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speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world. The writer
is chary of assertion or denial in these matters. He believes that
they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation. He
believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions upon these
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of
religion. The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and
exclusively with the God of the Heart. He declares as his own
opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern
thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either
benevolent or malignant towards men. But if the reader believes
that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome
is not very different. For the purposes of human relationship it is
impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as
struggling and takingl,
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the
Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still
our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and
the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect
righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final
personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have
no such appetite for a separate immortality. God is my immortality;
what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no
more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.
H. G. W.
Dunmow,
May, 1917.
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION
1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER
Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be
an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little
while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found
in existence, and already in a state of diffusion. People have
begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there. It is
interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the
consciousness of the Roman world. But when a religion has been
interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the
name and story of a founder. The renascent religion that is now
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins. It
is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has
always been visible to those who had eyes to see. It is perhaps
plainer than it was and to more people—that is all.
It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of
those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of
Christianity. Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley’s, speak of it
as Christianity without Theology. They do not know the creed they
are carrying. It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle
theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great
stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.
One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to
some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather
than a sympathetic coincidence. Of that the reader shall presently
have an opportunity of judging.
This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only
the opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an
extreme neglect of definition. It was not at first anything more
than a sect of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst
the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more
enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in
affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal
mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of
Christianity. Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of
its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had
not defined its God. And even to-day it has to be noted that a
large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds
have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood,
that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the
statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of
both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of
the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all
the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly Arians as
though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to
give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement
possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its
maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the
confusions of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds now,
a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come
to self-consciousness. But it is so coming, and this present book
is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the
various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic
cults amidst which it has appeared.
The writer’s sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that
he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no
pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his
best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the
reader must reckon with this bias. He has found this faith growing
up in himself; he has found it, or something very difficult to
distinguish from it, growing independently in the minds of men and
women he has met. They have been people of very various origins;
English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians, French, people brought up in
a “Catholic atmosphere,” Positivists, Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans.
Their diversity of source is as remarkable as their convergence of
tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon parallel lines has
come out to the same light. The new teaching is also traceable in
many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be heard
from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.
2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and
any recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or
unknowingly, it worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is
fairly confronted with the plain questions of the case, the vague
identifications that are still carelessly made with one or all of
the persons of the Trinity dissolve away. He will admit that his
God is neither all-wise, nor all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he
is neither the maker of heaven nor earth, and that he has little to
identify him with that hereditary God of the Jews who became the
“Father” in the Christian system. On the other hand he will assert
that his God is a god of salvation, that he is a spirit, a person, a
strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human soul. He
will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a close
resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
“Christ.” …
The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon
any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that
sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence
of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.
For the True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very
antithesis of that bickering monopolist who “will have none other
gods but Me”; and when a human heart cries out—to what name it
matters not—for a larger spirit and a stronger help than the
visible things of life can give, straightway the nameless Helper is
with it and the God of Man answers to the call. The True God has no
scorn nor hate for those who have accepted the many-handed symbols
of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China. Where there is faith,
where there is need, there is the True God ready to clasp the hands
that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness behind the ivory
and gold.
The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think
clearly among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above
everything else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have
characteristics, to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being,
not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that
means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside
it. And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays
sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes. Our
practice with God is better than our theory. None of us really pray
to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the
wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria
declared to be God. We pray to one single understanding person.
But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck
their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was
no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full
of magical terror, and few religious people have thought it worth
while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction. The
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the
comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to
the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the
official creed. But one magnificent protest against this
theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious
man, the cold superb humour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at
first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint
Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original
intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.
The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing
to its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become
least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new
believers are very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the
nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has
grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the
Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant. But that God trails with
him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations; his alleged
infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his
vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even make a
caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different and
antagonistic figure.
It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has
led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite
qualities for their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the
mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic
dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas
within which they thought. Many of these makers of Christianity,
like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his
election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church
from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and
personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the
struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs
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