Part 7 (1/2)
So to picture deity seems at first sight a survival of mere childishness. Professor John Fiske, of Harvard, has told us that when he was a boy G.o.d always conjured up in his imagination the figure of a venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske. How many of us can recall such early crude and childish thoughts of G.o.d! A mother asked her young daughter what she was drawing. ”A picture of G.o.d,” was the answer. ”But no one knows what G.o.d looks like,” the mother said. ”They will,” came the rejoinder, ”when I get through.” We all began with some such primitive idea of deity. Indeed, these early conceptions long persist in many minds, as the following statements, written by college students, indicate: ”I think of G.o.d as real, actual skin and blood and bones, something we shall see with our eyes some day, no matter what lives we lead on earth.” ”It may be a remnant of youth, but anyhow, every time I think of G.o.d there appears a vague image of a man, with all members of the body, just enormously large.” ”I have always pictured him according to a description in _Paradise Lost_ as seated upon a throne, while around are angels playing on harps and singing hymns.” ”I think of G.o.d as having bodily form and being much larger than the average man. He has a radiant countenance beaming with love and compa.s.sion. He is erect and upright, fearless and brave.”[3]
No one of us may be contemptuous of such crude ideas; we all possessed them once. Indeed the loss of them, with their picture of deity, clear in feature and distinct in outline, has been to some a shock from which faith has not recovered. When increasing knowledge discredited our immature theology, and our world immeasurably widened, the very human G.o.d of our first imaginations was lost among the stars. We learned that this is a universe where the light that falls upon our eyes tonight left the far heavens when Abraham was shepherding on Syrian hills. The Christian Gospel of the personal Father which once was good news became a serious problem. We still may cling to the old meanings of our religious faith; still we may pray in hours of need as though our childhood's G.o.d were really there; but at times we suspect that we are clinging to the beauty of an early memory while reluctantly we lose conviction of its truth. Many modern men and women can understand the plight of the famous Dr. Jowett of Oxford, who, so runs the tradition, inserted ”used to” in a m.u.f.fled voice, when he recited the creed: ”I _used to_ believe in G.o.d the Father Almighty.”
With such misgivings, whether as habitual disturbers of our faith or as occasional moods of unbelief that come and go, most of us must be familiar. What Charles Darwin is reported to have said about himself, many if they spoke frankly would say too: ”Sometimes I feel a warm sense of a personal G.o.d, and then”--with a shake of his head--”it goes away.”
III
Whatever may be our theology, the fact is plain that the denial of a personal G.o.d solves no problem. For if we may not think of G.o.d in terms of personality, the query still remains, which was there before--_in what terms shall we conceive of the Eternal_? In a discussion on the nature of the sky, one boy, denying the idea of a solid canopy, exclaimed, ”There ain't any sky.” Said the other, seeing how little this negation solved the problem, ”Well, what _is_ it that ain't?” Some such inquiry one must put to his doubts about G.o.d's personality. Though we may deny a personal G.o.d, nevertheless in the place where he once stood, creator and sustainer of all existence, is Something that we do think of somehow. We may have but little of Carlyle's sublime imagination; may not easily transport ourselves to stand with him on the far northern cliff, ”behind him all Europe and Africa fast asleep, except the watchmen, and before him the silent Immensity and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but the porch-lamp.” Yet who of us, regarding the illimitable universe, on the far outskirts of which our little earth is whirling, so minute that through the strongest telescope from the nearest star its conflagration would be quite invisible, has escaped the sense of a Universal Power?
And the human mind cannot so keep itself at home in little tasks and pleasures as to evade the question: How shall we think of the Power that made the universe? In what terms? By what a.n.a.logies? Hours of revelation come in every serious life when no desire compares in urgency with the desire to know the character of the Eternal. It does make a prodigious difference what hands hold the leash of the universe.
This second fact is also clear, that if we are to think of the Eternal at all, we must think in terms of something drawn from our experience.
When we sing of Paradise we speak of golden streets and gates of pearl, and Th.o.r.eau remarks that, arriving in heaven, he expects to find pine trees there. Such words we do not take literally, but such words we cannot utterly avoid, for if we are to speak at all of the unknown glory, we must use pictures from the known. So we think of G.o.d in human symbols. We cannot catch him in an abstract definition as though a boy with a b.u.t.terfly net should capture the sun at noon. Our minds are not fitted for such enterprise. Of necessity we take something homely, familiar, close at hand, and lifting it up as far as we can reach, say _G.o.d is most like that_. No one who thinks at all of the Eternal escapes this necessity.
By this method the _materialist_ reaches his philosophy. Haeckel laughs to scorn the opening clause of the ”Apostles' Creed.” ”I believe in G.o.d the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”--for such faith no words are contemptuous enough. This denial does not mean however that Haeckel has no faith; he deliberately offers a creedal subst.i.tute which runs in part: I believe in a ”chemical substance of a viscous character, having alb.u.minous matter and water as its chief const.i.tuents.” In such terms does Haeckel think of the Eternal. A professor of medicine has remarked that such a theory reduces all reality to ”phosphorus and glue.” When some Psalmist cries, ”Bless the Lord, O my soul,” nothing substantial is speaking or is being spoken to save phosphorus and glue! When an Italian patriot cries, ”The time for dying comes to all, but the time for dishonoring oneself ought never to come,” nothing is real and causal save phosphorus and glue!
And every gracious and redeeming deed in history from the love of mothers to the cross of Christ has been a complicated working out of phosphorus and glue! In whatever labored phrases he may state his case, the materialist's method there is obvious; he has taken physical energy, of whose presence in his own body he is first a.s.sured, and whose reality he has then read out into the world, and this homely and familiar experience he has lifted up as far as he can reach to say, the Eternal is most like that.
So far as method is concerned, the _theist_ of necessity travels the same road; only he insists on a n.o.bler symbol than physical energy in terms of which to think of G.o.d. He takes _mind_. He says in effect: There may be wide stretches of the universe where our intellects meet no answer and find no meaning. But in much of the universe we do see meaning; and how can intelligence find sense where intelligence has not put sense? A few scratches on a cliff's face in a.s.syria, after centuries of neglect, rendered up their meaning to the mind of Rawlinson. They were themselves the work of intelligence, and intelligence could read them. So, the theist continues, the universe is in part at least intelligible. Our minds fit into it and are answered by it. We can trace its laws and predict its movements. Man first worked out the nature of the ellipse in theoretical geometry, and then telescopes later showed the gigantic ellipses of planetary orbits in the heavens. Can it be that this intelligible world, readable by mind, is itself essentially mindless? As easily believe that the notes of Wagner's operas were accidentally blown together by a whirlwind and yet are playable by man! Therefore the theist believes the universe to be rational; he takes mind as he has known it in himself, and lifting it as high as he can reach, cries, G.o.d is most like that.
So far as the general method of approach is concerned, the Christian travels the same road to his idea of G.o.d. Only he cannot believe that the best he knows is too good or too great to be a symbol in terms of which to think of the Eternal. Therefore he will not take a byproduct of experience such as physical energy, nor a section of personality such as mind; he takes the full orb of personality, _self-conscious being that knows and purposes and loves_, and he affirms that G.o.d is most like this. Such in its simplest form is the Christian a.s.sertion of G.o.d's personality.
In one of his n.o.blest pa.s.sages Martineau has put into cla.s.sic form this necessity, which we have been discussing, of thinking about G.o.d in terms of human experience: ”G.o.d, being infinite, can never be fully comprehended by our minds; whatever thought of him be there, his real nature must still transcend: there will yet be deep after deep beyond, within that light ineffable; and what we see, compared with what we do not see, will be as the raindrop to the firmament. Our conception of him can never _correspond with the reality_, so as to be without omission, disproportion, or aberration; but can only _represent the reality_, and _stand for G.o.d_ within our souls, till n.o.bler thoughts arise and reveal themselves as his interpreters. And this is precisely what we mean by a symbolical idea. The devotee who prostrates himself before a black stone,--the Egyptian who in his prayers was haunted by the ideal form of the graceful ibis or the monstrous sphinx--the Theist who bends beneath the starry porch that midnight opens to the temple of the universe--the Christian who sees in heaven a spirit akin to that which divinely lived in Galilee, and with glorious pity died on Calvary--all alike a.s.sume a representation of him whose immeasurable nature they can neither compa.s.s nor escape.
And the only question is, whether the conception they portray upon the wall of their ideal temple is an abominable idol, or a true and sanctifying mediatorial thought.”
IV
In their endeavor thus to think of G.o.d in terms of personality, some are perplexed because in their imagination a person is inseparable from flesh. ”I think of G.o.d as a personal being,” writes a college student. ”A personal being would have a form that you could see or touch.” But this would be true only if the grossest materialism were accepted, and the spiritual life declared to be the product of brain as digestive fluids are of salivary glands. On any other basis, personality is not indissolubly bound to body nor by it necessarily delimited. A man cannot hear without his ear, but he is not his ear; he cannot hear without the auditory nerve, but he is not the auditory nerve; he cannot hear without the temporal lobe of the brain, but he is not the brain nor any portion of it. These may be the instruments which he uses; he is free when they are well, hampered when they are broken, and at last he is separable from them all. John Quincy Adams at the age of eighty met a friend upon a Boston street. ”Good morning,” said the friend, ”and how is John Quincy Adams today?”
”Thank you,” was the ex-president's reply, ”John Quincy Adams himself is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation.
Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable and I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is quite well, quite well.” Such a conception of man as _being_ a permanent personality and _having_ a temporary body is essential to any worthy meaning when we use personal terms about G.o.d.
With such an elevated thought, however, of what personality does mean, it soon is evident that no other reality with which we deal is so worthy to be the symbol of an Eternal Spirit. Is one perplexed that G.o.d, who is invisible, should be pictured in the similitude of human persons? But _we_ are invisible. The outward husks and fleshly garment of our friends we indeed have seen, but upon the friend himself--consciousness, love, purpose, ideal, and character--no eye has looked. No mirror ever has been strong enough to show us to ourselves. In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as G.o.d.
Indeed, personality is essentially the most unlimited reality with which we deal; in comparison a solar system is a little thing.
Consider _memory_, by which we can retrace our youthful days, build our shanties once again at brooksides, replay our games, and recapitulate the struggles and the joys of the first days at school.
Nothing in all the universe can remember except persons. Were we not so familiar with this element in human greatness, we would more often pause to exclaim, as did Augustine, fifteen centuries ago, ”Great is the power of memory. Amazement overcomes me when I think of it. And yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains, the broad rivers, the wide ocean, the courses of the stars, and pa.s.s themselves, the crowning wonder, by!” Consider _imagination_, by which, sitting still in body we can project ourselves around the world, can walk down Princes Street in Edinburgh, or stand in mingled awe and condemnation before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, or rise uncovered before the majesty of the Matterhorn. Nothing in all the universe can do that except persons. Were full power to act wherever we can _think_ added to our gifts, we should come so near to incipient omnipresence as to be in dread of our responsibility. Consider _love_, by which we live not so much where our bodies are as where our friends and family may be. Love expands the individual until his real life is independent of geography. Says one lover to another:
”The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double.”
Many a mother in America has _lived_ in the trenches of France; many a man has found that what might happen to him where his body was could not be compared with what might happen to him where his friends.h.i.+ps were; and as we grow in love and loyalty we find ourselves scattered all over creation. How far such an expansion of life may go our Lord revealed when he said, ”Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.” (Matt.
25:40.) Nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath can so extend itself in love save persons.
Finally, consider _creative power_ by which human beings project themselves into the future, and, with masterful ideals in mind, lay hold on circ.u.mstance and bend it to their will. As if he shared creative power with the Eternal, an engineer summons nature's forces to his bidding and lays his will upon them, until where nothing was a structure stands that mankind may use for centuries. Nothing in all the universe can so create except persons. In that essentially creative act where deathless ideas and harmonies are given being by poets and musicians, so that something out of nothing is brought to pa.s.s by personality, man faces a mystery as abysmal as G.o.d's making of the world. ”Paradise Lost” is wonderful; but not half as wonderful as the creative personality itself who years before projected it. ”An inward prompting,” Milton says, ”which now grew daily upon me, that by labor and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they should not willingly let it die.” Nothing can so create save personality.
Personality is not so limited that we should be ashamed to think of G.o.d in terms of it. Rather, of all realities with which we deal, personality alone, invisible, reaching back in memory, reaching out in imagination, expanding itself in love, and laying hold upon the future with creative power, is a worthy symbol of the Eternal Spirit.
Even when the meaning of personality has been so enlarged and elevated, we should not leave our statement of belief in G.o.d as though our experience of personality were a mould into which our thought of him is poured and so delimited. We are not presumptuous Lilliputians, running out with verbal stakes and threads, to pin down the tall, majestic Gulliver of the Eternal and dance in theological exultation round our capture. We know better than that. We understand how insufficient is every human name for G.o.d. We know that when we have said our best--”How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past tracing out!” (Rom. 11:33).
Nothing more has marred the Christian message and discredited the Christian faith than the unwise presumption that has forced its definitions into the secrets of the Infinite. ”It is enough to say,”