Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
cio che per l'universo si squaderna.
_Dante._
For the Christian the barrier that finally checks the advance of life is
not death but a self-concentrated self. It is freedom misused and lost,
freedom turning against the life that has striven to bring it to birth.
Perversity builds that barrier and human life cannot pass it or—shall we
not say with the Christian?—God cannot pass it. This alone thwarts the
divine purpose for man and brings about the 'second' and only true
death.
We have nothing to urge against this teaching of religion; we see the
second death beginning in every man who is perverting freedom from its
life-furthering office. We see in him that which he seems to have being
taken away. Moreover, we are prepared to believe that the first death,
willingly accepted (as we have also seen) as an element in purposive and
potent life, is but the gate through which men pass to more of life. We
may have our moments of doubt, because we cannot see with our eyes the
other side of that gate, and the sense-habit is strong within us; but
reason demands, as the Christian religion declares, that life that is
growing here and is big with promise unfulfilled shall go on there.
The Christian seems to know much of the other side of that gate that
other people do not know. He talks of heaven, of paradise, of hell. We
understand him when he talks of hell; there is so much evidence of that
here and now. But we are less clear about his paradise, less clear still
about his heaven. What does he really mean when he speaks, all too
positively and definitely (we think), about these two?
Undoubtedly most Christians have meant a good many things at which not a
few of them will smile now. They have meant things that were certainly
not of the mind of Christ, but of the unilluminated and uncriticizing
and biased minds of other men. Sometimes they have pictured a man who
is, even to our eyes, a mere beginner in the divine art of life,
plunged, as it were, into a very sea of God, sent with all his mere
beginnings to live as he may amid God's unveiled glories. That is not a
picture which instructed and enlightened Christians favour now. Our
friend to whom we so constantly appeal will tell us of Paradise, where
Jesus and the thief were to meet together. He will speak of
'intermediate' purifying and enriching states through which the beginner
passes, learning his art of life. He will assure us that he knows of
very few who even to his poor vision seem fit to 'go to heaven,' fit,
that is, to endure the full glory of beauty and holiness and truth
resplendent and realized in the 'beatific vision' of God. And in this he
commends himself. He is an evolutionist of the coming worlds, this
believer in an advance through them towards the splendours of the City
of God. And after all he has the collective voice of Christendom
speaking with him. Only a minority of Christians from the beginning
until now have not been evolutionists of the worlds to come.
No doubt the Christian arranges his pictorial conceptions of those
worlds too systematically, and marks off grades as life never does. But
in the main life has kept its hold upon him and he has been unable not
to see that it must go on, move, change, grow, on the far side of death.
We have no quarrel with his principle in this regard, though we may
contest the mechanical fashion in which, not rarely, he applies it. And
when he speaks of the 'beatific vision' of the City of God, our hearts
are stirred in response. We too seek a 'continuing city' of life in its
grandeur. We, too, see the promise of that city here, even in the very
failures of our own. And when the Christian tells us of his Lord's
Prayer—Thy kingdom come, as it is in heaven, we feel that heaven is not
alien from us or from our desires and our hopes. If heaven is indeed the
crown and consummation of personal and social life on earth, then it is
to heaven we ourselves are looking forward, looking, fearing, longing.
We, too, have our vision of a kingdom where love shall be the king, and
self-seeking, with all its dreadful consequences, be done away. We can
see it is this that ruins our cities of earth, this alone. And where
this is not, there indeed will be our kingdom come, as well as God's.
An Eastern's imagination may depict the 'holy city, the new Jerusalem,'
in her 'light,' as 'pure gold, like unto clear glass'; he may exhaust
that imagination in details of chalcedony and emerald and pearl; that is
his way. But when he says that 'the nations of them which are saved
shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their
glory and honour into it,' he gives speech to our mind through his. For
this, this, is the 'goal of human endeavour' for us. We have watched the
advance of life towards our own cities and in turn watching them have
discovered what they lack and what, in their poverty of attainment and
abundant promise, they foretell if life goes on beyond the gates of
death. So, sharing the Christian's faith that indeed it does, we share
his vision.
Only as a social being is any man a man at all. Only when the promise of
other men is fulfilled, is his promise fulfilled. No man (we see that
plainly) can be 'saved' alone; he must be saved in his nations, by true
community in a life grown to be harmonious with life everywhere, in and
with the source of all life. Only in God can any man fulfil his destiny
as a man among men who must be one with them if he is not to 'perish
everlastingly.' We and the Christian agree—once we see what he means and
he sees what we mean. And it is through Jesus Christ that we discover
the meaning of the Christian. We may, perhaps, not unsuitably, urge him
to try to discover ours in the same way. For it is only when he has
wandered from the side of Christ and forgotten or misinterpreted the
mind of Christ that there is trouble between us.
It is easy to forget and misinterpret, very easy to substitute for
divine spirit and life and the divine 'word,' a machinery of logic or
tradition or institutional arrangement. But it is destructive of the
possibility of mutual understanding between us. Again, we must urge, it
is machine-like scheming that divides, not real religion or knowledge of
life. 'Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your
tradition' is a prophet's saying of the widest application in the
affairs of men. But when we recognize this, even on one side only of a
dividing line, the process of correction has begun. And as a matter of
fact there is recognition now on both sides, and day by day it extends
itself and its influence. Science and philosophy and religion are met
together as they have never in the history of the world been met before,
open-eyed, conscious of the common heritage of training in the battle of
the world and in the struggles of practical life, which has biased every
one of us and been the chief agent in turning the common search after
truth by men of good will into a war of opinions.
To confess that we are all, in so far as we are honest seekers,
'builders of Jerusalem' after our own manner and degree, is the first
and perhaps the hardest step to take towards full co-operation between
us. What children we are, that we do not know it! Yet, in truth, we
cannot know it until on both sides we give up the fond belief, the
delusion, that we are not seekers but have either attained or received,
either attained the full truth of the world and ourselves by knowledge,
or received it through an external and externally given revelation. Once
we know that we are all pilgrims and that the divine city lies ahead for
every one of us, both in knowledge and in life, we may travel together.
With the Christian we may work for the divine kingdom. We share his
belief and his trust in the omnipotence of redeeming love. Nothing, we
see, can redeem this earth but love. There is love to be seen faintly,
amid dark and conflicting shadows, in the biologist's picture of a
world-Eden, where it is after all and in spite of all 'creation's final
law.' But the fulness of its glory is unveiled only in the love of
Christ, passing our knowledge.
'Conceiving our life in this manner, the material evolution of the
world becomes the incarnation and the expression of a spiritual meaning,
of a divine event which is actually in process of coming to pass. No
longer, for example, do we think of the earth's movement round the sun
as a meaningless rotation: we think of it as preparing the conditions
which enable life to rise to its sublimest height, we see the whole
creation saturated in sunlight. Not in vain are the heavens starred with
innumerable fires. They speak to us of worlds to which they give life
and being, warming them with their heat, brightening them with their
beams. And the end to which all these lives are moving, of every flower
that blooms, of every bird that sings, is also the central principle of
the entire evolution of the universe—the embodied Word of God. For the
purpose of the whole is nothing other than the incarnation of the
divine, the participation of the created in the eternal life of the
uncreated, of which the God-man is the perfect revelation.... If God be
indeed the end of all existence, he must needs fill all things with his
being. If God is love, his arms are round the entire universe, and there
is no creature anywhere unloved by him.'
PRINCE EUGENE TROUBETZKOY.
APPENDIX
BOOKS ON THE SUBJECTS OF PART I.
B. MOORE. _The Origin and Nature of Life._ (Home University Library).
J. A. THOMSON and P. GEDDES. _Evolution._ (Home University Library).
A. R. HINKS. _Astronomy._ (Home University Library).
R. MELDOLA. _Chemistry._ (Home University Library).
J. WARD. _Heredity and Memory._
OLIVER LODGE. _The Ether of Space._
A. RUHE and N. M. PAUL. _Henri Bergson; An Account of his Life and
Philosophy._
SAMUEL BUTLER. _Life and Habit._
H. BERGSON. _Time and Freewill._
H. BERGSON. _Matter and Memory._
H. BERGSON. _Creative Evolution._
J. WARD. _The Realm of Ends._
H. DRIESCH. _The Science and Philosophy of the Organism._
W. JAMES. _Principles of Psychology._
E. S. RUSSELL. _Form and Function._
A. D. DARBISHIRE. _An Introduction to a Biology._
J. S. HALDANE. _Organism and Environment._
BOOKS ON THE SUBJECTS OF PART II.
T. R. GLOVER. _The Jesus of History._
A. CLUTTON-BROCK. _The Ultimate Belief._
A. CLUTTON-BROCK. _What is the Kingdom of Heaven?_
W. S. PALMER. _Providence and Faith._
W. S. PALMER. _The Ladder of Reality._
WILLIAM LAW. _The Spirit of Love._
WILLIAM LAW. _The Spirit of Prayer._
G. TYRRELL. _Lex Orandi._
G. TYRRELL. _Lex Credendi._ _Faith and Freedom_—(edited by C. H. S.
Matthews).
R. G. COLLINGWOOD. _Religion and Philosophy._
ALEXANDER NAIRNE. _The Epistle of Priesthood._
A. S. PRINGLE-PATTISON. _The Idea of God in the Light of Recent
Philosophy._
FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL. _Eternal Life._
FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL. _The Mystical Element of Religion._
A. C. TURNER. _Faith, Prayer and the World's Order_ (Essay in
_Concerning Prayer_—edited by B. H. Streeter).
_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_.
Transcriber's Notes.
The cover was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public
domain.
The original spelling and punctuation has been retained.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
Italicized words and phrases in the text version are presented by
surrounding the text with underscores.