Part 11 (1/2)
Not him that with fantastic boasts A sombre people dreamed they knew; The mere barbaric G.o.d of Hosts That edged their sword and braced their thew: A G.o.d they pitted 'gainst a swarm Of neighbour G.o.ds less vast of arm.
He is well known, this ”G.o.d of Hosts”. Doubtless once he was the Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently transformed into the G.o.d of battles, who ranged himself on the side of his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even knavery, the G.o.d of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line, of him who afterwards was preached as the G.o.d of devil and h.e.l.l. What has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?--
A G.o.d like some imperious King, Wroth, were his realm not duly awed; A G.o.d for ever hearkening Unto his self-commanded laud; A G.o.d for ever jealous grown Of carven wood and graven stone.
No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emanc.i.p.ation of the Western world from its degrading belief in a ”G.o.d of Hosts”. It is only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the ”sovereignty of ethics,” the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the emanc.i.p.ation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature, together with an equally painstaking research into the history of kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion--the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial religion an impossibility to all who are at pains to inform themselves of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that--
G.o.d whose ghost in arch and aisle Yet haunts his temple--and his tomb; And follows in a little while Odin and Zeus to equal doom; A G.o.d of kindred seed and line; Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.
And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abas.e.m.e.nt, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a pa.s.sionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-G.o.d such as this!
O streaming worlds, O crowded sky!
O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this!
This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot.
The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully a.s.serted. Of old we learned that man was ”made in the image of G.o.d,” but now we see that the--
G.o.d of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle-line--
he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry--
Lord G.o.d of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget--lest we forget!--[2]
we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the ”Lord G.o.d of Hosts,”
”the Man of War,” ”the G.o.d of Victories,” whom Spanish viceroys and captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose amongst men, and that the day _must_ come when it will be finally abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-G.o.d is not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for--
This was what Man in his violent youth begot.
This G.o.d was made in the image of man.
And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of his G.o.d, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, ”far above music,” could tell of his G.o.d, then would he be but the idealised image of himself.
He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.
The G.o.d I know of, I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
_Raise thou the stone and find me there,_ _Cleave thou the wood and there am I,_ Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far for me to know.
I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear a.s.sociated with the emotion, but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. ”Raise thou the stone . . . cleave thou the wood,” and we are in the presence of the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world.
Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far for me to know.
Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them ”everlasting,” to this earth, to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is pa.s.sing away.
_Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt._
The melancholy Herac.l.i.tus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas.