PREFACE

This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious

belief of the writer. That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it is

not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a profound

belief in a personal and intimate God. There is nothing in its

statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for the

expression of a faith different from and perhaps in several particulars

opposed to his own. The writer will be found to be sympathetic with

all sincere religious feeling. Nevertheless it is well to prepare the

prospective reader for statements that may jar harshly against deeply

rooted mental habits. It is well to warn him at the outset that the

departure from accepted beliefs is here no vague scepticism, but a quite

sharply defined objection to dogmas very widely revered. Let the writer

state the most probable occasion of trouble forthwith. An issue upon

which this book will be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma

of the Trinity. The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea,

which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two centuries and

formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are

based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of

all religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations

which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only

disrespectful attention at the present time. There you have a chief

possibility of offence. He is quite unable to pretend any awe for what

he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that undignified

gathering. He makes no attempt to be obscure or propitiatory in this

connection. He criticises the creeds explicitly and frankly, because he

believes it is particularly necessary to clear them out of the way of

those who are seeking religious consolation at this present time of

exceptional religious need. He does little to conceal his indignation at

the role played by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing

the religious life of mankind. After this warning such readers from

among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible

to storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an

ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read on

at their own risk. This is a religious book written by a believer,

but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to them more

sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism. That the writer

cannot tell. He is not simply denying their God. He is declaring that

there is a living God, different altogether from that Triune God and

nearer to the heart of man. The spirit of this book is like that of a

missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and smash some Polynesian

divinity of shark’s teeth and painted wood and mother-of-pearl. To the

writer such elaborations as “begotten of the Father before all worlds”

are no better than intellectual shark’s teeth and oyster shells. His

purpose, like the purpose of that missionary, is not primarily to shock

and insult; but he is zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a

reverence that stands between man and God. He gives this fair warning

and proceeds with his matter.

His matter is modern religion as he sees it. It is only incidentally and

because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal Christianity.

In a previous book, “First and Last Things” (Constable and Co.), he has

stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and thought

as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of metaphysics that

is, seems to him to be a discussion of the relations of class and

individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist and the Realist, the

opposition of the One and the Many, the contrast of the Ideal and the

Actual, all these oppositions express a certain structural and essential

duality in the activity of the human mind. From an imperfect recognition

of that duality ensue great masses of misconception. That was the

substance of “First and Last Things.” In this present book there is no

further attack on philosophical or metaphysical questions. Here we

work at a less fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and

religious ideas. But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a

whole world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about

the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to think

that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a confusion

of intention due to a double meaning of the word “God”; that the word

“God” conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but several essentially

different ideas, incompatible one with another, and falling mainly into

one or other of two divergent groups; and that people slip carelessly

from one to the other of these groups of ideas and so get into

ultimately inextricable confusions.

The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought that

preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was essentially

a struggle--obscured, of course, by many complexities--to reconcile and

get into a relationship these two separate main series of God-ideas.

Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two

antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by

speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the

other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God;

the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most

highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God

tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling

with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and

awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this

idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would

suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that

phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a

persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas

of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature

accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into

a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and

flowers and the dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer

metaphor for such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the

trouble is that it seems impossible to most people to continue to

regard the relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical

metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment of

intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and

inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator God,

of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the invention of a

Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as something bridging the

great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator descending into the sphere of the

human understanding. That, and the suggestive influence of the Egyptian

Trinity that was then being worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had

saturated the thought of Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in

unity, are probably the realities that account for the Third Person of

the Christian Trinity. At any rate the present writer believes that the

discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were dominated

by such natural and fundamental thoughts. These discussions were,

of course, complicated from the outset; and particularly were they

complicated by the identification of the man Jesus with the theological

Christ, by materialistic expectations of his second coming, by

materialistic inventions about his “miraculous” begetting, and by the

morbid speculations about virginity and the like that arose out of

such grossness. They were still further complicated by the idea of the

textual inspiration of the scriptures, which presently swamped thought

in textual interpretation. That swamping came very early in the

development of Christianity. The writer of St. John’s gospel appears

still to be thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already

hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer of St. John’s gospel

was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man. He was emasculated

mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry. He quotes; his

predecessor thinks.

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions of

early Christian thought in passing. His business here is the definition

of a position. The writer’s position here in this book is, firstly,

complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator, and secondly,

entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer. That, so to speak, is

the key of his book. He cannot bring the two ideas under the same term

God. He uses the word God therefore for the God in our hearts only,

and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the ultimate mysteries of the

universe, and he declares that we do not know and perhaps cannot know in

any comprehensible terms the relation of the Veiled Being to that living

reality in our lives who is, in his terminology, the true God. Speaking

from the point of view of practical religion, he is restricting and

defining the word God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he

is restricting it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence

from our religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the

religious life.

Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an

Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book

acceptable to them if they will read “the Christ God” where the writer

has written “God.” They will then differ from him upon little more than

the question whether there is an essential identity in aim and quality

between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who answer to their

Creator God. This the orthodox post Nicaean Christians assert, and many

pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the Cathars) contradicted with its

exact contrary. The Cathars, Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with

the Manichaeans, that the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. The

Christ God was his antagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley.

And passing beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be

found to many problems in comparative theology in this distinction

between the Being of Nature (cf. Kant’s “starry vault above”) and the

God of the heart (Kant’s “moral law within”). The idea of an antagonism

seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the

Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to

be “antagonistic.” On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern

Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God the creator

is altogether and without distinction also God the King of Mankind.

Christianity stands somewhere between such complete identification and

complete antagonism. It admits a difference in attitude between Father

and Son in its distinction between the Old Dispensation (of the Old

Testament) and the New. Every possible change is rung in the great

religions of the world between identification, complete separation,

equality, and disproportion of these Beings; but it will be found that

these two ideas are, so to speak, the basal elements of all theology in

the world. The writer is chary of assertion or denial in these

matters. He believes that they are speculations not at all necessary to

salvation. He believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions

upon these points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials

of religion. The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and

exclusively with the God of the Heart. He declares as his own opinion,

and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern thought, that

there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either benevolent or

malignant towards men. But if the reader believes that God is Almighty

and in every way Infinite the practical outcome is not very different.

For the purposes of human relationship it is impossible to deny that

God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as struggling and taking a part against

evil.

The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely

extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion. His aim in this

book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer entangled in

such speculations and disputes.

Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and that

is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter IV.,

1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal immortality. [It

is discussed in “First and Last Things,” Book IV, 4.] He omits this

question because he does not consider that it has any more bearing upon

the essentials of religion, than have the theories we may hold about the

relation of God and the moral law to the starry universe. The latter is

a question for the theologian, the former for the psychologist. Whether

we are mortal or immortal, whether the God in our hearts is the Son of

or a rebel against the Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of

salvation, is still our self-identification with God, irrespective of

consequences, and the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and

in the world. Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect

righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final personal

death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have no such appetite

for a separate immortality. God is my immortality; what, of me, is

identified with God, is God; what is not is of no more permanent value

than the snows of yester-year.