knowledge and false conceptions of the world in which we live! They
come down to us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded as
the center of the universe, all other bodies revolving around it. Man
lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly
powers.
It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of mankind was, by
the operation of some psychological law, forced to externize and
visualize, yes, and humanize, the object upon which its interest
centers. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God is a spirit,
that He is everywhere, that He fills all nature, that not a sparrow
falls to the ground without his notice, and that heaven is not a
place, but a state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being,
endowed with our human attributes, with likes and dislikes, sorely
tried by our sins and weaknesses; nearer us sometimes than at others,
present everywhere, yet abiding in one particular place called
heaven--these and many other childish and contradictory things.
That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman, regarded God under the
image of a maker, detached absolutely like any human workman from
the work of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely distinct
from the world as being its center,--“Upholder, Governor, and
Sovereign Lord.” “He created all things out of nothing, and preserves
them every moment, and could destroy them as He made them.” “He is
separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his
attributes.” This being is always described and interpreted in terms
of man, or of our own finite human nature, reflecting in his outlines
human history, human political and social institutions, and the aims
and objects of concrete human beings. He does not hesitate to relate
this God to “every movement which has convulsed and refashioned the
surface of the earth,” and hence to make him responsible for the
death and destruction and misery which have attended earthquakes and
have set back the tide of human progress. Of course every noxious
insect, every noxious plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from
Him also. “Wars when just” are from Him also. Who or what are they
from when they are not just, the great Cardinal does not say. Can
both sides be just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a
manlike God lead us.
The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative--if not more so--as
the typical theological mind, never gets mired in such contradictions
or tangled up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such confusion
arises out of the habit of mind which sees the whole creation
directed to man; his good is its one object and aim, and when his
good suffers, something has miscarried. The cruel and destructive
things in nature can only be accounted for on the theory that some
aboriginal calamity, like the fall of man, had visited the world
before God took charge of things.
The naturalist sees this as the best possible world, sees that Nature
is not an indulgent stepmother, but a strict disciplinarian; that
the good and well-being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat
are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justified in a day or a
week, or in this place or that, but require ages and continents to
come to their full fruition. The good and the evil that will come
out of the terrible World War will not all be apparent this year, or
next, but only in the perspective of history--in the sum total of
human progress of the ages. Such a view is a slap in the face of our
egotism which demands instant returns, and which makes the individual
supreme.
With Nature, as I have so often said, our standards of good and
evil apply to us alone, and they change with the changing years.
The naturalist sees that pain and delay and defeat are the price
of development; that the world is imperfect, and man is imperfect,
because growth and development are the law of nature; that there is
always a higher level, and always will be, which we realize only when
we look back. A perfect world, as we use the term, would mean the end
of all development.
VI. THE ETERNAL
How much is in a name! When we call the power back of all God,
it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance,
persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and
summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and
sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes,
of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these
things make it all the more real to us.
The word “God” has so long stood for the conception of a being who
sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and
governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe,
God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation.
It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total
problem of life and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which
identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all
these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly
says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes
the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which
we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation.
The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in terms of our own
psychology, we get into trouble. We cannot measure the Infinite by
the standards of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims are
not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which I use the term, does
not plan and design and adapt means to ends as does man. God is no
more the maker than He is the thing made. How natural for us to think
that the air was made for us to breathe, the water for us to drink,
the light for us to see, and the earth for us to inhabit! But these
things are older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing in the
fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid the rails, but was not
the fence there before it was?
There is design in Nature, but not in the sense that there is design
in human affairs and contrivances. There is no designer. There are
living machines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution is a vital
process. Man’s course is a right line, Nature’s is a circle. Man
aims to cut out the waste, the pain, the failures. How does Nature
trim her trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only by a
survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every branch that dies and
decays and falls from the tree does so at the risk of the health
and well-being of the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a
hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See how evenly the
pine and spruce and hemlock and oak forests get planted by Nature’s
haphazard method, but think of the time involved! But what is time
to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and gets his forest quickly.
He trims his wood and avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood.
He selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and avoids the
dangers of the struggle to survive. He takes the side of the weak
against the strong, but Nature favors only the strong.
The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The weather goes its way
irrespective of you and me. Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine,
are no respecters of persons. The seasons came and went before man
appeared, just as they do now. The Eternal never takes sides as
man takes sides, but because it does not, should we lose faith?
The Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not otherwise.
The light shines for all. Providence is a universal beneficence.
The clouds go their way. The beneficence is seen in the slow
amelioration of meteoric conditions through countless æons, till the
cloud and the bow appeared, and with them conditions favorable to
life. The impartial rains are oblivious to our human needs, but, as I
so often say, they are on the side of life. They are on the side of
development. They made the sublime drama of evolution possible.
The weather favored us æons before we were born, because it favored
life. Therefore, when we say that the Eternal is neither for us nor
against us, we mean in our special human sense. He is on the side of
the righteous only when the righteous live according to the rule of
Nature or rightness, or in harmony with the eternal order. And he is
against the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In vain do
we pray for victory on the eve of battle, except in so far as prayer
puts courage into our hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the
physical and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is from
the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the fruit of the order which
It established, or, rather, which It is.
As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot get away from the
Eternal. He sticketh closer than a brother, closer than the blood in
our own hearts, not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder
and depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often struggle,
tears, defeat.
Not by placing God afar off in the heavens--a supersensuous,
supermundane, supernatural being--do we make the problem easier.
Not till we bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the old myth
of Christ again), and identify Him with everything without us and
within--not till God becomes man--do we see a light under the feet of
Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood and brotherhood and
sacrifice and humility and beneficence and altruism in Nature. When
we see man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of God.
In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of
charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation--human
virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature. If this is a
hard gospel, still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live
other than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see the sources
of our power, our help, our health. We know the conditions of our
well-being. We know the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our
reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and inevitably. Their
fountainhead is in Nature.
Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not lose faith. We know
that Nature is still Nature. If disease and pestilence and famine
rage, we know that there are weapons with which to fight them. We
know that order comes out of chaos, that life comes out of death. We
have neither to curse our gods nor to praise them, neither to do
penance nor to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use wisely
the gifts they bestow.
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY
What difficulties and contradictions we fall into the moment we
identify Nature with God, and what equal or greater difficulties we
fall into if we refuse to identify Nature with God! True it is that
in the former case we bring God very near and make him very real; we
see and feel our direct and continuous dependence upon Him--indeed,
that we are a part of Him; that every breath we draw, and every
thought we think, and every pound of energy we put forth is in and
through Him; and that we can no more wander or escape from Him than
we can escape gravity or chemical affinity. There are no skeptics or
atheists in regard to Nature. It alone exists and goes on forever.
But here comes the pinch! God as Nature is not only the author of the
good, He is the author of what we call evil also; He is as many-sided
as Nature is. The savage and merciless aspects of Nature are of
Him also; He is in the jungles of Africa, as well as in the walks
of culture and refinement; in the destroying tornado as well as in
the gentle summer breeze; in the overwhelming floods as well as in
the morning dews. He is as much the author of disease as He is of
health; of war, pestilence, famine, as He is of peace, plenty, and
the progress of the world. He is in the trenches and the slaughter
of the contending armies as truly as in the most peaceful and pious
family or social circle in the world. The asphyxiating gases are his,
and the bursting bombs, no less than the breaking hearts and the
prayerful souls at home. The comets that come like apparitions in the
heavens, and then are gone, and the stars that shine steadfastly,
are all a part of the same scheme. The dragons and monsters that
possessed the earth and the fruits thereof for millions of years in
geologic time were the work of that divinity which shapes our ends
to-day.
We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we
belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine
origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation; but
we are fragments of the same granite that forms the foundation of
the earth. “I am stuccoed with birds and quadrupeds all over,”
says Whitman. The reptile was our ancestor; we were cradled in the
old seas; we are kin to the worm and the mollusk; we derive from
creeping, swimming, noisome things, from the slime and mud of the
old sea bottoms, from the cosmic dust and the solar radiations. Why
should we put on superior airs when not one atom of matter will turn
aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from
destruction? The vast army of elemental forces knows us not. We may
divert them and bend them to our will, but they heed us not; they
destroy us the moment we lose control.
Nature does not love us any more than she hates us; she goes her way,
indifferent.
The best we can say about it all is that Nature, or the Natural
Providence, is too big for us to grasp; that in these seas we can
find no soundings. But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is
worth living, love always pays; Nature serves us when we know how to
use her; when we plant and sow wisely God will send the increase.
Friendly or unfriendly, of God or of the Devil, the physical forces
have ministered to us. More things have been for us than have been
against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than
have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers
than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightning;
more fertile land upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader
belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. Thorns and spines
and nettles are the exception in vegetation; stings and venomous
fangs are the exception in animal life. Hawks can catch the smaller
birds, yet there are vastly more small birds than hawks. The weasel
can catch the rabbit and the squirrel and the rat, yet there are
ten-fold, fifty-fold, more of these rodents than there are weasels.
The carnivorous beasts of the plains and of the jungle do not
exterminate the herbivorous; there is more good than evil everywhere;
more peace than war; more kindness than cruelty. The God of Nature
goes his way, but his way is our way; we have arisen out of Nature;
as it is, the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream
makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they
do not all stagnate on the way. Some of the seed which the winds
sow falls upon barren places, but not the most of it. Some men are
born criminals or cripples or malformed, but not the majority. The
creatures preyed upon always vastly outnumber the creatures that prey
upon them. And in truth, in the whole realm of Nature more things
wait upon man than war upon him.
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE
The unnamable, the unthinkable, the omnipotent, the omnipresent,
we cannot discuss or define in terms of our humanity. The moment
we try to do so we are involved in contradictions, just as we are
when we try to define the sphere in terms of the plane. The sphere
has no length, it has no breadth, it has no thickness, in the sense
that bodies upon its surface have. It has no weight, and it has no
beginning and no end, and we may say that its motion is eternal rest;
yet rest implies motion, and motion implies rest.
When we say that there is no God, we only mean that there is no
being that we can define or conceive of in terms of man. Nothing in
the finite can help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite,
the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being without sharing
the limitations of being, or without being subject to the bounds
of time and space. If God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is
all-powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence ceases to exist.
One after another the human and personal attributes we ascribe to Him
disappear when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the infinite.
The infinite is equivalent to negation. There are no terms in which
we can define the ether; it is the negative of all things that have
length and breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or substance, or
friction or cohesion, or place or power. An infinite being is as much
a contradiction of terms as a square or plane sphere would be. If
God is a person, with human-like attributes and emotions,--though we
call them divine,--it is legitimate to ask, Where is He? where was He
before the solar systems took form? where will He be after they have
again become formless?
Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the Infinite as superman;
He is man magnified to infinity. He is the supreme king or ruler of
the universe. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has eyes, ears,
hands, feet, and the emotions of love, anger, pity, and the like. Man
thus imposes his own form upon the power that is and upholds the
cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then seeks to propitiate
it and influence it as He Himself is propitiated and influenced.
Praise is sweet to it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because
these things are sweet to man.
When we call this force Nature, we bring it near to us and can see
and feel our direct relation to it. We are bone of its bone and
flesh of its flesh. We see its impersonal or unpersonal character.
We get light on the vexed problem of good and evil which is such an
insoluble enigma to the theologians.
Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all; has no
partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles, no deputied
atonements, no evil apart from the good and no good apart from the
evil, no life without death and no death without life.
IX. THE INSOLUBLE
What desperate efforts mankind has made to shape this vast, blind,
unconscionable power we call Nature into an image of a God that would
satisfy our moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where did men
get their standards of such a God? They have evidently been slowly
evolved through the friction of man with man. They have possessed
survival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have contributed to
the fullness of life and to length of days. One may adopt Biblical
language and say that righteousness endureth forever. The triumph
of the wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, it
may embrace whole periods of human history, and entail measureless
suffering on the human race, but change and retribution surely
come. The way of man’s moral and material progress is like the
stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now disrupted and noisy in
rapids and falls, now sluggish and almost stagnant in long level
reaches, but which does go forward and reach its goal at last. But
is there not some predetermined bent toward righteousness,--not of
the ecclesiastical sort, but of the scientific sort,--toward the
relations of man with man, that results in the greatest good to the
greatest number,--a bent inherent in the nature of things? Would
evolution have taken the road toward man and all the other forms of
life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started at all had there
not been some initial impulse, or some thought, somewhere, of all
that was to follow?
The doctrine of design does not meet the problem; the doctrine of
chance does not meet it. Design in our human world means a designer.
What, then, does it mean in the non-human world? There can be no
design in such a world, because the human mind is not present. There
can be no chance, because a chance jumbling and collision of the
primordial elements could not result in the organized matter that is
life, any more than a thousand of brick dumped upon the ground can
take the form of a house. The brick and mortar demand an architect,
and organized matter demands an organizing principle. Whence its
source? There we are where no further step can be taken. What about
the divine mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If you place
your God here, I shall ask him some embarrassing questions, such as,
Where did you come from? Where have you been all these æons? Why are
you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods? Why have you made the
world so full of misery? Or, I might ask the question a little boy
asked his father: “Why did God make Satan?” The problem, it seems to
me, is quite as embarrassing to us mortals with a God as without one.
It is just as hard to account for a God as to account for the initial
impulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope with only one end.
In trying to find the other end, we only get ourselves hopelessly
tied up.
X. PAYING THE DEBT
In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying
the debt of Nature”--“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to
Nature--the earth, the air, the water--for the elements of our bodies
and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we
must settle the account. That we are going to have something left
over--that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the
mind--is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give
up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its
own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is
that a consummation devoutly to be wished?
Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But
processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum
total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass
dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in
Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our
universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as
puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We
are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate
the material from what we call the spiritual.
The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop
yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset,
or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be
whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the
life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the
window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the
phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved,
they, too, are links in the cycle of change.
One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage
to say:
“that we must look for life
Hereafter, not by one and one,--your soul
Alone among the souls of other men,
Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever--
But we must see when all at last is counted
And the great sum is made, how one by one
We have returned to Her, the Mother of All,--
The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us.
For we must live at last a part of Her--
For we shall be forever as one with Her.”
The reverent old people to whom I just referred paid the debt long
ago, and the day of reckoning for some of us cannot be far off. After
the account is closed who or what has profited by the transaction? We
are prone to put such questions to Nature, but they are irrelevant.
The universe is not run for profit, as we use the term. So far as we
can see, it is run just to satisfy the æsthetic and creative feeling
of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space run down, they are
wound up again, and suns and planets are started anew. The great game
never comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it should ever
have begun, except as the flowers begin in spring, or as a man begins
when he is born. Antecedents! Antecedents!--always. We cannot apply
our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of the Eternal with
us. “That I have positively appeared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.”