Part 10 (2/2)

In the old days long past, when, tormented with doubts, embittered by disappointment, he would fain be rid of his burden, the voice of the Master kept ever repeating:--

”Follow the gleam”.

And so he followed--followed it through life, over the wide earth, until the land's end was reached. But even then the Spirit did not forsake him. The ”gleam” still shone like a star in the deepening sky, till it stood at length over the waters at the gates of the great bar that led out into the Infinite. And last of all, the ”call,” clear and unmistakable; and there sure enough, waiting beyond the bar, was the ”Pilot,” the Master of the gleam, ”ready to receive the soul”.[1]

[1] Jean Valjean's death in _Les Miserables_.

XV.

”THE UNKNOWN G.o.d.”

The G.o.d on whom I ever gaze, The G.o.d I never once behold; Above the cloud, beneath the clod, The Unknown G.o.d, the Unknown G.o.d.”

--WILLIAM WATSON.

One great function of poetry is to keep open the road which leads from the seen to the unseen world, and as the last echoes of this n.o.ble poem die away, it would seem as though a door had been opened in heaven and an unearthly vision had been revealed to our wondering eyes. It is as though some strange inspiration had fallen upon one suddenly, like that which the seer in the Apocalypse felt when he said, ”And immediately I was in the spirit”. The truth is we have been led into the invisible world, we have gained with the poet ”a sense of G.o.d”. The strange, undefinable attraction of the infinite is upon us.

Perhaps we have not yet learnt how strong that fascination is; how that it is not only the source of that inner light which we see reflected in the countenance of the philosopher and saint, but that it is powerful to arrest the attention of men who are for ever saying that no such reality exists, or, that even if it does, man need no more concern himself about it. Has he not the solid earth and the realm of sense?

Why should he seek what is beyond it? _O caecas hominum mentes_! Man cannot help himself. Well does the ethic master say, ”What is the use of affecting indifference towards that about which the mind of man never can be indifferent?” And why not? Because man came thence?

There is that in us ”which drew from out the boundless deep”. In some incomprehensible way the infinite is in us, and we are therefore restless, dissatisfied ultimately with all that is not it. ”The eye is not filled with sight nor the ear with hearing,” for in us there is the capacity, and therefore, in our best moments, the yearning to see and hear something which sense can never give. Greater than all that is here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. ”Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature,” says Pascal in the _Pensees_, ”but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not ma.s.s its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water may destroy him. But even though the world should fall and crush him he would still be more n.o.ble than his destroyer because he knows that he dies, but the advantage which the world possesses over him--of that the world knows nothing.” And, therefore, the universe is nothing to him who is conscious that there is that in man which made all worlds and shall unmake them--the eternal Mind, one and identical throughout the realm of intelligence.

This is no dreaming, but an interpretation of man and nature necessitated by the undeniable facts of life. The finite does not exhaust man's capacities, it cannot even satisfy them. He was made for something vaster. He is ever seeking the boundless, the infinite.

Hence the most positive, the most scientific of philosophers, Mr.

Herbert Spencer, believes that there is one supreme emotion in man, utterly indestructible, the emotion of religion; and what is religion but the yearning I have described for communion, not with the world, vast and entrancing as it is; not with humanity, admirable, even wors.h.i.+pful in its highest estate; but with that which transcends them and all things, the enduring reality which men call Divine? Spencer and Emerson are at one. Nothing but the Infinite will ultimately satisfy man.

Such are the thoughts awakened by the music of this poet's song, which haunts one with a sense of the mystery of the illimitable. I do not read it as a confession of agnosticism, save in the sense in which all philosophers are ready to admit that our knowledge of the ultimate reality of existence is as mere ignorance compared with what we do not, and cannot, know of it. I read it rather as a profession of the higher theism, or, if you will, of the higher pantheism, for it is immaterial how far we go in maintaining the Divine immanence, provided we safeguard the sovereign fact of individuality and abstain from all confusion of the human personality and the Divine.

There is prevalent a most erroneous impression that the Divine immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that to a.s.sert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit its universality. Such is not the case, as an a.n.a.lysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term ”person” is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguis.h.i.+ng note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the const.i.tution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the honorific t.i.tle of _person_. Man is a _person_, because a subsistent, self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. _A fortiori_ is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not self-sufficing, then nothing or n.o.body is. Hence we have to point out in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality, the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the omnipresence of the Divine, because--

In my flesh his spirit doth flow Too near, too far for me to know;

because, to use Emerson's language, ”G.o.d appears with all his parts in every moss and every cobweb,” or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to identically the same thing, ”All the forces operative in the universe are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite Energy”--because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the Infinite, with no detriment to its immanence, since of no other being could they by any possibility be true. Theist or pantheist, it matters very little by what name men call themselves so long as they do not imprison themselves within the walls of the false version of the philosophy of relativity, which binds them over to acknowledge nothing beyond their five external senses, to identify the unseen with the unknown, and thereby to stunt and ultimately to atrophy the sublime powers, transcending the insignificant senses we share with the animal world, as the sky towers above earth, whereby this n.o.ble poem of the ”Unknown G.o.d” was given us by William Watson.

And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only rightful basis of religious idealism.

In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the voice of the senses is still, that we ”gain a sense of G.o.d” at all. It is a vision of the mind--of mind knowing Mind, of soul transcending all distinctions and recognising itself. It is the sublime region of the higher unity into which subject and object are taken up and their distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all this majestic vision rose.

When, overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day; Then do I cast my c.u.mbering load, Then do I gain a sense of G.o.d.

But of what G.o.d? for there are G.o.ds many and lords many. There is the known G.o.d, of whom the Western world has heard so much now these two thousand years, the G.o.d of the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures, themselves acclaimed as his unique and authentic revelation, the embodiment of absolute truth. That G.o.d has not been forgotten yet.

Just now his temple is thronged with wors.h.i.+ppers.[1] Ministers of religions in America, archbishops in Spain, are eager in their invocations, and if we may believe our newspapers, the Cardinal of Madrid guaranteed the harmlessness of American cannon and rifles to those who will implore his a.s.sistance through the intercession of saints. It is the war-cry of old: ”_The Lord is a Man of War!_”

But the moral sense, the Divinity within, as contrasted with the Divinity in the skies, tells the poet that this old-world G.o.d is an idol, a glorified image of man in his ”violent youth,” a ”giant shadow hailed Divine”.

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