blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of
condescension and much explanatory by-play. Those who profess
modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely
compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of
Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious
passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things
are a barbaric inheritance.
But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption
that those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually
anarchistic, let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of
the preceding paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section
which follows. We would free men and women from exact and
superstitious rules and observances, not to make them less the
instruments of God but more wholly his. The claim of modern
religion is that one should give oneself unreservedly to God, that
there is no other salvation. The believer owes all his being and
every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean,
fine, wholesome, active and completely at God’s service as he can.
There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a
consecrated life. It is a matter between the individual and his
conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he
may do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any
occasion. Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to
determine and perform the right act. Nothing can excuse his failure
to do so. But what is here being insisted upon is that none of
these things has immediately to do with God or religious emotion,
except only the general will to do right in God’s service. The
detailed interpretation of that “right” is for the dispassionate
consideration of the human intelligence.
All this is set down here as distinctly as possible. Because of the
emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most
obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is
always tending to leak back into religious feeling. Amongst the
sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular,
ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic
cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an
extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until
Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the
propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence. But a
superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters the mind, distorts
the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it unclean, is just
as offensive to God as any positive depravity.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE LIKENESS OF GOD
1. GOD IS COURAGE
Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard
as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of
ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the
statement of what God is. Since language springs entirely from
material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in
theological statement. So that I have not called this chapter the
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.
And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.
2. GOD IS A PERSON
And next GOD IS A PERSON.
Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion
are very insistent. It is, they declare, the central article, the
axis, of their religion. God is a person who can be known as one
knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who
partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with
the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values
much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.
He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to
know him is to have a direction in our lives. He feels us and knows
us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts… .
God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite. He is as
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.
Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty. They say,
Show us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the
silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, “First
and Last Things,” in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God. Suffice it
here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent
imperfections. If we do not use our phraseology with a certain
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas
to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as
theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings. And about this
word “person” it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as
possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.
Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently
decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that
he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused,
divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep. On
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to
suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never
forgetting. But only abstract and theoretical persons are like
that. We couple with him the idea of a body. Indeed, in the common
use of the word “person” there is more thought of body than of mind.
We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress. We speak
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or
offences against property. And the gods of primitive men and the
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person. They
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was
because they were aloof or because their “persons” were too splendid
for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was
utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic
personality away somewhere in Heaven. The personal appearance of
the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much
that description may be explained away by commentators as
symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers
as a statement of concrete reality. Now if we are going to insist
upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly
God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon
a throne.
But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian
theological thought—that, for instance, which has found such
delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of
Rabindranath Tagore—has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic
insistence upon a body. From the earliest ages man’s mind has found
little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the
personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the
body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being
still a person and an individual. From this it is a small step to
the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or
pre-existing body. That is the idea of theological Christianity, as
distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith. The Triune
Persons—omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent—exist for all
time, superior to and independent of matter. They are supremely
disembodied. One became incarnate—as a wind eddy might take up a
whirl of dust… . Those who profess modern religion conceive
that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea of spirituality, a