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tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a
time-worn immortal. Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the
prime of their vigour. These are gods after the ancient habit of
the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and
reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out
of Fate,—
“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe.”
But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but
our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure
of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his
strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time,
eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that
was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean,
discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his
lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before
him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting
the rising sun. Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks
and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him. There
should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and
blades of the turf at his feet… .
4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE
One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most
trite and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that
deserves careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used;
there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a
multitude of loves of different colours and values. There is the
love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there
is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife,
there is illicit love and the love one bears one’s home or one’s
country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and
love which is a passion of jealousy. Love is frequently a mere
blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it
may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor
generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive
craving of a man for another man’s wife may be made out to be a
light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts
of love that people will call “true love,” there is something of
that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential
quality of the knowledge of God.
Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the
windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is
the open door by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor
disappoints, nor betrays.
The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced
trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love
of God. The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a
climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be
satiated or fatigued. But the latter is far more like the love of
comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and
been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and
forgiven, and come to a complete and generous fellowship. There is
a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on
battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who
have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave
and tender things for one another, though but recently they have
been trying to kill each other. There is often a pure exaltation of
feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great
stress. These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to
what we mean when we speak of the love of God.
That is man’s love of God, but there is also something else; there
is the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this
is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love
of a woman for her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men;
God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who
are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet
whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere love. The
spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily
death… .
And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach
him. He has need of us as we of him. He desires us and desires to
make himself known to us. When at last the individual breaks
through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that
moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man. He
has won us from his enemy. We come staggering through into the
golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth,
until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.
THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS
1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST
It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to
drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God,
the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth
bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.
It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme
instability of absolute negation.
Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who
was a very typical antagonist of all religion. He died only the
other day. He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man
almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin. A
decade or more ago he wrote a book called “The Nature of Man,” in
which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about
life. They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our
discussion of sin, they will be referred to again. But it is not
Professor Metchnikoff’s intention to provide material for a
religious discussion. He sets out his facts in order to overthrow
theology as he conceives it. The remarkable thing about his book,
the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no
inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive
theology as he conceives it. The development of his science has
destroyed that right.
He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our
ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology
is modified through these changes. When he comes from his own world
of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.
He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with
it fifty years or more ago.
Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes
that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the
general scheme and method of our thinking.
The influence of biology upon thought in general consists
essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and
developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of
super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual,
maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death
of its constituent individuals. Natural History, which began by
putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere
classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its
adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and
importance the individual adventure. “The Origin of Species” was
for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.
The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be
stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we
current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us
distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and
so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an
ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our
individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other
individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants. But the
species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to
newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life
is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble
of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is
still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions
under which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit
of adjustment, and the “ills of life,” of the individual life that
is, are due to its “disharmonies.” Man, acutely aware of himself as
an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species,
finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He
fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph
of his kind. He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of
victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal
extinction.
Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is
confused with priestcraft and dogmas, is associated with
disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and
misguidance. How completely he misconceives the quality of
religion, how completely he sees it as an individual’s affair, his
own words may witness:
“Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The
solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as
satisfactory. A future life has no single argument to support it,
and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the
whole range of human knowledge. On the other hand, resignation as
preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a
longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the
inevitability of death.”
Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death,
and by a future life the prolongation of individuality. But
Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with
that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that
preoccupation with the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from
“preaching resignation” to death, seeks as its greater good a death
so complete as to be absolute release from the individual’s burthen
of KARMA. Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.
The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it
approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and
over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor
Metchnikoff’s assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to lose
one’s self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that
this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the
religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if
they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it
is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape
from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is
the ultimate of religion.
At times, indeed, he seems almost
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