What thought the boy of these explanations? Do you think they helped him at all? Do you think he was able to accept them as real? Did they throw any light into the darkness of his doubts?
The boy took them and considered them. He considered them fairly, I am sure; he would have accepted them if he could. For what he was looking for was simply guidance and light. He had no desire for aught but this. If he revolted now from the faith of his people it was because he found there neither teaching he could accept nor help. If the scientific theologian shewed him that the error was in him and not in the faith the boy would, I think, have been glad. So he took these explanations and considered them, and this is what he thought.
They tell me that the seven days of creationare seven epochs. I did not ask that. To my question whether man has fallen, as the Bible says, or risen, as science declares, no reply has been given.
There is only a specious likening of a man's life, saying that man falls from the innocence of his childhood to sin through the knowledge of evil, and requires redemption. My question is avoided, and a new sophism given me which is also untrue. A child is not innocent. It is only ignorant and weak. Its natural impulses are those of a savage. It requires to learn the knowledge of good and evil to subdue these instincts. This symbolism of the child is utterly false. A child is to us a very beautiful thing because its tenderness, its helplessness, its clinging affection awaken in us feelings of love, of protection, which we feel are beautiful. All men should, all men I think do, love children, but the beauty is in the man's emotions that are awakened, not in those qualities of the children that awaken them.
To go beyond this and say that a child should be a model to man is to display ignorance of what children are, to mistake effect for cause, to exalt childishness into a virtue. Theologians use this argument, which is merely a play upon our affection for children, to try and induce us to accept their theology with the same ignorantconfidence that a child accepts all it is told by its parents. It would suit theologians for all men to be babes in this sense, in their senselessness. But if theology will bear the light of reason, why ask us to accept it blindly? Why? Is it because it will not bear scrutiny?
And surely of all the answers, this answer about the character of God is the most extraordinary. "God is not really unjust or partial, or revengeful. That is merely the impression His acts make on us." Truly here is an argument. How can anyone, even God, be judged except in His acts? If His acts are revengeful, is not He revengeful? "No!" says the theological scientist, "that is merely your ignorance. Events make a wrong impression on you."
How, then, am I to judge which are wrong and which are right impressions? God acts, as it seems to me, angrily; He is not angry. On other occasions He acts, as it seems, mercifully. How am I to know that this impression of mercy is not an error? How, in fact, am I to know that anything exists at all? If God's anger and partiality and changeableness are merely impressions of my mind, are not all His attributes merely impressions also, and do not exist? In fact, is not God Himself merely an impression and He does not exist? Where are you going tostop? The theologian will doubtless say, "When I tell you." But then he is unfortunately arrogating to himself an authority which does not exist, an authority to twist and turn the Bible to suit his own sophisms, an authority to bind your mind which no one has given him. Impressions forsooth. What impressions can any candid mind have of the scientific theologian? And when the boy read the explanation of the difference between the all-presence of God and the all-presence of Satan, I am afraid he laughed.
But prayer is a serious matter. No one can feel anything but sorrow to see the explanation of God and prayer. The theological scientist again repeats the Bible words and has his own explanation. No, God is not moved by prayer. This is merely another wrong impression of ours, an impression taken from the Bible words. The action of prayer is not objective, but subjective; its effect is not on God, but on you.
Now mark what he has led himself into. Prayer will purify a man. To ask God for what he wants won't make the slightest difference in God's acts, but will in your own feelings. Nevertheless, as of course no one would or could pray unless he hoped to be answered, man must be told that God does listen. But this is not true. Therefore, according to theological science, theBible directly tells us a falsehood in order to lead us into a good action. Is there any escape from this? There is none. The whole meaning and reason of prayer is that Goddoeslisten, that Hedoesforgive if asked, that Hedoeshelp us and save us. Unless a man held this belief firmly he would not pray. Try and you will see. Imagine to yourself, as the theologian declares, that God is quite unmoved by prayer, and that the action of prayer is subjective, and see if you can get up any prayer at all. It is impossible. How much fervency will there be in a request you know will not be granted or attended to? How much subjective action will follow that prayer? The subjective action is absolutely dependent on your belief that God does listen and is influenced by your prayer. But the scientific theologian says your premise is false.
Can you imagine this theologian's prayer? Can you see him kneeling and uttering supplications to a god whom he knows he cannot affect or influence, and pausing now and then to see how the subjective effect on himself was getting on? But it is not even a subject to be bitter over, only to be sad. Truly, if I wanted to make a man an atheist and a scoffer, a railer at all religion, at all religious emotions, at all that is best in our natures, I would take him to a scientific theologianand have him taught the scientific theological theory of prayer.
And again, though the boy understood how a man could be the son of his father, the husband of his wife, the father of his son, three different relations to three people, it did not help him to understand how he could be so to one person. A man cannot be his own son and his own father, and have proceeding from him a third person different and yet the same. The argument seemed to him childish.
As to the teaching of Christ, of what use is a teaching that is suitable only to an ideal state of things? Is it any use to me to tell me that if everyone agreed at once to follow this teaching the world would be perfect? Even if this were true, what would be the use? The world never has accepted it and does not do so now. No one does except a few people who are called visionaries or fanatics. Even the Quakers only accept a part, and it is well for them that their fellow citizens do not accept even that part, or these Quakers would soon be robbed of their wealth. A nation of Quakers would be a nation of slaves. All this talk of what would happen if at a given signal all the world became perfect is useless dream talk. I want realities. This code of Christ is not a reality. No quicker way ofdestroying civilization and all that it means could be desired than by attempting to follow it. We must be ready and prepared to fight other nations, we must have armies and navies, and we must honour them. We must have magistrates, and police, and prisons, and gallows.
"I went," thought the boy, "to these theological scientists, for help in my everyday life, for clear directions and explanations, and what do they give me? A mass of words meaning nothing, words and words, and tangled thoughts; evasion and misrepresentation, misty dreams and cloud-hidden ideals. They cannot explain, and therefore the whole thing is false. There is no truth anywhere in it. The whole teaching of the Bible, from the Creation down to the incarnation of Christ and His second coming, is one huge mistake. Why people keep on believing it I cannot say. But anyhow I have found out its falseness, and I will not. Let it all go. It will make no difference and be rather an advantage. What use have I ever had from this religion that has been dinned into me? It gave me false ideas of the world and nature which I have had to unlearn. It gave me an unworkable code of conduct which I never tried to follow, but I got into trouble for it. To call oneself a Christian is merely a way of talking. No one is so really,and the only difference between me and the others will be that while they are not Christians but think they are, I am not a Christian and know I am not."
Was the boy glad or sorry? I do not know. I think perhaps he was both. He felt like a man who has shaken off a burden, a load that contained mere weight and no useful thing. He would step more lightly in future.
But he felt, too, like a man who has skirted a precipice, secure in that a railing fenced him in from danger, when he suddenly discovers that the railing is decayed to the core and will vanish at a touch. He felt dizzy and afraid, and the feeling grew upon him.
May be, he thought, it is a good thing to have a religion. People of all faiths, of all nations, seem to cling to theirs very strongly. It is the one thing they cannot bear to lose. Yet I do not know what they get from it. At least I do not know what people get from Christianity. What I look for in a faith are these three things.
I wish an explanation of my origin, of the origin of man and his relation to this world, and to what there may be beyond this world. I want an explanation I can accept, and that is not contradicted by the knowledge we acquire from other sources than religion.
And I want a guide to life. I want a guide to life as it is. For I have to live in the world as it exists, and I would have help and direction to do so well. I want a teaching and an example I can refer to in my everyday troubles.
Finally, I would know something of the Hereafter. I would desire to hear of the after death. I cannot believe that all non-Christians, including myself and the majority of Christians, go to hell. That is repulsive. Nor can I believe in the heavens they tell us of. If all be true that they tell us, it has no attraction this Christian heaven. To be for ever singing praises is not life but monotony. Did any man in health, and strength, and sanity ever yearn to die in order to reach this Heaven they tell us of? Did not Aucassin say long ago that if he were to believe the monks Heaven was a place for the poor and maimed, the foolish, the childish and silly, the stupid, the cowards, the ugly, the undesirable, the failures of earth, and that he cared not for it? Whoever was unfit for earth was the more fit for heaven. No! If there is another world it must be different from the conceptions of Heaven and Hell as are taught. And I would know. These seem to me the essentials of religion. They are the three things I want. I have not found them. It may be that in the other greaterfaiths that hold the world I may find what I seek. I cannot say. But meanwhile I must do without. It is better to have no compass than a faulty one. It is better to watch for the stars, even if the night be thick and it be hard to see.
Such, I think, was what he thought. Whether he ever found what he sought, whether any faith can give what he asks, whether indeed these three things are essentials of religion at all, will be found in the latter part of the book. This part is but the introduction to explain why and by whom the search was made, and what was sought.
From the East has come all our light. All world religions have begun there, have grown there, have mostly spread there.
Brahminism and Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, Mahommedanism and Parseeism, the cult of the Taoists and Confucians, every belief that has been a great belief, that has led man captive, has come from the East. Even the Mythologies of Greece and Rome were from Asiatic sources, from Babylon and Chaldea. In the North we have originated only Thor and Odin, Balder and the Valkyries.
I do not think anyone who has lived in the East can doubt why this has been so. Where is it man's thoughts are deepest and strongest, where is it that his heart responds to the heart of the world until they beat throb for throb?
It is never in the North; for the cold winds and dreary skies, the rain and cloud and gloom,do not draw a man out from himself, but drive him in. Every keen breeze that blows, every shower, every grey day, reminds him not of his soul but of his body. It must be kept warm, it must be fed, it must be housed. He cannot forget that the outside world must be guarded against, is an enemy to be feared.
And man must live in houses with other people. He cannot be alone, he cannot ever feel alone with just himself and the world. Yet it is only in solitude, when alone with Nature, that she will talk to you. For her voice is very low, and there must be a great silence before she will tell her secrets.
But there in the East it is not so. For weeks and months, for half the year may be, one perfect day is joined to another by more perfect nights.
Only there can man be alone. Only there, in the limitless silence of the desert, in the unending forests, can you live and forget all other men, and yourself almost, and be alone with Him who is God.
You want but little, no house to shelter you, no fire, but very little food and drink and clothes. You do not feel that restless desire to do something born of cold winds and skies. Your roof by day is the palm or tamarind, by night you watch the stars wheeling over your head. Thereis no one to commune with but Nature, and if you love her as she should be loved; if you woo her as she would be wooed; if you can send out your soul to lose itself with her in the wonders of the infinite, then shall you hear the music of the stars.
Thus has all religion come from the land of the sun: light is the fount of faith.
Never till you have been to the East can you know what faith is. Have we not religion, nay religions, in the North? Yes, but not as they have there. Do we not believe in the West? Yes, but not as they believe. Faith lies there in the great distances, in the dawn, the noon, the sunset, in the holiness of the dark. It has sunk into the heart of man. Consider, what do you see when you land anywhere in the East, what strikes you most, what is most prominent, not in the landscape, but in the people?
It is their religion.
You watch the people in the streets and you ask, Why has the merchant in that shop trident marks on his forehead? Because he is a Hindu and follows Vishnu. And that clerk who gave me money in the bank, why has he those other marks? Because he is a Brahmin. And that money-lender seems to have rubbed his forehead with ashes? He is a Chetty.
They carry their religion about with them, they are proud of it, they desire all men to know it. See that man's beard, he is a Mahommedan; and yonder man with a green turban, he is a Seyid. They would not desire you to doubt it.
Did you ever see Englishmen praying in the streets? Perhaps never. Certainly if ever you have seen it you condemned it as unnatural. "Let him pray at home," you have thought. "He is parading his piety." But here in the East it is different.
Go by the morning train, leave Rangoon Station when the sun is shining on the great pagoda, and you will see men and women and children lean out of the carriage windows to salute it, to murmur a prayer. The Mahommedan spreads his cloth and turns to Mecca, and prays no matter where he may be. He is not ashamed. It does not seem to him strange. He does it absolutely naturally, as all these people do all the things that pertain to their faiths. Neither his fellow-believers nor the adherents of other faiths wonder.
The Hindu may hate the Mahommedan for social reasons, and the Buddhist may hate both, but they do not despise each other for being religious.
It would never occur to a Hindu to despise or jeer at a Mahommedan for spreading his cloth atthe street corner and praying. He thinks the faith a mistaken faith,hewould not have it. But if a man is a Mahommedan it is right of him to pray, of course.
I have never heard, no one has ever heard, one Oriental jeer at another for being religious, for obeying the commands of his faith. But I have heard Christians and teachers of Christianity do so very often. We will jeer at a Mahommedan for praying, at a Hindu for observing his caste, at a Buddhist for raising his hands in honour to his pagoda, at a Chinaman for protecting the graves of his fathers. For in the West we have never known what real religion is. We have it not ourselves, and so we cannot recognise and honour it in others. No brave man will mock at another brave man, though an enemy; no one who has loved mocks at another lover, though he love strange things. Only those jeer who do not know, and the Christians of the West jeer at the faiths of the East, at the simple natural religion of the people, because they know not what religion of the heart can be.
In Europe, what difference does a man's faith make? None. He may live a lifetime with other men and no one know or care what his faith may be. Unless he is a poor man and in need of mission, it is considered impertinence toask. But here in the East a man's faith is everything. You cannot get away from it even for a moment. It is an essential part of him.
There is another thing that strikes one very soon. These Oriental religions have little or no organisation. Here in Europe there is nothing so organised as religion. Consider the Catholic faith and the organisation of Rome. It is a marvel of government, of very strict government indeed. And the other forms of Western Christianity are not much behind. The Greek Church is organised as a branch of Government. So, too, to a lesser extent is the Anglican Church, and if the Dissenting bodies, as we call them, are not connected with the State, they have nevertheless a strong system of government.
These organisations are not now, of course, so strong as they were. They used to drag the men into religion by force, by State aid, they used to insist on conformity and punish laxity of observance. That is now gone, but a strong and continuous pressure still exists, exerted by the Churches in many ways. All Churches in Europe are always having "missions." Our great cities are full of them, and the country is not free of them. There has to be a continual shepherding of the flock or the Church might dwindle sadly. Men have to be preached at andcaught one way or another. All through Europe immense sums are spent yearly in Christianising the poor.
In the East nothing of this exists. There is no head of Hinduism; that of the Sultan in Mahommedanism is merely nominal; how slight the organisation is of Buddhism those who have read my former book will know.
Hindus are guided by the race of Brahmins, who in turn are guided by no one. They are a great community themselves, without any organisation or binding authority. They need no Pope, no Acts of Uniformity. They are Brahmins because they are so. And so it may be said in general. Faiths in the East require no strong organisations to hold them together. Religion is innate in the believers. It seems wonderful. And they have no missions. If a man feels the need of faith he will seek it and obtain it. It is there for him if he will come. And all do come. How many millions in Europe, even in England, have no religious usages? Can you in the East find one man?
When you think of Europe and its faiths you seem to be in a garden where the hedges are carefully clipped and the flowers are trained and pruned, and where you may not walk on the grass. It is all order, and method, and restriction,for the flowers are exotics and would die without the tending, they would vary if they were not kept true to type. But the East is Nature's garden, where the flowers grow wild everywhere; no one tends them or cares for them, but each grows his own way, developes his own power and strength, from the lowest grasses to the gorgeous orchid or the poison lily.
Therefore it may be that in this East, this country whence all religions have come, where the whole air breathes of faiths and all life is full of them, the man who has lost his early beliefs may learn new ones. There is so much to choose from, so many varieties of thought and emotion.
In this Empire of ours are all the great religions. It is the home of Brahminism, of the mystical forms of Hinduism, beyond which it has never spread. There are more Mahommedans here than under the Sultan of Roum. There are the Parsees here, fugitives long ago from Persia on account of their faith, the only sun worshippers who are left. There are Jews who came here no one can tell how long ago, there are Christians who date back may be eighteen centuries, there are Armenians and Arabs. Within this Empire live the only race professing a Buddhism that is pure and without superstition; and beside these there are ahundred other cults, superstitions, or religions, call them what you will.
From the spirit worship of the Shan plateau to the dignified philosophic theories of the Brahmo Somaj is a space as wide as the world can show, yet may it be bridged with religions that differ but by small degrees till the whole be passed.
If anyone want a faith here are enough and to spare. "Therefore," thought the boy, who had now become a man, "I will seek here for what I want. I know what I want. I have it clearly before me. I have even written it down. It is not as if I was undertaking a blind search for something of which I was not sure. These are my three essentials: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, a promise in the after life that gives me something to really desire, to really hope for, to be a haven towards which I may steer. I will take each subject, each section of a subject, separately and read it up. I will read up these faiths from books, I will study them as I can from the people, and I will see what they are. Surely somewhere can be found what I desire, what I desire so greatly to find."
Therefore the man got books and read them. He read books on Hinduism, many of them; he read the Vedas and the sacred hymns. He learnt of Vishnu and Siva, of Krishna and the milkmaids. He found books on caste and read them, of how these were originally four castes which subdivided. He read of suttee and the car of Juggernauth. He then turned to Mahommedanism and the life of Mahommed. He read the Koran. He learned the early history of the faith, of its rise, of the glory of its result, of the fall of its great Empire. He saw it had much to do with Judaism, there were great similarities, there were also differences. He read of Parseeism, that taught by Zoroaster which they call fire worship; he read of Jainism, of the cult of the Sikhs, of many another strange faith; he learned of the spirit worship of theaboriginal tribes among the mountains, of Phallic worship and its monstrosities.
He read of Confucius and his teachings, of Laotze and his doctrines, of ancestor worship among the Chinese, of Shintoism in Japan.
Most of all he read about Buddhism. There was something here that attracted him more than in all the rest. In the life of Gaudama the Buddha he found a beauty that came to him as a charm, in the teachings of the Great Teacher there seemed to him a light such as he had not seen. Mystery and miracle and the supernatural had always jarred on him, they had an unpleasant savour, as of appeals to the lowest elements in the minds of the credulous and ignorant. Truth he thought should not need such meretricious attractions. Here was a faith that needed none of these things. It could exist without them. It contained explanations, not dogmas. It was reasonableness instead of hysteria, it denounced mysticism and the cult of the supernatural.
It took the man several years to read these books, and he lived those years much alone. His house lay half up a mountain side. Below him lay tangled masses of hills clothed with dense forest, with here and there a clearing. Before him was a jagged mountain wall, behind a great bare dome of rock. It was alwayswonderful to sit and watch, to see the sun rise in gold and crimson behind the peaks, while all below lay in a white mist; to watch the sun rays fall and the mist grow thinner, showing faint outlines of tree clump and hill contour, till all the mist was gone and the world was full of golden light. Daily he saw the marvel of the dawn. He learnt to love it as the most beautiful of things, most beautiful because full of the promise of untold glory. For the most part his life was very lonely. There were the labourers who worked for him, the black, half-nude people who came in gangs in May and left in February of each year. They were not of his world. He directed their work, he paid them, but he did not know them. He wondered at them, that was all, and there were scattered here and there throughout the hills other Europeans, who lived much the same life as he did, and whom he met occasionally at their houses or his, or at the club ten miles away. He liked them, some of them were his best friends, a great part of his life was theirs also.
But there was, aside from his friends, aside from the merry meetings, the games, the chaff, the laughter, another life apart. There was a life he lived to himself, in another world it seemed. His world was of the mountain and the fell, ofthe brooks that laughed down the precipice, of the giant trees, the tangled creepers, the delicate orchid far above. His thoughts were with them and with his books, for they should be brothers. He read and he watched, and he tried to understand; he asked of nature the meaning of these religions, to tell him the secret that he would know. What is the truth of things—what do you mean? And I——What doImean? What is the secret of it all?
The mountains and the trees answered him and told him secrets, the secrets of their hearts, but not the secret he would know. They murmured to him of many things, of beauty, of love, of peace, of forgetfulness. They sang the world's slumber song.
But of whence, of how, of whither they told him nothing, only they ceased talking when he asked, they ceased their song and there was silence. They could not tell.
So he lay upon the rocks and read, and the hills and trees wondered because they knew not of what he read. "Take care," they whispered; "why trouble? Life is so short, surely it were wise to make the best of it; for no one can answer what you ask. We die and fall and new trees grow again, the hills are newly clad each year. The old return in new forms. Wecan tell of ourselves, we are not afraid. Our lives are full of delight. Death has no terror for us. But you? Of you we know nothing. We have no echo to your words."
Yet the man read on. He dreamed and read and dreamed again.
"I have three wants," he said. "I would know whence I came, I would have some rule to live by, I would know whither I am going. Religions, many religions profess to tell men these things, surely somewhere there will be truth. Nearly all men are satisfied with their religion, cannot I find one that satisfies me? It is so little that I ask, I have here so many answers. Amongst them I will be able to find what I want." Therefore he read on. But in the thoughts of many teachers there is not clearness, but confusion. In a multitude of counsellors there is not wisdom, only mist, only the strange shadows made by many lights. He found that he did not gain. "Sometimes," he said, "I agree with one, sometimes with another. No one seems to be altogether true. There is Truth, perhaps, but not the whole Truth. This will not do."
At last he said to himself that he would make a system. He would take certain ideas from various faiths, he would put them together, hewould compare them one by one and see what he learnt.
There is, he said, the First Cause. What do religions say about this First Cause? There is Brahma, and Jehovah, and Ahriman, with Ormuz; there is the Buddhist doctrine of Law, there is the Christian Trinity. These are some of the chief ideas. What can be made of them? Have they a common truth? Are the great religions utterly at variance about this First Cause, or can they agree? I will take this point and consider it first. What is the First Cause? Then I will pass to another. What does life mean? Why are we here? Is there any explanation of this? For what object does man exist? To what end? He did not mean what is the end of man, but what is the object of man, of life? To whom is it a benefit that man exists? To God—if there be a God? If not, to whom? It cannot be that existence is an aimless freak, that it has no object. But what can this object be? What was to be gained by creating man at all? That was question number two. There is no answer to this question.
There were many other questions that he asked. And when he had framed a question he sat down to his books to find the answer. He worked at them as problems to be solved. Hesought in the various faiths described in his books the answers to these problems. What he found will be shown in the next few chapters; but let it be understood again how and why he sought.
He had been born in a faith and brought up in it, and had abandoned it. He left it because he sought in it certain helps to thought and to life that it seemed to him religion ought to give. More, it seemed to him that these answers were of the very essence of religion. His fathers' faith gave him answers he could not accept, it gave him a rule of life he could not follow, that seemed to him untrue. Yet would he not be satisfied with ignorance, he would search further. He wanted a religion, a belief, and he would find it.
For I want it to be understood very clearly that he was no scoffer, no denier of religion. It was the very reverse. He so much wanted a faith, it seemed to him such an eminently necessary thing, that he would not be content till he had one that he could really accept and believe. He hated doubt and half acceptance. He wanted a truth that appealed to him as a whole truth, that held no room for doubt.
"All men," he said, "have religion. They love their faiths, they find in them help andconsolation and guidance, at least they tell me so. Why am I to be left out? Men say that religion is a treasure beyond words. Then I, too, would share in the treasure. But I cannot take what has been offered me. It does not seem to me to be true. Icannotbelieve it. This religion repels me. I cannot say how greatly it repels me. They say it is beautiful. It must be so to some. It is not so to me. Its music to me is not music, but harshest discord. It is not surely that I have no desire for religion, no eye for beauty, no ear for harmony, I know it is not that. No man loves beauty more than I do. There are things in this faith I have rejected that appeal to me. I see in other faiths, too, ideas that are beautiful. But no one seems all true, and none answers my three questions. Yet will I look till I find.
"And meanwhile there are the hills and the woods. These are my dreams.
"But surely in my scheme I shall discover something."
Sitting on the hillside when the hot season was coming near its end he saw the thunderstorms come across the hills. From far away they came, black shadows in the distance, and the thunder like far off surf upon the shore. Nearer they would grow and nearer, passing from ridge to ridge, their long white skirts trailing upon the mountain sides, until they came right overhead and the lightning flashed blindingly, while the thunder roared in great trumpet tones that shuddered through the gorges. The man watched them and he saw how gods were born. It was Thor come back again—Thor with his hammer, Thor with his giant voice. Thus were born the gods, Thor and Odin, Balder God of the Summer Sun, Apollo and Vulcan, Ahriman and Ormuz, night and day.
So were born all the gods. You can read of it in Indian, in Greek, in Roman, in Norwegian mythology, in any mythology you like. You can see the belief living still among the Chins, the Shans, the Moopers; for them the storm-wind and earthquake, the great rivers and the giant hills, all these have causes, and they who cause them are gods. From these have grown all the ideas of God that the peoples hold now. They were originally local, local to the place, local to the people, and as the people progressed so did their ideas of God.
It seemed to the man lying on his hillside easy to follow how it all arose; for, indeed, was it not going on about him? Did not the forest people speak of a god in the great bare rock behind him? Were there not gods in the ravines, gods in the hidden places of the hills? It was so easy to realise as he watched the storm-cloud bursting before him, as the lightning flashed and the thunder trumpet sounded in the hills, that men should personify these. Nay, more, he saw the wild men about him actually personifying them. He could understand.
God was the answer to a question; as the question grew so did the reply.
The savage asks but little. He does not ask "Who am I?" "Who made the world, and why?" Such questioning comes but in later years. He fears the thunder; it is to him a great and wonderful and overpowering thing. It forces itself upon his notice, and he explains it as the voice of a greater man, a God. He lives in the heavens, for His voice comes from thence. The giant peaks that swathe themselves in clouds, the volcano and the earthquake, the great river flowing for ever to the sea, with its strange floods, its eddies, its deadly undertow, in these too must be gods. These are the first things that force themselves upon his dim observance. He wonders, and from his wonder is born a god. But as he grows in mental stature, in power of seeing, in power of feeling, he observes other forces. How is the heaven held up, the great heavy dome as he imagines it? It is Atlas who does so. There is a god of the Autumn and Spring, of the Summer and Winter. So he personifies all forces he perceives but does not understand. For he has no idea of force except as emanating from a Person, of life which is not embodied in some form like his own or that of some animal. Whenever anything is done it must be Some One whodoes it, and that Some One is like himself, only greater and stronger.
There is not in the savage god any conception differing from that of man. There is not in any god any realisable conception different from that of man. The savage god is hungry and thirsty, requires clothes and houses, has in all things passions and wants like a man. That makes the god near to the man. With later gods is it different? God can be realised only by means of the qualities He shares with man. Deduct from your idea of God all human passions, love and forgiveness, and mercy, and revenge, and punishment, and what is left? Only words and abstractions which appeal to no one, and are realisable by no one. Declare that God requires neither ears to hear nor eyes to see, nor legs to walk with, nor a body, and what is left? Nothing is left. When anyone, savage or Christian, realises God he does so by qualities God shares with man. God is the Big Man who causes things. That is all. To say that God is a spirit and then to declare that a spirit differs in essence from a man is playing with words. No realisable conception does or can differ.
The conception of force by itself is but avery late idea. As one by one the phenomena of nature attract man's observation he personifies them. It will be noticed that unless a force intrudes itself on him he does not personify it. What people ever personified gravity? And why not? Surely gravity is evident enough. Every time a savage dropped a stone on his toes he would recognise gravity. But no. That a stone falls to the ground because a force draws it is an idea very late to enter man's brain. It seems to him, as he would say, the nature of a stone to fall. And then gravity acts always in the same way. It is not intermittent—like lightning, for instance. Therefore he never conceives of gravity as a force at all. When men had come to perceive that it was a force, they had passed the personifying stage. But the savage personified each force as he perceived it. First the sun and storm, till at last he came to himself and began to study his own life. He had good and bad luck; that was Fortune. Evil deeds are done, and good; he is beginning to classify and generalise; there are gods of Good and Evil. He has come to Ormuz and Ahriman little by little; as his power of generalising progresses, he drops the smaller gods. They disappear, they are but attributes of greatergods. And as he grows in mental grasp and makes himself the centre of his world, so does the God of Man become the God of Nature too. The greater absorbs the lesser.
The God who cared for man, the God of his past, of his present, of his future, is become the great God. He rules all the gods until he alone is God.
So it seemed to the man that God arose, never out of reason, always out of instinct. There was no difference. It is all the same story. There is innate in all men a tendency to personify the forces they cannot understand. Because they want an explanation, and personality is the only one that offers at first. To attribute effects to persons is aboriginal science. To attribute them to natural laws is later science. Each is the answer to the same question. Men personify forces in different ways according to their mental and emotional stature, to their capacity for generalising. They express their ideas in different ways according to their race and their country. The Hindu began with a god in each force, to represent each idea, and so the lower people still remain, afraid of many gods. But those of mental stature gradually generalised, till at last they came to one God, Brahm, and the lesser gods asemanating from him. This was a hierarchy; and then finally the greatest thinkers came to one God only, and the idea that the lesser gods are but representatives of His manifold nature. You can see all the stages before you now. It is simply a question of brain power, and the sequence remains the same. First the lesser, then the greater. It is never the other way on.
So does Christian mythology personify three ideas of God, as a Trinity, as three Persons in One, and a Devil. The Hindu would express such a conception of God by a god with three heads. Christianity, rejecting such crude symbolism, does so by a mystical creed. The Devil is being dropped. But the Jew and the Mahommedan have only one God. All force emanates from Him. He is the Cause of all things. He is One.
And yet it is not a reasoned answer, but an instinctive one. The savage, no more than the Christian, does not reason out his God. The feeling, the understanding of God is innate, abiding—never the result of a mental process. The idea of God is a thing in itself; it grows with the brain, but it is not the result of any process of the brain; just as a forest tree grows the greater in richer soil.
As the idea of gods increased in majesty,as the numbers decreased and became merged in three, in two, or in one, so did their power increase. The gods were at first but local, local to the place, local to the tribe. So was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who was jealous of the other gods. And gradually their local god or gods grew into the God of the whole world. It was only a question of mental development, of the power of generalisation in conception. Man conceived a ruler of the world in the Roman Emperor before he conceived an all-powerful God. The man as he meditated, as he watched, would see the stages before his eyes. There was the savage, the Kurumba and Moopa with his many gods in the hills all about; there were the Hindus, the traders whose temples shewed white in the groves beneath, many steps higher in civilisation with their supreme Brahm and minor gods emanating from him; there was the Moslem with his "God is God." He had the stages before his eyes.
Therefore when he came to consider this question of God he found in God-worship in Hinduism, Parseeism, Mahommedanism, Judaism, Christianity, no differing conception. They held all the same idea in different shapes. There was nothing new. God, one or multiple,made the world according to His own good pleasure, ruled it according to His will. The savage knew most of God, because his god was but a man enlarged and the nearer to him for that. With greater contemplation the crudities have been removed, the manlike qualities disappear one by one, until with the few greatest thinkers they are all gone. God has become a "Spirit," an abstraction, an unthinkable, incomprehensible God that is of no use to anyone; for He cannot be influenced by prayer, He has no passions to be roused, He has become lost in the heavens, an inscrutable force. Such was the evolution of God.
Only when he came to Buddhism was there a new thing. He found no longer God or gods, but Law. That was indeed new, that was indeed very different from the other faiths. The world came into being under Law, it progressed under Law, it would end, if it ever did end, under Law. And this Law was unchanged, unchangeable for ever. Let me consider, he said, these two conceptions, Personality and Law.
What is this world to the Buddhist? It is a place that has evolved and is evolving under Law. He does not speak of God creating one thing or another, but of a sequence of events.The Buddhist was Darwin two thousand years before Darwin. He saw the rule of Law long before our scientific men found it in the stars. I do not think it is so easy to follow the origin of this idea as it is of the idea of God. With the latter we have the stages before our eyes, but how the Buddhist idea of law arose we can only conjecture. It is not, I think, an instinct like the knowledge of God. It is more of a mental process, like the reasoning of science. It is a negation as opposed to an assertion. It is the negative pole. It must surely have arisen like modern science from the observation of facts. I do not say that the idea of law is absent from other faiths. You see it in the Commandments. Certain sequences were recognised, but with Judaism they were ascribed to the order of a Personality. Buddhism, like science, knows of no Personality. The laws of a Theocracy were always liable to change and correction. The laws of the Buddhist are inviolable. The Christian thinks laws can be violated, the Buddhist knows they are inviolable.
You cannot break a law. It is true that many declare otherwise, that Charles Kingsley in a famous lecture declared you could break the law of gravity. "The law is," says he,"that a stone should fall to the earth; but by stretching out your hand you can prevent the stone falling. Thus you can break the law." So argued Charles Kingsley, so think mistily many men because they have never troubled to define the words they use. There is no law that a stone should fall to the earth. The law of gravity is that bodies attract each other directly as their mass, and inversely as the square of the distance. You do not break this law by holding a stone in your hand. Nay, you can feel it acting all the time you do so. You cannot break this law. You cannot break any law. Law is another word for the inevitable. Whom did the Greeks put above all the gods? It was [Greek: anachkê], Necessity. Did, then, the Greeks see that behind all their personification of forces Law ruled? It may be so. They have the two ideas, God and Law. It is perhaps the old battle of free will and destination. And which is true? To the Greek Necessity was behind God, to the Theist God is behind Law. The laws are but His orders. He can break them and change them and modify them. And yet, it is so hard to see clearly how Theists can avoid the difficulty. If God's laws are perfect truths they cannot be alterable. Onlythe imperfect would be changed. Yet if God's laws are perfect, is not He, too, bound by them? And if He be bound, is not His free will, His omnipotence limited? Surely God cannot transgress His own laws of righteousness; is there not "necessity" to Him too? But if this be so, then where is the need of any knowledge beyond the knowledge of law? If it be indeed eternal, as the Buddhists say, what need for more? In the science of nature we need not go beyond, we cannot. In the science of man, who is but part of nature, why should we do so? Is it not better, truer, more beautiful to believe in everlasting laws of righteousness that rule the world than to believe that a Personality has to be always arranging and interfering? Would we not in a state prefer perfect laws to a perfect king, who, however, was imperfect in this that his laws were imperfect and had to be checked in their working? Which is the more perfect conception? Surely that of law. If crime and ignorance, if mistake and waywardness brought always inevitably their due punishment and correction, where is a ruler needed? It is imperfection that requires changing.
Think what a difference, what an immense difference, it makes to a man which he believes, how utterly it alters all his attitude to the Unknown, to the Infinite, whether he believes in God or in Law. For among all religions, all faiths, all theories of the unknown there are only these two ideas, Personality or Law, free will or inevitableness. And how different they are.
In the face of eternity there are two attitudes: that of the Theist, whether Christian or Jew, Hindu or spirit worshipper; and that of the Buddhist, the believer in Law. To the believer in God or in gods, what is the world and what is man? They are playthings in the hands of the Almighty. God is responsible to no one, He knows no right and wrong, no necessity beyond Himself, all He does must be right. He is All-powerful. Man mustcrouch before Him in fear. If man suffer he must not cry out against God; he must say in due submissiveness, "Thy will be done." A man must even be thankful that matters are not worse. If in a shipwreck many are drowned and few, bereft of all but life, are hardly saved, what must they do? They must render thanks to God that He didn't drown them too. Not because they are aware of being punished for any sin, that does not come to man in calamity. You cannot imagine a common sin that engulphs men and women, children and babes, from all countries, of all professions, of many religions, in one common disaster. No! God can be bribed, not with presents perhaps now, but with reverence. It is the cringe that deprecates uncontrollable Power. It is the same feeling that makes the savage lay a fruit or a flower before the Spirit of the Hills lest he too be killed by the falling rocks.
For what do men imagine God to be? Do you think that each man holds one wonderful conception of God? Not so. The civilised man's idea of God is as the savage idea. Each man builds to himself his own God, out of his ideals, civilised or savage. Truly, if you ask a man to tell you his idea of God he will answer you vaguely out of his creeds or sacred books;but if you watch that man's actions towards God, you will soon discover that his God is but his ideal man glorified.
To a tender woman her God is but the extreme of the tenderness, the beauty, the compassion which she feels, and the narrowness which she has but does not realise. And cannot you see in your mind's eye the German Emperor's God clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a German pickelhaube and swearing German oaths? Man's God is but what he admires most in himself. He can be propitiated, he can be bribed. The savage does it with a bowl of milk or a honey cake, the mediæval man did it with a chapel or a painted window. You say this idea has ceased. Have you ever prayed to God and said, "Spare me this time and I will be good in future. I will do this. I will do that." Or, more beautifully, "Spare him that I love and let the punishment fall on me. Let me bear his sins." Is not the very idea of atonement expressed by Christ's life? A price has to be paid to God. He must be bought off. Man's attitude before God must be that of the child, submissive with downcast eyes, full of praise, never daring to blame. "Tell me and I will obey, do not punish me or I perish." Then there is theattitude of the believer in eternal law. For him the world holds no caprice, no leaning to one side or another, no revenge, no mercy. Each act carries with it an inevitable result: reward if the act be good, punishment if it be bad. You can break a command of God. He may tell you to do a thing and you may refuse. You cannot break a law. It is the inevitable, the everlasting. You cannot rebel against law. The sin is not rebellion, but ignorance. The attitude is not submission, but inquiry, the thirst for truth. Adam lost Eden because he sought for the knowledge of good and evil. But the law-believer says that only in wisdom, only in truth, is there any hope. He stands before the eternal verities with clear eyes to see them, with a strong heart to bear what his ignorance may make him suffer. Out of his pain he will learn the sequences of life. He has gained much.
What has he lost? Are not mercy and fatherly care, forgiveness and love, beautiful things? Yet they, too, are of God. If you know not of Him, only of Law, have you not lost out of your life some of the greatest thoughts? How will you comfort your heart when it is sore if you have not God? Is prayer nothing?
Truly, said the man, these are beautiful things. If I could have them alone. But I cannot. I fear the other qualities more than I love these. I would have neither. I would be a man and live under Law. It seems to me enough. If Law be absolute I see no room for God.
Over against him were the long ridges of the hills where the rain-clouds gathered from the south. He saw them come in great masses surging up the valleys and hiding the contours of the hills. The lightning flashed across the peaks and the thunder echoed in long-drawn trumpet blasts. "The savage," he said, "saw there only gods warring with one another. Now with wiser eyes we see the reign of Law. We do not know all the laws; we cannot even yet tell how much rain will come, whether it will be famine or plenty. We cannot see the Law, but we never doubt the Law is there. With man it is the same. Births and deaths, suicides and murders, are they too not all under Law? Why should not man's soul be so too? Where is the need of God?"
As he came down the mountain side the rain was falling heavily, as it can only in the tropics. The dry hollows were already streams, the streams were foaming torrents. "They act under Law," he said. "Their life is bounded all byLaw." And then of a sudden, watching the foaming water, he saw more clearly.
"True, the stream runs within its banks, but banks do not make the stream. Gravity, that drags down these waters, acts in certain sequence, but that sequence is not gravity. Gravity is a force. When we enumerate the law we do not define, or know, or understand the force, only the way it acts. Force is force, and law is law. They are not the same. They do not explain each other. What a dead thing would law be that had no force acting within it. Truly, I must see more clearly. Law does not deny force; nay, but it predicates it—is, in fact, an outcome of it. Law is a sequence along which force acts; neither can exist without the other. All force is ruled by law. Yes, but what is force—what are any of the forces that exist: gravity, and electricity, and heat, and life? Forms of motion? May be; but whence the motion?
"Ah me!" said the man, "then am I back again at the beginning. Have I learnt nothing? I thought law might suffice, but it will not. If law is inevitable, then are we but helpless atoms following the stream of necessity. Then is freewill dead. Yet there is freewill. There is force, there is life, whence come these forces? And if one say that force is God, what then?
"Perhaps there is this: there are two truths—there is God and there is Law. Both are true, as there is destiny and there is freewill. But how can that be? I see it is so, that it must be so. But how? Is it that there are facets of some great truth behind which we can never know?"
The man was weary. "What have I gained? Only that I have a truth, which I cannot understand, which gives me no help, or but little? Have I gained anything to help me in life? I have gained this, perhaps, that if Law be not a full explanation, it is true, as far as it goes; if not a whole truth, yet it is a truth. Why go further? The scientist cares for nothing more when he has learned the laws of gravity. He is content to be ignorant of whence the force comes, because he can go no further. In the battle of life is not this enough? Can we not, too, be as the scientist, denying nothing, but searching only for that which we can know and which will be useful to us? If force be God, yet should His ways not be mysterious. Let us not shut our eyes and comfort ourselves in ignorance by saying, 'There is no Law; God is inscrutable, God knows no Law. He is inexpressible, changeable and uncertain.' But truly there is Law. Behind the gods, behind God, thereis[Greek: anachkê], there is Necessity, there is an unfailing sequence of events,which is righteousness. Let us learn then what righteousness is. Let us learn what is true in order to do what is right."
But after all it is all speculation. There is no evidence. It is a theory built on nothing. What is the value of it? Nothing at all. What is to be gained by all this? Only barren words, finely spun theories made of air. Where is the proof of God or of Law? There is none.
Perhaps it does not matter. It may be that all this speculation about the First Cause, about the Ruling Power of the world, is unnecessary. What matter if God be inscrutable, if He has given us commands for our lives that are clear, if He has laid down for us His will that we should follow. Even if Law be not a full explanation, even if a knowledge of all Law would not mean a knowledge of everything, what would this signify if we can see enough of the laws that govern our lives so to order ourselves as to reach the goal? Whether the Theist be right or the Buddhist, in his theories of the world, the main question with which we are concerned is ourselves. Has any religion a working code of life that is true, that is adapted to us as we are, that is not in conflict with facts and common sense? What matters its name or its supposed origin? Is there such athing? So thought the man, turning from abstract ideas to real necessities. After all, what I and all men want is not abstract ideas, whether of God or Law, but present help and guidance. Has any God taught any believer a perfect code of life, has any Buddhist searcher discovered the natural Law of life? For if so I would know them. Never mind the whence or how, give me the facts.
It seemed to him, looking back in the beginning of faiths, that morals, that rules of life had no part there. When the Northman saw Thor in the thunder there was no moral code there. The Greek gods were frankly not so much immoral, which predicates a code of morals, as unmoral. They knew of no such thing. It is the same with all the early gods, with the Hindu gods and those of all other early beliefs. The Chin savage on the Burmese frontier sees gods in the great peaks, but these gods demand from him no moral observance, they impress upon him no moral standard. All that the early gods demanded was fear, reverence, worship. Even the Jehovah of the Jews asked at first only this. It is not till you get to the third commandment that conduct comes in, and the moral code was scanty. The early gods of all kinds, of all faiths, had no moral code either for themselves or man. They demanded onlyobedience and fear and worship. The moral code came later.
It seems unnecessary now to consider whence they came, how they grew, why they became added to the worship of the gods, which was all that early religion meant. Some of that will come elsewhere. It is immaterial here which is only the man's search after a code, any code that would act. For it remains that all faiths when once they had left the elementary stage did add a code of conduct as part of their religion, saying it came from God, or was an immutable law, and tried to induce men to follow it by declaring that it alone would lead to happiness hereafter. All the greater faiths have these codes. "And I," said the man to himself as he searched, "I care nothing whence the code is supposed to have come, truly or falsely, as long as I find it. I want a guide to life as it is. Has any faith such a guide? For each declare that it alone has. Show me these rules to life."
The books showed him. They showed him codes of all degrees, from the simplest to the most complex, from the plain cult of courage, the very first and most necessary of all virtues, to the immensely complicated code of observances of the Brahmin; and outside religions there were the philosophies of Greece and Rome, ofIndia and China, of Persia and Germany, and Scotland.
Now should man so order his life as to live righteously here, and to be of good repute before man and his own conscience? How shall a man so form himself here that if indeed there be a life hereafter he may enter it without fear? What are these codes?
It seemed to him that there ran in some ways a great sameness through the creeds, that up to a certain stage they differed but little. Courage against the foe, courage to face suffering, truth and honesty, and later mercy and compassion, charity of act and thought, courtesy and beauty of mind; these were the additions the faiths made, little by little, to the ground-work of reverence of the gods. And so they grew, adding bit by bit, as civilisation increased and necessity dictated. They added many of them sanitary rules, observances for washing, for cooking, for choosing food, incorporating with religion whatever practice found useful, and thereby giving a sanctity which it would otherwise have lacked. Sometimes rules were added to preserve the race pure, as with the Jews or the Hindus, evolving in the latter religion into the vast system of caste that separates the different races, all of whom call themselves Hindus. With the two faiths as just mentionedthe tendency was to narrowness and restriction, to the exclusion of other races; with others, such as the Mahommedan and Buddhist, it was to expansion, to the acceptance of other peoples, until at last some great Prophet arose to give coherence and form to the whole and include it in the sacred books. So arose the codes, the man thought. But this hardly matters. What are the codes?
It seemed to him that out of all the faiths only two held codes that rose much above the level of savage conduct. We cannot go back to the codes of Moses or Mahommed; we cannot accept the narrow racial limitations of Hinduism; we have outgrown the simple ethics of Zoroaster and the Egyptians. The teachings of Confucius and Laotze are strange to us, and the philosophies, if they seem clear, are so singularly unconvincing. They lack so greatly all that appeals to mankind; they are so much codes in the head and not for the heart; they are as mathematical drawings compared to a work of art; they do not ring true. And so there were quickly left for him only two, the codes of Christ and of Buddha, the examples of the two greatest prophets the world has known.
And between the teachings of the great Teacher who lived two thousand and five hundred years ago, and that of the man God of theChristians six hundred years later, what difference is there? They start from different beginnings, they work towards perhaps different ends; but in the methods, in the rules of life, what difference is there? That which was taught by the sea of Galilee is but the echo of the words spoken long before below the Himalayan Hills. They are the same, read them. The two greatest faiths the world has known, the two greatest teachers that ever came to man to help him in his need, have brought him the same message. Believe not in the world, believe not in wealth, in power, in greatness, in strength. These are not what man should seek. Nay, but leave the world behind you because it is all evil, all very evil. Nothing of this world is of any value. In a man's heart is his greatest treasure. Make therefore your heart pure from the world. Leave it all and turn to God, to righteousness. Cultivate your own soul apart from all the pleasures of life. The other world can be gained only by abjuring this. Wealth and honour and ambition, all the glories of the world, are but traps to catch you. Even the loves we love are wrong. The Buddha left his wife and child. The Christ never married, and denied even his mother any love beyond that of a disciple. It is all the same. Their lives, their teachings are the same.
The man sighed as he read. Surely, he said, these are hard things to believe, that the world is evil. No, but it is not evil. That a man can only fit himself for heaven by being unfit for earth. I cannot believe this. I have not changed since I thought this over as a boy. This is not a true code, not a true rule, not a true faith, whether Christian or Buddhist. I did not believe then, a boy; I do not believe now, a man.
The world is not evil. There is evil there, but so much of good. There are stains there truly, but so much of beauty. Do you think I can watch the sun rise, the daily marvel which is beyond words, and hate the world? Can I see the man I love, the men who have helped me, who have been with me, the men who are my friends, and say that they are of a world that is evil? And the women, the girls, the children, are their lives for us nothing? Are they of a world that we must abjure? It is never so. Truly, there are in these teachings, whether of the Christ or of the Buddha, much that is of beauty, much, so much that touches our hearts, I had at times fain believe. But I find in the world beauty also, beauty that comes as near, that comes nearer than they do. When a man is honest and honourable and true, and rises to great position, to be spoken well of by all men, is that an evil thing? Is thewealth that comes of the keen brain, the strong will, a calamity? Are our loves, our hopes, our fears but evil? Yet they are of the world. Beautiful as is the teaching, there are in the world things far more beautiful. I will never believe, never, that the world and flesh are partners to the Devil. I will never believe that.
"And more," said the man slowly. "No one ever does believe it—none but a very few. The world has rejected it always; not from wickedness, but because the teaching is never true. They do not acknowledge their disbelief. No! The Christians and the Buddhists maintain their faith by words. But in secret, in their own hearts, before the world, in the action of their own hands, have they ever acknowledged these beliefs?"
Neither the Christ nor the Buddha are the models men follow, because men are sure that, though there be truth in their teachings yet it is not all the truth, though there be beauty yet are there other beauties as great, nay greater than these. The world is never evil, and if it were, to follow these doctrines would not be the way to make it better.
Then the man turned from his books again to the world beneath him, he came to reality from dreams. I have learnt nothing? No, but I have learnt something. I have learned what Ihave yet to learn. And I have learned more. I know why I disbelieve, because I love the world as it is, and because I will never believe that what calls to my heart from there is wrong. The beauty of things is the truth of things. And in truth and beauty is the voice of God as surely, nay more surely than in the voice of any prophet of two thousand years ago.