- it would appear that our science of invariable harmonious law itself can give no other answer; and we must still demand what invisible life is plying at this seamless warp and woof of "evolution," "natural selection," "metamorphosis." Is it we individually, we collectively, who do it, we who can neither make nor mar one of these laws, and who advance only by accepting and rightly using them according to laws. of reason and love? Is it, as some dream, spirits wiser than we, a hierarchy of diviner insights and powers? We gain not a step by such ascent, towards reaching the constitutive force of law. Spirits. themselves are not less truly expressions of this force in their mental energies, for being also free, productive, personal. Their spontaneity itself rests on this mystery of orderly law, like the movements of atoms and of suns. Morality is personal liberty; but it is no less the movement of immutable law, transcending the individual, while it lifts him into the freedom and strength which belong to universal truth. We call the intelligence, of which universal law is the movement, God. But in reality we have no name for it, because no name can cover the whole. Law, Life, Love, Unity, Fatherhood, Brotherhood, this religion, that religion, all are waves of the One Divine Sea. None of these syllables have quite expressed the truth that is found only in the whole. They yield but fragments of a sense that was never sounded, of a growth that cannot end. The Vedantic worship of One Life in all was darkened by idolatry of tradition and of caste. Escape from Yet it should be noted that caste and tradition limitations. were held to be steps only, to higher unity of being which should dissolve them away. After all, the relations of the devotee with his ideal of the Supreme were felt to be personal and direct: his own sacrifice, his own disciplines, not another's, were relied on to make his illusions vanish and reality appear. All special religions have, in like manner, presented obstacles of their own to that free recognition of the infinite which they sought. Especially is this true of their pretensions to supernatural revelation, which science is so thoroughly setting aside in the name of law. In the lower stages of culture, supernaturalism is indeed a reaching forth to find God: it means that there is at least a divineness in things exceptional or wonderful, for those who have not yet learned what sacredness there is in things familiar and near. It is, primarily then, a form of spiritual progress, and satisfies real needs. But, when prolonged into scientific ages and enlightened races, claims of this kind practically teach that God is not in man, in nature, in history; but out of man, against nature, behind history; entering the world once on a time, with what men are expected to receive as truer than truth, more legislative than law, more loving than love. They teach that spirit is to be held the more divine for secluding itself in the prescriptive claim of one or of a few. They teach that the infinite is the better recognized for confining its manifestation to a class, an epoch, an individual life. All this limitation of universal forces, this prescription of divine paths, this foreclosure of inspiration, the liberty of our day holds to be no better than sarcophagus or shroud. It will choose rather that pantheism of the Spirit that finds God instant and informing in all history, experience, law, and work. What Eastern contemplation could foreshadow, Western vigor and grasp of things will have to deliver out of its limitations, old and new, by bringing the unities of races and sciences and faiths, to serve, now that their day too has come, this eternal desire of the soul. Never can man, with whatsoever motive, even in theory separate himself from God. Theology has vainly attempted it, under promptings of fear and self-contempt. Even the noble sentiment of humility has been pressed by a sense of imperfection and inward evil, to the point of imagining a gulf positively separating the divine from the human. It has thus attempted what would divide deity itself, and abolish at once both human and divine. This also was in vain. It is the virtue of modern culture, intellectual and moral, that it educates man in self-respect; so that he shall no longer think himself bound to deny the validity of his own nature, in order to affirm the reality of the divine. It does not hesitate to assure him that it is only where he finds his own real being that he is finding God. |