THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD
I
It is obvious that one could not dwell much on the power of the
life-principle without coming sooner or later to the thought of God. As
already hinted, I did not come to it at once because my conception of
God made Him of so little use to me.
And yet, in popular phraseology, I had "served" God all my life. That
is, brought up in an atmosphere in which the Church was a divinely
instituted system for utilising God, I served the system, without
getting much beyond the surface plane of what were technically known as
"services." When trial came such services offered me an anodyne, but
not a cure.
II
The first suggestion, that my concept of God might not be sufficient to
my needs came out of a conversation in New York. It was with a lady whom
I met but that once, within a year or two after my experience at
Versailles. I have forgotten how we chanced on the subject, but I
remember that she asked me these questions:
"When you think of God _how_ do you think of Him? How do you picture
Him? What does He seem like?"
Trying to reply I recognised a certain naivete, a certain childishness,
in my words even as I uttered them. In my thoughts I saw God as three
supernal men, seated on three supernal thrones, enshrined in some vague
celestial portion of space which I denominated Heaven. Between Him and
me there was an incalculable distance which He could bridge but I could
not. Always He had me at the disadvantage that He saw what I did, heard
what I said, read what I thought, punishing me for everything amiss,
while I could reach Him only by the uncertain telephony of what I
understood as prayer. Even then my telephone worked imperfectly. Either
the help I implored wasn't good for me, or my voice couldn't soar to
His throne.
The lady smiled, but said nothing. The smile was significant. It made me
feel that a God who was no more than what I had described could hardly
be the Universal Father, and set me to thinking on my own account.
III
I wish it were possible to speak of God without the implication of
dealing with religion. By this I mean that I am anxious to keep religion
out of this whole subject of the conquest of fear. The minute you touch
on religion, as commonly understood, you reach the sectarian. The minute
you reach the sectarian you start enmities. The minute you start
enmities you get mental discords. And the minute you get mental
discords no stand against fear is possible.
But I mean a little more than this. Man, as at present developed, has
shown that he hardly knows what to do with religion, or where to put it
in his life. This is especially true of the Caucasian, the least
spiritually intelligent of all the great types of our race.
Fundamentally the white man is hostile to religion. He attacks it as a
bull a red cloak, goring it, stamping on it, tearing it to shreds. With
the Caucasian as he is this fury is instinctive. Recognising religion as
the foe of the materialistic ideal he has made his own he does his best
to render it ineffective.
Of this we need no better illustration than the state of what we
conventionally know as Christendom. Christendom as we see it is a purely
Caucasian phase of man's struggle upward, with Caucasian merits and
Caucasian defects. Nowhere is its defectiveness more visible than in
what the Caucasian has made of the teaching of Jesus Christ. It was
probably a misfortune for the world that almost from the beginning that
teaching passed into Caucasian guardianship. I see in the New Testament
no indication on the part of Our Lord and the Apostles of wishing to
separate themselves from Semitic co-operation. The former taught daily
in the Temple; the latter, as they went about the world, made the
synagogue the base of all their missions. The responsibility for the
breach is not under discussion here. It is enough to note that it took
place, and that Caucasian materialism was thus deprived of a
counteragent in Hebrew spiritual wisdom. Had this corrective maintained
its place it is possible that religion might now be a pervasive element
in the Caucasian's life instead of being pigeon-holed.
IV
The Caucasian pigeon-holes God. Otherwise expressed, he keeps God in a
specially labelled compartment of life, to be brought out for occasional
use, and put back when the need is over. It is difficult to mention God
to a Caucasian reader without inducing an artificial frame of mind. As
there are people who put on for strangers and guests an affected,
unnatural politeness different from their usual breezy spontaneity, so
the Caucasian assumes at the thought of God a mental habit which can
only be described as sanctimonious. God is not natural to the Caucasian;
the Caucasian is not natural with God. The mere concept takes him into
regions in which he feels uneasy. He may call his uneasiness reserve or
reverence, or by some other dignified name; but at bottom it is neither
more nor less than uneasiness. To minimise this distress he relegates
God to special days, to special hours, to services and ceremonials. He
can thus wear and bear his uncomfortable cloak of gravity for special
times, after which he can be himself again. To appeal to God otherwise
than according to the tacitly accepted protocol is to the average
Caucasian either annoying or in bad form.
I should like, then, to dissociate the thought of God from the
artificial, sanctimonious, preternaturally solemn connotations which
the Name is certain to bring up. I want to speak of Him with the same
kind of ease as of the life-principle. I repeat, that I never found Him
of much use in allaying fear till I released Him from the Caucasian
pigeon-hole to see Him, as it were, in the open. Once in the open I got
rid, to some degree, of the Caucasian limitations of thinking along the
lines of sect, just as in the infinitude of the air you can forget for a
minute houses with rooms and walls. The discovery--that is, discovery
for myself--that God is Universal, which is not so obvious as it sounds,
was, I think, the first great step I made in finding that within that
Universal fear should be impossible.
V
About the same time I chanced on a passage written by Joseph Joubert, an
eighteenth-century French Catholic, not so well known to the modern
reader as he ought to be, which impressed me deeply.
"L'âme ne peut se mouvoir, s'éveiller, ouvrir les yeux, sans santir
Dieu. On sent Dieu avec l'âme comme on sent l'air avec le corps.
Oseraije le dire? On connaît Dieu facilement pourvu qu'on ne se
contraigne pas à le definir--The soul cannot move, wake, or open the
eyes without perceiving God. We perceive God through the soul as we feel
air on the body. Dare I say it? We can know God easily so long as we do
not feel it necessary to define Him."
I began to see that, like most Caucasian Christians, I had been laying
too much stress on the definition. The Trinity had, so to speak, come
between me and the Godhead. I had, unconsciously, attached more
importance to God's being Three than to His being God. Seeing Him as
Three I instinctively saw Him as Three Persons. Seeing Him as Three
Persons I did not reflect that the word Person as applied to God must be
used in a sense wholly different from that in which we employ it with
regard to men. To get into what I call the open I had to bring myself to
understand that we cannot enclose the Infinite in a shape, or three
shapes, resembling in any way the being with digestive organs, arms, and
legs, which worked its way up from slime.
That is, in order to "dwell in the secret place of the Most High,"[4]
where one is immune from fear, I was obliged to give up the habit of
embodying God in any form. I had to confess that what is meant by the
Three Persons in One God I did not know. Furthermore, I saw no necessity
for thinking that I knew, since such knowledge must transcend all scope
of the human mind. The formula, if you must have a formula, is one
thing; but the turning it into a statute of limitations and applying it
to the Illimitable is another.
[4] The Book of Psalms.
To make my position clearer, and to avoid the subject of religion, let
me add that, inferring from the Bible that there is a Father, a Son, and
a Holy Ghost, I did not feel it imperative on my part to go beyond this
use of terms. Merely to abstain from definition was like a load taken
off my mind. How the Son was begotten of the Father, or the Holy Ghost
proceeded from them both, or what eternal mysteries were symbolised in
this purely human phraseology, were, it seemed to me, matters with which
I need not concern myself, seeing that they passed all my comprehension.
Not the Trinity should come first to powers so limited as mine--but God.
It dawned on me, too, that God need not necessarily be to me what He is
to others, nor to others what He is to me. Of the Infinite the finite
mind can only catch a finite glimpse. I see what I can see; another sees
what he can see. The visions may be different, and yet each vision may
be true. Just as two painters painting the same landscape will give
dissimilar views of it, so two minds contemplating God will take of Him
only what each is fitted to receive. Water poured into differently
coloured glasses will take on the colour of the cup which it fills, even
though it be the self-same water in them all. If I find God for myself I
shall probably not behold in Him exactly what anyone else in the whole
world or in all time has ever beheld in Him before.
I saw, too, that from a certain point of view the stand of the agnostic
is a right one. We cannot know God in the sense of knowing His being or
His "Personality," any more than we can know the essence of the
life-principle. Just as we know the life-principle only from what it
does, so we know God only from such manifestations of Himself as reach
our observation. Everything else is inference. Because we see something
of His goodness we infer that He is good; because we experience
something of His love we infer that He is loving; because we behold
something of His power we infer that He is almighty. It is first of all
a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those
conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is
independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is
"unknowable" to us has to be admitted.
I make this statement now in order not to be misunderstood when later I
may say that God must be this or that. Though I shall do so for the
sake of brevity it will always be in the sense that, if God is what we
have inferred from His manifestations, He must be this or that. In other
words, having to some degree worked my own way out of fear I must tell
how I came to feel that I know the Unknowable, doing it with the inexact
phraseology which is all I find to hand.
VI
Reaching the conclusions noted above I was relieved of the pressure of
traditions and instructions. Traditions and instructions helped me in
that they built the ship in which I was to put to sea. The discoveries
had to be my own. The God of whom I had heard at my mother's knee, as
the phrase goes, had always been shadowy to me; the God who was served
by "services" had always seemed remote. A God who should be "_my_ God,"
as the psalmists say so often, must, I felt, be found by me myself,
through living, searching, suffering, and struggling onward a step or
two at a time. "That's pretty near free-thinking, isn't it?" a
clergyman, to whom I tried to explain myself, once said to me. "No," I
replied; "but it _is_ pretty near thinking _free_."
To think freely about God became a first necessity; to think simply a
second one. The Universal Father had been almost lost to me behind veil
after veil of complexities. The approaches to Him seemed to have been
made so roundabout, requiring so many intermediaries. Long before I had
dared to think of what I may call emancipation, the "scheme of
salvation," as it was termed, had struck me as an excessively
complicated system of machinery, considering the millions upon millions
who had need of it. In theory you were told, according to St. Paul, to
"come boldly before the throne of the heavenly grace," but in practice
you were expected to do it timidly.
You were expected to do it timidly because the pigeon-holed Caucasian
God was represented--unconsciously perhaps--as difficult, ungenial,
easily offended. He measured your blindness and weakness by the
standard of His own knowledge and almightiness. A puritan God, extremely
preoccupied with morals as some people saw them, He was lenient,
apparently, to the narrow-minded, the bitter of tongue, and the
intolerant in heart. He was not generous. He was merciful only when you
paid for His mercy in advance. To a not inconsiderable degree He was the
hard Caucasian business man, of whom He was the reflection, only
glorified and crowned.
It will be evident, of course, that I am not speaking of "the Father" of
the New Testament, nor of the official teaching of any church or
theology. To the rank and file of Caucasians "the Father" of the New
Testament is very little known, while the official teaching of churches
and theologies is so hard to explain that not much of it gets over to
the masses of those willing to subscribe to it. I refer only to the
impression on the mind of the man in the street; and to the man in the
street God, as he understands Him, is neither a very friendly nor a very
comprehensible element in life. Instead of mitigating fear He adds to
it, not in the Biblical sense of "fearing God," but in that of sheer
animal distrust.
VII
While turning these things over in my mind I got some help from two of
the words most currently in Christian use. I had long known that the
English equivalents of the Latin equivalents of the terms the New
Testament writers used gave but a distorted idea of the original sense;
but I had let that knowledge lie fallow.
The first of these words was Repentance. In these syllables there is
almost no hint of the idea which fell from the evangelistic pen, while
the word has been soaked in emotional and sentimental associations it
was never intended to be mixed with. The _Metanoia_; which painted a
sober, reflective turning of the mind, had been so overcharged with the
dramatic that sober, reflective people could hardly use the expression
any more. Repentance had come to have so strong a gloss of the
hysterical as to be almost discredited by men of common sense. It was a
relief, therefore, to remember that it implied no more than a turning to
God by a process of thought; and that a process of thought would
find Him.
The other word was Salvation. Here again our term of Latin derivation
gives no more than the faintest impression of the beauty beyond beauty
in that which the sacred writer used. _Soteria_--a Safe Return! That is
all. Nothing complicated; nothing high-strung; nothing casuistical. Only
a--Safe Return! Yet all human experience can be read into the little
phrase, with all human liberty to wander--and come back. True, one son
may never leave the Father's home, so that all that it contains is his;
but there is no restraint on the other son from getting his knowledge as
he will, even to the extent of becoming a prodigal. The essential is in
the Safe Return, the _Soteria_, when the harlots and the husks have been
tried and found wanting.
I do not exaggerate when I say that the simplicity of these conceptions
was so refreshing as almost to give me a new life. One could say to God,
with the psalmist, "Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me
from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of
deliverance"--and mean it. One could conceive of it as possible to turn
toward Him--and reach, the objective. The way was open; the access was
free; the progress as rapid as thought could make it. One could think of
oneself as _knowing God_, and be aware of no forcing of the note.
"We can know God easily so long as we do not feel it necessary to define
Him." Once having grasped this truth I began to see how natural knowing
God became. The difficulty of the forced, of the artificial, of the mere
assent to what other people say, of which the Caucasian to his credit is
always impatient, seemed by degrees to melt away from me. No longer
defining God I no longer tried to know Him in senses obviously
impossible. I ceased trying to _imagine_ Him. Seeing Him as infinite,
eternal, changeless, formless because transcending form, and
indescribable because transcending words and thoughts, I could give
myself up to finding Him in the ways in which He would naturally be
revealed to me.
VIII
These, of course, were in His qualities and His works.
Let me speak of the latter first.
I think light was the medium through which I at once felt myself to be
seeing God. By this I mean nothing pantheistic--not that the light was
God--but God's first and most evident great sign. Then there was the
restful darkness. There were the moon and the stars, "the hosts of
heaven," as the Hebrews aptly called them, becoming more and more
amazing as an expression of God the more we learn how to read them. Then
there were the elements, the purifying wind, the fruitful rain, the
exhilaration of snow-storms, the action and reaction from heat and cold.
Then there was beauty: first, the beauty of the earth, of mountains, of
seas, and all waters, of meadows, grainfields, orchards, gardens, and
all growing things; then, the beauty of sound, from the soughing of the
wind in the pines to the song of the hermit-thrush. There was the beauty
wrought by man, music, painting, literature, and all art. There were the
myriad forms of life. There were kindness and friendship and family
affection and fun--but the time would fail me! God being the summing up
of all good things, since all good things proceed from Him, must be seen
by me in all good things it I am to see Him at all.
I had heard from childhood of a world in which God was seen, and of
another world, this world, in which He was not seen. I came to the
conclusion that there was no such fantastic, unnatural division in what
we call creation--that there was only one world--the world in which God
is seen. "The soul cannot move, wake, or open the eyes without
perceiving God." It is a question of physical vision, with spiritual
comprehension.
IX
Seeing God breaking through all that I had previously thought of as
barriers, it was easy to begin to think of Him as Universal. I say begin
to think, because God's Infinitude had been only a word to me hitherto,
not a quality realised and felt. I do not presume to say that to any
adequate degree I feel and realise it now; but the habit of looking on
every good thing as a sign of His activity cannot but bring Him close
to me.
That is my chief point with regard to the Infinite--that it must be
_here_. As I used to think of infinity I saw it stretching to boundless
reaches away from me; but only from the point of view of present Good
being present God did the value of the Infinite come to lie in its
nearness rather than in its power of filling unimaginable space. On my
part it was inverse mental action, seeking God where I was capable of
finding Him, and not in regions I could never range.
But having grasped the fact that the Universal, wherever else it was,
must be with me the purely abstract became a living influence. I felt
this the more when to the concept of Infinitude I added that of
Intelligence. I use the much-worked word intelligence because there is
no other; but when one thinks for a second of what must be the
understanding of an Infinite Mind, intelligence as a descriptive term
becomes absurdly inadequate.
This was the next fact which, if I may so express myself, I made my
own--that not only the Universal is ever with me, but that it is ever
with me with ever-active concern. There was a time when it was hard for
me to believe that a Mind busied with the immensities of the universe
could come down to such trivial affairs as mine. Important as I might be
to myself I could hardly be otherwise than lost amid the billions of
forms of life which had come into existence through the ages. To the
Three in One, on the Great White Throne, in the far-away Heaven, I must
be a negligible thing, except when I forced myself on the divine
attention. Even then it was hardly conceivable that, with whole solar
systems to regulate, I could claim more than a passing glance from the
all-seeing eye.
But to an Infinite Mind bathing me round and round I must be as much the
object of regard as any solar system. To such a Mind nothing is small,
no one thing farther from its scope than another. God could have no
_difficulty_ in attending to me, seeing that from the nature of His
mental activity, to put it in that way, He could not lose sight of me
nor let me go. When an object is immersed in water it gives no extra
trouble to the water to close round it. It can't help doing it. The
object may be as small as a grain of dust or as big as a warship; to the
water it is all the same. Immersed in the Infinite Mind, closed round by
it, it was giving God no extra trouble to think of me, of my work, my
desires, the objects with which I was living, since by the nature of His
Being He could do nothing else.
Having established it with myself that Universal Presence was also
Universal Thought I had made another step toward the elimination of
fear. I took still another when I added the truth of Universal Love.
I need hardly say that this progression was not of necessity in a
strictly consecutive order, nor did it come by a process of reasoning
out from point to point. I was simply the man in the street dealing with
great ideas of which he had heard ever since he had been able to hear
anything, but trying at last to see what they meant to him. My position
might have been described in the words used by William James in one of
his _Letters_ to indicate his own. "The Divine, for my _active_ life, is
limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest and determine
me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God
might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but
differences of intensity may make the whole centre of one's energy
shift." I did have a "feeling of God" however vague; but I had more of
the feeling of a Church. I could dimly discern the Way, without going
on to the Truth and the Life which give the Way its value. It will be
evident then that if my "discoveries" along these lines were discoveries
in the obvious, it was in that obvious to which we mortals so often
remain blind.
During many years the expression, the love of God, was to me like a
winter sunshine, bright without yielding warmth. I liked the words; I
knew they expressed a truth; but between me and the truth there was the
same kind of distance which I felt to lie between myself and God. "It is
largely a question of intensity," to repeat what has just been quoted
from William James, "but differences of intensity may make the whole
centre of one's energy shift." My conception of the love of God lacked
just that quality--intensity.
It came, to some degree, with the realisation that the Universal Thought
must be with _me_. A non-loving Universal Thought was too monstrous a
concept to entertain. The God who "broke through" my many
misunderstandings with so much good and beauty could have only one
predominating motive. The coming of my spiritual being to this planet
might be a mystery wrapped in darkness, and yet I could not but believe
that the Universal Father was behind that coming and that I was His son.
I could rest my case there. The love of God, after having long been like
a doctrinal tenet for which one had to strive, became reasonable,
natural, something to be understood. Finding that love in so many places
in which I had seen mere physical phenomena, and in so many lovely
things I had never placed to its credit, I began to feel that life could
be infused and transformed by it, in proportion as my own perception
grew. So, little by little, the centre of energy shifted, as one came to
understand what the Sons of Korah meant when they sang, "God is our
refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore _will we
not fear_ though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be
carried into, the midst of the sea."[5] With Universal Thought
concentrated in love upon oneself fear must be forced backward.
[5] The Book of Psalms.
And especially when you add to that the concept of Almighty Power. This
fourth and last of the great attributes is the one with which I, as an
individual, have found it most difficult to clothe the Infinite. I mean
that it is the one for which it is hardest for me to develop what
William James calls "a feeling," an inner realisation. I lay no stress
upon this. It is a question of growth. The Presence, the Thought, the
Love have become to me what I may be permitted to call tremulously
vivid. In proportion as they are vivid I get the "feeling" of
Almightiness exercised on my behalf; in proportion as they are tremulous
the Almightiness may remain in my consciousness, but it seems exercised
on my behalf but slightly.
In other words, the Infinitude of Thought and Love are, to some extent,
apprehended by my inner self, while the Infinitude of Power is as yet to
me rather an intellectual abstraction. What my inner self may be I am
not prepared to say, but I know that it is there, as everyone else
knows that it is in him. "Strengthened with might by the Spirit in the
inner man,"[6] is what St. Paul says, and I suppose most of us recognise
the fact that our inner self is stronger or weaker in proportion as it
is more nourished or less nourished by our sense of the Being of God. It
is largely a question of intensity. If I interpret William James aright
he means by "a feeling" an intellectual concept after it has passed
beyond the preliminary keeping of the brain, and become the possession
of that inner man which is the vital self. To this vital self the sense
of Almighty Power really used for me is still, to a great degree,
outside my range.
[6] Epistle to the Ephesians.
I make the confession not because it is of interest, but because it
illustrates a main deduction which I should now like to draw. It is to
the effect that God is with us _to be utilised_. His Power, His Love,
His Thought, His Presence, must be at our disposal, like other great
forces, such as sunshine and wind and rain. We can use them or not, as
we please. That we could use them to their full potentiality is, of
course, not to be thought of; but we can use them in proportion to our
ability. If I, the individual, still lack many things; if I am still a
prey to lingering fears; it is probably because I have not yet rooted
out a stubborn disbelief in His Power. If I succeed in this I shall
doubtless be able to seize more of His bounty. It is not a question of
His giving, but of my capacity to take.
The contrary, I venture to think, is the point of view of most of us. We
consider God somewhat as we do a wealthy man whom we know to be a miser,
forming the shrewd surmise that we shall not get much out of him. The
God who fails to protect us from fear fails, I believe, because we see
Him first of all as a niggard God. He is a niggard not merely with
regard to money but all the good things for which He has given us a
desire, with no intention of allowing that desire to be gratified. Once
more, He is the hard Caucasian business man, whom His subordinates serve
because they don't see what else to do, but whom they rarely love.
We shall not, in my judgment, overcome fear till we see Him as He surely
must be, generous beyond all our conceptions of generosity. Years,
experience, many trials, and some knowledge of the world, have convinced
me that we have no lawful or harmless cravings for which, _as far as God
is concerned_, there is not abundant satisfaction. I am convinced that
absolute confidence in God's overflowing liberality of every sort is
essential to the conquest of fear. If we don't profit by that liberality
the fault is not His but our own. I am tempted to think that the belief
of so many generations of nominal Christians in a God whose power was
chiefly shown in repressions, denials, and capricious disappointments is
responsible, in so small measure, for our present world-distress.
In my own case it was a matter of re-education. To find God for myself I
had to be willing to let some of my old cherished ideas go. They may
have been true of God as He reveals Himself to others; they are not true
of Him as He makes Himself known to me. The Way that leads _me_ to the
Truth and the Life is undoubtedly the Way I must follow.
Doing that I have found so much, mentally, emotionally, materially,
which I never had before, that I cannot but look for more as my
absorbing power increases. The process is akin to that of the
unshrivelling of the inner man, as a bud will unfold when the sunshine
becomes strong enough. The transformation must be in thought. There must
be first the _Metanoia_, the change of mind, the new set of concepts;
and then the _Soteria_, the Safe Return, to the high, sane ideal of a
co-operative Universe, with a loving, lavish Universal Heart behind it.
"To the chief Musician for the Sons of Korah:
"'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed, and though the
mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.... Come, behold the
works of the Lord.... He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the
earth; he breaketh the bow, he cutteth the spear in sunder, he burneth
the chariot in the fire.... _Be still then, and know that I am
God,'"_[7]
[7] Book of Psalms.