swallowed up in his victory.
5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM
God comes to us within and takes us for his own. He releases us
from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience
and adventure; he receives us and gives himself. He is a stimulant;
he makes us live immortally and more abundantly. I have compared
him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands
quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.
The finding of God is the beginning of service. It is not an escape
from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the
prison of the mortal self. Not to realise that, is the heresy of
Quietism, of many mystics. Commonly such people are people of some
wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs. They
make religion a method of indolence. They turn their backs on the
toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious
reverie in which they flirt with the divinity. They will recount
their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully
God has tried and proved them. But indeed the true God was not the
lover of Madame Guyon. The true God is not a spiritual troubadour
wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose. The true God goes
through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for
recruits along the street. We must go out to him. We must accept
his discipline and fight his battle. The peace of God comes not by
thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.
6. GOD DOES NOT PUNISH
Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for
moral indignation. Many of the early Gods were mainly Gods of Fear.
They were more often “wrath” than not. Such was the temperament of
the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps
under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian
Trinity and who became also the Moslem God.* The natural hatred of
unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves,
against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar
usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this
conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually “upset” by
the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance.
Now this God would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would
be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his
congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms. This divine
“frightfulness” is of course the natural human dislike and distrust
for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike
reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the
latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing
permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its
secular arm… .
* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English
and American readers that a very large proportion of early
Christians before the creeds established and regularised the
doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was God;
they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of
humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove.
These beliefs survived for a thousand years tbroughout Christendom:
they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the
Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic
church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old
Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of
the Cathars against the Hebrew God. But in this book, be it noted,
the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to
indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.
It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct
for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish
sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so
readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with
a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the
house on fire. None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of
God the Revengeful, God the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion.
It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of
everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less
tolerant and gentle than themselves. The recent literature of the
Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.
Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for
denying the irascibility of his God and teaching “the Kaffirs of
Natal” the dangerous heresy that God is all mercy. “We cannot allow
it to be said,” the Dean of Cape Town insisted, “that God was not
angry and was not appeased by punishment.” He was angry “on account
of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty.”
The case of the Rev. Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a
second assertion of the Church’s insistence upon the fierceness of
her God. This case is not to be found in the ordinary church
histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a
very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the church would
prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.
7. GOD AND THE NURSERY-MAID
Closely related to the Heresy of God the Avenger, is that kind of
miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the
overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with
such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word
“God” first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational
restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye.
God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to
leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while
she goes off upon her own aims. But indeed, the teaching of God
Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful
than an indecent assault. The reason rebels and is crushed under
this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many minds never rise again
from their injury. They remain for the rest of life spiritually
crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion
of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.
I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his
Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still
believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a
fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,
perpetually waiting to condemn and to “strike me dead”; his flames
as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my
feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would
be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a
child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this
Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God
himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to
me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.
I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with
this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges,
still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place
where God should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not
be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish
observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are
afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of
science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of
the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing,
but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For the true God has no
lash of fear. And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven
face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his
bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the
ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him! How he loves
the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to
rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy
the happy children of God! …
Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a
real wickedness of the priest that is different from other
wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and
strange perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop
of Canterbury speak for me. This that follows is the account given
by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation
(July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF