lake that has been fed by countless springs. It is a great pool of
living water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much
impurity. It is synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from
original complexities; the sediment subsides.
A life perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is a life without
mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance
of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions. Such a life is bliss,
or nirvana. It is unconsciousness below dreaming. Consciousness is
discord evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need. At
every need consciousness breaks into being. Imperfect adjustments,
needs, are the rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being
through which the light of consciousness shines—the light of
consciousness and will of which God is the sun.
So that every need of human life, every disappointment and
dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men
may and do come to the realisation of God.
There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human
life from which there does not come or has not come a contribution
to men’s religious ideas. At every challenge men have to put forth
effort, feel doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill
shadow of their mortality. At every challenge comes the possibility
of help from without, the idea of eluding frustration, the
aspiration towards immortality. It is possible to classify the
appeals men make for God under the headings of their chief system of
effort, their efforts to understand, their fear and their struggles
for safety and happiness, the craving of their restlessness for
peace, their angers against disorder and their desire for the
avenger; their sexual passions and perplexities… .
Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort
of sediment into religion. Each, that is to say, has its own kind
of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God. It is only in
the synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the
idea of God grows clear. The effort to understand completely, for
example, leads to the endless Heresies of Theory. Men trip over the
inherent infirmities of the human mind. But in these days one does
not argue greatly about dogma. Almost every conceivable error about
unity, about personality, about time and quantity and genus and
species, about begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity
and every kink in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward
in some form of dogma. Beside the errors of thought are the errors
of emotion. Fear and feebleness go straight to the Heresies that
God is Magic or that God is Providence; restless egotism at leisure
and unchallenged by urgent elementary realities breeds the Heresies
of Mysticism, anger and hate call for God’s Judgments, and the
stormy emotions of sex gave mankind the Phallic God. Those who find
themselves possessed by the new spirit in religion, realise very
speedily the necessity of clearing the mind of all these
exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling. The search
for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value until
most has been swept away.
2. HERESIES OF SPECULATION
One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest. It is infinitely
the most various sort. It includes all those heresies which result
from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those
which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the
heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The
former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in
comparison natural, simple confusions. The former are the errors of
the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside,
or are brought down to us in our social structure out of a barbaric
past.
To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate
doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God’s absolute qualities, such
odd deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the
virginity of Mary and Joseph, and the like. All these things are
parts of orthodox Christianity. Yet none of them did Christ, even
by the Christian account, expound or recommend. He treated them as
negligible. It was left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for
little, red-haired, busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out
exactly what their Master was driving at, three centuries after
their Master was dead… .
Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack
their inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state
unnecessary perfections. They seek God by logic, ignoring the
marginal error that creeps into every syllogism. Their conceit
blinds them to the limitations upon their thinking. They weave
spider-like webs of muddle and disputation across the path by which
men come to God. It would not matter very much if it were not that
simpler souls are caught in these webs. Every great religious
system in the world is choked by such webs; each system has its own.
Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which make up doctrinal
Christianity and imprison the mind of the western world to-day, not
one seems to have been known to the nominal founder of Christianity.
Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah; never spoke
clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of salvation and
the significance of his martyrdom. We are asked to suppose that he
left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to their
eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord’s Prayer but
leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church
staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation,
until the “experts” of Nicaea, that “garland of priests,” marshalled
by Constantine’s officials, came to its rescue… . From the
conversion of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied
about Christ’s memory and hid him from the sight of men. We are no
longer clear about the doctrine he taught nor about the things he
said and did… .
* Even the “Apostles’ Creed” is not traceable earlier than the
fourth century. It is manifestly an old, patched formulary.
Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but
transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password
among the elect.
We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all
at heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless
here to spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different
formulae in which the orthodox have attempted to believe in
something of the sort. There are several useful encyclopaedias of
sects and heresies, compact, but still bulky, to which the curious
may go. There are ten thousand different expositions of orthodoxy.
No one who really seeks God thinks of the Trinity, either the
Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of the Sabellian or the
Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories
made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on
lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of
India. Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the
human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural
heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human
character, and which are common to all religions. Against these it
is necessary to keep constant watch. They return very insidiously.
3. GOD IS NOT MAGIC
One of the most universal of these natural misconceptions of God is
to consider him as something magic serving the ends of men.
It is not easy for us to grasp at first the full meaning of giving
our souls to God. The missionary and teacher of any creed is all
too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the
poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people
who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality
still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their
own purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet than a
magnificent Fetish. They did not really want him, but they have
heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use
of him. They call upon his name, they do certain things that are
supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying
prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind,
industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early
Christian literature, the Bible, and suchlike mental mortification,
or making the Sabbath dull and uncomfortable. In return for these
fetishistic propitiations God is supposed to interfere with the
normal course of causation in their favour. He becomes a celestial
log-roller. He remedies unfavourable accidents, cures petty
ailments, contrives unexpected gifts of medicine, money, or the
like, he averts bankruptcies, arranges profitable transactions, and
does a thousand such services for his little clique of faithful