This was what Man in his violent youth begot.

This god 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 God, 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 God, 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 God 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 associated 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 passing away.

Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

The melancholy Heraclitus, 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 illustrate 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 God "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. God 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 associated 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 worships an "Unknown God" 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 assent of the overwhelming masses 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 God on whom I ever gaze, The God 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 God. "Behold I show you a mystery." There are two incarnations. There is the incarnation of God in flesh and blood, in Chrishna in India, in Jesus in Palestine. Men have, men do worship these men as gods. 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 God. 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 God!" 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 God—

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



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

[2] Recessional, Rudyard Kipling.

[3] Herbert Spencer, First Principles, passim.

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



XVI.

"A CHAPEL IN THE INFINITE."

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they, —TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

The supreme value of the two great poets of the Victorian era is this, that they have attuned their song to the expression of modern thought concerning those transcendent realities which must ever possess an inexhaustible interest for mankind. Thus we see, in an age which acknowledges the complete emancipation of the human reason, the supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment, Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith" than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism. Browning has faced the riddle of the universe, the bewildering mystery of a world of pain and sorrow, with unconquerable courage and hope. His musician, Abt Vogler, believes in eternal harmony, with Plato and Carlyle:—

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

And, being no dreamer or pessimist, seeing reason at the heart of things, and good the final goal of ill, he

At least believes in soul, and is very sure of God.

Here are the three imperishable realities—God, Soul, Hereafter. Of all the rest is it ultimately true which the weary preacher said: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," or, as the modern Ecclesiastes has it: Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.

In the words of the opening stanzas of the "In Memoriam," Tennyson is evidently affected by the spectacle the world exhibits to the thoughtful man in its multitudinous religious sects and segments, and the strange contrasts the national, political and ethical unities of mankind present, with their theological divergencies. As we have seen, the etymology of the word "religion" signifies that its intent and purpose is to bind men together, whereas, as we mournfully confess, it has hitherto proved a fruitful source of schism and division, national as well as individual. It is only since the much-despised and denounced "world" and its modern civilisation has effectually curtailed the offensive powers of corporations, synods and inquisitions, that religion has ceased to outrage the public conscience by repetitions of the enormities of former times.

As the sweep of his vision ranges over past and present, the poet is enabled to estimate these fragmentary philosophies aright; he sees them in their proper perspective, in their relation to the infinite Reality behind them. He calls them "little systems," "broken lights": he is able to forecast their future; "they cease to be". There is but One Eternal, "without shadow of change or turning": "And Thou, O Lord, art more than they".

This is the fact which weighs so heavily with the thoughtful and discriminating minds of the day—that all the apocalyptic theologies and religious philosophies which purport to reveal the unspeakable mystery known to exist, though hidden from our sight, end only in belittling it. Doubtless an element of accommodation is discoverable and essential in the purest thought of the unseen order; our thoughts of the Soul of souls must be such as our spirits can supply. Men so divided in belief as Kant and Newman have both recognised this fact, the only difference being that, while the former understands the creeds and their tenets as symbols wherein man, striving to express the inexpressible, finds relief and rest to his spirit, Newman looks upon them as so much history, which if a man shall not accept as fact, "without doubt he shall perish everlastingly". To him, as to all who really stand by their order, the New Covenant is a revelation, complete and final, of all that can or will be known of the transcendental order. It claims that "a door was opened in heaven," and those mysteries made manifest "to little ones" which had been "hidden from the wise" and far-seeing philosophers of old. It claims to be "the tabernacle of God with men," "God manifest in the flesh," or in sacraments, rites and symbols—nay, it is the "city come out of heaven from God," it is the cathedral of humanity.

This was believed profoundly, almost universally, in the days before the flood—the flood of knowledge let loose upon mankind, beginning with the days of the Renascimento and continuing down to our own. But the philosopher-poet of the nineteenth century sees nothing of it in the altar and system set up in this Western world. Like the rest, it is, to him, a "little system," which ultimately ceases to be. The heavenly city fades into an earthly chamber, the vast cathedral of humanity dwindles to a spot on the horizon, it shrinks to the dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".

The first great shock to the pretentious dogmatism of the Western world came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in the infinite azure could be so precious in God's sight as this earth of ours, it was believed, for had it not been chosen as the scene and stage of that transcendent act whereby the Deity had consecrated humanity for ever to himself? Now it turns out that the physical origin of this world of ours is precisely that of others, while, so far from being the centre of the universe, it is but a speck in infinity, positively invisible from any of the million suns that light the eternal way from our own central orb to the infinities that range beyond. The ecclesiastical mind of those days astutely fastened on the charge of impugning the sacred record of Moses—itself a phenomenal instance of incompetent infallibility—but the real explanation of Galileo's persecution lies in the fact that, with this earth in a dependent position and in ceaseless motion, the whole system of theology suffered a serious shock. Where were heaven and hell in the new version astronomy gave of things? Where did Jesus' spirit go on his death? Where is limbo, and where is purgatory? Whither did he go when he ascended bodily into the air? Since this earth is uncounted myriads of miles from the spot in space which it occupied this morning when we awoke, what became of the inspired geography of the terra incognita, according to which the several receptacles of spirits were mapped out with such unfaltering precision?

With the vanishing of the pre-eminent claims advanced by a rudimentary science on behalf of this earth, and supported by the unsuspecting theology of the childhood of the world, the earth-born philosophy of things wrapped up in its fate must also disappear. While the earth dwindles into a spot in endless space, its "little systems" share its fate, and our Western cathedral shrinks to the dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".

Or, look at the matter numerically. Jesus, who avowedly confined his missionary efforts to his own race, "for to them only am I sent," is made by the writer of Matthew's Gospel to give a world-wide commission to his disciples on the very eve of his mysterious disappearance from earth: "Go ye and teach all nations," he is reported to have enjoined upon them. Peter, doubtless, was present upon this occasion, or, at any rate, we cannot conceive him ignorant of the commission; and yet we find him refusing point-blank to admit Cornelius the centurion—the first candidate who offered himself—into the Church, and, according to the Acts, a sheet full of animals had to be let through the roof of his house before he could be turned from his purpose of confining the new religion exclusively to Jews. The explanation, of course, of such universality as Christianity has attained is mainly due to the influence of the cosmopolitan Saul of Tarsus, though the idea of an Oecumenical Society was by no means his original thought. The Stoics were full of the ideal, and the Cynics before them, while Socrates refused to describe himself as a citizen of Athens, but claimed the whole world as his fatherland, and the outer barbarians, as the exclusive Greeks styled them, he called his brethren.

And, now, how many of the human family are enrolled as "citizens of the holy places"; what numbers assemble for worship in the great cathedral? Statistics are unnecessary, but we cannot but remember the temples to God raised in other ages and other lands, which endure to this hour, imperishable witnesses to a truth which is "the light of life". What that truth is, we shall see later. But when we remember the great pre-Christian systems of the East and of Egypt, and the very stones dug out of the earth cry aloud in witness to the eternal truths, God, Soul, Hereafter; when we realise the devotion of martyred Israel to the faith of their fathers, and the great Mohammedan revolt against the dogmatical puerilities of the sixth century; when, I say, we remember that one and all endure to this hour, and in unimpaired vigour, and still more, when that absorbingly interesting study known as the science of Comparative Religion has shown us that of orthodoxy is true what is true of all religious systems—that it enjoys a monopoly of nothing save of errors peculiar to itself, and that of its doctrines, all that is true is not new, and all that is new is not true—we are in a fairer position to estimate its precise place and influence in the world and the sources from which it has drawn its inspiration.

Even of the comparatively few in the vast family of humanity who own its supremacy, how many can repeat its shibboleths in common? And if disunion, the true mark of error, be at work among them, can we believe that the future is reserved for it? It is unquestionable that the cultivated intellect of the Continent is profoundly estranged from the version prevalent there, while it is only the spirit of compromise, so characteristic of the race, carried into the domain of dogmatism which prevents a similar insurrection in England. If the sacerdotal lion can lie down side by side with the Broad Church lambs, it is only because the wicked world, symbolised for the moment by the strong arm of the law and the public sense of decency, curbs the ferocity of heresy hunters and bids them look to their manners lest some worse thing befall them. It is felt instinctively that the popular phylacteries, the peculiar trappings in which Divine truth has been set forth in England, are not worth discussion among serious men.

And this will help us to estimate at its true value the argument which lost John Henry Newman to rational religion and won him for Roman Catholicism. What finally decided him that the Ultramontane version of religion was the true one, was the famous Securus judicat orbis terrarum of Augustine. The verdict of the world is against you, he had urged against the Donatists, and what was conclusive against them appeared to be conclusive against Anglicans, who could only appeal for support to their own kith and kindred. However that may be, what answer is forthcoming to the retort which the phenomena of to-day unmistakably suggest? If the universal consent of the fourth century, semi-barbarous, uneducated, profoundly credulous, and avowedly uncritical, serves to prove the truth of that form of Gnosticism known as orthodoxy, what are we to say of the uniform rejection of it, as such, by the decidedly cultivated intellect of the nineteenth century? If the prior unanimity was adequate to prove its dogmatic truth, why should not the spectacle offered by educated Europe and America be sufficient to show its groundlessness? Whatever it may be to "babes" and "little ones" to whom it loves to appeal from the "undue exaltation of intellect" which can see no basis whatsoever on which to rest the historical Christianity of the Churches, certain it is to those who know, it is among those things which "have their day and cease to be". It cannot be a cathedral vast as the race, it can never be more than a system among systems, a chapel isolated in the infinite.

The truth of this will be more clearly seen if we reflect on the nature of the claim of the Churches to be in exclusive possession of Divine knowledge, the sole revealer of God to man. Ever since the words of the Gnostic gospeller, "He shall lead you unto all truth," were written, it has been claimed that the authentic medium of Divine communications has been a corporation or a book, one or the other being affirmed to be an exhaustive and infallible philosophy of God and man. Solomon is said to have had grievous misgivings as to the Lord of heaven and earth being enclosed within the temple he had built, but no such anxieties beset the framers of the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds, or their imitators in subsequent ages. What a spectacle for gods and men! "All truth" summed up in Thirty-nine Articles, or a score of Oecumenical Councils! It is the profanity, I had almost said the sacrilege, of it, which is so shocking to the instinctive reverence of our minds. And what truths, too, are commended to our keeping in these canons and articles! Beginning with the natural depravity of human affections, purposely inflicted upon us because of another's transgression, we are taught, as a direct corollary from this, that the Deity is no more moral in his emotions than ourselves; for, in order to right the first wrong, he is made to perpetrate another which no one would hesitate to pronounce immoral in us, viz., the chastisement of the innocent in the place of the guilty. We need say nothing of the lie direct and overwhelming which the unanswerable facts of science, in many of its departments, give to the whole story of "the fall" of a first man, and the consequent superstructure which the perverse ingenuity of man has erected upon it. We need only confine ourselves to the plain fact that the so-called scheme is an outrage upon the ethical nature of man, and therefore that it can never have emanated from God. In the latest explanations of "the Atonement," the Anglican theologians explain it away, "the redemption" of Jesus being no more than the example of his saintly life and his uncomplaining submission to death. The angry God, who will not relax his frown save at the sight of blood, is conveniently forgotten in the more refined circles of ecclesiasticism, and is now left to the meditations of Little Bethel or Breton peasants.

And this is a Divine revelation, a heavenly system of truth so far beyond human reason, and so intrinsically unrelated to any of our faculties, that it could never have been discovered by man's intelligence, but only preternaturally communicated from without! To Paul, who is alone responsible for the famous scheme, this is the "wisdom hidden from the ages, which none of the princes of this world ever knew"—his peculiar way of describing the superiority of his teaching to that of the Greek masters like Plato and Aristotle. But the civilised world—the orbis terrarum of the nineteenth century—holds with Socrates that the moral law is supreme over gods and men, and believes that Mill and Carlyle are safer guides when they teach, that no less than the best moral emotion discoverable in man may be ascribed to the God of men. "Depend upon it," says the great man of his hero, Frederick the Great, "it is flatly inconceivable that moral emotion could have been put into him by an entity which had none of its own."

Meanwhile, if the universe be good at heart, if reason be indeed its soul, the tendencies of modern thought must be leading mankind to some predestined end. The movements known to history as the Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march. To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions are subjected to so minute and pitiless an analysis; when every dogma of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its undeveloped stages; to-day, when, in spite of the destructive work being done, a reverence and a true zeal for truth reigns as it never did before in this world's history, when the sense of the responsibility and solemnity of life weighs upon men so profoundly, there must, I say, be some goal towards which humanity is moving, there must be some synthesis which shall reconcile for them their aspirations and their knowledge, some harmony which shall resolve the discordant notes of life—in a word, there must be some

Far-off, Divine event Towards which the whole creation moves.

What is that event? Unless a man is prepared to say that the present chaotic condition of religious thought is to perpetuate itself, or that we are to revert to the ideal of mediaevalism—a world iron-bound by the dogmatism of self-appointed representatives of "all truth,"—or unless we are to expect a mental paralysis consequent upon a universal scepticism, there must be some definite bourne for which the forces now at work in humanity are making. We are not able to believe in the perpetuity of an unstable equilibrium in the world of mind any more than in the universe of matter, nor does history show any warrant for the expectation that the world will return to the discarded ideal of a mediaeval theocracy, nor does the language of modern agnosticism, with its hesitations and falterings, encourage one to believe that therein is a solution, complete and final, of those obstinate questionings which beset us. No; we believe with Kant in the indestructibility of the religious sentiment. We hold that if the soul of man have not whereon to feed, it will feed upon itself to its own destruction. We are persuaded that the Infinite which is necessary to explain the finite, is alone adequate to satisfy its desires. Our faith is in a "religion within the boundaries of mere reason".

In the first place, its beliefs are the one element of truth in all the "little systems" of this and of all time. It is here they touch the confines of the eternal. It is in this centre of changeless truth that all their wandering, broken lights do meet. This is the one reality behind the phantoms and phenomena wherewith they have been perplexing and confusing man's thoughts; it is at the same time the great ideal, the passion for which is the star of life.

What a majestic source of unity is there here! The soul positively thrills at the thought of the boundless possibilities of good which centre in this conception of religion. That which the faiths of the world aspired to do, might hope to become an accomplished fact did their votaries believe with Shelley that only

The One remains, the many change and pass;

did they obey the ancient prophet's command, "Depart from your idols". For what are all the current creeds and orthodoxies of every age and land but so many "idols of the market place," veritable simulacra or images of something ineffable, beyond the power of man's mind to completely conceive, or of his stammering tongue to utter? They served their purpose in the childhood of humanity, they were schoolmasters to train it to higher things, tabernacles of skins wherein to enshrine the Holy of Holies in rude and uncultured times. But now that humanity is reaching the full stature of its manhood, is it not time to preach from the house-tops what philosophers have been thinking ever since the emancipation of European intellect, aye and before it too, in the great Moorish schools, which sprung up before the scholasticism of the middle ages? Is it not time that intelligent clergymen of every school in Christendom should openly declare in their pulpits what they think, believe and discuss in the privacies of their studies?

If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a great reality, one of "the many which change and pass," a spot in boundless space, "a chapel in the infinite".

For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins discord—sure sign of error—the confusion and strife of tongues, the jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously reaching—

Tendentes manus ripae ulterioris amore?

And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being who "is for ever reason".

But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology. And then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about explaining how that the "God of knowledge" [1] has much in common with their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of infallible texts and articles of religion, a modus vivendi may be arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on at every Church Congress—men who know in their hearts that the "inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly, irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings, glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".

Science and religion, we protest, need no reconciliation, for they never were at war. Not religion, but pseudo-philosophy and so-called theology—this it is to which science is an implacable and irreconcilable foe. And she will never cease from her determined opposition until the ecclesiastical idol vacates the very last niche it occupies in its "chapel," clothes itself with the white robe of contrition, and sits humbly upon the stool of repentance awaiting a scientific absolution.

For us, such reconciliation is an unmeaning phrase. We never professed to follow aught but reason's kindly light, for that we know to be the Divine Light in us. And, therefore, all that comes to us in reason's name, comes accredited, as though from the innermost court of the Great Presence itself. We discard nothing but what offends reason and its ascertained laws; we bring everything before its bar. Science is to us a Divine revelation, its teachings are among our inspired literature. No need therefore of reconciliation between religion and science when we resolve both, as in a final synthesis, into the root fact of all this wondrous universe—eternal reason. And because of this, a faith such as ours is part of the order of imperishable realities, for the kingdom of reason, like the throne of the Eternal, is for ever and ever.



[1] Deus Scientiarum Dominus.



XVII.

"THE OVER-SOUL."

The most serious errors in the philosophical and religious domains are generally found to be nothing but the exaggeration, or the minimising, of a truth, very much as evil, physical and moral, is often the privation of a corresponding good, the absence of something which ought to be present. Year by year the vast majority of religionists in this Western world are seriously engaged in the commemoration of a transcendent mystery, the humanisation, or incarnation, of the Deity in the person of the Prophet of Nazara. As might be expected, the upholders of this belief are by no means all agreed as to the manner in which this momentous event came about, and, while there are many prepared to speak of "Our Lord Jesus Christ"—and we certainly feel no difficulty in so speaking of an elevated and saintly spirit such as he—all are not prepared to subscribe to the precise formulation of the mystery as given in an Athanasian creed, or a homily of a fourth century father. Beyond admitting in a general and rather vague way that Jesus is "Divine," many people are not prepared to go. They would shrink from saying that he was the Infinite and Eternal, from whom all things derive their being; they see no necessity for believing in the story of his miracles, or the legendary account of his appearance in this world; above all, his virginal conception and birth they often repudiate in terms. They are coming to see—these open-minded men and women of the Anglican body—that the pre-eminence of Jesus must rest, not upon miracles, but on morals; that it is not his mystic offices, but his moral grandeur, which makes him to be so great a figure in history. In a word, that it is not his miracles which prove his teaching, but his teaching must authenticate his miracles.

Now, all this is, of course, very hopeful, and makes directly for that reconstruction of religion on an ethical basis which we conceive it our duty to press upon the attention of our age. Venerable to us is the memory and teaching of the last of the noble line of Jewish seers. Not one of the masters of the Church ethical, whom we obediently follow, but has exhausted, one might say, the possibilities of speech in their reverence and admiration for the great spirit of Jesus. When Immanuel Kant published the Critique of the Practical Reason, old men and thinkers of the Fatherland were moved to tears at the thought that the great deliverance had come at last, that a man had at length arisen who had penetrated to the core the significance of the great prophet's teaching. The only true commentator on Jesus and his religion is Immanuel Kant. Heretofore, men have followed Paul, Athanasius and Augustine; it is high time the ethics of Kant were substituted in colleges and seminaries of the clergy, and our ministers of religion taught to interpret the Gospel from the standpoint of the moral law instead of the imaginary dogmatics of Paul, and the dialectics of Athanasius and Augustine.

But the doctrine of incarnation unquestionably embodies a great element of truth, which it were our very serious loss to overlook. It supplies us with an admirable illustration of what was asserted in the beginning, namely, that an error is but a truth misstated, either by excess or defect. The Christian, or rather the ancient, orthodox presentation of the dogma errs in both ways. By excess, because it proclaims a man to be the personal Deity, that the flesh and blood of a mortal being is adorable, as is the highest Being, with the supreme offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the pronoun "I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself, unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically assert that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him," says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of God, as many as believe in his name."

This account of the matter we conceive to be immeasurably below the truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being, owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam; but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters, the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the "Over-soul," associated, as far as this expression goes, with the name of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.

We are all incarnations, flesh-takings, of the infinite. Not only so, but the very unconscious universe, the silent, but ever-living nature is but the garment which clothes the Invisible, and in clothing reveals him; the beauty of nature is the veil, growing slenderer with every fresh access of knowledge, which scarce conceals the Great Presence. Vanini was thrust into the dungeons of the Inquisition at Naples on a charge of atheism. "Atheism!" contemptuously retorted the wretched captive, "I could prove God from that straw," picking up with his feet a fragment of the bed on which he lay in fetters. For the universal Life was in the straw. The life in that slender ear is one with the mighty pulsations of the ocean, the growth of the forest, and of the world of men, and the illimitable stars beyond. The being is one, the life is one, and above all, the mind, the exclusive endowment of man, is one too—one in us, one in the Supreme; we share it, for "we also are his offspring". There is only one Soul—the Divine, and the souls of the sons of men are, not so much images of that, made in its likeness, as it itself, in essence one, yet, participately, in every human being. "I have said, ye are gods, and sons of the Most High, every one," quoted Jesus with approval. So says Emerson, and this is his doctrine of the "Over-soul".

After thus indicating in general outline the essential features of this culminating teaching of ethical religion, it may be well to trace its historical development. It will be found to be, not an original speculation of our own teacher, but a precious belief held by elect souls in all ages to embody the truth of the relations between what is called the Divine and the human. I say "called" because this doctrine annihilates the distinction. As the electricity in the atmosphere may annihilate space by enabling us to flash a thought instantaneously even to a world whose distance is measured in millions of miles, so does this sublime conception of the great Oneness shatter the foundations on which all outside redemptions, priests, sacrifices, formalisms, rituals, sacraments, devilry, hell fire, and the rest repose, by showing every man that he is his own priest and sacrificer. No anointing or ordering can make him more than he is in himself (not through Christ or any man), the true-born son of God, one in nature with whatsoever is Highest in existence. Boldly does Emerson fling out his challenge—

Draw it thou canst the mystic line, Rightly severing his from thine, Which is human, which Divine.

We cannot. In our innermost selves we are Divine. We may say with Emerson, on the heights of the holy mount, when we have by long thought realised the truth, and by living the life which is alone worthy of such a conception, "I the imperfect adore my own Perfect". We seek to pray, we would fain worship. Then look no more into the skies; there is nought but vapour there and the silent worlds that shine eternally. Look not in the churches and the temples, for they are made by men's hands, empty of the Divine Presence as a mausoleum is of life. Let us look into ourselves for the true Shekinah, the true manifestation of the Divine, nay, the truly Divine is there. The Good in man, that is God; that alone is worthy of our adoration and our love.

I do not think it can be questioned that this is a noble conception of man and God and their mutual relations, and as far as one can judge of the trend of modern thought, it would appear that only on some such grounds is the intelligence of the age prepared to recognise theism as a possible belief. The conception of the Deity as a Being anterior to creation in existence, eternally dissevered from it in being, an external object, so to speak, of admiration, reverence and fear, seems incomprehensible to the modern mind. It certainly did to the whole idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England. The "immeasurable clergyman" [2] view of the Deity, seated somewhere in the skies, and listening all day and night to the Hallelujah Chorus, is now wholly and absolutely impossible outside little Bethel and Bibliolatry.

But the truth must be confessed that in refusing to acknowledge what one may call an outside deity, an "absentee god," who pays periodical visits to his creation and acts only at the instant request of prayer, we are reverting to religious ideals that had their home in the land of the Indus and the Ganges, a thousand years before Christianity was heard of. It is the knowledge of this fact that fills one with stupefaction when we think of Exeter Hall and the type of Christian missioner who goes out to assail the venerable beliefs of Hindooism, when our cultivated men, our Emersons, Coleridges, Carlyles and Wordsworths, are positively reverting to the ideals of ancient India. The doctrine of the Over-soul, essentially shared in by all men; the belief that man is not in name, but in reality, not through the vicarious intercessions of another, but by his own nature, a Divine son, is in essence a form of Hindoo thought, and the recent translations of their sacred books enable us to read that truth there.

The Jewish conception of the Deity was utterly opposed to this. In that theology the Supreme Being was ever transcendent, and probably Jesus, a son of Israel, was not greatly removed from this belief. "Salvation is of the Jews," he proclaimed. Certainly there are no indications in the three earlier gospels of any such teaching as that of Emerson, though it is found, in suggestion at least, in the fourth gospel. Christ is made to say in one of those lengthy speeches at the close of the book, "If any man will keep my words, I will come to him and my Father will come to him, and we will take up our abode with him;" and again, "I and the Father are one". Here is a suggestion, faint enough, of the teaching that the Divine is present in the hearts of the just, of the ethically good, but there is a world of difference between that and the essential Divinity of every human soul, because part of the Over-soul, which is one in all men. No; Jesus was a son of Israel, and his ideals were those of his race. The few words quoted from the fourth gospel are in the spirit of the larger belief, but they are Neo-Platonic in their origin, as is the whole Johannine gospel, and cannot be taken as fairly representing the mind of the greatest of the Jewish seers. If we would see the Eastern teaching in the West, we must search, not the Old or New Testament, but the pages of the Alexandrian School, of Philo, and above all, of Plotinus, who believed that the supreme truths were learnt, not by study, nor by revelation from without, but in an ecstasy of the soul, losing itself in the contemplation of the Divine—in the "flight of the alone to the Alone".

Now, that which Plotinus considered an extraordinary occurrence, an experience perhaps only possible to elect spirits, men at length began to look upon as the truth of the normal relations between their Maker and themselves. Of course, so stupendous a change took centuries in evolution, and, naturally, the Christian Church and its clergymen gave it no sort of encouragement. It would never do to preach abroad that every man was his own priest, and so we wade through the whole of mediaevalism without finding any recognition of the great teaching. It is only when we are in the comparatively modern epoch of the fourteenth century that we find it in Eckhart, the German mystic. "There is," he writes, "something in the soul which is above the soul. . . . It is absolute and free from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, for in these there is distinction. . . . I have called it a power, sometimes a light. . . . This light is satisfied only with the super-essential essence." It is ever entering "into that unity where no man dwelleth," where there are no distinctions, "neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost". It is the plain of the Great Silence, the centre of the immovable peace, an Inner Sea whose still waters are nevertheless bounded by no shores. It is the sense, rather it is the reality, of the Infinite in man, that of which all seers have dreamed under many diverse forms. I take it to be the Nirvana of Buddha, the eternal silence that follows when the last of the avenues of sense has been passed, and the soul enters at length into the possession of itself, that is, into the recognition of its infinitude. It is what Jesus means when he speaks of the faithful ones—they who have endured even to the end—entering "into the joy of their Lord". It is the apostle's unspeakable peace, "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding".

Another of the school of Eckhart, Tauler, gives his own experience, and it is not dissimilar. He finds his soul "so grounded in God that it is dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature". No man, he says, can distinguish between the sunshine and the air. How much less the light of the created and the uncreated Spirit! We are lost in the abyss which is our source. "From the place whence the rivers of waters go forth, thither do they return." [3] Those words always haunt one with a sense of the mysterious. They seem to say that the beginning and the end of all are the same—the abyss of the Infinite. Emerson believes that man came forth thence, is there now, and abides there for ever. And surely Tennyson's lines must occur to the memory of every one:—

When that which drew from out the boundless deep, Turns again home.

To begin to think at all, is to be brought, at length, to thoughts such as these—the thought of the Inner Sea, on whose still and boundless waters all is silence, peace, God.

After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of professional divines, or the denizens of the cloister, but in the philosophy of modern Germany. Schelling carries it still farther by pronouncing that there is but one reason, one mind, the human and the Divine being identical. The lines of Paracelsus are inevitably suggested:—

O God, Thou art Mind! Crush not my mind, O God!

Fichte, in his Characteristics of the Present Age, pronounces the individual to be but "a single ray of the one universal and necessary thought". "There is but One Life, one animating power, one Living Reason . . . of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a modification, definition, variety and form." And, finally, he goes so far as to say that it is only by, and to, mere earthly and finite perception, that this one and homogeneous life of reason is broken up and divided into separate individual persons. What a piercing thought! Surely it is almost past believing that the eternal Life is itself in us, nay, that it is we; that in very literal truth we may say, "I and the Infinite are One". Only one who could speak in tongues of men and angels is fit to hold discourse on thoughts so sublime, but it is difficult to discern a flaw in the arguments of these prophetic souls who have dared to believe and to preach to men, "Ye are gods, and sons of the Most High, every one".

It is a doctrine we learn only from the new masters. Nothing half so fair, so radiant, did we hear in days of old, so rich in promise, so full of inspiration and helpfulness. "You are an adopted son of God," it was said. There is but one natural son, the Messiah and Logos, Jesus Christ. Through him alone we have access to the Divine, apart from him we are children of wrath; only in him are we "light in the Lord". "He that believeth not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth with him." To this hour do they say these things, but we who have been privileged to hear wiser words, diviner voices, know that nothing can come between our lonely spirits and the Great Alone—no Church, no Book, no Messiah, or Saviour. We are greater than all that, for the eternal soul of man is within us, heir-at-law divine of the promises, and in its own right a natural son of God.

But to continue. The scattered rays of this wonderful gospel are focussed in the transcendental teaching of the last of the ethical prophets, Waldo Emerson. In him the truth shines forth as the sun. We have seen the germ of the doctrine in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mystics, its resurrection in the noble school of German idealism which grew out of the teaching of the great master himself, Immanuel Kant. The man who introduced it to England, the link, so to speak, between Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Emerson, was Coleridge, for whom there is but one reason, shared in by all intelligent beings, which is in itself the universal soul. To this profoundly reverent thinker reason is not a faculty, much less a property of the human mind. Man cannot be said so much to possess reason as to partake of it. He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in the canopy of heaven.

Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is one and identical in all men, even as the sun in the high heavens is one and the same for every dweller in the solar system. Yea, more than this, we cannot shrink from the consequences of our affirmation, the mind in man is not conceivably other than the Mind which is self-subsistent and infinite. After what manner shall we conceive of the intelligence which laid down the foundations of the world, traced the pathway of the stars, fixed the laws which nature has immutably obeyed from the eternal past even to this hour, if we conceive it not after the manner of the mind in us which has at length discovered these laws? How can we hold one intelligence to know and another to originate them? As truth is one and identical for all minds, so must be the intelligences which know and originate that truth. Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes—a bald contradiction in terms. It affects to be unable to discern Mind in the cosmos when it is exercising that very mind in formulating its doubts. It is as though a man should go hunting his house for a light with a candle burning in his hand. What on earth can we be searching for when the "candle of the Lord," as Locke called it, is the very illuminant we must employ in our search? "Tell me," Emerson would ask, "the truths your sciences establish, the principle of your philosophies, are they valid for all intelligences or only some?" Surely, for all intelligences, you will reply. "Then, I will urge, these truths must be one and identical if all intelligences admit them." Certainly. "How, then, can there be any doubt but that intelligence itself, mind itself, is one and identic in all men, since all think alike of the cosmos, and one and identic also in that everlasting Cause of the cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?"

Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, but we are he, we are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the light in man, the good in man is God.

Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot be found within himself.

He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in the skies—it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful profanities upon the canvases of our artists—nor will he need that his soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds" with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now that there is no God anywhere who is not within him. He will need no Chrishna, Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering humanity is ever with us, the repression of the flesh is an unceasing sacrifice which we offer up in the temple of our bodies out of reverence for the Divinity within them.



NOTE.—The best account of Emerson's ethical and speculative teaching is to be found in Cooke's Life of Emerson, obtainable through Green & Co., Essex Hall, Strand. I am indebted to it for much of the expository portion of this chapter.



[1] The fact that Petavius, a Jesuit theologian, felt it his duty to condemn several ante-Nicene writers as heretical, though honest, offenders against orthodoxy, is evidence enough that Athanasianism is a spurious development unknown to the earlier ages.

[2] Tennyson's description of the "average Englishman's" theology.

[3] Ecclesiastes i. 7.

[4] And, we add, for ninety-nine out of every hundred philosophers of repute.

THE END