It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem most
arbitrary to the inquirer. For they relate of God, as men will relate of
a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions, the aims
of his kingship. And just as they advance no proof whatever of the
existence of God but their realisation of him, so with regard to these
qualities and dispositions they have little argument but profound
conviction. What they say is this; that if you do not feel God then
there is no persuading you of him; we cannot win over the incredulous.
And what they say of his qualities is this; that if you feel God then
you will know, you will realise more and more clearly, that thus and
thus and no other is his method and intention.
It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full
implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it asserted
that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of
knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to
power. For that he must use human eyes and hands and brains.
And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only beginning
to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as time goes on. But
it is possible to define the broad outlines of the attainment he seeks.
It is the conquest of death.
It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the
individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an
undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to
threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun. God
fights against death in every form, against the great death of the
race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness,
misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us
“from the body of this death.” This is the battle that grows plainer;
this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal’s round of
eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and laughing and weeping, fearing
and failing, and presently of wearying and dying, which is the
whole life that living without God can give us. And from these great
propositions there follow many very definite maxims and rules of life
for those who serve God. These we will immediately consider.