God is the unknown, and hence the nothing _qua_ us. He is also the
ensemble of all we know, and hence the everything _qua_ us. So that the
most absolute nothing and the most absolute everything are extremes that
meet (like all other extremes) in God.
Men think they mean by God something like what Raffaelle and Michael
Angelo have painted; unless this were so Raffaelle and Michael Angelo
would not have painted as they did. But to get at our truer thoughts we
should look at our less conscious and deliberate utterances. From these
it has been gathered that God is our expression for all forces and powers
which we do not understand, or with which we are unfamiliar, and for the
highest ideal of wisdom, goodness and power which we can conceive, but
for nothing else.
Thus God makes the grass grow because we do not understand how the air
and earth and water near a piece of grass are seized by the grass and
converted into more grass; but God does not mow the grass and make hay of
it. It is Paul and Apollos who plant and water, but God who giveth the
increase. We never say that God does anything which we can do ourselves,
or ask him for anything which we know how to get in any other way. As
soon as we understand a thing we remove it from the sphere of God’s
action.
As long as there is an unknown there will be a God for all practical
purposes; the name of God has never yet been given to a known thing
except by way of flattery, as to Roman Emperors, or through the attempt
to symbolise the unknown generally, as in fetish worship, and then the
priests had to tell the people that there was something more about the
fetish than they knew of, or they would soon have ceased to think of it
as God.
To understand a thing is to feel as though we could stand under or
alongside of it in all its parts and form a picture of it in our minds
throughout. We understand how a violin is made if our minds can follow
the manufacture in all its detail and picture it to ourselves. If we
feel that we can identify ourselves with the steam and machinery of a
steam engine, so as to travel in imagination with the steam through all
the pipes and valves, if we can see the movement of each part of the
piston, connecting rod, &c., so as to be mentally one with both the steam
and the mechanism throughout their whole action and construction, then we
say we understand the steam engine, and the idea of God never crosses our
minds in connection with it.
When we feel that we can neither do a thing ourselves, nor even learn to
do it by reason of its intricacy and difficulty, and that no one else
ever can or will, and yet we see the thing none the less done daily and
hourly all round us, then we are not content to say we do not understand
how the thing is done, we go further and ascribe the action to God. As
soon as there is felt to be an unknown and apparently unknowable element,
then, but not till then, does the idea God present itself to us. So at
coroners’ inquests juries never say the deceased died by the visitation
of God if they know any of the more proximate causes.
It is not God, therefore, who sows the corn—we could sow corn ourselves,
we can see the man with a bag in his hand walking over ploughed fields
and sowing the corn broadcast—but it is God who made the man who goes
about with the bag, and who makes the corn sprout, for we do not follow
the processes that take place here.
As long as we knew nothing about what caused this or that weather we used
to ascribe it to God’s direct action and pray him to change it according
to our wants: now that we know more about the weather there is a growing
disinclination among clergymen to pray for rain or dry weather, while
laymen look to nothing but the barometer. So people do not say God has
shown them this or that when they have just seen it in the newspapers;
they would only say that God had shown it them if it had come into their
heads suddenly and after they had tried long and vainly to get at this
particular point.
To lament that we cannot be more conscious of God and understand him
better is much like lamenting that we are not more conscious of our
circulation and digestion. Provided we live according to familiar laws
of health, the less we think about circulation and digestion the better;
and so with the ordinary rules of good conduct, the less we think about
God the better.
To know God better is only to realise more fully how impossible it is
that we should ever know him at all. I cannot tell which is the more
childish—to deny him, or to attempt to define him.