We may go further. We may admit, nay, we must vehemently maintain, that Morality without Religion is far better than Religion without Morality. Look at this man who makes no profession of Religion, but who is temperate, honest, self-sacrificing for the public good. Look at that man who made a loud profession, but who was leading a life of secret vice, who was false to the trust reposed in him, who appropriated what had been committed to his charge. Can there be any doubt, we are triumphantly asked, that of these two, the religious is inferior to the irreligious? There can be no doubt whatever, would be the reply of every well-instructed Christian. Morality without Religion is incalculably better than Religion without Morality. But what does this prove with regard to Christianity? It simply proves how eternally true is the parableof our Lord: 'A certain man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not, but afterwards he repented and went. And he came to the second and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir, and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto Him, The first,' and our Lord confirmed the answer.
That kind of comparison between Religion and Morality is most misleading, for such 'Religion' is not Religion at all. It may be hypocrisy, it may be superstition, it may be self-deception: Christianity it is not, and never can be. The contrast is not really between Morality and Religion, but between Morality and Immorality, Falsehood, Fraud, and Wilful Imposition. Whatever else the Kingdom of God may be, it is at leastRighteousness: where there is no Righteousness, there can be no Kingdom of God. Whatever else Christian doctrine may be, it is at least a doctrine according to godliness, a teaching in accordance with the eternal laws of righteousness. For purposes of analysis and convenience, we may distinguish between Religion and Morality, and show them working in different spheres, but it is utterly erroneous to suppose that they can be actually divorced. In every right and rational representation of the Christian Religion, Morality is included and imbedded, otherwise it is only a maimed and mutilated Religion which is held out for acceptance. On the other hand, in all true Morality, especially in its highest and purest manifestations, Religion is present. It is possible to decry Morality. 'Mere Morality,' in the current acceptation of the phrase, may lack a good deal, may be a phase of self-righteousness, self-interest, cold calculation,a keeping up of appearances before the world, but Morality itself is of a higher strain: it is the fulfilment of every duty to one's self and to one's neighbour: it implies that each duty is done from the right motive: the purer and loftier it becomes the more it encroaches on the religious domain: it is crowned and glorified with a religious sanction: it is, visible or hidden, conscious or unconscious, a doing of the will of God. Morality, to hold its own, must be 'touched by emotion,' and Morality touched by emotion is identical with Religion. To admit moral obligation in all its length and breadth, and depth and height, is to admit God.[1]
A curious illustration of the fact that Morality, to be permanent, needs the inspiration of Religion, that Morality, at its best and purest, tends to become Religion, isafforded in such a work as Dr. Stanton Coit'sNational Idealism and a State Church. Dr. Coit has for twenty years been engaged in founding ethical societies, and his high and disinterested aims need not be called in question. But the book is evidence that in order to support the lofty principles which he so earnestly expounds, he is obliged to call in the aid of principles which he imagined himself to have discarded. He begins by denying the Supernatural in every shape and form. He will have none of a personal God, or of a personal immortality. There is no higher being than Man. All trust must be shifted from supernatural to human agencies. 'Combined human foresight, the general will of organised society, assumes the rôle of Creative Providence.' 'This is, then, the presupposition of all moral judgment in harmony with which I would reconstruct the religions of the world: that no crime and no good deed that happens in this world shallever be traced to any other moral agencies than those actually inhabiting living human bodies and recognised by other human beings as fit subjects of human rights and privileges.' In other words, Morality, Morality alone, Morality without any sanction from Above, or any hope from Beyond, is the all-sufficient strength and ennoblement of man.
But what is the superstructure which Dr. Stanton Coit proceeds to build upon this foundation? One would naturally expect that Prayer and Churches and Sacraments would have no place. But these are exactly what he insists on retaining; these will apparently be more important, more necessary, in the future than in the past. 'We should appropriate and adapt the materials furnished us by the rites and ceremonies of the historic Church. As the woodbird, bent on building her nest, in lieu of better materials makes it of leaves and of feathers from her breast, so may we use what is familiar, old,and close at hand. It is all ours; and the homelike beauty of the Church of the future will be enhanced by the ancient materials wrought into its new forms.' So much enhanced, indeed, that most people will be inclined to tolerate the new forms simply because of the ancient materials which are allowed to remain. Among the ancient materials which Dr. Coit appropriates or adapts, prayer occupies a prominent place. And he is severe upon those,e.g., Comte and Dr. Congreve, who would banish petition from the sphere of worship. He delights in pointing out that, in despite of themselves, they include requests for personal blessings. Nor is prayer to be a mere aspiration or inarticulate longing of the soul. 'No mental activity can become definite, coherent, and systematic, and remain so, except it be embodied and repeated in words.... A petition that does not, or cannot, or will not, formulate itself in words, and let the lips move to shape them, and thevoice to sound them, and the eye to visualise them on the written or printed page, becomes soon a mere torpor of the mind, or a meaningless movement of blind unrest, or a trick of pretending to pray. Perfected prayer is always spoken.'
To whom, or to what, this prayer, uttered or unexpressed, is to be offered, may be difficult of comprehension. It is not to God, as we have hitherto employed that sacred name; but Dr. Coit insists that the word 'God' shall be retained, and that we have no right to deny to this God the attribute of Personality. 'Any one who worships either a concrete social group or an abstract moral quality may justly protest against the charge that his God is impersonal: he may insist that it is either superpersonal or interpersonal, or both.' The worship of Nature appears to be discouraged, and to be considered as of comparatively little worth. 'We dare never forget that moral qualities stand to us in adifferent dynamic relation from the grass and the stars and the sea—no effects upon us or upon these will result from petitions even of a most righteous man to them. But no one can deny that prayers to Purity, Serenity, Faith, Humanity, England, Man, Woman, to Milton, to Jesus, do create a new moral heaven and a new earth for him who thirsts after righteousness.' Leaving the name of our Lord out of the discussion, why should a prayer to Serenity have more moral influence than a prayer to the Sea? Why should a prayer to the Stars be less efficacious than a prayer to Milton, whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart? We have only to invest the stars and the sea with certain qualities evolved from our own imagination to make them as worthy of worship as either Milton or Serenity. Dr. Coit is scathing in his criticism of the Positivist prayers, whether of Comte or of Dr. Congreve: they are 'screamingly funny': 'the most monstrousabsurdity ever perpetrated by a really good and great man.' The epithets are possibly justified; but are they quite inapplicable to one who supposes that an invocation of the Living and Eternal God means no more than an invocation of England, or Faith, or Woman? It is only when God has become to us an abstraction that an abstraction can take the place of God.
A manual of services fitted to a nation's present needs is what, according to Dr. Coit, is required to ensure the progress and triumph of the ethical movement. 'Until the new idealism possesses its own manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its deeper thought and purpose. The moment, however, it has invented such a means of communication, it would seem inevitable that a rapid moral and intellectual advancement of man must at last take place, equal in speed and in beneficence to the material advancement which followedduring the last century in the wake of scientific inventions.' The ritual of ethical societies will not outwardly differ much from the ritual to be found in existing religions. Its details have yet to be arranged or 'invented.' The only things certain are that a book of prayers ought to be provided at once, and that in Swinburne'sSongs before Sunrisemay be found an 'anthology of prayer suitable for use in the Church of Humanity,' prayers 'as sublime and quickening in melody and passion as anything in the Hebrew prophets or the Litany of the Church.'
Dr. Coit does not denounce theology as theology, he even insists on being himself ranked among theologians. His readers may be surprised to learn on what doctrines he dwells with particular fondness. He laments that belief in the existence and power of the devil should be waning. 'We may not believe in a personal devil, but we must believe in a devil who acts very like a person.'He predicts that teachers will more and more teach a doctrine of hell-fire. Out of kindness they will terrify by presenting the evil effects, indirect and remote, of selfish thoughts and dispositions. 'We must frighten people away from the edge of the abyss which begins this side of death.' Finally, though, of course, the word is not used in the ordinary sense, the necessity of the doctrine of the Incarnation is upheld. 'The Incarnation must for ever remain a fundamental conception of religion. Until all men are incarnations of the principle of constructive moral beneficence, and to a higher degree, Jesus will remain pre-eminent; and it is quite possible that in proportion as he is approached, gratitude to him will increase rather than diminish.' 'Even should any one ever in the future transcend him, still it will only be by him and in glad acknowledgment of the debt to him. There never can in the future be a dividing of the world into Christianityand not Christianity. It will only be a new and more Christian Christianity, compatible with liberty and reason.'
Thus the drift and tendency of this book bring us back, however unintentionally, to the Faith of which it appears, at first sight, to be the renunciation. It establishes irresistibly that Morality, to be living and permanent, must have religious sanction and inspiration, that we need to be delivered from the awful thraldom of evil, that the supreme realities are the things which are unseen; that prayer is the life of the soul; that public worship is a necessity; that in Christ the greatest redemptive power has been embodied, and the purest vision of the Eternal has been granted; and that, in its adaptation to human needs, its fostering of human aspirations, its ministering to human sorrows, its renewal of human penitence, its consecration of life and its hope in death, no Ethical Society yet devised gives anysymptom of being able to supplant the Church of Him Who said, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.'
Now, from the fact that Morality at its best assumes a religious tinge, merges itself in Religion, we may legitimately infer that, without the inspiration of Religion, Morality at its best will not long prevail.[2] 'Love, friendship,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'good nature, kindness carried to the height of sincere and devoted affection, will always be the chief pleasures of life, whether Christianity is true or false; but Christian Charity is not the same as any of these, or all of these put together, and I think that if Christian Theology were exploded, Christian Charity would not survive it.'[3] At present, when Religion has pervaded everything with its sacred sanctions, it is easy to say that Religionwould not be greatly missed were it discarded, and that Morality would be unaffected. This is pure conjecture. To test its worth we should need a state of society from which every vestige of Religion had disappeared. It will not do to retain any of the beliefs or the customs which owe their origin to a sense of the Unseen and Eternal, to a sense of any Power above ourselves, ruling our destinies and instilling into our minds thoughts and desires and hopes beyond the visible and the material. If Morality, in the limited acceptation of the term, is sufficient for the elevation and welfare of mankind, it is not to be supported by any admixture of Religion: it must prove its power by itself. Religion must be utterly abolished, its every sanction must be universally rejected, its every impulse must have universally ceased before it can be contended with any measure of assurance that the world will be none the worse, may be even the better, for its vanishing.
If Religion is a delusion, remember what must be eliminated from our convictions. There can be no higher tribunal than that of man by which our actions can be judged.[4] A life of outward propriety is the utmost that can be demanded of us, if it is only against the wellbeing of our neighbour or the promotion of our own happiness that we can transgress. What has human law to do with our hearts? What legislation can deal with 'envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness,' unless they manifest themselves in outward acts? A base, unloving, impure, acrimonious, untruthful man may crawl through life, never having been arrested, never having been sentenced to any term of penal servitude. He can stand erect before all the laws of the country and say, 'All these have I kept from my youth up.' And unless there be a higher law than the law of man, unless there be a law written on our hearts by the Finger ofGod, unless there be One to whom, above and beyond all earthly appearances, we can mournfully declare, 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,' nothing more can be reasonably demanded. If there is nothing higher than the visible, it can be only visible results which are of any value. The giving of money to help the needy, and the giving of money in order to obtain a reputation for generosity, must stand on the same level. The widow's mite will be worth infinitely less than the shekels which come from those who devour widows' houses. If there be none to search the heart, none save poor frail fellow-mortals to whom we must give account, what an incentive to purity of motive and loftiness of aspiration is removed! But let men talk as they will, there is a conscience in them which whispers, It does matter whether our hearts as well as our actions are right; it does matter whether we have good motives, good intentions; there is a scrutiny of hearts,making and to be made more fully yet; there is One before Whom, even though we have not broken the law of the land, we confess with anguish, Against Thee have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight: where I appear most irreproachable, Thine eye detecteth error: it is not the occasional trespass that I have chiefly to lament, it is the sin that is almost part and parcel of my very being, the sin that corrodes even where it does not glare, the sin that undermines even where it does not crash.
The most thoughtful of those who have lost faith in the Living God and in fellowship with Him hereafter, look on this life with a pessimistic eye. Without trust in the Unseen and Eternal, life is worthless, an idle dream. With its harassing cares, with its petty vexations, with its turbulence and strife, its sorrows, its breaking up of old associations, its quenching the light of oureyes, 'O dreary were this earth, if earth were all!' On the stage of the world, 'the play is the Tragedy Man, the hero the conqueror worm!'
We cannot but extend the deepest sympathy, the warmest admiration to those who, bereft of belief and of hope, yet cling tenaciously to moral goodness.[5] 'What is to become of us,' asks the pensive Amiel, 'when everything leaves us, health, joy, affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work, when the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charms? ... There is but one answer, keep close to Duty. Be what you ought to be; the rest is God's affair.... And supposing there were no good and holy God, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the enigma, the pole star of a wanderinghumanity.'[6] Who does not see that it is the lingering faith in God which gives strength to this conviction and that, were the faith obliterated, the natural conclusion would be for the cultured, 'Vanity of vanities: all is vanity'; and for the multitudes, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' 'I remember how at Cambridge,' says Mr. F. W. H. Myers of George Eliot, 'I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity on an evening of rainy May: and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men—the wordsGod, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was thefirst, how unbelievable thesecond, and yet how peremptory and absolute thethird. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and uncompromising Law. Ilistened and night fell: her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the gloom, and it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.'[7]
Withdraw belief in a God above and in a life beyond, the only reason for obedience to Duty and Morality will be either our own pleasure, the doing what is most agreeable to ourselves; or sympathy, the bearing of others' burdens, in the hope that when we have passed away there may be some on earth who will reap the harvest which we havesown; or public opinion, the views which are prevalent in a particular time in a particular region; and these reasons are hardly likely to produce a morality which will be other than that of self-indulgence, of despair, or of conventionality.[8]
'We can get on very well without a religion,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'for though the view of life which Science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no difficulty in turning their minds away from its transient character.' If it would only last! But it does not last: those dearer to us than ourselves are snatched away. Could anything be more selfish, more despicably base than to go about saying, All that is of noconsequence, so long as I meet with pleasant people and have an infinite number of things to enjoy? It is true that an infinite number of my fellow-creatures may not be enjoying an infinite number of things, may have trouble in recalling almost anything worthy of the name of enjoyment, but why should I be depressed by that? I find no difficulty in turning away my mind from the misfortunes of others. 'We can get on very well without religion.' No doubt without it some of us can have agreeable society and a variety of pleasures more or less refined; but this does not prove that religion is no loss. On the same principle, we can get on very comfortably without honesty, without sobriety, without purity, without generosity. We can get on very comfortably indeed without anything except without a heart which is intent on self-gratification, and which excludes all thought of the wants and woes of the world. 'Let us eat and drink, forto-morrow we die,' is the irresistible, though rather inconsistent, conclusion of that sublime austerity which so indignantly repudiates the merest hint of reward or hope within the veil, and which so sensitively shrinks from the mercenariness of the Religion of the Cross.
'The wages of sin is death:if the wages of Virtue be dust,Would she have heart to endure for the lifeof the worm and the fly!'[9]
What are the facts? What is the growing tendency where men think themselves strong enough to do without religious beliefs, when they have been proclaiming that the suppression of Religion will be the exaltation of a purer Morality? There are plenty of indications that the laws of Morality are found to be as irksome as the dictates of Religion. The first step is to cry out for a higher Morality, to censure the Morality ofthe New Testament as imperfect and inadequate, as selfish and visionary. The next step is to question the restraints of Morality, to clamour for liberty in regard to matters on which the general voice of mankind has from the beginning given no uncertain verdict. The last step is to declare that Morality is variable and conventional, a mere arbitrary arrangement, which can be dispensed with by the emancipated soul. The literature which assumes that Religion is obsolete does not, as a rule, suffer itself to be much hampered by the fetters of Morality. The non-Religion of the Future is what, we are confidently told, increasing knowledge of the laws of Sociology will of necessity bring about. Should that day ever dawn, or rather let us say, should that night ever envelop us, it will mean the diffusion of non-Morality such as the world has never known.[10]
[1]Appendix.
[2]Appendix VI.
[3]Nineteenth Century, June 1884.
[4]Appendix VII.
[5]Appendix VIII.
[6]Journal Intime, ii.
[7]Modern Essays.
[8]Appendix IX.
[9] Tennyson,Wages.
[10]Appendix X.
'Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence.'—PSALM cxxxix. 7.
'Do I not fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.'—JEREMIAH xxiii. 24.
'The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee.'—1 KINGS viii. 27.
'In Him we live, and move, and have our being.'—ACTS xvii. 28.
'One God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all.'—EPHESIANS iv. 6.
'Of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.'—ROMANS xi. 36.
'That God may be all in all.'—1 CORINTHIANS xv. 28.
Among proposed substitutes for Christianity, none occupies a more prominent place than Pantheism, the identity of God and the universe. 'Pantheism,' says Haeckel, 'is the world system of the modern scientist.'[1] Pantheism, or the Religion of the Universe, is, in one aspect, a protest against Anthropomorphism, the making of God in the image of man. It is in supposing God to be altogether such as we are, to be swayed by the same motives, to be actuated by the same passions as we are, that the most deadly errors have arisen. Robert Browning, inCaliban upon Setebos, represents a half-brutalbeing who lives in a cave speculating upon the government of the world, wondering why it came to be made, and what could be the purpose of the Creator in making it. Every motive that could sway the savage mind is in turn discussed: pleasure, restlessness, jealousy, cruelty, sport. 'Because I, Caliban,' such is the process of his reasoning, 'delight in tormenting defenceless animals, or would crush any one that interfered with my comfort, or do things because my taskmaster obliges me to do them, so must it be with Him Who made the world.' With great grotesqueness, but with marvellous power, the degraded monster argues as to the reasons which could have prompted the Unseen Ruler to frame the earth and its inhabitants. Everything that he attributes to God is in keeping with his own base nature. What is the explanation of the horrors which have been perpetrated in the Name of God? The sacrifice of humanbeings, of vanquished enemies, or of the nearest and the dearest, the agonies of self-torture, did not these originate in the transference to the Invisible God of the emotions and principles by which men were guiding their own lives? They had no notion of forbearance and forgiveness and patience, therefore they did not think that there could be forgiveness with God. They were to be turned aside from their fierce, revengeful purposes by bribes and by the protracted sufferings of their foes, therefore they thought that God might be bribed by gifts or propitiated by pains. What they were on earth, delighting in bloodshed and conquest and revelry, that, they supposed, must be the Being or the Beings who ruled in the world unseen.
God is not as man is, this was a lesson which ancient prophets struggled to teach. He is not a man that He should lie, or a sonof man that He should repent. He is not to be conceived as influenced by the petty hopes and fears and jealousies which influence the mass of mortals. 'My thoughts are not as your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.' He is infinitely exalted above the best and wisest of His children and to see in Him only their likeness is not to see Him aright. It is not to be denied that the writers of the Old Testament employ anthropomorphic language to vivify the justice and goodness of the Eternal. They speak of His Eyes and of His Face, of His Hands and of His Arm and of His Voice. They speak of Him walking in the Garden and smelling a sweet savour. They speak of Him repenting and being jealous and coming down to see what is done on earth. Such figures, however, as a rule, have a forceand an appropriateness which never can become obsolete or out of date. They even heighten the Majesty and Spotless Holiness of God. They are felt to be, at most, words struggling to express what no words can ever convey: they are the readiest means of impressing on the dull understanding of men their practical duty, of letting them know with what purity and righteousness they have to do. It is not in such figures that any harm can ever lie. The error of taking literally such phrases as 'Hands' or 'Arm' or 'Voice' is not very prevalent, but the error of framing God after our moral image is not distant or imaginary. There is a mode of speaking about Divine Purposes and Divine Motives which must jar on those who have begun to discern the Divine Majesty, to whom the thought of the All-Embracing Presence has become a reality.
The representation of the Almighty and Eternal as one of ourselves, as animated by the lowest passions and paltriest prejudices of mankind, as a 'magnified and non-natural' human being, is recognised as ludicrously inadequate and terribly distorted. The representation of the Creator as 'sitting idle at the outside of the Universe and seeing it go,' as having brought it into being and afterwards left it to itself, as mingling no more in its events and evolution, is utterly discarded. It is, however, to such representations that the assaults of modern critics are directed, and in the overthrow of such representations it is imagined that Christianity itself is overthrown. The assailants maintain that Christianity in attributing Personality to God makes Him in the image of man, and separates Him from the Universe. But what is meant by Personality? It does not mean abeing no higher than man, with the limitations and imperfections of man.[2] Mr. Herbert Spencer, who would not ascribe Personality to God, yet affirmed that the choice was not between Personality and something lower than Personality, but between Personality and something higher. 'Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical motion?'[3] The description of Personality given by the author of theRiddle of the Universewould be repudiated by every educated Christian. 'The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognises the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere.'[4] That conclusion,—weare not concerned with the steps by which the conclusion is reached,—does not strike one as a modern discovery. In what authoritative statement of Christian doctrine God is defined asnotbeing everywhere, or 'an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form,' we are unaware. There is apparent misunderstanding in the supposition that we have to take our choice between God as entirely severed from the world, and God existing in the world. God, it is asserted in current phraseology, cannot be both Immanent and Transcendent; He cannot be both in the world and above it. 'In Theism,' so Haeckel draws out the comparison, 'God is opposed to Nature as an extra-mundane being, as creating and sustaining the world, and acting upon it from without, while in Pantheism God, as an intra-mundane being, is everywhere identical with Nature itself, and is operative within the world as "force" or"energy."'[5] If there is no juggling with words here, it can hardly be juggling with words to point out that so far as 'space' goes, an intra-mundane being, rather than an extra-mundane, is likely to be 'limited in extension.'
The imagination that the Christian God is a Personality like ourselves, and is to be found only above and beyond the world, finds perhaps its strangest expression in some of the writings of that ardent lover of Nature, the late Richard Jefferies. 'I cease,' so he writes inThe Story of my Heart, 'to look for traces of the Deity in life, because no such traces exist. I conclude that there is an existence, a something higher than soul, higher, better, and more perfect than deity. Earnestly I pray to find this something better than a god. There is something superior, higher, more good. For this I search, labour,think, and pray.... With the whole force of my existence, with the whole force of my thought, mind, and soul, I pray to find this Highest Soul, this greater than deity, this better than God. Give me to live the deepest soul-life now and always with this soul. For want of words I write soul, but I think it is something beyond soul.' Could anything be more pathetic or, at the same time, more self-refuting? How can anything be greater than the Infinite, more enduring than the Eternal, better than the All-Pure and All-Perfect? It could be only the God of unenlightened, unchristian teaching, Whom he rejected. The God Whom he sought must be not only in but beyond and above all created or developed things. It was, indeed, the Higher than the Highest that he worshipped. It was for God, for the Living God, that his eager soul was athirst, and it is in God, the Living God, that his eager soul is now, we humbly trust, for ever satisfied.
'The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Him.' 'Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?' 'My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways saith the Lord.' 'In Him we live and move and have our being.' 'Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.'[6] Now it cannot be denied that some who have striven to express after this fashion the unutterable majesty and the universal presence of God, who have endeavoured to demonstrate that God is in all things, and that all things are in God, have at times failed to make their meaning plain. Either from the obscurity of their own language, or from the obtuseness of their readers, they have been considered Atheists. While vehemently asserting that God iseverywhere, they have been taken to mean that God is nowhere. The actual conclusion to be drawn from the treatises of Spinoza, the reputed founder of modern Pantheism, is still undecided. But no one now would brand him with the name of Atheist. He was excommunicated by Jews and denounced by Christians, yet there are many who think that his aim, his not unsuccessful aim, was to establish faith in the Unseen and Eternal on a basis which could not be shaken. So far from denying God, he was, according to one of the greatest of German theologians, 'a God-intoxicated man.' 'Offer up reverently with me a lock of hair to the manes of the holy, repudiated Spinoza! The high world-spirit penetrated him: the Infinite was his beginning and his end: the Universe his only and eternal love.... He was full of religion and of the Holy Spirit, and therefore he stands alone and unreachable, master in his art above the profane multitude,without disciples and without citizenship.'[7] Dean Stanley went so far as to say that 'a clearer glimpse into the nature of the Deity was granted to Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, than to the combined forces of Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod of Dordrecht.'[8] Such a judgment is rather hard upon the divines who took part in that celebrated Synod, but at any rate it indicates that the great philosopher, misunderstood and persecuted, was elaborating in his own way, this great truth, 'In him we live and move and have our being.' 'Of Him, and through Him are all things.'
In their loftiest moments, contemplating the marvels of the heavens above and the earth beneath, devout souls have, wherever they looked, been confronted with the Vision of God. 'What do I see in allNature?' said Fénelon, 'God. God is everything, and God alone.' 'Everything,' said William Law, 'that is in being is either God or Nature or Creature: and everything that is not God is only a manifestation of God; for as there is nothing, neither Nature nor Creature, but what must have its being in and from God, so everything is and must be according to its nature more or less a manifestation of God.'
It is the thought which has inspired poets of the most diverse schools, which has been their most marvellous illumination and ecstasy.
Now it is Alexander Pope:
All are but parts of one stupendous wholeWhose body Nature is, and God the soul.
Now it is William Cowper:
There lives and worksA soul in all things and that soul is God.
Now it is James Thomson ofThe Seasons:
These, as they change, Almighty Father! theseAre but the varied God. The rolling yearIs full of Thee.
Now it is William Wordsworth:
I have feltA Presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts, a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of manA motion and a spirit which impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.
Now it is Lord Tennyson:
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him Who reigns?* * * * *Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet.Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands or feet.