immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that
to assert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit
its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the
conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is
utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its
essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of
self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all
considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a
brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is
sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they
endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the
honorific title of _person_. Man is a _person_, because a subsistent,
self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. _A
fortiori_ is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not
self-sufficing, then nothing or nobody is. Hence we have to point out
in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so
far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality,
the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a
person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute
self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the
omnipresence of the Divine, because--
In my flesh his spirit doth flow
Too near, too far for me to know;
because, to use Emerson's language, "God appears with all his parts in
every moss and every cobweb," or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to
identically the same thing, "All the forces operative in the universe
are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite
Energy"--because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the
Infinite, with no detriment to its immanence, since of no other being
could they by any possibility be true. Theist or pantheist, it matters
very little by what name men call themselves so long as they do not
imprison themselves within the walls of the false version of the
philosophy of relativity, which binds them over to acknowledge nothing
beyond their five external senses, to identify the unseen with the
unknown, and thereby to stunt and ultimately to atrophy the sublime
powers, transcending the insignificant senses we share with the animal
world, as the sky towers above earth, whereby this noble poem of the
"Unknown God" was given us by William Watson.
And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do
not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only
rightful basis of religious idealism.
In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the
voice of the senses is still, that we "gain a sense of God" at all. It
is a vision of the mind--of mind knowing Mind, of soul transcending all
distinctions and recognising itself. It is the sublime region of the
higher unity into which subject and object are taken up and their
distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the
awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with
a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises
that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something
more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all
this majestic vision rose.
When, overarched by gorgeous night,
I wave my trivial self away;
When all I was to all men's sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God.
But of what God? for there are gods many and lords many. There is the
known God, of whom the Western world has heard so much now these two
thousand years, the God of the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures,
themselves acclaimed as his unique and authentic revelation, the
embodiment of absolute truth. That God has not been forgotten yet.
Just now his temple is thronged with worshippers.[1] Ministers of
religions in America, archbishops in Spain, are eager in their
invocations, and if we may believe our newspapers, the Cardinal of
Madrid guaranteed the harmlessness of American cannon and rifles to
those who will implore his assistance through the intercession of
saints. It is the war-cry of old: "_The Lord is a Man of War!_"
But the moral sense, the Divinity within, as contrasted with the
Divinity in the skies, tells the poet that this old-world god is an
idol, a glorified image of man in his "violent youth," a "giant shadow
hailed Divine".
Not him that with fantastic boasts
A sombre people dreamed they knew;
The mere barbaric God of Hosts
That edged their sword and braced their thew:
A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm
Of neighbour gods less vast of arm.
He is well known, this "God of Hosts". Doubtless once he was the
Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently
transformed into the god of battles, who ranged himself on the side of
his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even
knavery, the god of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line,
of him who afterwards was preached as the god of devil and hell. What
has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?--
A God like some imperious King,
Wroth, were his realm not duly awed;
A God for ever hearkening
Unto his self-commanded laud;
A God for ever jealous grown
Of carven wood and graven stone.
No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers
appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emancipation of the
Western world from its degrading belief in a "God of Hosts". It is
only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here
and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the
"sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to
eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the
emancipation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance
of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that
famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds
that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about
an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature,
together with an equally painstaking research into the history of
kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root
doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion--the absolute and unlimited
sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of
morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial
religion an impossibility to all who are at pains to inform themselves
of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that--
God whose ghost in arch and aisle
Yet haunts his temple--and his tomb;
And follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom;
A God of kindred seed and line;
Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.
And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to
music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the
Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right
to sit in judgment on an idol-god such as this!
O streaming worlds, O crowded sky!
O life, and mine own soul's abyss,
Myself am scarce so small that I
Should bow to Deity like this!
This my Begetter? This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.
The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more
perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more
masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the
image of God," but now we see that the--
God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle-line--
he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!--[2]
we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of
retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral
stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord God of Hosts,"
"the Man of War," "the God of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and
captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept
into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that
hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A
nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last
remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have
faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which
makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose
amongst men, and that the day _must_ come when it will be finally
abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-god is
not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for--
This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.
This god was made in the image of man.
And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer
vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the
poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the
spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of
his God, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If
even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, "far above music," could
tell of his God, then would he be but the idealised image of himself.
He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous
theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.
The God I know of, I shall ne'er
Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
_Raise thou the stone and find me there,_
_Cleave thou the wood and there am I,_
Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.
I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of
inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear associated with the emotion,
but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence
may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. "Raise thou
the stone . . . cleave thou the wood," and we are in the presence of
the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world.
Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.
Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to
me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever
enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the
unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of
existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears
in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole
visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal
insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly
come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks
that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so
enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth,
to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the
totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is
passing away.
_Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt._
The melancholy Heraclitus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens
us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over
which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas.
Seneca, centuries ago, noted the same of our own bodies; the process of
dissolution is continuous, until at length the restorative power itself
will desert us and the process will be complete.
But at the heart of this universal impermanence there is a soul of
reality which the poet discerns amid the fleeting atoms of the stone
and the fibre of the growing tree. It is as though we found ourselves
in a vast hall, filled to repletion with machinery in every condition
of motion, from the slowest and scarcely perceptible movements of the
hour hand of a watch up to the incalculable rapidity of a fly-wheel.
All is flux, change, consumption of energy, wear and tear of the
machinery itself. We know it must run down sometime, we know one day
it must all be renewed. But amid all this instability we are well
aware that there is a secret source of power, a centre whence a renewal
of energy ceaselessly arises. Without its incessant action not one
single movement in that vast hall could be obtained. It is the one
real thing amidst a world of others which are wearing and wasting away
and therefore in a true sense unreal. The secret spring whence the
energy is generated may be invisible, but we _know_ it is somewhere,
and if any one denied its existence we should not take the trouble to
answer him. A faint, halting symbol is this of the eternal and
unchanging reality at the heart of the worlds--a dim light whereby to
illustrate the most solemn of truths, that always and everywhere, in
the lightest as in the greatest movements of nature, in the fragrance
of a flower, the iridescence of a crystal, or the fierce energies which
shoot up mountains of hydrogen flames hundreds of miles high from the
crater of the sun, we have the revelation of "a Power without
beginning, without end," [3] permanent while all is in a condition of
ceaseless flux and change, living while all around are hastening to
their deaths, the one only truly existent Being anywhere, the hidden
source of all existence and life.
So far, we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of
indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a
figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a
poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of
the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to
give as to the _method_ of such action as has been described on the
part of the invisible and universal Energy, for we cannot even explain
the _nexus_ between an act of human volitional energy and the raising
of an arm. There are the facts, demonstrable and undeniable, but the
_how_ of those facts, no man on this earth knoweth or perhaps ever will
know. Well may Browning profess himself content to endure in patience
the ignorance which is our lot here, if only at length "thy great
creation-thought thou wilt make known to me". The "great
creation-thought" cannot be known now. Watson is as sure of it as his
spiritual ancestor:--
I trust it not this bounded ken.
But though the "creation-thought" cannot be fathomed, though we cannot
_comprehend_ the nature of the ultimate Reality, the fact of the great
existence and omnipresence is clearly _apprehensible_, and therefore
must be acknowledged as a demonstrated fact by every man.
And, if such be the case, in what sense is God "unknown"? Unknown,
certainly, in the sense that he is unseen, but we now know that the
only real things are those of the invisible world. God is unknown
because incomprehensible, now and always, here and hereafter, in this
life and in all possible lives. The Infinite must ever be beyond the
_comprehension_ of the finite.
Though saint and sage their powers unite
To fathom that abyss of light,
Ah! still that altar stands.[4]
But the Divine is not beyond the _apprehension_ of man's mind, and as
far as I can by diligent reading of Mr. Spencer attain to his innermost
meaning, I do not think he denies this fact, as he most unquestionably
does not deny the validity of religious motion, which, arguing against
the Positivist philosophy, he rightly contends cannot, in its highest
sense, be associated with any being other than the Highest of all
beings. "What's in a name?" I ask, and whether a man calls himself
theist or agnostic--so that he does admit something greater than man,
and does give us scope and opportunity for the exercise of those powers
and emotions which refuse to be bounded by, or satisfied with, the
merely phenomenal and transitory, but are ever seeking for communion
with the Noumenal and the Eternal--in my judgment matters very little.
There is a higher synthesis in which partial truths are being
constantly taken up and reconciled in some fuller and more luminous
expression, and I have no doubt that that scientific reconciliation of
materialism and spiritualism which is now progressing so rapidly will
eventually be effected between those who now call themselves theists
and agnostics.
To ethical idealists the great question is this: Does your belief make
for reverence; does it subdue your soul with a sense of the wonder and
mystery which are everywhere so conspicuous in nature; does it foster
the growth of your spiritual powers as opposed to the merely animal
instincts of your body; does it make you more moral, fill you with an
increasing enthusiasm for the good life for its own sake? Or, on the
other hand, does what you profess dishearten you, fill you with
melancholy and foreboding and a sense of the unprofitableness of
things, of the apparent aimlessness of all that is going on or being
done, of the fruitlessness of all human endeavour? Is the sigh of the
inspired sceptic, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," ever and anon
rising from your heart, and are you losing your faith in yourself and
humanity? That is the test of a faith--what it does for you, and you
could have no better one. The fact that he worships an "Unknown God"
means no shrinking of enthusiasm in him who believes that that
everlasting Power, which science no less than philosophy commands him
to believe, is identical with that very Power which is conspicuously
working in the universe for universal aims which also are good.
Outside a handful of men of no consequence amid the thundering assent
of the overwhelming masses of mankind, the course of things here is
upwards. Instinct suggests it, reason proclaims it, history confirms
it. But there are no two supreme powers, and therefore that Power I
reverence--
The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold--
is also the everlasting "Power which makes for righteousness," that is,
for moral progress, the only progress ultimately worth caring about.
Men crave to see God. "Behold I show you a mystery." There are two
incarnations. There is the incarnation of God in flesh and blood, in
Chrishna in India, in Jesus in Palestine. Men have, men do worship
these men as gods. But there is a higher incarnation, a sublimer
theophany. There is that before which all incarnations, all saviours,
have ever bowed down in lowliest adoration; there is that whose
obedience they would not surrender if "the whole world and the glory
thereof" were given to them. There is that which is older than man and
his redeemers, higher than the stars, vast as the Immensities, ancient
as the Eternities themselves, and in this incarnation man may see God.
What is it? It is the moral law, the eternal sanction crowning the
right, inborn in rational man, the very soul of reason within him,
inborn in things--the law which no man ever invented, which never had
beginning, which can know no end, because it is the Divine order
revealed to earth. It is the necessary nature of the one essential
Being, and we recognise it because "we are his offspring," because like
him we are Divine.
"Unknown God!" Yes, but not here. As long as I have the instinct of
ethics, as long as I feel myself constrained to bow down in the dust
before goodness, to deem myself unworthy to tie the latchet of the
shoes of the hero or the saint; so long as I see the course of the
world steadily, undeniably, ascending the sacred hill of progress, so
long must I confess that the Power behind the veil, behind the world,
is a moral Power, that that Power recognises the validity of moral
distinctions as I do, that the ethic law is his law, that when I live
by that law I _see God_--
The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold,
Above the cloud, beneath the clod,
The Unseen God, the Unseen God.
[1] These words were written during the opening days of the late
Spanish-American war.
[2] _Recessional_, Rudyard Kipling.
[3] Herbert Spencer, _First Principles, passim_.
[4] Mrs. Barbauld's fine hymn, "As once upon Athenian ground".
XVI.
"A CHAPEL IN THE INFINITE."
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they,
--TENNYSON, In Memoriam.
The supreme value of the two great poets of the Victorian era is this,
that they have attuned their song to the expression of modern thought
concerning those transcendent realities which must ever possess an
inexhaustible interest for mankind. Thus we see, in an age which
acknowledges the complete emancipation of the human reason, the
supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment,
Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith"
than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism. Browning
has faced the riddle of the universe, the bewildering mystery of a
world of pain and sorrow, with unconquerable courage and hope. His
musician, _Abt Vogler_, believes in eternal harmony, with Plato and
Carlyle:--
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
And, being no dreamer or pessimist, seeing reason at the heart of
things, and good the final goal of ill, he
At least believes in soul, and is very sure of God.
Here are the three imperishable realities--God, Soul, Hereafter. Of
all the rest is it ultimately true which the weary preacher said:
"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," or, as the modern Ecclesiastes has
it: _Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse_.
In the words of the opening stanzas of the "In Memoriam," Tennyson is
evidently affected by the spectacle the world exhibits to the
thoughtful man in its multitudinous religious sects and segments, and
the strange contrasts the national, political and ethical unities of
mankind present, with their theological divergencies. As we have seen,
the etymology of the word "religion" signifies that its intent and
purpose is to bind men together, whereas, as we mournfully confess, it
has hitherto proved a fruitful source of schism and division, national
as well as individual. It is only since the much-despised and
denounced "world" and its modern civilisation has effectually curtailed
the offensive powers of corporations, synods and inquisitions, that
religion has ceased to outrage the public conscience by repetitions of
the enormities of former times.
As the sweep of his vision ranges over past and present, the poet is
enabled to estimate these fragmentary philosophies aright; he sees them
in their proper perspective, in their relation to the infinite Reality
behind them. He calls them "little systems," "broken lights": he is
able to forecast their future; "they cease to be". There is but One
Eternal, "without shadow of change or turning": "And Thou, O Lord, art
more than they".
This is the fact which weighs so heavily with the thoughtful and
discriminating minds of the day--that all the apocalyptic theologies
and religious philosophies which purport to reveal the unspeakable
mystery known to exist, though hidden from our sight, end only in
belittling it. Doubtless an element of accommodation is discoverable
and essential in the purest thought of the unseen order; our thoughts
of the Soul of souls must be such as our spirits can supply. Men so
divided in belief as Kant and Newman have both recognised this fact,
the only difference being that, while the former understands the creeds
and their tenets as symbols wherein man, striving to express the
inexpressible, finds relief and rest to his spirit, Newman looks upon
them as so much history, which if a man shall not accept as fact,
"without doubt he shall perish everlastingly". To him, as to all who
really stand by their order, the New Covenant is a revelation, complete
and final, of all that can or will be known of the transcendental
order. It claims that "a door was opened in heaven," and those
mysteries made manifest "to little ones" which had been "hidden from
the wise" and far-seeing philosophers of old. It claims to be "the
tabernacle of God with men," "God manifest in the flesh," or in
sacraments, rites and symbols--nay, it is the "city come out of heaven
from God," it is the cathedral of humanity.
This was believed profoundly, almost universally, in the days before
the flood--the flood of knowledge let loose upon mankind, beginning
with the days of the Renascimento and continuing down to our own. But
the philosopher-poet of the nineteenth century sees nothing of it in
the altar and system set up in this Western world. Like the rest, it
is, to him, a "little system," which ultimately ceases to be. The
heavenly city fades into an earthly chamber, the vast cathedral of
humanity dwindles to a spot on the horizon, it shrinks to the
dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".