The imagination that the Christian God is a Personality like ourselves,
and is to be found only above and beyond the world, finds perhaps its
strangest expression in some of the writings of that ardent lover of
Nature, the late Richard Jefferies. 'I cease,' so he writes in _The
Story of my Heart_, 'to look for traces of the Deity in life, because
no such traces exist. I conclude that there is an existence, a
something higher than soul, higher, better, and more perfect than
deity. Earnestly I pray to find this something better than a god.
There is something superior, higher, more good. For this I search,
labour, {74} think, and pray.... With the whole force of my existence,
with the whole force of my thought, mind, and soul, I pray to find this
Highest Soul, this greater than deity, this better than God. Give me
to live the deepest soul-life now and always with this soul. For want
of words I write soul, but I think it is something beyond soul.' Could
anything be more pathetic or, at the same time, more self-refuting?
How can anything be greater than the Infinite, more enduring than the
Eternal, better than the All-Pure and All-Perfect? It could be only
the God of unenlightened, unchristian teaching, Whom he rejected. The
God Whom he sought must be not only in but beyond and above all created
or developed things. It was, indeed, the Higher than the Highest that
he worshipped. It was for God, for the Living God, that his eager soul
was athirst, and it is in God, the Living God, that his eager soul is
now, we humbly trust, for ever satisfied.
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