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class="calibre1">not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because

tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a

time-worn immortal. Jove too and Wotan are figures far past the

prime of their vigour. These are gods after the ancient habit of

the human mind, that turned perpetually backward for causes and

reasons and saw all things to come as no more than the working out

of Fate,—

 

“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe.”

 

But the God of this new age, we repeat, looks not to our past but

our future, and if a figure may represent him it must be the figure

of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his

strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time,

eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that

was still but a promise; he should bear a sword, that clean,

discriminating weapon, his eyes should be as bright as swords; his

lips should fall apart with eagerness for the great adventure before

him, and he should be in very fresh and golden harness, reflecting

the rising sun. Death should still hang like mists and cloud banks

and shadows in the valleys of the wide landscape about him. There

should be dew upon the threads of gossamer and little leaves and

blades of the turf at his feet… .

 

4. WHEN WE SAY GOD IS LOVE

 

One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most

trite and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that

deserves careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used;

there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a

multitude of loves of different colours and values. There is the

love of a mother for her child, there is the love of brothers, there

is the love of youth and maiden, and the love of husband and wife,

there is illicit love and the love one bears one’s home or one’s

country, there are dog-lovers and the loves of the Olympians, and

love which is a passion of jealousy. Love is frequently a mere

blend of appetite and preference; it may be almost pure greed; it

may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit self-forgetful nor

generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the furtive

craving of a man for another man’s wife may be made out to be a

light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts

of love that people will call “true love,” there is something of

that same exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential

quality of the knowledge of God.

 

Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the

exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the

windows by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is

the open door by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor

disappoints, nor betrays.

 

The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its

earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much

possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced

trust, and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love

of God. The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a

climax, and then again seeks presently a climax, and that may be

satiated or fatigued. But the latter is far more like the love of

comrades, or like the love of a man and a woman who have loved and

been through much trouble together, who have hurt one another and

forgiven, and come to a complete and generous fellowship. There is

a strange and beautiful love that men tell of that will spring up on

battlefields between sorely wounded men, and often they are men who

have fought together, so that they will do almost incredibly brave

and tender things for one another, though but recently they have

been trying to kill each other. There is often a pure exaltation of

feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in any great

stress. These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest to

what we mean when we speak of the love of God.

 

That is man’s love of God, but there is also something else; there

is the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this

is not an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love

of a woman for her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men;

God must love his followers as a great captain loves his men, who

are so foolish, so helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet

whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an austere love. The

spirit of God will not hesitate to send us to torment and bodily

death… .

 

And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach

him. He has need of us as we of him. He desires us and desires to

make himself known to us. When at last the individual breaks

through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that

moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man. He

has won us from his enemy. We come staggering through into the

golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth,

until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

 

1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST

 

It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to

drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God,

the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth

bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.

It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme

instability of absolute negation.

 

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who

was a very typical antagonist of all religion. He died only the

other day. He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man

almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin. A

decade or more ago he wrote a book called “The Nature of Man,” in

which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about

life. They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our

discussion of sin, they will be referred to again. But it is not

Professor Metchnikoff’s intention to provide material for a

religious discussion. He sets out his facts in order to overthrow

theology as he conceives it. The remarkable thing about his book,

the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no

inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive

theology as he conceives it. The development of his science has

destroyed that right.

 

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our

ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology

is modified through these changes. When he comes from his own world

of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.

He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with

it fifty years or more ago.

 

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes

that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the

general scheme and method of our thinking.

 

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists

essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and

developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of

super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual,

maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death

of its constituent individuals. Natural History, which began by

putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere

classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its

adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and

importance the individual adventure. “The Origin of Species” was

for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.

 

The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be

stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we

current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us

distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and

so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an

ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our

individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other

individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants. But the

species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to

newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life

is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing

adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble

of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is

still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions

under which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit

of adjustment, and the “ills of life,” of the individual life that

is, are due to its “disharmonies.” Man, acutely aware of himself as

an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species,

finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He

fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph

of his kind. He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of

victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal

extinction.

 

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is

confused with priestcraft and dogmas, is associated with

disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and

misguidance. How completely he misconceives the quality of

religion, how completely he sees it as an individual’s affair, his

own words may witness:

 

“Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The

solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as

satisfactory. A future life has no single argument to support it,

and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the

whole range of human knowledge. On the other hand, resignation as

preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a

longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the

inevitability of death.”

 

Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death,

and by a future life the prolongation of individuality. But

Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with

that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that

preoccupation with the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from

“preaching resignation” to death, seeks as its greater good a death

so complete as to be absolute release from the individual’s burthen

of KARMA. Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.

The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it

approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and

over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor

Metchnikoff’s assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to lose

one’s self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that

this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the

religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if

they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it

is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape

from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is

the ultimate of religion.

 

At times, indeed, he seems almost

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