“miraculous” begetting, and by the morbid speculations about
virginity and the like that arose out of such grossness. They were
still further complicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of
the scriptures, which presently swamped thought in textual
interpretation. That swamping came very early in the development of
Christianity. The writer of St. John’s gospel appears still to be
thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already
hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer of St. John’s gospel
was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man. He was
emasculated mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry. He
quotes; his predecessor thinks.
But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions
of early Christian thought in passing. His business here is the
definition of a position. The writer’s position here in this book
is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator,
and secondly, entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer. That,
so to speak, is the key of his book. He cannot bring the two ideas
under the same term God. He uses the word God therefore for the God
in our hearts only, and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the
ultimate mysteries of the universe, and he declares that we do not
know and perhaps cannot know in any comprehensible terms the
relation of the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives who
is, in his terminology, the true God. Speaking from the point of
view of practical religion, he is restricting and defining the word
God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he is restricting
it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence from our
religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the
religious life.
Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an
Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book
acceptable to them if they will read “the Christ God” where the
writer has written “God.” They will then differ from him upon
little more than the question whether there is an essential identity
in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who
answer to their Creator God. This the orthodox post Nicaean
Christians assert, and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the
Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary. The Cathars,
Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that
the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. The Christ God was his
antagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley. And passing
beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be found to
many problems in comparative theology in this distinction between
the Being of Nature (cf. Kant’s “starry vault above”) and the God
of the heart (Kant’s “moral law within”). The idea of an antagonism
seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the
Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to
be “antagonistic.” On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and
modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God
the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King
of Mankind. Christianity stands somewhere between such complete
identification and complete antagonism. It admits a difference in
attitude between Father and Son in its distinction between the Old
Dispensation (of the Old Testament) and the New. Every possible
change is rung in the great religions of the world between
identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of
these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are, so to
speak, the basal elements of all theology in the world. The writer
is chary of assertion or denial in these matters. He believes that
they are speculations not at all necessary to salvation. He
believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions upon these
points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials of
religion. The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and
exclusively with the God of the Heart. He declares as his own
opinion, and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern
thought, that there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either
benevolent or malignant towards men. But if the reader believes
that God is Almighty and in every way Infinite the practical outcome
is not very different. For the purposes of human relationship it is
impossible to deny that God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as
struggling and takingl,
whether the God in our hearts is the Son of or a rebel against the
Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is still
our self-identification with God, irrespective of consequences, and
the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and in the world.
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect
righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final
personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have
no such appetite for a separate immortality. God is my immortality;
what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no
more permanent value than the snows of yester-year.
H. G. W.
Dunmow,
May, 1917.
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION
1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER
Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be
an exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little
while ago and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found
in existence, and already in a state of diffusion. People have
begun to hear of the new belief first here and then there. It is
interesting, for example, to trace how Christianity drifted into the
consciousness of the Roman world. But when a religion has been
interrogated it has always had hitherto a tale of beginnings, the
name and story of a founder. The renascent religion that is now
taking shape, it seems, had no founder; it points to no origins. It
is the Truth, its believers declare; it has always been here; it has
always been visible to those who had eyes to see. It is perhaps
plainer than it was and to more people—that is all.
It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of
those who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of
Christianity. Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley’s, speak of it
as Christianity without Theology. They do not know the creed they
are carrying. It has, as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle
theology, flatly opposed to any belief that could, except by great
stretching of charity and the imagination, be called Christianity.
One might find, perhaps, a parallelism with the system ascribed to
some Gnostics, but that is far more probably an accidental rather
than a sympathetic coincidence. Of that the reader shall presently
have an opportunity of judging.
This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only
the opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an
extreme neglect of definition. It was not at first anything more
than a sect of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst
the uproar and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more
enthusiastic Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in
affected horror at the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal
mystery of the Trinity was established as the essential fact of
Christianity. Throughout those three centuries, the centuries of
its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had
not defined its God. And even to-day it has to be noted that a
large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds
have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood,
that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the
statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of
both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of
the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all
the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly Arians as
though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the world
forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to
give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement
possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its
maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the
confusions of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds now,
a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come
to self-consciousness. But it is so coming, and this present book
is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to
compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the
various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic
cults amidst which it has appeared.