Part 6 (1/2)

It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem most arbitrary to the inquirer. For they relate of G.o.d, as men will relate of a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions, the aims of his kings.h.i.+p. And just as they advance no proof whatever of the existence of G.o.d but their realisation of him, so with regard to these qualities and dispositions they have little argument but profound conviction. What they say is this; that if you do not feel G.o.d then there is no persuading you of him; we cannot win over the incredulous.

And what they say of his qualities is this; that if you feel G.o.d then you will know, you will realise more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method and intention.

It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full implications of the statement that G.o.d is Finite, to hear it a.s.serted that the first purpose of G.o.d is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means to power. For that he must use human eyes and hands and brains.

And as G.o.d gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as time goes on. But it is possible to define the broad outlines of the attainment he seeks.

It is the conquest of death.

It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun. G.o.d fights against death in every form, against the great death of the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness, misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us ”from the body of this death.” This is the battle that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal's round of eating, drinking, l.u.s.ting, quarrelling and laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying and dying, which is the whole life that living without G.o.d can give us. And from these great propositions there follow many very definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve G.o.d. These we will immediately consider.

3. THE CRUCIFIX

But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind of intermediate faith between the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d of Youth and the vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number of people closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who, biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to which allusion has already been made.

He, who is called in this book G.o.d, they would call G.o.d-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would call G.o.d-the-Father. And what we speak of here as Life, they would call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man. And they would a.s.sert, what we of the new belief, pleading our profound ignorance, would neither a.s.sert nor deny, that that Darkness, out of which came Life and G.o.d, since it produced them must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them. And that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from death by him, would be reconciled with G.o.d the Father.* And this great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call G.o.d, they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who was crucified at Jerusalem.

* This probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for him is the wisdom of G.o.d manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind of man. Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive knowledge of G.o.d. Salvation is an escape from the ”inadequate” ideas of the mortal human personality to the ”adequate” and timeless ideas of G.o.d.

Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion. Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the veiled being nor about that being's relations to G.o.d and to Life. We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between these outer beings and our G.o.d. Our G.o.d is, we feel, like Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial. And the accepted figure of Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our wors.h.i.+p. It is not by suffering that G.o.d conquers death, but by fighting. Incidentally our G.o.d dies a million deaths, but the thing that matters is not the deaths but the immortality. It may be he cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock. These may be necessary sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in themselves bring victory. They may be necessary, but they are not glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, ”My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?” these things jar with our spirit. We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith that our G.o.d does not fail us nor himself. We cannot accept the Christian's crucifix, or pray to a pitiful G.o.d. We cannot accept the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly felt death. Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show G.o.d with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain, pain lost and forgotten in the surpa.s.sing glory of the struggle and the inflexible will to live and prevail... .

But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible the wounds, so long as he does not droop. G.o.d is courage. G.o.d is courage beyond any conceivable suffering.

But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the figure of G.o.d, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for divine action. The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man who proclaimed the loving-kindness of G.o.d and the supremacy of G.o.d's kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes something altogether distinct from a theological symbol. Immediately that we cease to wors.h.i.+p, we can begin to love and pity. Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint of non-resistance... .

We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance. We are the militant followers of and partic.i.p.ators in a militant G.o.d. We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon whose n.o.bility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest quality of all from our G.o.d, and a moribund figure is the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the spirit of our wors.h.i.+p.*

* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same sentiments I have here expressed.

”If I could fill the Crucifix with life as you do,” he says, ”I would gladly look on it, but the fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of glorified humanity. The Christ to whom we are led is One who 'hath been crucified,' who hath pa.s.sed the trial victoriously and borne the fruits to heaven. I dare not then rest on this side of the glory.”

I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit in a tract, ”The Call of the Kingdom,” by that very able and subtle, Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the vitalising stresses of the war we are winning ”faith in Christ as an heroic leader. We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which His disciple had of Him: 'His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His feet like unto burnished bra.s.s, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun s.h.i.+neth in its strength.'”

These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.

4. THE PRIMARY DUTIES

Now it follows very directly from the conception of G.o.d as a finite intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and visible kingdom throughout the world.

And that idea of G.o.d as the Invisible King of the whole world means not merely that G.o.d is to be made and declared the head of the world, but that the kingdom of G.o.d is to be present throughout the whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of G.o.d is to be in the teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the building of the workman's house. It means that ultimately no effigy of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps any more; G.o.d himself and no delegate is to be represented wherever men buy or sell, on our letters and our receipts, a perpetual witness, a perpetual reminder. There is no act altogether without significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for or against G.o.d, no life but can orient itself to him. To realise G.o.d in one's heart is to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the way of his service is neither to pull up one's life by the roots nor to continue it in all its essentials unchanged, but to turn it about, to turn everything that there is in it round into his way.

The outward duty of those who serve G.o.d must vary greatly with the abilities they possess and the positions in which they find themselves, but for all there are certain fundamental duties; a constant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself, a constant sedulousness to keep oneself fit and bright for G.o.d's service, and to increase one's knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent watchfulness of one's baser motives, a watch against fear and indolence, against vanity, against greed and l.u.s.t, against envy, malice, and uncharitableness. To have found G.o.d truly does in itself make G.o.d's service one's essential motive, but these evils lurk in the shadows, in the la.s.situdes and unwary moments. No one escapes them altogether, there is no need for tragic moods on account of imperfections. We can no more serve G.o.d without blunders and set-backs than we can win battles without losing men. But the less of such loss the better. The servant of G.o.d must keep his mind as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he can, just as an operating surgeon must keep his nerves and muscles as fit and his hands as clean as he can. Neither may righteously evade exercise and regular was.h.i.+ng--of mind as of hands. An incessant watchfulness of one's self and one's thoughts and the soundness of one's thoughts; cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence and prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness, fitness and steadfast work; these are the daily fundamental duties that every one who truly comes to G.o.d will, as a matter of course, set before himself.

5. THE INCREASING KINGDOM

Now of the more intimate and personal life of the believer it will be more convenient to write a little later. Let us for the present pursue the idea of this world-kingdom of G.o.d, to whose establishment he calls us. This kingdom is to be a peaceful and co-ordinated activity of all mankind upon certain divine ends. These, we conceive, are first, the maintenance of the racial life; secondly, the exploration of the external being of nature as it is and as it has been, that is to say history and science; thirdly, that exploration of inherent human possibility which is art; fourthly, that clarification of thought and knowledge which is philosophy; and finally, the progressive enlargement and development of the racial life under these lights, so that G.o.d may work through a continually better body of humanity and through better and better equipped minds, that he and our race may increase for ever, working unendingly upon the development of the powers of life and the mastery of the blind forces of matter throughout the deeps of s.p.a.ce. He sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our world and the stars. And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see nothing, our imaginations reach and fail. Beyond the limits of our understanding is the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from us... .