Part 22

We are prone to separate ourselves from the rest of Nature and to claim for ourselves much that we deny to all other animals, such as the existence of the soul, and its immortality. But we are all of one stuff. Out of the earth has come a creature that has changed the surface of the earth over vast areas; that has changed the course of rivers, and the face of continents; that has harnessed the forces of the earth and turned them against themselves. How the earth elements came to organize themselves into this creature--here we can take no step!

V. A PERSONAL GOD

I once heard an Irish laborer refer solemnly, with an upward lift of the head, to the man up above. He did not refer to the man down below, but no doubt might have done so had occasion required. If we have one, we must have the other to keep the balance. The man up above must keep his skirts clean, and to admit of this the man down below must be the scapegoat.

How long has the belief in the reality of these two manlike beings, the one all good, the other all evil, ruled in the minds and hearts of men! The old Hebrew prophets were drunk with the idea of a manlike Jehovah. A terrible man they made of him--a cruel, despotic ruler, wreaking his vengeance on his enemies, exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a lover of righteousness, but a vengeful, jealous, angry God. And the man down below was his fit counterpart, blocking and marring or defeating the plans of the man up above. These conceptions go with the infancy of the human reason.

So many phases of our religious belief are the result of imperfect knowledge and false conceptions of the world in which we live! They come down to us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded as the center of the universe, all other bodies revolving around it. Man lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly powers.

It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of mankind was, by the operation of some psychological law, forced to externize and visualize, yes, and humanize, the object upon which its interest centers. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God is a spirit, that He is everywhere, that He fills all nature, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without his notice, and that heaven is not a place, but a state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being, endowed with our human attributes, with likes and dislikes, sorely tried by our sins and weaknesses; nearer us sometimes than at others, present everywhere, yet abiding in one particular place called heaven--these and many other childish and contradictory things.

That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman, regarded God under the image of a maker, detached absolutely like any human workman from the work of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely distinct from the world as being its center,--“Upholder, Governor, and Sovereign Lord.” “He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as He made them.” “He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his attributes.” This being is always described and interpreted in terms of man, or of our own finite human nature, reflecting in his outlines human history, human political and social institutions, and the aims and objects of concrete human beings. He does not hesitate to relate this God to “every movement which has convulsed and refashioned the surface of the earth,” and hence to make him responsible for the death and destruction and misery which have attended earthquakes and have set back the tide of human progress. Of course every noxious insect, every noxious plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from Him also. “Wars when just” are from Him also. Who or what are they from when they are not just, the great Cardinal does not say. Can both sides be just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a manlike God lead us.

The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative--if not more so--as the typical theological mind, never gets mired in such contradictions or tangled up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such confusion arises out of the habit of mind which sees the whole creation directed to man; his good is its one object and aim, and when his good suffers, something has miscarried. The cruel and destructive things in nature can only be accounted for on the theory that some aboriginal calamity, like the fall of man, had visited the world before God took charge of things.

The naturalist sees this as the best possible world, sees that Nature is not an indulgent stepmother, but a strict disciplinarian; that the good and well-being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justified in a day or a week, or in this place or that, but require ages and continents to come to their full fruition. The good and the evil that will come out of the terrible World War will not all be apparent this year, or next, but only in the perspective of history--in the sum total of human progress of the ages. Such a view is a slap in the face of our egotism which demands instant returns, and which makes the individual supreme.

With Nature, as I have so often said, our standards of good and evil apply to us alone, and they change with the changing years. The naturalist sees that pain and delay and defeat are the price of development; that the world is imperfect, and man is imperfect, because growth and development are the law of nature; that there is always a higher level, and always will be, which we realize only when we look back. A perfect world, as we use the term, would mean the end of all development.

VI. THE ETERNAL

How much is in a name! When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these things make it all the more real to us.

The word “God” has so long stood for the conception of a being who sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe, God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation. It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation.

The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in terms of our own psychology, we get into trouble. We cannot measure the Infinite by the standards of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims are not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which I use the term, does not plan and design and adapt means to ends as does man. God is no more the maker than He is the thing made. How natural for us to think that the air was made for us to breathe, the water for us to drink, the light for us to see, and the earth for us to inhabit! But these things are older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing in the fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid the rails, but was not the fence there before it was?

There is design in Nature, but not in the sense that there is design in human affairs and contrivances. There is no designer. There are living machines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution is a vital process. Man’s course is a right line, Nature’s is a circle. Man aims to cut out the waste, the pain, the failures. How does Nature trim her trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only by a survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every branch that dies and decays and falls from the tree does so at the risk of the health and well-being of the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See how evenly the pine and spruce and hemlock and oak forests get planted by Nature’s haphazard method, but think of the time involved! But what is time to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and gets his forest quickly. He trims his wood and avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood. He selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and avoids the dangers of the struggle to survive. He takes the side of the weak against the strong, but Nature favors only the strong.

The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The weather goes its way irrespective of you and me. Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine, are no respecters of persons. The seasons came and went before man appeared, just as they do now. The Eternal never takes sides as man takes sides, but because it does not, should we lose faith? The Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not otherwise. The light shines for all. Providence is a universal beneficence. The clouds go their way. The beneficence is seen in the slow amelioration of meteoric conditions through countless æons, till the cloud and the bow appeared, and with them conditions favorable to life. The impartial rains are oblivious to our human needs, but, as I so often say, they are on the side of life. They are on the side of development. They made the sublime drama of evolution possible.

The weather favored us æons before we were born, because it favored life. Therefore, when we say that the Eternal is neither for us nor against us, we mean in our special human sense. He is on the side of the righteous only when the righteous live according to the rule of Nature or rightness, or in harmony with the eternal order. And he is against the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In vain do we pray for victory on the eve of battle, except in so far as prayer puts courage into our hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the physical and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is from the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the fruit of the order which It established, or, rather, which It is.

As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot get away from the Eternal. He sticketh closer than a brother, closer than the blood in our own hearts, not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder and depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often struggle, tears, defeat.

Not by placing God afar off in the heavens--a supersensuous, supermundane, supernatural being--do we make the problem easier. Not till we bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the old myth of Christ again), and identify Him with everything without us and within--not till God becomes man--do we see a light under the feet of Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood and brotherhood and sacrifice and humility and beneficence and altruism in Nature. When we see man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of God.

In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation--human virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature. If this is a hard gospel, still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live other than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see the sources of our power, our help, our health. We know the conditions of our well-being. We know the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and inevitably. Their fountainhead is in Nature.

Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not lose faith. We know that Nature is still Nature. If disease and pestilence and famine rage, we know that there are weapons with which to fight them. We know that order comes out of chaos, that life comes out of death. We have neither to curse our gods nor to praise them, neither to do penance nor to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use wisely the gifts they bestow.

VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY

What difficulties and contradictions we fall into the moment we identify Nature with God, and what equal or greater difficulties we fall into if we refuse to identify Nature with God! True it is that in the former case we bring God very near and make him very real; we see and feel our direct and continuous dependence upon Him--indeed, that we are a part of Him; that every breath we draw, and every thought we think, and every pound of energy we put forth is in and through Him; and that we can no more wander or escape from Him than we can escape gravity or chemical affinity. There are no skeptics or atheists in regard to Nature. It alone exists and goes on forever. But here comes the pinch! God as Nature is not only the author of the good, He is the author of what we call evil also; He is as many-sided as Nature is. The savage and merciless aspects of Nature are of Him also; He is in the jungles of Africa, as well as in the walks of culture and refinement; in the destroying tornado as well as in the gentle summer breeze; in the overwhelming floods as well as in the morning dews. He is as much the author of disease as He is of health; of war, pestilence, famine, as He is of peace, plenty, and the progress of the world. He is in the trenches and the slaughter of the contending armies as truly as in the most peaceful and pious family or social circle in the world. The asphyxiating gases are his, and the bursting bombs, no less than the breaking hearts and the prayerful souls at home. The comets that come like apparitions in the heavens, and then are gone, and the stars that shine steadfastly, are all a part of the same scheme. The dragons and monsters that possessed the earth and the fruits thereof for millions of years in geologic time were the work of that divinity which shapes our ends to-day.

We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation; but we are fragments of the same granite that forms the foundation of the earth. “I am stuccoed with birds and quadrupeds all over,” says Whitman. The reptile was our ancestor; we were cradled in the old seas; we are kin to the worm and the mollusk; we derive from creeping, swimming, noisome things, from the slime and mud of the old sea bottoms, from the cosmic dust and the solar radiations. Why should we put on superior airs when not one atom of matter will turn aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from destruction? The vast army of elemental forces knows us not. We may divert them and bend them to our will, but they heed us not; they destroy us the moment we lose control.

Nature does not love us any more than she hates us; she goes her way, indifferent.

The best we can say about it all is that Nature, or the Natural Providence, is too big for us to grasp; that in these seas we can find no soundings. But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is worth living, love always pays; Nature serves us when we know how to use her; when we plant and sow wisely God will send the increase. Friendly or unfriendly, of God or of the Devil, the physical forces have ministered to us. More things have been for us than have been against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightning; more fertile land upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. Thorns and spines and nettles are the exception in vegetation; stings and venomous fangs are the exception in animal life. Hawks can catch the smaller birds, yet there are vastly more small birds than hawks. The weasel can catch the rabbit and the squirrel and the rat, yet there are ten-fold, fifty-fold, more of these rodents than there are weasels. The carnivorous beasts of the plains and of the jungle do not exterminate the herbivorous; there is more good than evil everywhere; more peace than war; more kindness than cruelty. The God of Nature goes his way, but his way is our way; we have arisen out of Nature; as it is, the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they do not all stagnate on the way. Some of the seed which the winds sow falls upon barren places, but not the most of it. Some men are born criminals or cripples or malformed, but not the majority. The creatures preyed upon always vastly outnumber the creatures that prey upon them. And in truth, in the whole realm of Nature more things wait upon man than war upon him.

VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE

The unnamable, the unthinkable, the omnipotent, the omnipresent, we cannot discuss or define in terms of our humanity. The moment we try to do so we are involved in contradictions, just as we are when we try to define the sphere in terms of the plane. The sphere has no length, it has no breadth, it has no thickness, in the sense that bodies upon its surface have. It has no weight, and it has no beginning and no end, and we may say that its motion is eternal rest; yet rest implies motion, and motion implies rest.