Morality as a Religion Part 11

Not him that with fantastic boasts A sombre people dreamed they knew; The mere barbaric G.o.d of Hosts That edged their sword and braced their thew: A G.o.d they pitted 'gainst a swarm Of neighbour G.o.ds less vast of arm.

He is well known, this "G.o.d of Hosts". Doubtless once he was the Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently transformed into the G.o.d of battles, who ranged himself on the side of his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even knavery, the G.o.d of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line, of him who afterwards was preached as the G.o.d of devil and h.e.l.l. What has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?--

A G.o.d like some imperious King, Wroth, were his realm not duly awed; A G.o.d for ever hearkening Unto his self-commanded laud; A G.o.d for ever jealous grown Of carven wood and graven stone.

No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emanc.i.p.ation of the Western world from its degrading belief in a "G.o.d of Hosts". It is only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the "sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the emanc.i.p.ation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature, together with an equally painstaking research into the history of kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion--the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial religion an impossibility to all who are at pains to inform themselves of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that--

G.o.d whose ghost in arch and aisle Yet haunts his temple--and his tomb; And follows in a little while Odin and Zeus to equal doom; A G.o.d of kindred seed and line; Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.

And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abas.e.m.e.nt, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a pa.s.sionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-G.o.d such as this!

O streaming worlds, O crowded sky!

O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this!

This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot.

The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully a.s.serted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the image of G.o.d," but now we see that the--

G.o.d of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle-line--

he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry--

Lord G.o.d of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget--lest we forget!--[2]

we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord G.o.d of Hosts,"

"the Man of War," "the G.o.d of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose amongst men, and that the day _must_ come when it will be finally abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-G.o.d is not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for--

This was what Man in his violent youth begot.

This G.o.d was made in the image of man.

And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of his G.o.d, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, "far above music," could tell of his G.o.d, then would he be but the idealised image of himself.

He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.

The G.o.d I know of, I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.

_Raise thou the stone and find me there,_ _Cleave thou the wood and there am I,_ Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far for me to know.

I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear a.s.sociated with the emotion, but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. "Raise thou the stone . . . cleave thou the wood," and we are in the presence of the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world.

Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far for me to know.

Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth, to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is pa.s.sing away.

_Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt._

The melancholy Herac.l.i.tus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas.

Seneca, centuries ago, noted the same of our own bodies; the process of dissolution is continuous, until at length the restorative power itself will desert us and the process will be complete.

But at the heart of this universal impermanence there is a soul of reality which the poet discerns amid the fleeting atoms of the stone and the fibre of the growing tree. It is as though we found ourselves in a vast hall, filled to repletion with machinery in every condition of motion, from the slowest and scarcely perceptible movements of the hour hand of a watch up to the incalculable rapidity of a fly-wheel.

All is flux, change, consumption of energy, wear and tear of the machinery itself. We know it must run down sometime, we know one day it must all be renewed. But amid all this instability we are well aware that there is a secret source of power, a centre whence a renewal of energy ceaselessly arises. Without its incessant action not one single movement in that vast hall could be obtained. It is the one real thing amidst a world of others which are wearing and wasting away and therefore in a true sense unreal. The secret spring whence the energy is generated may be invisible, but we _know_ it is somewhere, and if any one denied its existence we should not take the trouble to answer him. A faint, halting symbol is this of the eternal and unchanging reality at the heart of the worlds--a dim light whereby to ill.u.s.trate the most solemn of truths, that always and everywhere, in the lightest as in the greatest movements of nature, in the fragrance of a flower, the iridescence of a crystal, or the fierce energies which shoot up mountains of hydrogen flames hundreds of miles high from the crater of the sun, we have the revelation of "a Power without beginning, without end," [3] permanent while all is in a condition of ceaseless flux and change, living while all around are hastening to their deaths, the one only truly existent Being anywhere, the hidden source of all existence and life.

So far, we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to give as to the _method_ of such action as has been described on the part of the invisible and universal Energy, for we cannot even explain the _nexus_ between an act of human volitional energy and the raising of an arm. There are the facts, demonstrable and undeniable, but the _how_ of those facts, no man on this earth knoweth or perhaps ever will know. Well may Browning profess himself content to endure in patience the ignorance which is our lot here, if only at length "thy great creation-thought thou wilt make known to me". The "great creation-thought" cannot be known now. Watson is as sure of it as his spiritual ancestor:--

I trust it not this bounded ken.

But though the "creation-thought" cannot be fathomed, though we cannot _comprehend_ the nature of the ultimate Reality, the fact of the great existence and omnipresence is clearly _apprehensible_, and therefore must be acknowledged as a demonstrated fact by every man.

And, if such be the case, in what sense is G.o.d "unknown"? Unknown, certainly, in the sense that he is unseen, but we now know that the only real things are those of the invisible world. G.o.d is unknown because incomprehensible, now and always, here and hereafter, in this life and in all possible lives. The Infinite must ever be beyond the _comprehension_ of the finite.

Though saint and sage their powers unite To fathom that abyss of light, Ah! still that altar stands.[4]

But the Divine is not beyond the _apprehension_ of man's mind, and as far as I can by diligent reading of Mr. Spencer attain to his innermost meaning, I do not think he denies this fact, as he most unquestionably does not deny the validity of religious motion, which, arguing against the Positivist philosophy, he rightly contends cannot, in its highest sense, be a.s.sociated with any being other than the Highest of all beings. "What's in a name?" I ask, and whether a man calls himself theist or agnostic--so that he does admit something greater than man, and does give us scope and opportunity for the exercise of those powers and emotions which refuse to be bounded by, or satisfied with, the merely phenomenal and transitory, but are ever seeking for communion with the Noumenal and the Eternal--in my judgment matters very little.

There is a higher synthesis in which partial truths are being constantly taken up and reconciled in some fuller and more luminous expression, and I have no doubt that that scientific reconciliation of materialism and spiritualism which is now progressing so rapidly will eventually be effected between those who now call themselves theists and agnostics.

To ethical idealists the great question is this: Does your belief make for reverence; does it subdue your soul with a sense of the wonder and mystery which are everywhere so conspicuous in nature; does it foster the growth of your spiritual powers as opposed to the merely animal instincts of your body; does it make you more moral, fill you with an increasing enthusiasm for the good life for its own sake? Or, on the other hand, does what you profess dishearten you, fill you with melancholy and foreboding and a sense of the unprofitableness of things, of the apparent aimlessness of all that is going on or being done, of the fruitlessness of all human endeavour? Is the sigh of the inspired sceptic, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," ever and anon rising from your heart, and are you losing your faith in yourself and humanity? That is the test of a faith--what it does for you, and you could have no better one. The fact that he wors.h.i.+ps an "Unknown G.o.d"

means no shrinking of enthusiasm in him who believes that that everlasting Power, which science no less than philosophy commands him to believe, is identical with that very Power which is conspicuously working in the universe for universal aims which also are good.

Outside a handful of men of no consequence amid the thundering a.s.sent of the overwhelming ma.s.ses of mankind, the course of things here is upwards. Instinct suggests it, reason proclaims it, history confirms it. But there are no two supreme powers, and therefore that Power I reverence--

The G.o.d on whom I ever gaze, The G.o.d I never once behold--

is also the everlasting "Power which makes for righteousness," that is, for moral progress, the only progress ultimately worth caring about.

Men crave to see G.o.d. "Behold I show you a mystery." There are two incarnations. There is the incarnation of G.o.d in flesh and blood, in Chrishna in India, in Jesus in Palestine. Men have, men do wors.h.i.+p these men as G.o.ds. But there is a higher incarnation, a sublimer theophany. There is that before which all incarnations, all saviours, have ever bowed down in lowliest adoration; there is that whose obedience they would not surrender if "the whole world and the glory thereof" were given to them. There is that which is older than man and his redeemers, higher than the stars, vast as the Immensities, ancient as the Eternities themselves, and in this incarnation man may see G.o.d.

What is it? It is the moral law, the eternal sanction crowning the right, inborn in rational man, the very soul of reason within him, inborn in things--the law which no man ever invented, which never had beginning, which can know no end, because it is the Divine order revealed to earth. It is the necessary nature of the one essential Being, and we recognise it because "we are his offspring," because like him we are Divine.

"Unknown G.o.d!" Yes, but not here. As long as I have the instinct of ethics, as long as I feel myself constrained to bow down in the dust before goodness, to deem myself unworthy to tie the latchet of the shoes of the hero or the saint; so long as I see the course of the world steadily, undeniably, ascending the sacred hill of progress, so long must I confess that the Power behind the veil, behind the world, is a moral Power, that that Power recognises the validity of moral distinctions as I do, that the ethic law is his law, that when I live by that law I _see G.o.d_--

The G.o.d on whom I ever gaze, The G.o.d I never once behold, Above the cloud, beneath the clod, The Unseen G.o.d, the Unseen G.o.d.

[1] These words were written during the opening days of the late Spanish-American war.

[2] _Recessional_, Rudyard Kipling.

[3] Herbert Spencer, _First Principles, pa.s.sim_.

[4] Mrs. Barbauld's fine hymn, "As once upon Athenian ground".

XVI.

"A CHAPEL IN THE INFINITE."