures is always to be understood as being between the Eternal Father and the Man Christ Jesus. That instant, immediate communion between the Persons of the Godhead which has been from all eternity knows not sound nor effort nor motion.

Amid the eternal silences
None heard but He who always spake,
And the silence was unbroken.

O marvellous! O worshipful!
No song or sound is heard,
But everywhere and every hour
In love, in wisdom, and in power,
The Father speaks His dear Eternal Word.
Frederick W. Faber

A popular belief among Christians divide the work of God between the three Persons, giving a specific part to each, as, for instance, creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, and regeneration to the Holy Spirit. This is partly true but not wholly so, for God cannot so divide Himself that one Person works while another is inactive. In the Scriptures the three Persons are shown to act in harmonious unity in all the mighty works that are wrought throughout the universe.

In the Holy Scriptures the work of creation is attributed to the Father (Gen. 1:1), to the Son (Col. 1;16), and to the Holy Spirit (Job. 26:13 and Ps. 104:30). The incarnation is shown to have been accomplished by the three Persons in full accord (Luke 1: 35), though only the Son became flesh to dwell among us. At Christ’s baptism the Son came up out of the water, the Spirit descended upon Him and the Father’s voice spoke from heaven (Matt. 3:16, 17). Probably the most beautiful description of the work of atonement is found in Hebrews 9:14, where it is stated that Christ, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God; and there we behold the three persons operating together.

The resurrection of Christ is likewise attributed variously to the Father (Acts 2:32), to the Son (John 10:17-18), and to the Holy Spirit (Rom. 1:4). The salvation of the individual man is shown by the apostle Peter to be the work of all three Persons of the Godhead (1 Pet. 1:2), and the indwelling of the Christian man’s soul is said to be by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (John 14:15-23).
The doctrine of the Trinity, as I have said before, is truth for the heart. The fact that it cannot be satisfactorily explained, instead of being against it, is in its favor. Such a truth had to be revealed; no one could have imagined it.

O Blessed Trinity!
O simplest Majesty! O Three in One!
Thou art for ever God alone.
Holy Trinity!
Blessed equal Three.
One God, we praise Thee.
Frederick W. Faber

The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

CHAPTER 3

A Divine Attribute: Something True About God


Majesty unspeakable, my soul desires to behold Thee. I cry to Thee from the dust.
Yet when I inquire after Thy name it is secret. Thou art hidden in the light which no man can approach unto. What Thou art cannot be thought or uttered, for Thy glory is ineffable.

Still, prophet and psalmist, apostle and saint have encouraged me to believe that I may in some measure know Thee. Therefore, I pray, whatever of Thyself Thou hast been pleased to disclose, help me to search out as treasure more precious than rubies or the merchandise of fine gold: for with Thee shall I live when the stars of the twilight are no more and the heavens have vanished away and only Thou remainest. Amen.

The study of the attributes of God, far from being dull and heavy, may for the enlightened Christian be a sweet and absorbing spiritual exercise. To the soul that is athirst for God, nothing could be more delightful.

Only to sit and think of God,
Oh what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breath the Name
Earth has no higher bliss.
Frederick W. Faber

It would seem to be necessary before proceeding further to define the word attribute as it is used in this volume. It is not used in its philosophical sense nor confined to its strictest theological meaning. By it is meant simply whatever may be correctly ascribed to God. For the purpose of this book an attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself.

And this brings us to the question of the number of the divine attributes. Religious thinkers have differed about this. Some have insisted that there are seven, but Faber sang of the ”God of a thousand attributes,” and Charles Wesley exclaimed,

Glory thine attributes confess,
Glorious all and numberless.

True, these men were worshiping, not counting; but we might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasonings of the theological mind. If an attribute is something that is true of God, we may as well not try to enumerate them. Furthermore, to this meditation on the being of God the number of the attributes is not important, for only a limited few will be mentioned here.

If an attribute is something true of God, it is also something that we can conceive as being true of Him. God, being infinite, must possess attributes about which we can know. An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God’s self-revelation. It is an answer to a question, the reply God makes to our interrogation concerning himself.

What is God like? What kind of God is He? How may we expect Him to act toward us and toward all created things? Such questions are not merely academic. They touch the far-in reaches of the human spirit, and their answers affect life and character and destiny.

When asked in reverence and their answers sought in humility, these are questions that cannot but be pleasing to our Father which art in heaven. ”For He willeth that we be occupied in knowing and loving,” wrote Julian of Norwich, ”till the time that we shall be fulfilled in heaven.... For of all things the beholding and the loving of the Maker maketh the soul to seem less in his own sight, and most filleth him with reverent dread and true meekness; with plenty of charity for his fellow Christians. ”To our questions God has provided answers; not all the answers, certainly, but enough to satisfy our intellects and ravish our hearts. These answers He has provided in nature, in the Scriptures, and in the person of His Son.

The idea that God reveals Himself in the creation is not held with much vigor by modern Christians; but it is, nevertheless, set forth in the inspired Word, especially in the writings of David and Isaiah in the Old Testament and in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the New. In the Holy Scriptures the revelation is clearer:

The heavens declare Thy glory, Lord,
In every star Thy wisdom shines;
But when our eyes behold Thy Word,
We read Thy name in fairer lines.
Isaac Watts

And it is a sacred and indispensable part of the Christian message that the full sun-blaze of revelation came at the incarnation when the Eternal Word became flesh to dwell among us.

Though God in this threefold revelation has provided answers to our questions concerning Him, the answers by no means lie on the surface. They must be sought by prayer, by long meditation on the written Word, and by earnest and well-disciplined labor. However brightly the light may shine, it can be seen only by those who are spiritually prepared to receive it.
”Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

If we would think accurately about the attributes of God, we must learn to reject certain words that are sure to come crowding into our minds - such words as trait, characteristic, quality, words which are proper and necessary when we are considering created beings but altogether inappropriate when we are thinking about God. We must break ourselves of the habit of thinking of the Creator as we think of His creatures. It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought. ”As nothing is more easy than to think,” says Thomas Traherne, ”so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” If we ever think well it should be when we think of God.

A man is the sum of his parts and his character the sum of the traits that compose it. These traits vary from man to man and may from time to time vary from themselves within the same man. Human character is not constant because the traits or qualities that constitute it are unstable. These come and go, burn low or glow with great intensity throughout our lives. Thus a man who is kind and considerate at thirty may be cruel and churlish at fifty. Such a change is possible because man is made; he is in a very real sense a composition; he is the sum of the traits that make up his character.

We naturally and correctly think of man as a work wrought by the divine Intelligence. He is both created and made. How he was created lies undisclosed among the secrets of God; how he was brought from no-being to being, from nothing to something is not known and may never be known to any but the One who brought him forth. How God made him, however, is less of a secret, and while we know only a small portion of the whole truth, we do know that man possesses a body, a soul, and a spirit; we know that he has memory, reason, will, intelligence, sensation, and we know that to give these meaning he has the wondrous gift of consciousness. We know, too, that these, together with various qualities of temperament, compose his total human self.

These are gifts from God arranged by infinite wisdom, notes that make up the score of creations loftiest symphony, threads that compose the master tapestry of the universe.

But in all this we are thinking creature-thoughts and using creature-words to express them. Neither such thoughts nor such words are appropriate to the Deity. ”The Father is made of none,” says the Athanasian Creed, ”neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son: not made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.” God exists in Himself and of Himself. His being He owes to no one. His substance is indivisible. He has no parts but is single in His unitary being.

The doctrine of the divine unity means not only that there is but one God; it means also that God is simple, uncomplex, one with Himself. The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts. Between His attributes no contradiction can exist. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one. All of God does all that God does; He does not divide himself to perform a work, but works in the total unity of His being.

An attribute, then, is a part of God. It is how God is, and as far as the reasoning mind can go, we may say that it is what God is, though, as I have tried to explain, exactly what He is He cannot tell us. Of what God is conscious when He is conscious of self, only He knows. ”The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” Only to an equal could God communicate the mystery of His Godhead; and to think of God as having an equal is to fall into an intellectual absurdity.

The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities; they are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures. Love, for instance, is not something God has and which may grow or diminish or cease to be. His love is the way God is, and when He loves He is simply being Himself. And so with the other attributes.

One God! one Majesty!
There is no God but Thee!
Unbounded, unextended Unity!
Unfathomable Sea!
All life is out of Thee,
and Thy life is Thy blissful Unity.
Frederick W. Faber

Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer

CHAPTER 2

God Incomprehensible


Lord, how great is our dilemma! In Thy Presence silence best becomes us, but love inflames our hearts and constrains us to speak.


Were we to hold our peace the stones would cry out; yet if we speak, what shall we say? Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not in order that we may believe.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: ”What is God like?”

This book is an attempt to answer that question. Yet at the outset I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody.

We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown. It is not possible for the mind to crash suddenly past the familiar into the totally unfamiliar. Even the most vigorous and daring mind is unable to create something out of nothing by a spontaneous act of imagination. Those strange beings that populate the world of mythology and superstition are not pure creations of fancy. The imagination created them by taking the ordinary inhabitants of earth and air and sea and extending their familiar forms beyond their normal boundaries, or by mixing the forms of two or more so as to produce something new. However beautiful or grotesque these may be, their prototypes can always be identified. They are like something we already know.

The effort of inspired men to express the ineffable has placed a great strain upon both thought and language in the Holy Scriptures. These being often a revelation of a world above nature, and the minds for which they were written being a part of nature, the writers are compelled to use a great many ”like” words to make themselves understood.

When the Spirit would acquaint us with something that lies beyond the field of our knowledge, He tells us that this thing is like something we already know, but He is always careful to phrase His description so as to save us from slavish literalism. For example, when the prophet Ezekiel saw heaven opened and beheld visions of God, he found himself looking at that which he had no language to describe. What he was seeing was wholly different from anything he had ever known before, so he fell back upon the language of resemblance. ”As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire.”

The nearer he approaches to the burning throne the less sure his words become: ”And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it.... This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

Strange as this language is, it still does not create the impression of unreality. One gathers that the whole scene is very real but entirely alien to anything men know on earth. So, in order to convey an idea of what he sees, the prophet must employ such words as ”likeness,” ”appearance,” ”as it were,” and ”the likeness of the appearance.” Even the throne becomes ”the appearance of a throne” and He that sits upon it, though like a man, is so unlike one that He can be described only as ”the likeness of the appearance of a man.”

When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea from our own head and make it mean ”in the exact image.” To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that-which-is-not-God. To think of creature and Creator as alike in essential being is to rob God of most of His attributes and reduce Him to the status of a creature. It is, for instance, to rob Him of His infinitude: there cannot be two unlimited substances in the universe. It is to take away His sovereignty: there cannot be two absolutely free beings in the universe, for sooner or later two completely free wills must collide. These attributes, to mention no more, require that there be but one to whom they belong.

When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

”The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee,” said Nicholas of Cusa, ”because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained.”

”If anyone should set forth any concept by which Thou canst be conceived,” says Nicholas again, ”I know that that concept is not a concept of Thee, for every concept is ended in the wall of Paradise.... So too, if any were to tell of the understanding of Thee, wishing to supply a means whereby Thou mightest be understood, this man is yet far from Thee.... forasmuch as Thou art absolute above all the concepts which any man can frame.”

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control. We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like, and what He is like is of course a composite of all the religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we have known or heard about, and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.

If all this sounds strange to modern ears, it is only because we have for a full half century taken God for granted. The glory of God has not been revealed to this generation of men. The God of contemporary Christianity is only slightly superior to the gods of Greece and Rome, if indeed He is not actually inferior to them in that He is weak and helpless while they at least had power.

If what we conceive God to be He is not, how then shall we think of Him? If He is indeed incomprehensible, as the Creed declares Him to be, and unapproachable, as Paul says He is, how can we Christians satisfy our longing after Him? The hopeful words, ”Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace,” still stand after the passing of the centuries; but how shall we acquaint ourselves with One who eludes all the straining efforts of mind and heart? And how shall we be held accountable to know what cannot be known?

”Canst thou by searching find out God?” asks Zophar the Naamathite; ”canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” ”Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son,” said our Lord, ”and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” The Gospel according to John reveals the helplessness of the human mind before the great Mystery which is God, and Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure.

The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source. How can this be realized?

The answer of the Bible is simply ”through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience. God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement He reconciled us to Himself, and by faith and love we enter and lay hold on Him.

”Verily God is of infinite greatness,” says Christ’s enraptured troubadour, Richard Rolle; ”more than we can think; ... unknowable by created things; and can never be comprehended by us as He is in Himself. But even here and now, whenever the heart begins to burn with a desire for God, she is made able to receive the uncreated light and, inspired and fulfilled by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, she tastes the joys of heaven. She transcends all visible things and is raised to the sweetness of eternal life....

Herein truly is perfect love; when all the intent of the mind, all the secret working of the heart, is lifted up into the love of God.”’

That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a paradox best described as

Darkness to the intellect
But sunshine to the heart.
Frederick W. Faber

The author of the celebrated little work The Cloud of Unknowing develops this thesis throughout his book. In approaching God, he says, the seeker discovers that the divine Being dwells in obscurity, hidden behind a cloud of unknowing; nevertheless he should not be discouraged but set his will with a naked intent unto God. This cloud is between the seeker and God so that he may never see God clearly by the light of understanding nor feel Him in the emotions. But by the mercy of God faith can break through into His Presence if the seeker but believe the Word and press on.

Michael de Molinos, the Spanish saint, taught the same thing. In his Spiritual Guide he says that God will take the soul by the hand and lead her through the way of pure faith, ”and causing the understanding to leave behind all considerations and reasonings He draws her forward.... Thus He causes her by means of a simple and obscure knowledge of faith to aspire only to her Bridegroom upon the wings of love.”

For these and similar teachings Molinos was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition and sentenced to life imprisonment. He soon died in prison, but the truth he taught can never die. Speaking of the Christian soul he says: ”Let her suppose that all the whole world and the most refined conceptions of the wisest intellects can tell her nothing, and that the goodness and beauty of her Beloved infinitely surpass all their knowledge, being persuaded that all creatures are too rude to inform her and to conduct her to the true knowledge of God.... She ought then to go forward with her love, leaving all her understanding behind. Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him.”

”What is God like?” If by that question we mean ”What is God like in Himself?” there is no answer. If we mean ”What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?” there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying. For while the name of God is secret and His essential nature incomprehensible, He in condescending love has by revelation declared certain things to be true of Himself. These we call His attributes.

Sovereign Father, heavenly King,
Thee we now presume to sing;
Glad thine attributes confess,
Glorious all, and numberless.
Charles Wesley