There has always been a demand upon the theological teacher that he
should supply a cosmogony. It has always been an effective propagandist
thing to say: “OUR God made the whole universe. Don’t you think that
it would be wise to abandon YOUR deity, who did not, as you admit, do
anything of the sort?”
The attentive reader of the lives of the Saints will find that this
style of argument did in the past bring many tribes and nations into
the Christian fold. It was second only to the claim of magic advantages,
demonstrated by a free use of miracles. Only one great religious system,
the Buddhist, seems to have resisted the temptation to secure for
its divinity the honour and title of Creator. Modern religion is like
Buddhism in that respect. It offers no theory whatever about the origin
of the universe. It does not reach behind the appearances of space
and time. It sees only a featureless presumption in that playing with
superlatives which has entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the
Hegelians with the delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or
the Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the back of all known
things there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is
a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or
ill. Of that Being, whether it is simple or complex or divine, we
know nothing; to us it is no more than the limit of understanding,
the unknown beyond. It may be of practically limitless intricacy and
possibility. The new religion does not pretend that the God of its life
is that Being, or that he has any relation of control or association
with that Being. It does not even assert that God knows all or much more
than we do about that ultimate Being.
For us life is a matter of our personalities in space and time. Human
analysis probing with philosophy and science towards the Veiled Being
reveals nothing of God, reveals space and time only as necessary forms
of consciousness, glimpses a dance of atoms, of whirls in the
ether. Some day in the endless future there may be a knowledge, an
understanding of relationship, a power and courage that will pierce into
those black wrappings. To that it may be our God, the Captain of Mankind
will take us.
That now is a mere speculation. The veil of the unknown is set with
the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal. The Veiled
Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the mirror upon
which the busy shapes of life are moving. It is as if it waited in a
great stillness. Our lives do not deal with it, and cannot deal with it.
It may be that they may never be able to deal with it.