generous as possible—of individual variations for common good.
Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste
react on each individual. So we raise again, in the twentieth
century, the old question of ‘the greatest good,’ which men
discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in
the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the
Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar
Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages
and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici.”
And again:
“The old dream of a cooperative effort to improve life, to bring
happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above
all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and
philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our
steps toward that height—just as the Athenians did two thousand
years ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no
disputable tradition—nothing that scepticism can corrode or
advancing knowledge undermine. Its foundations are the fundamental
and unchanging impulses of our nature.”
And again:
“The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our
time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor
altruistic. It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an
inspiration in the finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a
happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges
all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation
of happiness. The advance guard of the race, the men and women in
whom mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they
have reached Pisgah’s slope and in increasing numbers men and women
are pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land.”
“Pisgah—the Promised Land!” Mr. McCabe in that passage sounds as
if he were halfway to “Oh! Beulah Land!” and the tambourine.
That “larger spirit,” we maintain, is God; those “impulses” are the
power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies. He has but
to realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the
Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be
lured back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from
that preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the
presence of Divinity.
3. GOD IS AN EXTERNAL REALITY
It may be argued that if atheists and agnostics when they set
themselves to express the good will that is in them, do shape out
God, that if their conception of right living falls in so completely
with the conception of God’s service as to be broadly identical,
then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no
more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of
man’s inherent good will. Why trouble about God then? Is not the
declaration of a good disposition a sufficient evidence of
salvation? What is the difference between such benevolent
unbelievers as Professor Metchnikoff or Mr. McCabe and those who
have found God?
The difference is this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone
upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard,
trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral
strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs
like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs
beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from
himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a
masterless man. His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness,
his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation. His devotion
is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that
may change. At any moment it may change. He may have pledged
himself to his own pride and honour, but who will hold him to his
bargain? He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable
sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no
one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate.
He has no real and living link with other men of good will.
And those whose acquiescence in the idea of God is merely
intellectual are in no better case than those who deny God
altogether. They may have all the forms of truth and not divinity.
The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and
the persuasion of the unconverted theologian, are both like lamps
unlit. The lit lamp has no difference in form from the lamp unlit.
But the lit lamp is alive and the lamp unlit is asleep or dead.
The difference between the unconverted and the unbeliever and the
servant of the true God is this; it is that the latter has
experienced a complete turning away from self. This only difference
is all the difference in the world. It is the realisation that this
goodness that I thought was within me and of myself and upon which I
rather prided myself, is without me and above myself, and infinitely
greater and stronger than I. It is the immortal and I am mortal.
It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and
insecure. It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable
goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of
my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the
happiness and welfare of others—because I choose to do so. On the
contrary I have come under a divine imperative, I am obeying an
irresistible call, I am a humble and willing servant of the
righteousness of God. That altruism which Professor Metchnikoff and
Mr. McCabe would have us regard as the goal and refuge of a broad
and free intelligence, is really the first simple commandment in the
religious life.
4. ANOTHER RELIGIOUS MATERIALIST
Now here is a passage from a book, “Evolution and the War,” by
Professor Metchnikoff’s translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which
comes even closer to our conception of God as an immortal being
arising out of man, and external to the individual man. He has been
discussing that well-known passage of Kant’s: “Two things fill my
mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I
dwell on them—the starry vault above me, and the moral law within
me.”
From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this
most definite and interesting statement:
“Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the
scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as
one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not
shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a
secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert
as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external
to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single man
or in any single nation. It is the work of the blood and tears of
long generations of men. It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is
enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and
his religion. Its creation and sustenance are the crowning glory of
man, and his consciousness of it puts him in a high place above the
animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the
struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must be
measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the
debasement or perfection of man’s great achievement.”
This is the same reality. This is the same Link and Captain that
this book asserts. It seems to me a secondary matter whether we
call Him “Man’s Great Achievement” or “The Son of Man” or the “God
of Mankind” or “God.” So far as the practical and moral ends of
life are concerned, it does not matter how we explain or refuse to
explain His presence in our lives.
There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr.
Chalmers Mitchell and the position of this book. In this book it is
asserted that GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of
self-suppression to our weakness.
5. A NOTE ON A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY
Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture
upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the
same characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the