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Title: Thoughts on Life and Religion - An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable - Professor Max Müller
Author: Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
Language: English
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[Illustration: coverpage]
THOUGHTS ON
LIFE AND RELIGION
THOUGHTS ON
LIFE AND RELIGION
An Aftermath from the Writings of
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER
BY HIS WIFE
THIRD IMPRESSION
London
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND
COMPANY LTD.
1907
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
PREFACE
This book has been prepared in accordance with a wish expressed by
many known and unknown admirers of my husband's writings, who desire
to possess in a portable form the passages that have specially
appealed to them in his different works, and in the _Life and
Letters_.
I have taken this opportunity of adding extracts from private
letters, and from the writings he left unfinished, which would not
otherwise have become known to any but his own family or a few
intimate friends.
Those who have read the _Life and Letters_, do not need to be told
that Max Müller lived from his earliest years in the firm conviction
that all is wisely ordered in this life, and 'all for our real good,
though we do not always see it, and though we cannot venture to
fathom the wisdom guiding our steps through life.'
To others his unswerving trust and faith as shown in these extracts
may be a revelation, for he seldom talked on such subjects. This
trust and faith gave him strength through the bitter struggles of
his early life, taught him resignation during the years when the
dearest wish of his heart seemed unattainable, supported him later
when those he tenderly loved were snatched from him by death, and
upheld him in his last long and depressing illness.
My earnest desire is that this little book may prove a help and
comfort to many exposed to like trials, and strengthen those whose
path now stretches before them as a sunny avenue, to meet the
sorrows that almost surely await them as life advances.
GEORGINA MAX MÜLLER.
_June 11, 1905_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Art of Life, 1
The Beautiful, 4
The Bible, 6
Children, 12
Christ, the Logos, 13
Christianity, 21
Death, 34
The Deity, 44
The Divine, 57
Doubts, 60
Evolution of Religion, 66
Faith, 70
The Fatherhood of God, 73
Future Life, 74
The Infinite, 87
Knowledge, 96
Language, 99
Life, 103
Love, 121
Mankind, 129
Mind or Thought, 132
Miracles, 135
Music, 138
Nature, 139
Obscurity, 142
Old Age, 143
Religion and Religions, 145
Revelation, 184
The Rig-Veda, 189
Science, 190
The Self, 192
Sorrow and Suffering, 198
The Soul, 208
Theosophy, 215
Truth, 217
The Will of God, 222
Wonder, 226
Words, 228
Work, 230
The World, 233
THE ART OF LIFE
To learn to understand one another is the great art of life, and to
'agree to differ' is the best lesson of the comparative science of
religion.
_Silesian Horseherd._
There is a higher kind of music which we all have to learn, if our
life is to be harmonious, beautiful, and useful. There are certain
intervals between the young and the old which must be there, which
are meant to be there, without which life would be monotonous; but
out of these intervals and varieties the true art of life knows
how to build up perfect harmonies.... Even great sorrow may be a
blessing, by drawing some of our affections away from this life to
a better life ... of which, it is true, we know nothing, but from
which, when we see the wisdom and love that underlie this life, we
may hope everything. We are meant to hope and to trust, and that is
often much harder than to see and to know.... The greatest of all
arts is the art of life, and the best of all music the harmony of
spirits. There are many little rules to be learnt for giving harmony
and melody to our life, but the thorough bass must be--love.
_Life._
One thing is necessary above all things in order to live
peaceably with people, that is, in Latin, _Humanitas_, German,
_Menschlichkeit_. It is difficult to describe, but it is to claim
as little as possible from others, neither an obliging temper
nor gratitude, and yet to do all one can to please others, yet
without expecting them always to find it out. As men are made up
of contradictions they are the more grateful and friendly the less
they see that we expect gratitude and friendliness. Even the least
cultivated people have their good points, and it is not only far
better but far more interesting if one takes trouble to find out
the best side and motives of people, rather than the worst and most
selfish.... Life is an art, and more difficult than Sanscrit or
anything else.
_Life._
We become chiefly what we are more through others than through
ourselves, and happy is the man whose path in life leads him only by
good men and brings him together with good men. How often we forget
in judging others the influences under which they have grown up. How
can one expect a child to be truthful when he sees how servants, yes
often parents, practise deceit. How many children hear from those
to whom they look up, expressions, principles, and prudent rules
of life, which consciously or unconsciously exercise an influence
on the young life of the child. Yet with how little of loving
introspection we pass our judgments.
_MS._
If you want to be at peace with yourself, do not mind being at war
with the world.
_MS._
THE BEAUTIFUL
Is the Beautiful without us, or is it not rather within us? What we
call sweet and bitter is our own sweetness, our own bitterness, for
nothing can be sweet or bitter without us. Is it not the same with
the Beautiful? The world is like a rich mine, full of precious ore,
but each man has to assay the ore for himself, before he knows what
is gold and what is not. What, then, is the touchstone by which we
assay the Beautiful? We have a touchstone for discovering the good.
Whatever is unselfish is good. But--though nothing can be beautiful,
except what is in some sense or other good, not everything that is
good is also beautiful. What, then, is that something which, added
to the good, makes it beautiful? It is a great mystery. It is so to
us as it was to Plato. We must have gazed on the Beautiful in the
dreams of childhood, or, it may be, in a former life, and now we
look for it everywhere, but we can never find it,--never at least in
all its brightness and fulness again, never as we remember it once
as the vision of a half-forgotten dream. Nor do we all remember the
same ideal--some poor creatures remember none at all.... The ideal,
therefore, of what is beautiful is within us, that is all we know;
how it came there we shall never know. It is certainly not of this
life, else we could define it; but it underlies this life, else we
could not feel it. Sometimes it meets us like a smile of Nature,
sometimes like a glance of God; and if anything proves that there is
a great past, and a great future, a Beyond, a higher world, a hidden
life, it is our faith in the Beautiful.
_Chips._
THE BIBLE
The fault is ours, not theirs, if we wilfully misinterpret the
language of ancient prophets, if we persist in understanding their
words in their outward and material aspect only, and forget that
before language had sanctioned a distinction between the concrete
and the abstract, between the purely spiritual as opposed to the
coarsely material, the intention of the speakers comprehended both
the concrete and the abstract, both the material and the spiritual,
in a manner which has become quite strange to us, though it lives on
in the language of every true poet.
_Science of Religion._
Canonical books give the reflected image only of the real doctrines
of the founder of a new religion; an image always blurred and
distorted by the medium through which it had to pass.
_Science of Religion._
The Old Testament stands on a higher ethical stage than other sacred
books,--it certainly does not lose by a comparison with them. I
always said so, but people would not believe it. Still, anything to
show the truly historical and human character of the Old Testament
would be extremely useful in any sense, and would in nowise injure
the high character which it possesses.
_Life._
If we have once learnt to be charitable and reasonable in the
interpretation of the sacred books of other religions, we shall more
easily learn to be charitable and reasonable in the interpretation
of our own. We shall no longer try to force a literal sense on words
which, if interpreted literally, must lose their true and original
purport; we shall no longer interpret the Law and the Prophets as if
they had been written in the English of our own century, but read
them in a truly historical spirit, prepared for many difficulties,
undiscouraged by many contradictions, which, so far from disproving
the authenticity, become to the historian of ancient language and
ancient thought the strongest confirmatory evidence of the age, the
genuineness, and the real truth of ancient sacred books. Let us but
treat our own sacred books with neither more nor less mercy than
the sacred books of any other nations, and they will soon regain
that position and influence which they once possessed, but which the
artificial and unhistorical theories of the last three centuries
have wellnigh destroyed.
_Science of Religion._
By the students of the science of religion the Old Testament can
only be looked upon as a strictly historical book by the side
of other historical books. It can claim no privilege before the
tribunal of history, nay, to claim such a privilege would be to
really deprive it of the high position which it justly holds
among the most valuable monuments of the distant past. But the
authorship of the single books which form the Old Testament, and
more particularly the dates at which they were reduced to writing,
form the subject of keen controversy, not among critics hostile to
religion, but among theologians who treat these questions in the
most independent, but at the same time the most candid and judicial,
spirit. By this treatment many difficulties, which in former times
disturbed the minds of thoughtful theologians, have been removed,
and the Old Testament has resumed its rightful place among the most
valuable monuments of antiquity.... But this was possible on one
condition only, namely, that the Old Testament should be treated
simply as an historical book, willing to submit to all the tests of
historical criticism to which other historical books have submitted.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
What the student of the history of the continuous growth of religion
looks for in vain in the books of the Old Testament, are the
successive stages in the development of religious concepts. He does
not know which books he may consider as more ancient or more modern
than other books. He asks in vain how much of the religious ideas
reflected in certain of these books may be due to ancient tradition,
how much to the mind of the latest writer. In Exodus iii. God is
revealed to Moses, not only as the supreme, but as the only God.
But we are now told by competent scholars that Exodus could not
have been written down till probably a thousand years after Moses.
How then can we rely on it as an accurate picture of the thoughts
of Moses and his contemporaries? It has been said with great truth
that 'it is almost impossible to believe that a people who had been
emancipated from superstition at the time of the Exodus, and who had
been all along taught to conceive God as the one universal Spirit,
existing only in truth and righteousness, should be found at the
time of Josiah, nearly nine hundred years later, steeped in every
superstition.' Still, if the writings of the Old Testament[1] were
contemporaneous with the events they relate, this retrogressive
movement would have to be admitted. Most of these difficulties
are removed, or considerably lessened, if we accept the results
of modern Hebrew scholarship, and remember that though the Old
Testament may contain very ancient traditions, they probably were
not reduced to writing till the middle of the fifth century B.C.,
and may have been modified by and mixed up with ideas belonging to
the time of Ezra.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
[Footnote 1: The reader is reminded that these lectures were
published in 1891, before English theologians had reached any
generally received results in the study of the dates of the
various parts of the Old Testament. It would be more correct now
to substitute 'the Pentateuch' in the above sentence for the 'Old
Testament.' For a statement of the modern views of the several
periods to which the different books may be assigned, see Canon
Driver's _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament_.]
May we, or may we not, interpret, as students of language, and
particularly as students of Oriental languages, the language of
the Old Testament as a primitive and as an Oriental language? May
we, or may we not, as true believers, see through the veil which
human language always throws over the most sacred mysteries of the
soul, and instead of dragging the sublimity of Abraham's trial and
Abraham's faith down to the level of a merely preternatural event,
recognise in it the real trial of a human soul, the real faith of
the friend of God, a faith without stormwinds, without earthquakes
and fires, a faith in the still small voice of God?
_MS._
Is it really necessary to say again and again what the Buddhists
have said so often and well, that the act of creation is perfectly
inconceivable to any human understanding, and that, if we speak of
it at all, we can only do so anthropomorphically or mythologically?
_MS._
CHILDREN
All seems so bright and perfect, and quite a new life seems to
open before me, in that beloved little child. She helps me to look
forward to such a far distance, and opens quite a new view of one's
own purpose and duties on earth. It is something new to live for, to
train a human soul entrusted to us, and to fit her for her true home
beyond this life.
_Life._
I doubt whether it is possible to take too high a view of life
where the education of children is concerned. It is the one great
work entrusted to us, it forms the true religion of life. Nothing
is small or unimportant in forming the next generation, which is to
carry on the work where we have to leave it unfinished. No single
soul can be spared--every one is important, every one may be the
cause of infinite good, or of infinite mischief, for ever hereafter.
_MS._
CHRIST, THE LOGOS
An explanation of _Logos_ in Greek philosophy is much simpler than
is commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the
Greeks thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term,
namely _Logos_, expressed both, though they distinguished the inner
from the outer _Logos_. It is one of the most remarkable aberrations
of the human mind to imagine that there could be a word without
thought, or a thought without word. The two are inseparable; one
cannot exist or be even conceived without the other.
_Silesian Horseherd._
In nearly all religions God remains far from man. I say in nearly
all religions: for in Brahmanism the unity, not the union, of the
human soul with Brahma is recognised as the highest aim. This unity
with Deity, together with phenomenal difference, Jesus expressed in
part through the _Logos_, in part through the Son. There is nothing
so closely allied as thought and word, Father and Son. They can
be distinguished but never separated, for they exist only through
each other. In this matter the Greek philosophers considered all
creation as the thought or the word of God, and the thought 'man'
became naturally the highest _Logos_, realised in millions of men,
and raised to the highest perfection in Jesus. As the thought exists
only through the word, and the word only through the thought, so
also the Father exists only through the Son, and the Son through the
Father, and in this sense Jesus feels and declares himself the Son
of God, and all men who believe in Him His brethren. This revelation
or inspiration came to mankind through Jesus. No one knew the Father
except the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, and those to whom
the Son willeth to reveal Him. This is the Christian Revelation in
the true sense of the word.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Small as may be the emphasis that we now lay on the _Logos_
doctrine, in that period (_i.e._ of the Fourth Gospel) it was the
centre, the vital germ, of the whole Christian teaching. If we read
any of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church
fathers, we shall be surprised to see how all of them begin with the
word (_Logos_) as a fixed point of departure, and then proceed to
prove that the Word is the Son of God, and finally that the Son of
God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religion and philosophy are here closely
related.
_Silesian Horseherd._
What is true Christianity if it be not the belief in the true
sonship of man, as the Greek philosophers had rightly surmised,
but had never seen realised on earth? Here is the point where the
two great intellectual currents of the Aryan and Semitic worlds
flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah of the Jews was
recognised as the _Logos_, the true Son of God, and that He opened
or revealed to every man the possibility to become what he had
always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought,
the Word, the Logos, the Son of God.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Eternal life consists in knowing that men have their Father and
their true being in the only true God, and that as sons of this same
Father, they are of like nature with God and Christ.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Why should the belief in the Son give everlasting life? Because
Jesus has through His own sonship in God declared to us ours also.
This knowledge gives us eternal life through the conviction that we
too have something divine and eternal within us, namely, the word
of God, the Son whom He hath sent. Jesus Himself, however, is the
only begotten Son, the light of the world. He first fulfilled and
illumined the divine idea which lies darkly in all men, and made it
possible for all men to become actually what they have always been
potentially--sons of God.
_Silesian Horseherd._
We make the fullest allowance for those who, from reverence for
God and for Christ, and from the purest motives, protest against
claiming for man the full brotherhood of Christ. But when they say
that the difference between Christ and mankind is one of kind, and
not of degree, they know not what they do, they nullify the whole of
Christ's teaching, and they deny the Incarnation which they pretend
to teach.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
The Ammergau play must be very powerful. And I feel sure just now
nothing is more wanted than to be powerfully impressed with the
truly human character of Christ; it has almost vanished under the
extravagant phraseology of hymns and creeds, and yet how much
greater is the simple story of His unselfish life than all the
superlatives of later Theology. If one knows what it is to lose a
human soul whom one has loved--how one forgets all that was human,
and only clings to what was eternal in it, one can understand
the feelings of Christ's friends and disciples when they saw Him
crucified and sacrificed, the innocent for those whom He wished to
guide and save.
_MS._
Jesus destroyed the barrier between man and God, the veil that hid
the Holiest was withdrawn. Man was taught to see what the prophets
had seen dimly, that he was near to God, that God was near to every
one of us, that the old Jewish view of a distant Jehovah had arisen
from an excess of reverence, had filled the heart of man with fear,
but not with love. Jesus did not teach a new doctrine, but He
removed an old error, and that error, that slavish fear of God, once
removed, the human heart would recover the old trust in God--man
would return like a lost son to his lost father, he would feel that
if he was anything, he could only be what his God had made him,
and wished him to be. And if a name was wanted for that intimate
relation between God and man, what better name was there than Father
and Son?
_MS._
Those who deprived Jesus of His real humanity in order to exalt
Him above all humanity were really undoing His work. Christ came
to teach us, not what He was, but what we are. He had seen that
man, unless he learnt himself to be the child of God, was lost.
All his aspirations were vain unless they all sprang from one
deep aspiration, love of God. And how can we love what is totally
different from ourselves? If there is in us a likeness, however
small, of God, then we can love our God, feel ourselves drawn
towards Him, have our true being in Him. That is the essence of
Christianity, that is what distinguishes the Christian from all
other religions. And yet that very kernel and seed of Christianity
is constantly disregarded, is even looked upon with distrust. Was
not Christ, who died for us, more than we ourselves? it is said. Or
again, Are we to make ourselves gods? Christ never says that He is
different from ourselves; He never taught as a God might teach. His
constant teaching is, that we are His brethren, and that we ought to
follow His example, to become like Him, because we were meant to be
like Him. In that He has come near to God, as near as a son can be
to His father; He is what He was meant to be. We are not, and hence
the deep difference between Him and us.
_MS._
Then it is said, Is not Christ God? Yes, He is, but in His own
sense, not in the Jewish nor in the Greek sense, nor in the sense
which so many Christians attach to that article of their faith.
Christ's teaching is that we are of God, that there is in us
something divine, that we are nothing if we are not that. He also
teaches that through our own fault we are now widely separated from
God, as a son may be entirely separated and alienated from his
father. But God is a perfect and loving Father--He knows that we can
be weak, and yet be good, and when His lost sons return to Him He
receives them and forgives them as only a father can forgive. Let
us bestow all praise and glory on Christ as the best son of God.
Let us feel how unworthy we are to be called His brothers, and the
children of God, but let us not lose Christ, and lose our Father
whom He came to show us, by exalting Jesus beyond the place which He
claimed Himself. Christ never calls Himself the Father, He speaks of
His Father with love, but always with humility and reverence. All
attempts to find in human language a better expression than that of
son have failed. Theologians and philosophers have tried in vain
to define more accurately the relation of Christ to the Father, of
man to God. They have called Christ another person of the Godhead.
Is that better than Christ's own simple human language, I go to my
Father?
_MS._
Christ has been made so unreal to us, He has been spoken of in
such unmeasured terms that it is very difficult to gain Him back,
such as He was, without a fear of showing less reverence and love
of Him than others. And yet, unreal expressions are always false
expressions--nothing is so bad as if we do not fully mean what we
say. Of course we know Christ through His friends only, they tell us
what He told them--they represent Him as He appeared to them. What
fallible judges they often were they do not disguise, and that, no
doubt, raises the value of their testimony, but we can only see Him
as they saw Him; the fact remains we know very little of Him. Still,
enough remains to show that Christ was full of love, that He loved
not only His friends, but His enemies. Christ's whole life seems
to have been one of love, not of coldness. He perceived our common
brotherhood, and what it was based on, our common Father beyond this
world, in heaven, as He said.
_MS._
CHRISTIANITY
Christianity is Christianity by this one fundamental truth, that
as God is the father of man, so truly, and not poetically, or
metaphorically only, man is the son of God, participating in God's
very essence and nature, though separated from God by self and
sin. This oneness of nature between the Divine and the human does
not lower the concept of God by bringing it nearer to the level of
humanity; on the contrary, it raises the old concept of man and
brings it nearer to its true ideal. The true relation between God
and man had been dimly foreseen by many prophets and poets, but
Christ was the first to proclaim that relation in clear and simple
language. He called Himself the Son of God, and He was the firstborn
son of God in the fullest sense of that word. But He never made
Himself equal with the Father in whom He lived and moved and had
His being. He was man in the new and true sense of the word, and in
the new and true sense of the word He was God. To my mind man is
nothing if He does not participate in the Divine.
_Chips._
True Christianity lives, not in our belief, but in our love, in our
love of God, and in our love of man founded on our love of God.
_Chips._
True Christianity, I mean the religion of Christ, seems to me to
become more and more exalted the more we know and the more we
appreciate the treasures of truth hidden in the despised religions
of the world. But no one can honestly arrive at that conviction
unless he uses honestly the same measure for all religions.
_Science of Religion._
The position which Christianity from the very beginning took up
with regard to Judaism served as the first lesson in comparative
theology, and directed the attention even of the unlearned to a
comparison of two religions, differing in their conception of the
Deity, in their estimate of humanity, in their motives of morality,
and in their hope of immortality, yet sharing so much in common that
there are but few of the psalms and prayers in the Old Testament in
which a Christian cannot heartily join even now, and but few rules
of morality which he ought not even now to obey.
_Science of Religion._
It was exactly because the doctrine of Christ, more than that of
the founders of any other religion, offered in the beginning an
expression of the highest truths in which Jewish carpenters, Roman
publicans, and Greek philosophers could join without dishonesty,
that it has conquered the best part of the world. It was because
attempts were made from very early times to narrow and stiffen the
outward expression of our faith, to put narrow dogma in the place of
trust and love, that the Christian Church often lost those who might
have been its best defenders, and that the religion of Christ has
almost ceased to be what, before all things, it was meant to be, a
religion of world-wide love and charity.
_Hibbert Lectures._
The founder of Christianity insisted again and again on the
fact that He came to fulfil, and not to destroy; and we know
how impossible it would be to understand the true position of
Christianity in the history of the world, the true purport of the
'fullness of time,' unless we always remember that its founder was
born and lived and died an Israelite. Many of the parables and
sayings of the New Testament have now been traced back, not only to
the Old Testament, but to the Talmud also; and we know how difficult
it was at first for any but a Jew to understand the true meaning of
the new Christian doctrine.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
There is no religion in the whole world which in simplicity, in
purity of purpose, in charity, and true humanity, comes near to that
religion which Christ taught to His disciples. And yet that very
religion, we are told, is being attacked on all sides. The principal
reason for this omnipresent unbelief is, I believe, the neglect of
our foundations, the disregard of our own bookless religion, the
almost disdain of Natural Religion. Even bishops will curl their
lips when you speak to them of that natural and universal _religion_
which existed before the advent of our historical religions, nay,
without which all historical religions would have been as impossible
as poetry is without language. Natural religion may exist and does
exist without revealed religion--revealed religion without natural
religion is an utter impossibility.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
There can be no doubt that free inquiry has swept away, and will
sweep away, many things which have been highly valued, nay, which
were considered essential by many honest and pious minds. And yet
who will say that true Christianity, Christianity which is known by
its fruits, is less vigorous now than it has ever been before? There
have been discussions in the Christian Church from the time of the
Apostles to our own times. We have passed through them ourselves, we
are passing through them now.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
When we think of the exalted character of Christ's teaching, may
we not ask ourselves once more, What would He have said if He had
seen the fabulous stories of His birth and childhood, or if He had
thought that His Divine character would ever be made to depend on
the historical truth of the _Evangelia Infantiae_?
_Gifford Lectures, II._
Much of the mere outworks of Christianity cannot hold the ground
on which they have been planted, they have to be given up by force
at last, when they ought to have been given up long before; and
when given up at last, they often tear away with them part of the
strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only
the buttress outside, but a part of the living framework.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
What we call Christianity embraces several fundamental doctrines,
but the most important of them all is the recognition of the Divine
in man, or, as we call it, the belief in the Divinity of the Son.
The belief in God, let us say in God the Father, or the Creator
and Ruler of the world, had been elaborated by the Jews, and most
of the civilised and uncivilised nations of the world had arrived
at it. But when the Founder of Christianity called God His Father,
and not only His Father, but the Father of all mankind, He did no
longer speak the language of either Jews or Greeks. To the Jews,
to claim Divine sonship for man would have been blasphemy. To the
Greeks, Divine sonship would have meant no more than a miraculous,
a mythological event. Christ spoke a new language, a language
liable, no doubt, to be misunderstood, as all language is; but a
language which to those who understood it has imparted a new glory
to the face of the whole world. It is well known how this event,
the discovery of the Divine in man, which involves a complete
change in the spiritual condition of mankind, and marks the great
turning-point in the history of the world, has been surrounded by
a legendary halo, has been obscured, has been changed into mere
mythology, so that its real meaning has often been quite forgotten,
and has to be discovered again by honest and fearless seeking.
Christ had to speak the language of His time, but He gave a new
meaning to it, and yet that language has often retained its old
discarded meaning in the minds of His earliest, nay sometimes of His
latest disciples also. The Divine sonship of which He speaks was
not blasphemy as the Jews thought, nor mythology as so many of His
own followers imagined, and still imagine. Father and Son, divine
and human, were like the old bottles that could hardly hold the new
wine; and yet how often have the old broken bottles been preferred
to the new wine that was to give new life to the world.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
If we have learnt to look upon Christianity, not as something
unreal and unhistorical, but as an integral part of history, of
the historical growth of the human race, we can see how all the
searchings after the Divine or Infinite in man were fulfilled in the
simple utterances of Christ. His preaching, we are told, brought
life and immortality to light. Life, the life of the soul, and
immortality, the immortality of the soul, were there and had always
been there. But they were brought to light, man was made fully
conscious of them, man remembered his royal birth, when the word had
been spoken by Christ.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
We must never forget that it was not the principal object of
Christ's teaching to make others believe that He only was divine,
immortal, or the son of God. He wished them to believe this for
_their own_ sake, for _their own_ regeneration. 'As many as received
Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God.' It might be
thought, at first, that this recognition of a Divine element in man
must necessarily lower the conception of the Divine. And so it does
in one sense. It brings God nearer to us, it bridges over the abyss
by which the Divine and the human were completely separated in the
Jewish, and likewise in many of the pagan religions. It rends the
veil of the temple. This lowering, therefore, is no real lowering
of the Divine. It is an expanding of the concept of the Divine, and
at the same time a raising of the concept of humanity, or rather
a restoration of what is called human to its true character,--a
regeneration, or a second birth, as it is called by Christ Himself.
'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.'
_Gifford Lectures, III._
There is a constant action and reaction in the growth of religious
ideas, and the first action by which the Divine was separated from
and placed almost beyond the reach of the human mind, was followed
by a reaction which tried to reunite the two. This process, though
visible in many religions, was most pronounced in Judaism in its
transition to Christianity. Nowhere had the invisible God been
further removed from the visible world than in the ancient Jewish
religion, and nowhere have the two been so closely drawn together
again and made one as by that fundamental doctrine of Christianity,
the Divine sonship of man.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
Christ spoke to men, women, and children, not to theologians, and
the classification of His sayings should be made, not according to
theological technicalities, but according to what makes our own
heart beat.
_Life._
The yearning for union or unity with God, which we see as the
highest goal in other religions, finds its fullest recognition in
Christianity, if but properly understood, that is, if but treated
historically, and it is inseparable from our belief in man's full
brotherhood with Christ. However imperfect the forms may be in
which that human yearning for God has found expression in different
religions, it has always been the deepest spring of all religions,
and the highest summit reached by Natural Religion. The different
bridges that have been thrown across the gulf that seems to separate
earth from heaven and man from God, may be more or less crude and
faulty, yet we may trust that many a faithful soul has been carried
across by them to a better home. It is quite true that to speak of
a bridge between man and God, even if that bridge is called the
Self, is but a metaphor. But how can we speak of these things except
in metaphors? To return to God is a metaphor, to stand before the
throne of God is a metaphor, to be in Paradise with Christ is a
metaphor.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
The Christian religion should challenge rather than deprecate
comparison. If we find certain doctrines which we thought the
exclusive property of Christianity in other religions also, does
Christianity lose thereby, or is the truth of these doctrines
impaired by being recognised by other teachers also?
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
Love--superseding faith--seems to be the keynote of all
Christianity. But the world is still far from true Christianity, and
whoever is honest towards himself knows how far away he himself is
from the ideal he wishes to reach. One can hardly imagine what this
world would be if we were really what we profess to be, followers
of Christ. The first thing we have to learn is that we are not what
we profess to be. When we have learnt that, we shall at all events
be more forbearing, forgiving, and loving towards others. We shall
believe in them, give them credit for good intentions, with which, I
hope, not hell, but heaven, is paved.
_Life._
Our religion is certainly better and purer than others, but in the
essential points all religions have something in common. They all
start with the belief that there is something beyond, and they are
all attempts to reach out to it.
_Life._
How little was taught by Christ, and yet that is enough, and every
addition is of evil. Love God, love men--that is the whole law and
the prophets--not the Creeds and the Catechism and the Articles and
the endless theological discussions. We want no more, and those who
try to fulfil that simple law, know best how difficult it is, and
how our whole life and our whole power are hardly sufficient to
fulfil that short law.
_MS._
Christ's teaching is plainly that as He is the Son of God so we are
His brothers. His conception of man is a new one, and as that is
new, so must His conception of God be new. He lifts up humanity, and
brings deity near to humanity, and He expresses their inseparable
nature and their separate existences by the best simile which the
world supplies, that of Father and Son. He claims no more for
Himself than He claims for us. His only excellence is that which is
due to Himself--His having been the first to find the Father, and
become again His Son, and His having remained in life and death more
one with the Father than any one of those who professed to believe
in Him, and to follow His example.
_MS._
If Jesus was not God, was He, they ask, a mere man? A _mere_ man? Is
there anything among the works of God, anything next to God, more
wonderful, more awful, more holy than man? Much rather should we
ask, Was then Jesus a mere God? Look at the miserable conceptions
which man made to himself as long as he spoke of gods beside God?
It could not be otherwise. God is one, and he who admits other gods
beside or without Him degrades, nay, denies and destroys the One
God. _A_ God is less than man. True Christianity does not degrade
the Godhead, it exalts manhood, by bringing it back near to God,
as near as it is possible for the human thought to approach the
ineffable and inconceivable Majesty of the true God.
_MS._
If I ventured to speak of God's purpose at all, I should say,
that it is not God's purpose to win only the spiritually gifted,
the humble, the tender hearted, the souls that are discontented
with their own shortcomings, the souls that find happiness in
self-sacrifice--those are His already--but to win the intellectually
gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, or better still, to
win them both. It would be an evil day for Christianity if it could
no longer win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated,
the clever, and it seems to me the duty of all who really believe in
Christ to show that Christianity, if truly understood, can win the
highest as well as the humblest intellects.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
DEATH
Trust in God! What He does is well done. What we are, we are through
Him; what we suffer, we suffer through His will. We cannot conceive
His wisdom, we cannot fathom His love; but we can trust with a trust
stronger than all other trusts that He will not forsake us, when we
cling to Him, and call on Him, as His Son Jesus Christ has taught us
to call on Him, 'Our Father.' Though this earthly form of ours must
perish, all that was good, and pure, and unselfish in us will live.
Death has no power over what is of God within us. Death changes and
purifies and perfects us, Death brings us nearer to God, where we
shall meet again those that are God's, and love them with that godly
love which can never perish.
_Life._
Would that loving Father begin such a work in us as is now going
on, and then destroy it, leave it unfinished? No, what is will be;
what really is in us will always be; we shall be because we are.
Many things which are now will change, but what we really are we
shall always be; and if love forms really part of our very life,
that love, changed it may be, purified, sanctified, will be with
us, and remain with us through that greatest change which we call
death. The pangs of death will be the same for all that, just as the
pangs of childbirth seem ordained by God in order to moderate the
exceeding joy that a child is born into the world. And as the pain
is forgotten when the child is born, so it will be after death--the
joy will be commensurate to the sorrow. The sorrow is but the effort
necessary to raise ourselves to that new and higher state of being,
and without that supreme effort or agony, the new life that waits
for us is beyond our horizon, beyond our conception. It is childish
to try to anticipate, we cannot know anything about it; we are
meant to be ignorant; even the _Divina Commedia_ of a great poet
and thinker is but child's play, and nothing else.... No illusions,
no anticipations; only that certainty, that quiet rest in God, that
submissive expectation of the soul, which knows that all is good,
all comes from God, all tends to God.
_MS._
As one gets older death seems hardly to make so wide a gap--a few
years more or less, that is all--meantime we know in whose hands we
all are, that life is very beautiful, but death has its beauty too.
_Life._
We accustom ourselves so easily to life as a second nature,
and in spite of the graves around us, death remains something
unnatural, hard and terrifying. That should not be. An early death
is terrifying, but as we grow older our thoughts should accustom
themselves to passing away at the end of a long life's journey. All
is so beautiful, so good, so wisely ordered, that even death can be
nothing hard, nothing disturbing; it all belongs to a great plan,
which we do not understand, but of which we know that it is wiser
than all wisdom, better than all good, that it cannot be otherwise,
cannot be better. In faith we can live and we can die--can even see
those go before us who came before us, and whom we must follow.
All is not according to our will, to our wisdom, but according to
a heavenly will, and those who have once found each other through
God's hand will, clinging to His hand, find each other again.
_Life._
If we are called away sooner or later we ought to part cheerfully,
knowing that this earth could give no more than has been ours, and
looking forward to our new home, as to a more perfect state where
all that was good and true and unselfish in us will live and expand,
and all that was bad and mean will be purified and cast off. So let
us work here as long as it is day, but without fearing the night
that will lead us to a new and brighter dawn of life.
_MS._
Annihilation ... is a word without any conceivable meaning. We
are--that is enough. What we are does not depend on us; what we
shall be neither. We may conceive the idea of change in form, but
not of cessation or destruction of substance. People mean frequently
by annihilation the loss of conscious personality, as distinct from
material annihilation. What I feel about it is shortly this. If
there is anything real and substantial in our conscious personality,
then whatever there is real and substantial cannot cease to exist.
If on the contrary we mean by conscious personality something that
is the result of accidental circumstances, then, no doubt, we must
face the idea of such a personality ceasing to be what it now
is. I believe, however, that the true source and essence of our
personality lies in what is the most real of all real things, and in
so far as it is true, it cannot be destroyed. There is a distinction
between conscious personality and personal consciousness. A child
has personal consciousness, a man who is this or that, a Napoleon,
a Talleyrand, has conscious personality. Much of that conscious
personality is merely temporary, and passes away, but the personal
consciousness remains.
_Life._
One look up to heaven, and all this dust of the highroad of life
vanishes. Yes! one look up to heaven and that dark shadow of death
vanishes. We have made the darkness of that shadow ourselves, and
our thoughts about death are very ungodly. God has willed it so;
there is to be a change, and a change of such magnitude that even
if angels were to come down and tell us all about it, we could not
understand it, as little as the new-born child would understand
what human language could tell about the present life. Think what
the birth of a child, of a human soul, is; and when you have felt
the utter impossibility of fathoming that mystery, then turn your
thoughts upon death, and see in it a new birth equally unfathomable,
but only the continuation of that joyful mystery which we call a
birth. It is all God's work, and where is there a flaw in that
wonder of all wonders, God's ever-working work? If people talk of
the miseries of life, are they not all man's work?
_Life._
Great happiness makes one feel so often that it cannot last, and
that we will have some day to give up all to which one's heart
clings so. A few years sooner or later, but the time will come, and
come quicker than one expects. Therefore I believe it is right to
accustom oneself to the thought that we can none of us escape death,
and that all our happiness here is only lent us. But at the same
time we can thankfully enjoy all that God gives us, ... and there is
still so much left us, so much to be happy and thankful for, and yet
here too the thought always rushes across one's brightest hours: it
cannot last, it is only for a few years and then it must be given
up. Let us work as long as it is day, let us try to do our duty, and
be very thankful for God's blessings which have been showered upon
us so richly--but let us learn also always to look beyond, and learn
to be ready to give up everything,--and yet say, Thy Will be done.
_MS._
It is the most painful work I know looking through the papers and
other things belonging to one who is no more with us. How different
everything looks to what it did before. There is one beautiful
feature about death, it carries off all the small faults of the soul
we loved, it makes us see the true littleness of little things, it
takes away all the shadows, and only leaves the light. That is how
it ought to be; and if in judging of a person we could only bring
ourselves to think how we should judge of them if we saw them on
the bed of death, how different life would be! We always judge in
self-defence, and that makes our judgments so harsh. When they are
gone how readily we forget and forgive everything, how truly we love
all that was lovable in them, how we blame ourselves for our own
littleness in minding this and that, and not simply and truly loving
all that was good and bright and noble. How different life might be
if we could all bring ourselves to be what we really are, good and
loving, and could blow away the dust that somehow or other will fall
on all of us. It is never too late to begin again.
_Life._
The death of those we love is the last lesson we receive in
life--the rest we must learn for ourselves. To me, the older I grow,
and the nearer I feel that to me the end must be, the more perfect
and beautiful all seems to be; one feels surrounded and supported
everywhere by power, wisdom, and love, content to trust and wait,
incapable of murmuring, very helpless, very weak, yet strong in that
very helplessness, because it teaches us to trust in something not
ourselves. Yet parting with those we love is hard--only I fear there
is nothing else that would have kept our eyes open to what is beyond
this life.
_MS._
It is strange how little we all think of death as the condition of
all the happiness we enjoy now. If we could but learn to value each
hour of life, to enjoy it fully, to use it fully, never to spoil
a minute by selfishness, then death would never come too soon; it
is the wasted hours which are like death in life, and which make
life really so short. It is not too late to learn to try to be more
humble, more forbearing, more courteous, or, what is at the root of
all, more loving.
_Life._
The great world for which we live seems to me as good as the little
world in which we live, and I have never known why faith should
fail, when everything, even pain and sorrow, is so wonderfully good
and beautiful. All that we say to console ourselves on the death
of those we loved, and who loved us, is hollow and false; the only
true thing is rest and silence. We cannot understand, and therefore
we must and can trust. There can be no mistake, no gap, in the
world-poem to which we belong; and I believe that those stars which
without their own contrivance have met, will meet again. How, where,
when? God knows this, and that is enough.
_MS._
God has taught us that death is not so terrible as it appears to
most men--it is but a separation for a few short days, and then,
too, eternity awaits us.
_Life._
We live here in a narrow dwelling-house, which presses us in on all
sides, and yet we fancy it is the whole universe. But when the door
opens and a loved one passes out, never to return, we too step to
the door and look out into the distance, and realise then how small
and empty the dwelling is, and how a larger, more beautiful world
waits for us without. How it is in that larger world, who can say?
but if we were so happy in the narrow dwelling, how far more happy
shall we be out there! Be not afraid. See how beautifully all is
ordered; look up to the widespread firmament, and think how small
it is in comparison with God's almighty power. He who regulates the
courses of the stars will regulate the fate of the souls of men, and
those souls who have once met, shall they not meet again like the
stars?
_MS._
Those who are absent are often nearer to us than those who are
present.
_MS._
We reckon too little with death, and then when it comes it
overwhelms us. We know all the time that our friends must go, and
that we must go, but we shut our eyes, and enjoy their love and
friendship as if life could never end. We should say good-bye to
each other every evening--perhaps the last good-bye would find us
then less unprepared.
_MS._
There is something so natural in death. We come and we go, there is
no break.
_Life._
What is more natural in life than death? and having lived this long
life, so full of light, having been led so kindly by a Fatherly hand
through all storms and struggles, why should I be afraid when I have
to make the last step?
_Life._
THE DEITY
We clearly see that the possibility of intercourse between man and
God, and a revelation of God to man, depends chiefly or exclusively
on the conception which man has previously formed of God and man.
In all theological researches we must carefully bear in mind that
the idea of God is _our_ idea, which we have formed in part through
tradition, and in part by our own thinking. God is and remains
_our_ God. We can have a knowledge of Him only through our inner
consciousness, not through our senses.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Our duties toward God and man, our love for God and for man, are
as nothing without the firm foundation which is formed only by our
faith in God, as the Thinker and Ruler of the world, the Father of
the Son, who was revealed through Him as the Father of all sons, of
all men.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Though Christianity has given us a purer and truer idea of the
Godhead, of the majesty of His power and the holiness of His will,
there remains with many of us the conception of a merely objective
Deity. God is still with many of us in the clouds, so far removed
from the earth and so high above anything human, that in trying
to realise fully the meaning of Christ's teaching we often shrink
from approaching too near to the blinding effulgence of Jehovah.
The idea that we should stand to Him in the relation of children
to their father seems to some people almost irreverent, and the
thought that God is near us everywhere, the belief that we are also
His offspring, nay, that there has never been an absolute barrier
between divinity and humanity, has often been branded as Pantheism.
Yet Christianity would not be Christianity without this so-called
Pantheism, and it is only some lingering belief in something like a
Jove-like Deus Optimus Maximus that keeps the eyes of our mind fixed
with awe on the God of Nature without, rather than on the much more
awful God of the soul within.
_Chips._
The idea of God is the result of an unbroken historical evolution,
call it a development, an unveiling, or a purification, but not
of a sudden revelation.... What right have we to find fault with
the manner in which the Divine revealed itself, first to the eyes,
and then to the mind, of man? Is the revelation in nature really
so contemptible a thing that we can afford to despise it, or at
the utmost treat it as good enough for the heathen world? Our eyes
must have grown very dim, our mind very dull, if we can no longer
perceive how the heavens declare the glory of God.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
A belief in one Supreme God, even if at first it was only a
henotheistic, and not yet a monotheistic belief, took possession of
the leading spirits of the Jewish race at a very early time. All
tradition assigns that belief in One God, the Most High, to Abraham.
Abraham, though he did not deny the existence of the gods worshipped
by the neighbouring tribes, yet looked upon them as different from,
and as decidedly inferior to, his own God. His monotheism was, no
doubt, narrow. His God was the friend of Abraham, as Abraham was
the friend of God. Yet the concept of God formed by Abraham was a
concept that could and did grow. Neither Moses, nor the Prophets,
nor Christ Himself, nor even Mohammed, had to introduce a new God.
Their God was always called the God of Abraham, even when freed
from all that was local and narrow in the faith of that patriarch.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
To some any attempt to trace back the name and concept of Jehovah
to the same hidden sources from which other nations derived their
first intimation of deity may seem almost sacrilegious. They forget
the difference between the human concept of the Deity and the
Deity itself, which is beyond the reach of all human concepts. But
the historian reads deeper lessons in the growth of these human
concepts, as they spring up everywhere in the minds of men who have
been seekers after truth--seeking the Lord if haply they might feel
after Him and find Him--and when he can show the slow but healthy
growth of the noblest and sublimest thoughts out of small and
apparently insignificant beginnings, he rejoices as the labourer
rejoices over his golden harvest; nay, he often wonders what is
more truly wonderful, the butterfly that soars up to heaven on its
silvery wings, or the grub that hides within its mean chrysalis such
marvellous possibilities.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
The concept of God arises out of necessity in the human mind, and
is not, as many theologians will have it, the result of one special
disclosure, granted to Jews and Christians only. It seems to me
impossible to resist this conviction, where a comparative study
of the great religions of the world shows us that the highest
attributes which we claim for the Deity are likewise ascribed to it
by the Sacred Books of other religions.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
We can now repeat the words which have been settled for us centuries
ago, and which we have learnt by heart in our childhood--I believe
in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth--with the conviction
that they express, not only the faith of the apostles, or of
oecumenical councils, but that they contain the Confession of
Faith of the whole world, expressed in different ways, conveyed in
thousands of languages, but always embodying the same fundamental
truth. I call it fundamental, because it is founded, in the very
nature of our mind, our reason, and our language, on a simple and
ineradicable conviction that where there are acts there must be
agents, and in the end one Prime Agent, whom man may know, not
indeed in His own inscrutable essence, yet in His acts, as revealed
in Nature.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
The historical proof of the existence of God, which is supplied to
us by the history of the religions of the world, has never been
refuted, and cannot be refuted. It forms the foundation of all the
other proofs, call them cosmological, ontological, or teleological,
or rather it absorbs them all, and makes them superfluous. There
are those who declare that they require no proof at all for the
existence of a Supreme Being, or if they did, they would find it
in revelation, and nowhere else. Suppose they wanted no proof
themselves, would they really not care at all to know how the
human race, and how they themselves, came in possession of what, I
suppose, they value as their most precious inheritance? An appeal
to revelation is of no avail in deciding questions of this kind,
unless it is first explained what is really meant by revelation. The
history of religions teaches us that the same appeal to a special
revelation is made, not only by Christianity, but by the defenders
of Brâhmanism, Zoroastrianism, and Mohammedanism, and where is the
tribunal to adjudicate on the conflicting appeals of these and other
claimants? The followers of every one of these religions declare
their belief in the revealed character of their own religion, never
in that of any other religion. There is, no doubt, a revelation to
which we may appeal in the court of our own conscience, but before
the court of universal appeal we require different proofs for the
faith that is in us.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Given man, such as he is, and given the world, such as it is, a
belief in divine beings, and, at last, in one Divine Being, is not
only a universal, but an inevitable fact.... If from the standpoint
of human reason no flaw can be pointed out in the intellectual
process which led to the admission of something within, behind, or
beyond nature, call it the Infinite or any other name you like, it
follows that the history of that process is really, at the same
time, the best proof of the legitimacy and truth of the conclusions
to which it has led.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
There is no predicate in human language worthy of God, all we can
say of Him is what the Upanishads said of Him, No, No! What does
that mean? It meant that if God is called all-powerful, we have
to say No, because whatever we comprehend by powerful is nothing
compared with the power of God. If God is called all-wise, we have
again to say No, because what we call wisdom cannot approach the
wisdom of God. If God is called holy, again we have to say No, for
what can our conception of holiness be compared with the holiness
of God? This is what the thinkers of the Upanishads meant when they
said that all we can say of God is No, No.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
If people would only define what they mean by knowing, they would
shrink from the very idea that God can ever be known by us in the
same sense in which everything else is known, or that with regard
to Him we could ever be anything but Agnostics. All human knowledge
begins with the senses, and goes on from sensations to percepts,
from percepts to concepts and names. And yet the same people who
insist that they know God, will declare in the same breath that
no one can see God and live. Let us only define the meaning of
knowing, and keep the different senses in which this word has been
used carefully apart, and I doubt whether any one would venture
to say that, in the true sense of the word, he is not an Agnostic
as regards the true nature of God. This silence before a nameless
Being does not exclude a true belief in God, nor devotion, nor love
of a Being beyond our senses, beyond our understanding, beyond our
reason, and therefore beyond all names.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Every one of the names given to this infinite Being by finite
beings marks a stage in the evolution of religious truth. If once
we try to understand these names, we shall find that they were all
well meant, that, for the time being, they were probably the only
possible names. The Historical School does not look upon all the
names given to divine powers as simply true or simply false. We look
upon all of them as well meant and true for the time being, as steps
on the ladder on which the angels of God ascend and descend. There
was no harm in the ancient people, when they were thirsting for
rain, invoking the sky, and saying, 'O, dear sky, send us rain!' And
when after a time they used more and more general words, when they
addressed the powers (of nature) as bright, or rich, or mighty, all
these were meant for something else, for something they were seeking
for, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him. This is St.
Paul's view of the growth of religion.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
When God has once been conceived without 'any manner of similitude,'
He may be meditated on, revered, and adored, but that fervent
passion of the human breast, that love with all our heart, and all
our soul, and all our might, seems to become hushed before that
solemn presence. We may love our father and mother with all our
heart, we may cling to our children with all our soul, we may be
devoted to wife, or husband, or friend with all our might, but to
throw all these feelings in their concentrated force and truth on
the Deity has been given to very few on earth.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
If the history of religion has taught us anything, it has taught
us to distinguish between the names and the thing named. The names
may change, and become more and more perfect, and our concepts of
the Deity may become more perfect also, but the Deity itself is
not affected by our names. However much the names may differ and
change, there remains, as the last result of the study of religion,
the everlasting conviction that behind all the names there is
something named, that there is an agent behind all acts, that there
is an Infinite behind the finite, that there is a God in Nature.
That God is the abiding goal of many names, all well meant and well
aimed, and yet all far, far away from the goal which no man can
see and--live. All names that human language has invented may be
imperfect. But the name 'I am that I am' will remain for those who
think Semitic thought, while to those who speak Aryan languages
it will be difficult to invent a better name than the Vedanta
Sa_k_-_k_id-ânanda, He who is, who knows, who is blessed.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
However much we may cease to speak the language of the faith of our
childhood, the faith in a superintending and ever-present Providence
grows only stronger the more we see of life, the more we know of
ourselves. When that Bass-note is right, we may indulge in many
variations, we shall never go entirely wrong.
_MS._
We do not see the hand that takes our dear ones from us, but we
know whose hand it is, whose will it is. We have no name for Him,
we do not know Him, but we know that whatever name we give, He will
understand it. That is the foundation of all religion. Let us give
the best name we can find in us, let us know that even that must be
a very imperfect name, but let us trust that if we only believe in
that name, if we use it, not because it is the fashion, but because
we can find no better name, He will understand and forgive. Every
name is true if we are true, every name is false if we are false. If
we are true our religion is true, if we are false our religion is
false. An honest fetish worshipper even is better than a scoffing
Pope.
_MS._
In the ordinary sense of knowledge we cannot have any knowledge of
God; our very idea of God implies that He is beyond our powers of
perception and understanding. Then what can we do? Shut our eyes
and be silent? That will not satisfy creatures such as we are.
We must speak, but all our words apply to things perceptible or
intelligible. The old Buddhists used to say, The only thing we can
say of God is No, No! He is not this, He is not that. Whatever we
can see or understand, He is not that. But again I say that kind of
self-denial will not satisfy such creatures as we are. What can we
do? We can only give the best we have. Now the best we have or know
on earth is Love, therefore we say God is Love or loving. Love is
entire self-surrender, we can go no further in our conception of
what is best. And yet how poor a name it is in comparison of what
we want to name. Our idea of love includes, as you say, humility, a
looking up and worshipping. Can we say that of God's love? Depend
upon it, the best we say is but poor endeavour,--it is well we
should know it,--and yet, if it is the best we have and can give, we
need not be ashamed.
_Life._
And now that generations after generations have passed away, with
their languages--adoring and worshipping the Name of God--preaching
and dying in the Name of God--thinking and meditating on the Name
of God--there the old word stands still, breathing to us the pure
air of the dawn of humanity, carrying with it all the thoughts and
sighs, the doubts and tears, of our bygone brethren, and still
rising up to heaven with the same sound from the basilicas of Rome
and the temples of Benares, as if embracing by its simple spell
millions and millions of hearts in their longing desire to give
utterance to the unutterable, to express the inexpressible.
_Life._
THE DIVINE
It was, after all, the Jew who, in the great history of the world,
was destined to solve the riddle of the Divine in man. It was the
soil of Jewish thought that in the end gave birth to the true
conception of the relation between the Divine in nature and the
Divine in man.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
When the Divine in the outward world has once been fully recognised,
there can be nothing more or less divine, nothing more or less
miraculous, either in nature or in history. Those who assign a
divine and miraculous character to certain consecrated events only
in the history of the world, are in great danger of desecrating
thereby the whole drama of history, and of making it, not only
profane, but godless. It is easy to call this a pantheistic view of
the world. It is pantheistic, in the best sense of the word, so much
so that any other view would soon become atheistic. Even the Greeks
suspected the omnipresence of the Divine, when, as early as the
time of Thales, they declared that _all_ is full of the gods. The
choice here lies really between Pantheism and Atheism. If anything,
the greatest or the smallest, can ever happen without the will of
God, then God is no longer God. To distinguish between a direct and
indirect influence of the Divine, to admit a general and a special
providence, is like a relapse into polytheism, a belief in one and
many gods.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Human nature is divine nature modified. It can be nothing else.
Christ, in shaking off all that is not divine in man,--let us call
it by one general name, all that is selfish,--resumed His own
divinity.
_MS._
God comes to us in the likeness of man--there is no other likeness
for God. And that likeness is not forbidden, Christ has taught us
to see and love God in man. We cannot go further. If we attempt
to conceive anything more than human, our mind breaks down. But
we can conceive and perceive the Divine in man, and most in those
who are risen from the earth. While we live our love is human, and
mixed with earthly things. We love and do not love--we even hate,
or imagine we do. But we do not really hate any man, we only hate
something that surrounds and hides man. What is behind, the true
nature of man, we always love. Death purifies man, it takes away the
earthly crust, and we can love those who are dead far better than
those who are still living: that is the truth. We do not deceive
ourselves, we do not use vain words. Love is really purer, stronger,
and more unselfish when it embraces those who are risen. That is why
the Apostles loved Christ so much better when He was no longer with
them. While He lived, Peter could deny Him--when He had returned to
the Father, Peter was willing to die for Him. All that is so true,
only one must have gone through it, felt it oneself, in order to
understand it. If one knows the love one feels for the blessed, one
wants no temporary resurrection to account for the rekindled love of
the Apostles. They believed that Christ had truly risen, that death
had no power over Him, that He was with the Father. Was not that
more, far more, than a return to this fleeting life for a few hours,
or days, or weeks, or than an ascent through the clouds to the blue
sky? Ah! how the great truths have been exchanged for small fancies,
the _mira_ for the _miracula_.
_MS._
DOUBTS
There is certainly no happier life than a life of simple faith; of
literal acceptance, of rosy dreams. We must all grant that, if it
were possible, nothing would be more perfect. I gladly acknowledge
that some of the happiest, and also some of the best men and women
I have known, were those who would have shrunk with horror from
questioning a single letter of the Bible, or doubting that a serpent
actually spoke to Eve, and an ass to Balaam. But can we prevent the
light of the sun and the noises of the street from waking the happy
child from his heavenly dreams? Nay, is it not our duty to wake the
child, when the time has come that he must be up and doing, and take
his share in the toils of the day? And is it not well for those who
for the first time open their eyes and look around, that they should
see by their side some who have woke before them, who understand
their inquiring looks, and can answer their timid questions and
tell them in the simple-hearted language of the old poet:
'There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.'
_Gifford Lectures, III._
There is an atheism which is unto death, there is another atheism
which is the life-blood of all true faith. It is the power of
giving up what, in our best, our most honest, moments, we know to
be no longer true; it is the readiness to replace the less perfect,
however dear, however sacred it may have been to us, by the more
perfect, however much it may be detested, as yet, by the world. It
is the true self-surrender, the true self-sacrifice, the truest
trust in truth, the truest faith. Without that atheism religion
would long ago have become a petrified hypocrisy; without that
atheism no new religion, no reform, no reformation, no resuscitation
would ever have been possible; without that atheism no new life is
possible for any one of us.
_Hibbert Lectures._
How many men in all countries and all ages have been called
atheists, not because they denied that there existed anything beyond
the visible and the finite, or because they declared that the world,
such as it was, could be explained without a cause, without a
purpose, without a God, but often because they differed only from
the traditional conception of the Deity prevalent at the time, and
were yearning after a higher conception of God than what they had
learnt in their childhood.
_Hibbert Lectures._
There are moments in our life when those who seek most earnestly
after God think they are forsaken of God; when they hardly venture
to ask themselves, Do I then believe in God, or do I not? Let them
not despair, and let us not judge harshly of them; their despair may
be better than many creeds.... Honest doubt is the deepest spring of
honest faith; only he who has lost can find.
_Hibbert Lectures._
If we have once claimed the freedom of the spirit which St. Paul
claimed: to prove all things and hold fast that which is good: we
cannot turn back, we cannot say that no one shall prove our own
religion, no one shall prove other religions and compare them with
our own. We have to choose once for all between freedom and slavery
of judgment, and though I do not wish to argue with those who prefer
slavery, yet one may remind them that even they, in deliberately
choosing slavery, follow their own private judgment quite as much
as others do in choosing freedom.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Our own self-interest surely would seem to suggest as severe a trial
of our own religion as of other religions, nay, even a more severe
trial. Our religion has sometimes been compared to a good ship that
is to carry us through the waves and tempests of this life to a
safe haven. Would it not be wise, therefore, to have it tested, and
submitted to the severest trials, before we entrust ourselves and
those dear to us to such a vessel. And remember, all men, except
those who take part in the foundation of a new religion, or have
been converted from an old to a new faith, have to accept their
religious belief on trust, long before they are able to judge for
themselves. And while in all other matters an independent judgment
in riper years is encouraged, every kind of influence is used to
discourage a free examination of religious dogmas, once engrafted on
our intellect in its tenderest stage. We condemn an examination of
our own religion, even though it arises from an honest desire to see
with our own eyes the truth which we mean to hold fast; and yet we
do not hesitate to send missionaries into all the world, asking the
faithful to re-examine their own time-honoured religions. We attack
their most sacred convictions, we wound their tenderest feelings,
we undermine the belief in which they have been brought up, and we
break up the peace and happiness of their homes. Yet if some learned
Jew, or subtle Brahman, or outspoken Zulu asks us to re-examine the
date and authorship of the Old or New Testament, or challenges us
to produce the evidence on which we also are quite ready to accept
certain miracles, we are offended, forgetting that with regard to
these questions we can claim no privilege, no immunity.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
If we can respect a childlike and even a childish faith, we ought
likewise to learn to respect even a philosophical atheism which
often contains the hidden seeds of the best and truest faith. We
ought never to call a man an atheist, and say that he does not
believe in God, till we know what kind of God it is he has been
brought up to believe in, and what kind of God it is that he
rejects, it may be, from the best and highest motives. We ought
never to forget that Socrates was called an atheist, that the early
Christians were all called atheists, that some of the best and
greatest men this world has ever known have been branded by that
name.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
I have heard and read the worst that can be said against our
religion--I mean the true original teaching of Christ--and I feel
that I am ready in mind, if not in body, to lay down my life for the
truth of His teaching. All our difficulties arise from the doctrines
of men, not from His doctrine. There is no outward evidence of the
truth of His doctrine, but the Spirit of God that is within us
testifieth to its truth. If it does not, we are not yet disciples of
Christ, but we may be hereafter.
_Life._
Be certain of this, that to repress a doubt is to repress the spirit
of truth; a doubt well spoken out is generally a doubt solved. But
all this requires great seriousness of mind--it must assume an
importance greater than anything else in life, and then we can fight
our way through it. God is with us in our struggles.
_Life._
EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
Evolution is really the same as history, if we take it in its
objective sense. Subjectively, history meant originally inquiry,
or a desire to know; it then came to mean knowledge, obtained by
inquiry, and lastly, in a purely objective sense, the objects of
such knowledge.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
We may discover in all the errors of mythology, and in what we call
the false or pagan religions of this world, a progress towards
truth, a yearning after something more than finite, a growing
recognition of the Infinite, throwing off some of its veils before
our eyes, and from century to century revealing itself to us more
and more in its own purity and holiness. And thus the two concepts,
that of evolution and that of revelation, which seem at first so
different, become one in the end. If there is a purpose running
through the ages, if nature is not blind, if there are agents,
recognised at last as the agents of one Will, behind the whole
phenomenal world, then the evolution of man's belief in that Supreme
Will is itself the truest revelation of that Supreme Will, and
must remain the adamantine foundation on which all religion rests,
whether we call it natural or supernatural.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
The same changes in the idea of God, which we see in the different
books of the Bible, take place in the different chapters of our own
life. The child cannot but represent God to himself as a venerable
man, walking about, warning and reproving the creatures He has made.
The child has no higher conception as yet which it could apply to
God; if it heard of a higher one it could not grasp it. But as the
child grows and gathers in higher conceptions, the lower must give
way to the higher. As long as the evidence of the senses is the only
evidence which a child knows, he demands a visible God. When he
learns that the human senses are different modes of apprehension,
that according to their very nature they can never apprehend except
what is limited, then the mind involuntarily surrenders the visible
God, it believes in God as a Spirit. And so the growth of each man,
and the growth of the whole human race, goes on, and will go on;
and I cannot see how, if the world goes on as it has hitherto, it
can be otherwise but that much of the language of the New Testament
also will have to be surrendered. Changes have lately taken place
with the word _person_. Many things which were formerly comprehended
under personality have been discovered to be mere accessories, and
above the more material conception of personality, of individuality,
or of the I, a higher one is rising, that of the _Self_. The
I, the personality, is made up of many things which are purely
temporal--which are dear to us on earth, but which will pass away,
while the Self will abide for ever. Need we wonder, therefore, that
just those who wish to transfer only their highest to the Godhead
begin to shrink from speaking of a personal God? or insist on
defining the word 'personal' so that it should exclude all that is
incompatible with a perfect, unlimited, unchanging Being? What led
to such expressions as 'God is Love' but a feeling of reverence,
which shrank from speaking of God as loving as we love? This process
will go on as long as the thoughts and words of mankind grow and
change. Let us learn only from the Bible that those who spoke of God
as walking about in Paradise spoke as children, did the best they
could, gave all they had, and who shall say that their two mites
were in the sight of God less precious than all our creeds and
philosophies? They too will change, they too will be looked upon by
future generations as the language of children. But He to whom our
thoughts and prayers are addressed will interpret all languages and
dialects. Before Him the wisdom of the man will not sound much wiser
than the trustful ignorance of the child.
_MS._
FAITH
Next to our faith in God there is nothing so essential to the
healthy growth of our whole being as an unshaken faith in man.
_Chips._
Let us trust in Him to whom alone we owe all our blessings. If we
do not forsake Him, He will never forsake us--we cannot fathom His
love, but we can trust.
_MS._
Separation loses its bitterness when we have faith in each other and
in God. Faith in each other keeps us close together in life, and
faith in God keeps us together in eternity.
_MS._
Those who remember the happiness of the simple faith of their
childhood may well ask why it should ever be disturbed. Knowing
the blessedness of that faith we naturally abstain from everything
that might disturb it prematurely in the minds of those who are
entrusted to us. But, as the child, whether he likes it or not,
grows to be a man, so the faith of a child grows into the faith of
a man. It is not our doing, it is the work of Him who made us what
we are. As all our other ideas grow and change, so does our idea
of God. I know there are men and women who, when they perceive the
first warnings of that inward growth, become frightened and suppress
it with all their might. They shut their eyes and ears to all new
light from within and from without. They wish to remain as happy as
children, and many of them succeed in remaining as good as children.
Who would blame them or disturb them? But those who trust in God
and God's work within them, must go forth to the battle. With them
it would be cowardice and faithlessness to shrink from the trial.
They are not certain that they were meant to be here simply to enjoy
the happiness of a childlike faith. They feel they have a talent
committed to them which must not be wrapped up in a napkin. But the
battle is hard, and all the harder because, while they know they are
obeying the voice of truth, which is the voice of God, many of those
whom they love look upon them as disobeying the voice of God, as
disturbers of the peace, as giving offence to those little ones.
_MS._
There is a difference between the childlike faith of a man (all real
faith must be childlike) and the childlike faith of a child. The one
is Paradise not yet lost, the other Paradise lost but regained. The
one is right for the child, the other is right for the man. It is
the will of God that it should be so--but it is also the will of God
that we should all bear with each other, and join, each in his own
voice, in the great hymn of praise.
_MS._
Faith is that organ of knowledge by which we apprehend the Infinite,
namely, whatever transcends the ken of our senses and the grasp of
our reason. The Infinite is hidden from the senses, it is denied by
Reason, but it is perceived by Faith; and it is perceived, if once
perceived, as underlying both the experience of the senses and the
combinations of reason.
_Science of Language._
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD
Wherever our Father leads us there is our Fatherland.
_Life._
Man must discover that God is his father before he can become a
son of God. To know is here to be, to be to know. No mere miracle
will make man the son of God. That sonship can be gained through
knowledge only, 'through man knowing God, or rather being known of
God,' and till it is so gained it does not exist, even though it
be a fact. If we apply this to the words in which Christ speaks
of Himself as the Son of God, we shall see that to Him it is no
miracle, it is no mystery, it is no question of supernatural
contrivance; it is simply clear knowledge, and it was this
self-knowledge which made Christ what He was, it was this which
constituted His true, His eternal divinity.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
FUTURE LIFE
One wonders indeed how kindred souls become separated, and one feels
startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on
earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in
the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been
will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if
only we trust in the Wisdom that pervades and overshadows the whole
Universe, we need not know.
_Auld Lang Syne._
Even if we resign ourselves to the thought that the likenesses and
likelihoods which we project upon the unseen and unknown, nay, that
the hope of our meeting again as we once met on earth, need not
be fulfilled exactly as we shape them to ourselves, where is the
argument to make us believe that the real fulfilment can be less
perfect than what even a weak human heart devises and desires?
This trust that whatever is will be best, is what is meant by
faith, true, because inevitable, faith. We see traces of it in
many places and many religions, but I doubt whether anywhere that
faith is more simply and more powerfully expressed than in the Old
and New Testaments: 'For since the beginning of the world men have
not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O
God, beside Thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for
Him' (Isaiah lxiv. 4). 'As it is written, Eye hath not seen nor ear
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which
God hath prepared for them that love Him' (1 Cor. ii. 9).
_Hibbert Lectures._
The highest which man can comprehend is man. One step only he may
go beyond, and say that what is beyond may be different, but it
cannot be less perfect than the present; the future cannot be worse
than the past.... That much-decried philosophy of evolution, if it
teaches us anything, teaches us a firm belief in a better future,
and in a higher perfection which man is destined to reach.
_Hibbert Lectures._
In our longings for the departed we often think of them as young
or old, we think of them as man or woman, as father or mother, as
husband or wife. Even nationality and language are supposed to
remain after death, and we often hear expressions, 'Oh! if the
souls are without all this, without age, and sex, and national
character, without even their native language, what will they be to
us?' The answer is, They will really be the same to us they were
in this life. Unless we can bring ourselves to believe that a soul
has a beginning, and that our soul sprang into being at the time of
our birth, the soul within us must have existed before. But however
convinced we may be of the soul's eternal existence, we shall always
remain ignorant as to how it existed. And yet we do not murmur or
complain. Our soul on awakening here is not quite a stranger to
itself, and the souls who, as our parents, our wives, and husbands,
our children, and our friends, have greeted us at first as strangers
in this life, have become to us as if we had known them for ever,
and as if we could never lose them again. If it were to be so again
in the next life, if there also we should meet at first as strangers
till drawn together by the same mysterious love that has drawn us
together here, why should we murmur or complain? Thousands of years
ago we read of a husband telling his wife, 'Verily a wife is not
dear that you may love the wife, but that you may love the soul,
therefore a wife is dear.' What does that mean? It means that true
love consists not in loving what is perishable, but in discovering
and loving what is eternal in man or woman. In Sanscrit that eternal
part is called by many names, but the best seems that used in this
passage, Atma. We translate it by Soul, but it is even higher and
purer than Soul, it is best translated by the word _Self_. That
which constitutes the true Self, the looker-on, the witness within
us, that which is everywhere in the body and yet nowhere to be
touched, that which cannot die or expire, because it never breathed,
that is the Infinite in man which philosophers have been groping
for, though 'he is not far from every one of us.' It is the Divine
or God-like in man.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
The southern Aryans were absorbed in the struggles of thought:
their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of
existence, and the present, which ought to be the solution of both,
seems never to have attracted their attention, or called forth their
energies. There never was a nation believing so firmly in another
world, and so little concerned about this. Their condition on earth
was to them a problem; their real and eternal life a simple fact.
Though this is true chiefly before they were brought in contact
with foreign conquerors, traces of this character are still visible
in the Hindus as described by the companions of Alexander, nay,
even in the Hindus of the present day. The only sphere in which
the Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, and to
worship is the sphere of religion and philosophy, and nowhere have
religious and metaphysical ideas struck root so deeply in the mind
of a nation as in India. History supplies no second instance where
the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the other
faculties of a people.
_India._
Our happiness here is but a foretaste of our blessed life hereafter.
We must never forget that. We shall be called away, but we shall
meet again.
_Life._
We must have patience--and we all cling to life as long as there are
those who love us here. Those who love us there are always ours.
Nothing is lost in the world. How it will be, we know not, but if
we have recognised the working of a divine wisdom and love here on
earth, we can take comfort, and wait patiently for that which is to
come.
_Life._
Truly those who die young are blest. And shall we find them again
such as they left us? Why not? It is really here on earth that
those whom we love change, it is here that they die every day....
Where are all those bright joyous faces which we look at when we
open our photograph books from year to year? On earth they are lost,
but are they not treasured up for another life, where we shall be
not only what we are from day to day, never the same to-morrow as we
were yesterday, but where we are at once all that we can be--where
memory is not different from perception, nor our wills different
from our acts? We shall soon know--till then surely we have a right
to be what we are, and to cling to our human hopes. The more human
they are, the nearer the truth they are likely to be.
_Life._
I believe in all our hopes we cannot be human enough. Let us be what
we are--men, feel as men, sorrow as men, hope as men. It is true
our hopes are human, but what are the doubts and difficulties? Are
they not human too? Shall we meet again as we left? Why not? We do
not know _how_ it will be so, but who has a right to say it _cannot_
be so? Let us imagine and hope for the best that, as men, we can
conceive, and then rest convinced that it will be a thousand times
better.
_Life._
The inward voice never suggested or allowed me the slightest doubt
or misgiving about the reality of a future life. If there is
continuity in the world everywhere, why should there be a wrench
and annihilation only with us? It will be as it has been--that is
the lesson we learn from nature--_how_ it will be we are not meant
to know. There is an old Greek saying to the effect, to try to know
what the gods did not tell us is not piety. If God wished us to know
what is to be, He would tell us. Darwin has shown us that there is
continuity from beginning to end.
_Life._
I believe in the continuity of Self. If there were an annihilation
or complete change of our individual self-consciousness, we might
become somebody else, but we should not be ourselves. Personally, I
have no doubt of the persistence of the individual after death, as
we call it. I cannot imagine the very crown and flower of creation
being destroyed by its author. I do not say it is impossible, it
is not for us to say either yes or no; we have simply to trust,
but that trust or faith is implanted in us, and is strengthened by
everything around us.
_Life._
Do we really lose those who are called before us? I feel that they
are even nearer to us than when they were with us in life. We must
take a larger view. Our life does not end here, if only we can see
that our horizon here is but like a curtain that separates us from
what is beyond. Those who go before us are beyond our horizon at
present, but we have no right to suppose that they have completely
vanished. We cannot see them, that is all. And even that, we know,
can last for a short time only. We have lived and done our work in
life, before we knew those we loved, and we may have to live the
same number of years separated from them. But nothing can be lost:
it depends on ourselves to keep those we loved always near to our
thoughts, even though our eyes look in vain for them. The world is
larger than this little earth, our thoughts go further than this
short life, and if we can but find our home in this larger world, we
shall find that this larger home is full of those whom we loved, and
who loved us. There is no _chance_ in life; a few years more, a few
years less, will seem as nothing to us hereafter.
_Life._
I fully take in the real death (of my child), I know I shall follow
and die the same real death, and through that same real death I
trust the spirit of Christ will be my guide and helper, and bring
me to a better life, and unite me again with those whom I have
loved, and whom I love still, and those who have loved me and love
me still. God is no giver of imperfect gifts, and He has given me
life, but life on earth is imperfect. He has given me love, but love
on earth is imperfect. I believe, I must believe in perfection, and
therefore I believe in a life perfected and in a love perfected.
'Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders--Gott helfe mich Amen.'
_MS._
It seems hard, it seems so unintelligible, so far above us, that we
should know nothing at all of what is to come--that we should be
so completely separated for a time from those whom we love. Whence
all these limits? whence all those desires in us that cannot be
fulfilled? The limits teach us one lesson, that we are in the Hands
of a Higher Power. Wonderful as our body and our senses are, they
are a prison and chains, and they could not be meant for anything
else.
_MS._
Of what is to come, what is in store for us, we know nothing; and
the more we know that, the greater and stronger our faith. It must
be right, it cannot be wrong. Why was the past often so beautiful?
Because all tends to beauty, to perfection, and the highest point
of perfection is love. We are far from that here, yet all the
miseries of this life, or many at least, would vanish before love.
Life seems most unnatural in what we call the most highly civilised
countries--the struggle of life is fiercest there. Rest and love
seem impossible, and yet that is what we are yearning for, and it
may be granted us hereafter.
_MS._
How is it that we know so little of life after death? that we can
hardly imagine anything without feeling that it is all human poetry?
We are to believe the best, but nothing definite, nothing that can
be described. It is the same with God, we are to believe the best we
can believe, and yet all is earthly, human, weak. We are in a dark
prison here; let us believe that outside it there is no darkness,
but light--but what light, who knows?
_MS._
Wait, wait, do not ask. Children ask every year what the Christ
Child will bring them, but they are not told, they wait in the dark
room. Every year they expect something quite new, but it is always
the same old Christmas-tree, with its lights and flowers, and all
the rest. And why should it be so different when the door opens,
and we step out of this dark life into the bright room? Why should
all be different? We have stepped into this dark room here on earth,
and how often did we think it was very bright and very warm. We
shall step into another room, and it will be brighter, warmer, more
pure, more perfect.
_MS._
What is past, present, future? Is it not all one? only the past and
the future somewhere where at present we cannot be. Wait a little
time, and the eternal will take the place of the present,--and we
shall have the past again,--for the past is not lost. Nothing is
lost--but this waiting is sometimes very hard, and this longing very
hard. Friends go on all sides, it seems a different world, yet there
is work to do, and there is much left to love.
_MS._
If immortality is meant for no more than a continuance of existence,
if by a belief in immortality on the part of the Jews is meant no
more than that the Jews did not believe in the annihilation of the
soul at the time of death, we may confidently assert that, to the
bulk of the Jewish nation, this very idea of annihilation was as
yet unfamiliar. The fact is that the idea of absolute annihilation
and nothingness is hardly ever found except among people whose
mind has received some amount of philosophical education, certainly
more than what the Jews possessed in early times. The Jews did not
believe in the utter destruction of the soul, but, on the other
hand, their idea of life after death was hardly that of life at all.
It was existence without life. Death was considered by them, as by
the Greeks, as the greatest of misfortunes. To rejoice in death is a
purely Christian, not a Jewish, idea. Though the Jews believed that
the souls continued to exist in Sheol, they did not believe that the
wicked would there be punished and the good rewarded. All rewards
and punishments for virtue or vice were confined to this world, and
a long life was regarded as a sure proof of the favour of Jehovah.
It was the Jewish conception of God, as infinitely removed from this
world, that made a belief in true immortality almost impossible for
them, and excluded all hope for a nearer approach to God, or for
any share in that true immortality which belonged to Him and to Him
alone.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Our angels live in heaven, not on earth. We only recognise the
angelic in man, even in those we love the most, when we can no
longer see them. They are then nearer us than ever, we love them
more than ever. Happy are those who have such angels in heaven,
who draw our hearts away from earth and fill them with longing for
our true home. They lighten the burden of life, they give a quiet,
gentle tone to the joys of life, and they teach us to love those who
are left to us on earth, it may be but for a few days or years, with
a love which we never knew before, a love which bears all things,
believes all things, and gladly pardons all things.
_MS._
Life Eternal. Why do we so seldom face the great problem? With me
the chief reason was the conviction that we can _know_ nothing--that
we must wait and trust--do our work for the day which is--and
believe that nothing can happen to us unless God wills it. Know,
where knowledge is possible; believe, trust where faith only is
possible.
_MS._
I know we shall meet again, for God does not destroy what He has
made, nor do souls meet by accident. This life is full of riddles,
but divine riddles have a divine solution.
_Life._
THE INFINITE
Though we cannot know things finite, as they are in themselves, we
know at all events that they are. And this applies to our perception
of the Infinite also. We do not know through our senses what it
is, but we know through our very senses that it is. We feel the
pressure of the Infinite in the Finite, and unless we had that
feeling, we should have no true and safe foundation for whatever
we may afterwards believe of the Infinite. Some critics have urged
that what I call the Infinite ... is the Indefinite only. Of course
it is.... We can know the Infinite as the Indefinite only, or as
the partially defined. We try to define it, and to know it more
and more, but we never finish it. The whole history of religion
represents the continuous progress of the human definition of the
Infinite, but however far that definition may advance, it will never
exhaust the Infinite. Could we define it all, it would cease to be
the Infinite, it would cease to be the Unknown, it would cease to be
the Inconceivable or the Divine.
_Chips._
What we feel through the pressure on all our senses is the pressure
of the Infinite. Our senses, if I may say so, feel nothing but the
Infinite, and out of that plenitude they apprehend the Finite. To
apprehend the Finite is the same as to define the Infinite.
_Chips._
We accept the primitive savage with nothing but his five senses.
These five senses supply him with a knowledge of finite things; the
problem is how such a being ever comes to think or speak of anything
not finite, but infinite. It is his senses which give him the first
impression of infinite things, and force him to the admission of
the infinite. Everything of which his senses cannot perceive a
limit is to a primitive savage, or to any man in an early stage of
intellectual activity, unlimited or infinite. Man sees to a certain
point, and there his eyesight breaks down. But exactly where his
eyesight breaks down, there presses upon him, whether he likes it
or not, the perception of the unlimited or infinite. It may be
said this is not perception in the ordinary sense of the word. No
more it is, but still less is it mere reasoning. In perceiving the
infinite, we neither count, nor measure, nor compare, nor name. We
know not what it is, but we know that it is, and we know it because
we actually feel it and are brought in contact with it. If it seems
too bold to say that man actually sees the invisible, let us say
that he suffers from the invisible, and this invisible is only a
special name for the infinite. The infinite, therefore, instead of
being merely a late abstraction, is really implied in the earliest
manifestations of our sensuous knowledge. It was true from the very
first, but it was not yet defined or named. If the infinite had not
from the very first been present in our sensuous perceptions, such
a word as infinite would be a sound and nothing else. With every
finite perception there is a concomitant perception or a concomitant
sentiment or presentiment of the infinite; from the very first act
of touch, or hearing, or sight, we are brought in contact, not
only with the visible, but also at the same time with an invisible
universe. We have in this that without which no religion would have
been possible, we have in that perception of the infinite the root
of the whole historical development of religion.
_Hibbert Lectures._
No thought, no name is ever entirely lost. When we here in this
ancient Abbey,[2] which was built on the ruins of a still more
ancient Roman temple, seek for a name for the invisible, the
infinite that surrounds us on every side, the unknown, the true
Self of the world, and the true Self of ourselves--we too, feeling
once more like children kneeling in a small dark room, can hardly
find a better name than 'Our Father, which art in Heaven.'
_Hibbert Lectures._
[Footnote 2: Westminster.]
The idea of the infinite, which is at the root of all religious
thought, is not simply evolved by reason out of nothing, but
supplied to us, in its original form, by our senses. Beyond, behind,
beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present
to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every
side. What we call finite in space and time, in form and word, is
nothing but a veil or a net which we ourselves have thrown over the
infinite. The finite by itself, without the infinite, is simply
inconceivable; as inconceivable as the infinite without the finite.
As reason deals with the finite materials supplied to us by our
senses, faith, or whatever else we like to call it, deals with the
infinite that underlies the finite. What we call sense, reason, and
faith are three functions of one and the same perceptive self; but
without sense both reason and faith are impossible, at least to
human beings like ourselves.
_Hibbert Lectures._
The ancestors of our race did not only believe in divine powers
more or less manifest to their senses, in rivers and mountains,
in the sky and the sun, in the thunder and rain, but their senses
likewise suggested to them two of the most essential elements of all
religion: the concept of the infinite, and the concept of law and
order, as revealed before them, the one in the golden sea behind the
dawn, the other in the daily path of the sun.... These two concepts,
which sooner or later must be taken in and minded by every human
being, were at first no more than an impulse, but their impulsive
force would not rest till it had beaten into the minds of the
fathers of our race the deep and indelible impression that 'all is
right,' and filled them with a hope, and more than a hope, that 'all
will be right.'
_Hibbert Lectures._
The real religious instinct or impulse is the perception of the
infinite.
_Hibbert Lectures._
All objects which we perceive and afterwards conceive and name must
be circumscribed, must have been separated from their surroundings,
must be measurable, and can thus only become perceivable and
knowable and namable.... They are therefore finite in their very
nature.... If finiteness is a necessary characteristic of our
ordinary knowledge, it requires but little reflection to perceive
that limitation or finiteness, in whatever sense we use it, always
implies a something beyond. We are told that our mind is so
constituted, whether it is our fault or not, that we cannot conceive
an absolute limit. Beyond every limit we must always take it for
granted that there is something else. But what is the reason of
this? The reason why we cannot conceive an absolute limit is because
we never perceive an absolute limit; or in other words, because in
perceiving the finite we always perceive the infinite also.... There
is no limit which has not two sides, the one turned towards us, the
other turned towards what is beyond; and it is that Beyond which
from the earliest days has formed the only real foundation of all
that we call transcendental in our perceptual, as well as in our
conceptual, Knowledge.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The infinite was not discovered behind the veil of nature only,
though its manifestation in physical phenomena was no doubt the
most primitive and the most fertile source of mythological and
religious ideas. There were two more manifestations of the infinite
and the unknown, which must not be neglected, if we wish to gain a
complete insight into the theogonic process through which the human
mind had to pass from its earliest days. The infinite disclosed
itself not only in nature but likewise in man, looked upon as an
object, and lastly in man looked upon as a subject. Man looked upon
as an object, as a living thing, was felt to be more than a mere
part of nature. There was something in man, whether it was called
breath or spirit or soul or mind, which was perceived and yet not
perceived, which was behind the veil of the body, and from a very
early time was believed to remain free from decay, even when illness
and death had destroyed the body in which it seemed to dwell. There
was nothing to force even the simplest peasant to believe that
because he saw his father dead, and his body decaying, therefore
what was known as the man himself, call it his soul or his mind or
his person, had vanished altogether out of existence. A philosopher
may arrive at such an idea, but a man of ordinary understanding,
though terrified by the aspect of death, would rather be inclined
to believe that what he had known and loved and called his father
or mother must be somewhere, though no longer in the body....
It is perhaps too much to say that such a belief was universal;
but it certainly was and is still very widely spread. In fact it
constitutes a very large portion of religion and religious worship.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Nature, Man, and Self are the three great manifestations in which
the infinite in some shape or other has been perceived, and
every one of these perceptions has in its historical development
contributed to what may be called religion.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Like all other experiences, our religious experience begins with the
senses. Though the senses seem to deliver to us finite experiences
only, many, if not all, of them can be shown to involve something
beyond the Known, something unknown, something which I claim the
liberty to call infinite. In this way the human mind was led to
the recognition of undefined, infinite agents or agencies beyond,
behind, and within our finite experience. The feelings of fear, awe,
reverence, and love excited by the manifestations of some of these
agents or powers began to react on the human mind, and thus produced
what we call Natural Religion in its lowest and simplest form--fear,
awe, reverence, and love of the gods.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The perception of the Infinite can be shown by historical evidence
to be the one element shared in common by all religions. Only
we must not forget that, like every other concept, that of the
Infinite also had to pass through many phases in its historical
evolution, beginning with the simple negation of what is finite, and
the assertion of an invisible Beyond, and leading up to a perceptive
belief in that most real Infinite in which we live and move and have
our being.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
KNOWLEDGE
The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge is an old lesson,
but it has to be taught again and again. It was taught by Buddha,
it was taught by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time
in the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy has been called
the knowledge of our knowledge; it might be called more truly the
knowledge of our ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language
of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
_Last Essays._
Metaphysical truth is wider than physical truth, and the new
discoveries of physical observers, if they are to be more than
merely contingent truths, must find their appointed place
and natural refuge within the immovable limits traced by the
metaphysician.... It is only after having mastered the principles
of metaphysics that the student of nature can begin his work in the
right spirit, knowing the horizon of human knowledge, and guided by
principles as unchangeable as the pole star.
_Last Essays._
There is no subject in the whole realm of human knowledge that
cannot be rendered clear and intelligible, if we ourselves have
perfectly mastered it.
_Chips._
The bridge of thoughts and sighs that spans the whole history of
the Aryan world has its first arch in the _Veda_, its last in
Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_. In the _Veda_ we watch the first
unfolding of the human mind as we can watch it nowhere else. Life
seems simple, natural, childlike.... What is beneath, and above, and
beyond this life is dimly perceived, and expressed in a thousand
words and ways, all mere stammerings, all aiming to express what
cannot be expressed, yet all full of a belief in the real presence
of the Divine in Nature, of the Infinite in the Finite.... While
in the _Veda_ we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant's
_Critique_ the perfect manhood of the Aryan mind. It has passed
through many phases, and every one of them ... has left its mark.
It is no longer dogmatical, no longer sceptical, least of all is
it positive.... It stands before us conscious of its weakness and
its strength, modest yet brave. It knows what the old idols of
its childhood and youth were made of. It does not break them, it
only tries to understand them, but it places above them the Ideals
of Reason--no longer tangible--not even within the reach of the
understanding--but real--bright and heavenly stars to guide us even
in the darkest night.
_Last Essays._
All knowledge, in order to be knowledge, must pass through two
gates, and two gates only: the gate of the senses and the gate of
reason. Religious knowledge also, whether true or false, must have
passed through these two gates. At these two gates, therefore, we
take our stand. Whatever claims to have entered in by any other
gate, whether that gate is called primeval revelation or religious
instinct, must be rejected as contraband of thought; and whatever
claims to have entered by the gate of reason, without having first
passed through the gate of the senses, must equally be rejected, as
without sufficient warrant, or ordered at least to go back to the
first gate, in order to produce there its full credentials.
_Hibbert Lectures._
LANGUAGE
The history of language opens a vista which makes one feel almost
giddy if one tries to see the end of it, but the measuring-rod of
the chronologist seems to me entirely out of place. Those who have
eyes to see will see the immeasurable distance between the first
historical appearance of language and the real beginnings of human
speech: those who cannot see will oscillate between the wildly
large figures of the Buddhists, or the wildly small figures of the
Rabbis, but they will never lay hold of what by its very nature is
indefinite.
_Life._
By no effort of the understanding, by no stretch of imagination, can
I explain to myself how language could have grown out of anything
which animals possess, even if we granted them millions of years
for that purpose. If anything has a right to the name of specific
difference, it is language, as we find it in man, and in man only.
Even if we removed the name of specific difference from our
philosophic dictionaries, I should still hold that nothing deserves
the name of man except what is able to speak.
_Science of Thought._
Every language has to be learnt, but who made the language that
was to be learnt? It matters little whether we call language an
instinct, a gift, a talent, a faculty, or the _proprium_ of man;
certain it is that neither language, nor the power of language,
nor the conditions under which alone language can exist, are to be
discovered anywhere in the whole animal kingdom, except in man.
_Science of Thought._
It was Christianity which first broke down the barrier between Jew
and Gentile, between Greek and Barbarian, between the white and the
black. _Humanity_ is a word which you look for in vain in Plato and
Aristotle; the idea of mankind as one family, as the children of one
God, is an idea of Christian growth; and the science of mankind,
and of the languages of mankind, is a science which, without
Christianity, would never have sprung into life. When people had
been taught to look upon all men as brethren, then, and then only,
did the variety of human speech present itself as a problem that
called for a solution in the eyes of thoughtful observers; and from
an historical point of view it is not too much to say that the first
day of Pentecost marks the real beginning of the science of language.
_Science of Language._
And now, if we gaze from our native shores over the vast ocean of
human speech, with its waves rolling on from continent to continent,
rising under the fresh breezes of the morning of history, and slowly
heaving in our own more sultry atmosphere, with sails gliding over
its surface, and many an oar ploughing through its surf, and the
flags of all nations waving joyously together, with its rocks and
wrecks, its storms and battles, yet reflecting serenely all that
is beneath and above and around it; if we gaze and hearken to the
strange sounds rushing past our ears in unbroken strains, it seems
no longer a wild tumult, but we feel as if placed within some
ancient cathedral, listening to a chorus of innumerable voices: and
the more intensely we listen, the more all discords melt away into
higher harmonies, till at last we hear but one majestic trichord, or
a mighty unison, as at the end of a sacred symphony. Such visions
will float through the study of the grammarian, and in the midst of
toilsome researches his heart will suddenly beat, as he feels the
conviction growing upon him that men are brethren in the simplest
sense of the word--the children of the same father--whatever their
country, their language, and their faith.
_Turanian Languages._
LIFE
All really great and honest men may be said to live three lives:
there is one life which is seen and accepted by the world at large,
a man's outward life; there is a second life which is seen by a
man's most intimate friends, his household life; and there is a
third life, seen only by the man himself, and by Him who searcheth
the heart, which may be called the inner or heavenly--a life led in
communion with God, a life of aspiration rather than of fulfilment.
_Chips._
Where Plato could only see imperfections, the failures of the
founders of human speech, we see, as everywhere else in human
life, a natural progress from the imperfect towards the perfect,
unceasing attempts at realising the ideal, and the frequent triumphs
of the human mind over the inevitable difficulties of this earthly
condition--difficulties not of man's own making, but, as I firmly
believe, prepared for him, and not without a purpose, as toils and
tasks, by a higher Power, and by the highest wisdom.
_Chips._
Our life is not completely in our hands--we must submit to many
things which we may smile at in our inmost heart, but which
nevertheless are essential, not only to our happiness, but to our
fulfilling the duties which we are called to fulfil. We ought to
look upon the circumstances in which we are born and brought up as
ordained by a Higher Power, and we must learn to walk the path which
is pointed out to us!
_Life._
It is difficult to be always true to ourselves, to be always what we
wish to be, what we feel we ought to be. As long as we feel that,
as long as we do not surrender the ideal of our life, all is right.
Our aspirations represent the true nature of our soul much more than
our everyday life. I feel as much as you, how far I have been left
behind in the race which I meant to run, but I honestly try to rouse
myself, and to live up to what I feel I ought to be. Let us keep up
our constant fight against all that is small and common and selfish,
let us never lose our faith in the ideal life, in what we ought to
be, and in what with constant prayer to God we shall be, and let
us never forget how unworthy we are of all the blessings God has
showered down upon us.
_Life._
I feel quite thankful for any little misfortune; it is like paying
something of the large debt of happiness we owe, though it is but a
very trifling interest, and the capital we must owe for ever.
_MS._
I thought a long time about my happiness, and my unworthiness, and
God's unbounded mercy. And then I heard the words within me: 'Be not
afraid.' Yes, there must be no fear. Where there is fear there is no
perfect love. Our happiness here is but a foretaste of our blessed
life hereafter. We must never forget that. We shall be called away,
but we shall meet again.
_MS._
I begin to be quite thankful for my disappointment--we all want
winding up, and nothing does it so well as a great disappointment,
if we only see clearly Who sent it and then forget everything else.
_MS._
One sometimes forgets that all this is only the preparation for what
is to come hereafter. Yet we should never forget this, otherwise
this life loses its true meaning and purpose. If we only know what
we live for here, we can easily find out what is worth having in
this life, and what is not; we can easily go on without many things
which others, whose eyes are fixed on this world only, consider
essential to their happiness.
_MS._
The spirit of love, and the spirit of truth, are the two
life-springs of our whole being--or, what is the same, of our whole
religion. If we lose that bond, which holds us and binds us to a
higher world, our life becomes purposeless, joyless; if it holds us
and supports, life becomes perfect, all little cares vanish, and we
feel we are working out a great purpose as well as we can, a purpose
not our own, not selfish, not self-seeking, but, in the truest sense
of the word, God-serving and God-seeking.... Gentleness is a kind
of mixture of love and truthfulness, and it should be the highest
object of our life to attain more and more to that true gentleness
which throws such a charm over all our life. There is a gentleness
of voice, of look, of movement, of speech, all of which are but the
expressions of true gentleness of heart.
_MS._
It is impossible to take too high a view of life; the very highest
we take is still too low. One feels that more and more as our life
draws to its close, and many things that seemed important once are
seen to be of no consequence, while only a few things remain which
will tell for ever.
_MS._
I don't believe in what is called worldly wisdom. I do not think the
world was made for it--with real faith in a higher life I believe
one can pass through this life without let or hindrance. What I
dread are compromises. There are false notes in them always, and a
false note goes on for ever.
_MS._
How thankful we ought to be every minute of our existence to Him who
gives us all richly to enjoy. How little one has deserved this happy
life, much less than many poor sufferers to whom life is a burden
and a hard and bitter trial. But then, how much greater the claims
on us; how much more sacred the duty never to trifle, never to waste
time and power, never to compromise, but to live in all things,
small and great, to the praise and glory of God, to have God always
present with us, and to be ready to follow His voice, and His voice
only. Has our prosperity taught us to meet adversity when it comes?
I often tremble, but then I commit all to God, and I say, 'Have
mercy upon me, miserable sinner.'
_Life._
There is something very awful in this life, and it is not right to
try to forget it. It is well to be reminded by the trials of others
of what may befall us, and what is kept from us only by the love of
our Father in heaven, not by any merit of our own.
_MS._
How different life is to what one thought it when young, how all
around us falls together, till we ourselves fall together. How
meaningless and vain everything seems on earth, and how closely the
reality of the life beyond approaches us. Many days were beautiful
here, but the greater the happiness the more bitter the thought that
it all passes away, that nothing remains of earthly happiness, but a
grateful heart and faith in God who knows best what is best for us.
_MS._
Oh! if we could even in this life forget all that is unessential,
all that makes it so hard for us to recognise true greatness and
goodness in the character of those with whom this life brings us in
contact for a little while! How much we lose by making little things
so important, and how rarely do we think highly enough of what is
essential and lasting!
_MS._
You must accustom yourself more and more to the thought that here is
not our abiding city, that all that we call ours here is only lent,
not given us, and that if the sorrow for those we have lost remains
the same, we must yet acknowledge with gratitude to God the great
blessing of having enjoyed so many years with those whom He gave us,
as parents, or children, or friends. One forgets so easily the happy
years one has had with those who were the nearest to us. Even these
years of happiness, however short they may have been, were only
given us, we had not deserved them. I know well there is no comfort
for this pain of parting: the wound always remains, but one learns
to bear the pain, and learns to thank God for what He gave, for the
beautiful memories of the past, and the yet more beautiful hope for
the future. If a man has lent us anything for several years, and at
last takes it back, he expects gratitude, not anger; and if God
has more patience with our weakness than men have, yet murmurs and
complaints for the life which He measured out for us as is best for
us, are not what He expected from us. A spirit of resignation to
God's will is our only comfort, the only relief under the trials
God lays upon us, and with such a spirit the heaviest as well as
the lightest trials of life are not only bearable, but useful, and
gratitude to God and joy in life and death remain untroubled.
_Life._
By a grave one learns what life really is--that it is not here but
elsewhere--that this is the exile and there is our home. As we grow
older the train of life goes faster and faster, those with whom we
travelled together step out from station to station, and our own
station too will soon be reached.
_MS._
It seems to me so ungrateful to allow one moment to pass that is
not full of joy and happiness, and devotion to Him who gives us all
this richly to enjoy. The clouds will come, they must come, but they
ought never to be of our own making.
_Life._
The shadows fall thicker and thicker, but even in the shade it is
well, often better than in full sunshine. And when the evening
comes, one is tired and ready to sleep! And so all is ordered for
us, if we only accommodate ourselves to it quietly.
_Life._
As long as God wills it we must learn to bear this life, but when He
calls us we willingly close our eyes, for we know it is better for
us there than here. When so many whom we loved are gone before us,
we follow gladly; and the older we become here, the more one feels
that death is a relief. And yet we can thankfully enjoy what is
still left us on earth, even if our hearts no longer cling to it as
formerly.
_Life._
Our life here is not our own work, and we know that it is best for
us all just as it is. We ought to bear it, and we must bear it; and
the more patiently, yes, the more joyfully, we accommodate ourselves
to it, the better for us. We must take life as it is, as the way
appointed for us, and that must lead to a certain goal. Some go
sooner, some later, but we all go the same way, and all find the
same place of rest. Impatience, gloom, murmurs and tears do not help
us, do not alter anything, and make the road longer, not shorter.
Quiet, resignation, thankfulness and faith help us forwards, and
alone make it possible to perform the duties which we all, each in
his own sphere, have to fulfil.... The darker the night, the clearer
the stars in heaven.
_Life._
How different life might be, if in our daily intercourse and
conversation we thought of our friends as lying before us on the
last bed of flowers--how differently we should then judge, and
how differently we should act. All that is of the earth is then
forgotten, all the little failings inherent in human nature vanish
from our minds, and we only see what was good, unselfish, and loving
in that soul, and we think with regret of how much more we might
have done to requite that love. It is curious how forgetful we are
of death, how little we think that we are dying daily, and that
what we call life is really death, and death the beginning of a
higher life. Such a thought should not make our life less bright,
but rather more--it should make us feel how unimportant many things
are which we consider all-important: how much we could bear which we
think unbearable, if only we thought that to-morrow we ourselves or
our friends may be taken away, at least for a time. You should think
of death, should feel that what you call your own is only lent to
you, and that all that remains as a real comfort is the good work
done in this short journey, the true unselfish love shown to those
whom God has given us, has placed near to us, not without a high
purpose.
_Life._
What a marvel life seems to be the older we grow! So far from
becoming more intelligible, it becomes a greater wonder every day.
One stands amazed, and everything seems so small--the little one can
do so very small. One ought not to brood too much, when there is no
chance of light, and yet how natural it is that one should brood
over life and death, rather than on the little things of life.
_Life._
If we only hold fast the belief that nothing happens but by the will
of God, we learn to be still and can bear everything. The older
one grows, the more one feels sure that life here is but a long
imprisonment, and one longs for freedom and higher efforts.... How
small and insignificant is all in this life when we raise our eyes
above. Gazing up to the Lord of the Universe, all strife is made
easy. We speak different tongues when we think of the Highest, but
we all mean the same thing.
_MS._
It is sad to think of all that was and is no more, and yet there is
something much more real in memory than one used to think. All is
there but what our weak human senses require, and nothing is lost,
nothing can be lost except what we know would vanish one day, but
what was the husk only, not the kernel. I have learnt to live with
those who went before us, and they seem more entirely our own than
when they were with us in the body. And as long as we have duties to
fulfil, so long as there are others who lean on us and want us, life
can be lived a few years longer, it can only be a few years.
_MS._
Life is earnest! is a very old lesson, and we are never too old
to learn it. 'Life is an art' is Goethe's doctrine, and there is
some truth in it also, as long as art does not imply artful or
artificial. Huxley used to say the highest end of life is action,
not knowledge. There I quite differ. First knowledge, then action,
and what a lottery action is! The best intentions often fail, and
what is done to-day is undone to-morrow. However, we must toil on
and do what every day brings us, and do it as well as we can, and
better, if possible, than anybody else.
_Life._
What can we call ours if God did not vouchsafe it to us from day to
day? Yet it is so difficult to give oneself up entirely to Him, to
trust everything to His Love and Wisdom. I thought I could say,
'Thy Will be done,' but I found I could not: my own will struggled
against His Will. I prayed as we ought not to pray, and yet He heard
me. It is so difficult not to grow very fond of this life and all
its happiness, but the more we love it, the more we suffer, for we
know we must lose it and it must all pass away.
_MS._
Our idea of life grows larger, and birth and death seem like morning
and evening. One feels that as it has been so it will be again, and
all one can do is to try to make the best of every day, as it comes
and goes.
_Life._
The things that annoy us in life are after all very trifling things,
if we always bear in mind for what purpose we are here. And even in
the heavier trials, one knows, or one should know, that all is sent
by a higher power, and in the end must be for our best interests.
It is true we cannot understand it, but we can understand that God
rules in the world in the smallest and in the largest events, and
he who keeps that ever in mind has the peace of God, and enjoys his
life as long as it lasts.
_Life._
Life may grow more strange and awful every day, but the more strange
and awful it grows, the more it reveals to us its truest meaning
and reality, and the deepest depth of its divinity. 'And God saw
everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.'
_Life._
Enjoy the precious years God has added to your life, with constant
gratitude, with quiet and purity of soul, looking more to the
heavenly than to the earthly: that gives true joyfulness of soul, if
we _every moment_ recollect what is eternal, and never quite lose
ourselves in the small, or even the large cares of life.
_Life._
If we live on this earth only, if our thoughts are hemmed in by the
narrow horizon of this life, then we lose indeed those whom death
takes from us. But it is death itself which teaches us that there is
a Beyond, we are lifted up and see a new world, far beyond what we
had seen before. In that wide world we lead a new and larger life,
a life which includes those we no longer see on earth, but whom we
cannot surrender. The old Indian philosophers say that no one can
find the truth whose heart is attached to his wife and children. No
doubt perfect freedom from all affections would make life and death
very easy. But may not the very love which we feel for those who
belong to us, even when they are taken from us, bring light to our
eyes, and make us see the truth that, by that very love, we belong
to another world, and that from that world, however little we can
here know about it, love will not be excluded. We believe what we
desire--true--but why do we desire? Let us be ourselves, let us be
what we are meant to be on earth, and trust to Him who made us what
we are.
_MS._
Yes, every day adds a new thin layer of new thoughts, and these
layers form the texture of our character. The materials come
floating towards us, but the way in which they settle down depends
much on the ebb and flow within us. We can do much to keep off
foreign elements, and to attach and retain those which serve
best in building up a strong rock. But from time to time a great
sorrow breaks through all the strata of our soul--all is upheaved,
shattered, distorted. In nature all that is grand dates from such
convulsions--why should we wish for a new smooth surface, or let our
sorrows be covered by the flat sediment of everyday life?
_MS._
If we feel that this life can only be a link in a chain without
beginning and without end, in a circle which has its beginning and
its end everywhere and nowhere, we learn to bear it, and to enjoy it
too, in a new sense. What we achieve here assumes a new meaning--it
will not altogether perish, whether for good or for evil. What is
done in time is done for ever--what is done by one affects us all.
Thus our love too is not lost--what is loved in time is loved for
ever. The form changes, but that which changes, which undergoes
change, remains itself unchanged. We seem to love the fleeting forms
of life, and yet how can we truly love what is so faithless? No, we
truly love what is, and was, and will be, hidden under the fleeting
forms of life, but in itself more than those fleeting forms however
fair. We love the fair appearance too, how could it be otherwise?
but we should love it only as belonging to what we love--not as
being what we love. So it is, or rather so it ought to be. Yet while
we are what we are, we love the flower, not the sightless grain
of seed, and when that flower fades and passes away, we mourn for
it, and our only comfort is that we too fade and pass away. Then
we follow there, wherever they go. Some flowers fade sooner, some
later, but none is quite forgotten.
_MS._
It would be difficult to say at what moment in our young lives real
responsibility begins. The law fixes a time, our own heart cannot
do that. Yet in spite of this unknown quantity at the beginning, we
begin afterwards to reckon with ourselves. Why should we protest
against a similar unknown quantity before the beginning of our
life on earth? Wherever and whenever it was, we feel that we have
made ourselves what we are; is not that a useful article of faith?
Does it not help us to decide on undoing what we have done wrong
and in doing all the good we can, even if it does not bear fruit,
within or without, in this life? A break of consciousness does not
seem incompatible with a sense of responsibility, if we know by
reasoning, though not by recollection, that what we see done in
ourselves must have been done by ourselves. And even if we waive the
question of responsibility for the first two or three years of our
life on earth, surely we existed during those years though we do not
recollect it,--then why not before our life on earth?
_MS._
We must learn to live two lives--this short life here on earth with
its joys and sorrows, and that true life beyond, of which this is
only a fragment or an interruption. When we enter into that true
life, we shall find what we cannot find here, we shall find what we
have lost here. If only so many things did not seem so irregular, so
unnatural. The death of young children before their parents. We love
them better because we know we can lose them--that is true--but yet
it is a hard lesson to learn.
_MS._
One month will go after another, till at last this journey is over,
and we look back on it grateful for the many pleasures it has given
us, grateful for the company of so many kind friends whom we met,
grateful also for the struggles which we had to go through and which
will appear so small, and so little worth our tears and anguish,
when all is over and the last station and resting-place reached in
safety.
_MS._
LOVE
I cannot help thinking that the souls towards whom we feel drawn
in this life are the very souls whom we knew and loved in a former
life, and that the souls who repel us here, we do not know why, are
the souls that earned our disapproval, the souls from whom we kept
aloof, in a former life. But let us remember that if our love is
the love of what is merely phenomenal, the love of the body, the
kindness of the heart, the vigour and wisdom of the intellect, our
love is the love of changing and perishable things.... But if our
love, under all its earthly aspects, was the love of the true soul,
of what is immortal and divine in every man and woman, that love
cannot die, but will find once more what seems beautiful, true, and
lovable in worlds to come, as in worlds that have passed.... What we
truly love in everything is the eternal _âtman_, the immortal self,
and as we should add, the immortal God, for the immortal self and
the immortal God must be one.
_Last Essays._
We must not forget that if earthly love has in the vulgar mind been
often degraded into mere animal passion, it still remains in its
purest sense the highest mystery of our existence, the most perfect
blessing and delight on earth, and at the same time the truest
pledge of our more than human nature. To be able to feel the same
unselfish devotion to the Deity which the human heart is capable of,
if filled with love for another human soul, is something that may
well be called the best religion.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
What the present generation ought to learn, the young as well as the
old, is spirit and perseverance to discover the beautiful, pleasure
and joy in making it known, and resigning ourselves with grateful
hearts to its enjoyment; in a word--love, in the old, true, eternal
meaning of the word. Only sweep away the dust of self-conceit,
the cobwebs of selfishness, the mud of envy, and the old type of
humanity will soon reappear, as it was when it could still 'embrace
millions.' The love of mankind, the true fountain of all humanity,
is still there; it can never be quite choked up. He who can descend
into this fountain of youth, who can again recover himself, who can
again be that which he was by nature, loves the beautiful wherever
he finds it; he understands enjoyment and enthusiasm, in the few
quiet hours which he can win for himself in the noisy, deafening
hurry of the times in which we live.
_Chips._
Would not the carrying out of one single commandment of Christ,
'Love one another,' change the whole aspect of the world, and sweep
away prisons and workhouses, and envying and strife, and all the
strongholds of the devil? Two thousand years have nearly passed, and
people have not yet understood that one single command of Christ,
'Love one another'! We are as perfect heathens in that one respect
as it is possible to be. No, this world might be heaven on earth, if
we would but carry out God's work and God's commandments, and so it
will be hereafter.
_Life._
If we do a thing because we think it is our duty, we generally fail;
that is the old law which makes slaves of us. The real spring of our
life, and of our work in life, must be love--true, deep love--not
love of this or that person, or for this or that reason, but deep
human love, devotion of soul to soul, love of God realised where
alone it can be, in love of those whom He loves. Everything else
is weak, passes away; that love alone supports us, makes life
tolerable, binds the present together with the past and future, and
is, we may trust, imperishable.
_Life._
Love which seems so unselfish may become very selfish if we are
not on our guard. Do not shut your eyes to what is dark in others,
but do not dwell on it except so far as it helps to bring out more
strongly what is bright in them, lovely, and unselfish. The true
happiness of true love is self-forgetfulness and trust.
_Life._
There is nothing in life like a mother's love, though children
often do not find it out till it is too late. If you want to be
really happy in life, love your mother with all your heart; it is a
blessing to feel that you belong to her, and that through her you
are connected by an unbroken chain with the highest source of our
being.
_MS._
Is there such a thing as a Lost Love? I do not believe it. Nothing
that is true and great is ever lost on earth, though its fulfilment
may be deferred beyond this short life.... Love is eternal, and
all the more so if it does not meet with its fulfilment on earth.
If once we know that our lives are in the hands of God, and that
nothing can happen to us without His Will, we are thankful for
the trials which He sends us. Is there any one who loves us more
than God? any one who knows better what is for our real good than
God? This little artificial and complicated society of ours may
sometimes seem to be outside His control, but if we think so it is
our own fault, and we have to suffer for it. We blame our friends,
we mistrust ourselves, and all this because our wild hearts will not
be quiet in that narrow cage in which they must be kept to prevent
mischief.
_Life._
Does love pass away (with death)? I cannot believe it. God made
us as we are, many instead of one. Christ died for all of us
individually, and such as we are--beings incomplete in themselves,
and perfect only through love to God on one side, and through
love to man on the other. We want both kinds of love for our very
existence, and therefore in a higher and better existence too the
love of kindred souls may well exist together with our love of God.
We need not love those we love best on earth less in heaven, though
we may love all better than we do on earth. After all, love seems
only the taking away those unnatural barriers which divide us from
our fellow creatures--it is only the restoration of that union
which binds us altogether in God, and which has broken on earth
we know not how. In Christ alone that union was preserved, for He
loved us _all_ with a love warmer than the love of a husband for
his wife, or a mother for her child. He gave His life for us, and
if we ask ourselves there is hardly a husband or a mother who would
really suffer death for his wife or her child. Thus we see that even
what seems to us the most perfect love is very far as yet from the
perfection of love which drives out the whole self and all that is
selfish, and we must try to love more, not to love less, and trust
that what is imperfect here is not meant to be destroyed, but to be
made perfect hereafter. With God nothing is imperfect; without Him
everything is imperfect. We must live and love in God, and then we
need not fear: though our life seem chequered and fleeting, we know
that there is a home for us in God, and rest for all our troubles in
Christ.
_Life._
Let us hold together while life lasts. Hand in hand we may achieve
more than each alone by himself. We are much less afraid when we are
two together. The chief condition of all spiritual friendship is
perfect frankness. There is no better proof of true friendship than
sincere reproof, where such reproof is necessary. We are occupied
in one great work, and in this consciousness all that is small must
necessarily disappear.
_Life._
Why do we love so deeply? Is not that also God's will? And if so,
why should that love ever cease? What should we be without it? I
cannot believe that we are to surrender that love, that we are to
lose those who were given us to love. Love may be purified, may
become more and more unselfish, may be very different from what
it was on earth, but sympathy, suffering together and rejoicing
together, lies very deep at the root of all being--were it ever
to cease, our very being might cease too. We cannot help loving,
loving more and more, better and better. Thus life becomes brighter
and brighter again, and we feel that we have not lost those who are
taken from us for a little while. We love them all the more, all the
better.
_MS._
How selfish we are even in our love. Here we live for a short
season, and we know we must part sooner or later. We wish to go
first, and to leave those whom we love behind us, and we sorrow
because they went first and left us behind. As soon as one looks
beyond this life, it seems so short, yet there was a time when it
seemed endless.
_MS._
The past is ours, and there we have all who loved us, and whom we
love as much as ever, ay, more than ever.
_MS._
MANKIND
The earth was unintelligible to the ancients because looked upon
as a solitary being, without a peer in the whole universe; but
it assumed a new and true significance as soon as it rose before
the eyes of man as one of many planets, all governed by the same
laws, and all revolving around the same centre. It is the same with
the human soul, and its nature stands before our mind in quite a
different light since man has been taught to know and feel himself
as a member of a great family--as one of the myriads of wandering
stars all governed by the same laws, and all revolving around the
same centre, and all deriving their light from the same source.
'Universal History' has laid open new avenues of thought, and it
has enriched our language with a word which never passed the lips
of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle--_Mankind_. Where the Greek saw
barbarians, we see brethren; where the Greek saw nations, we see
mankind, toiling and suffering, separated by oceans, divided by
language, and severed by national enmity,--yet evermore tending,
under a divine control, towards the fulfilment of that inscrutable
purpose for which the world was created, and man placed in it,
bearing the image of God. History therefore, with its dusty and
mouldering pages, is to us as sacred a volume as the book of
nature. In both we read, or we try to read, the reflex of the laws
and thoughts of a Divine Wisdom. We believe that there is nothing
irrational in either history or nature, and that the human mind is
called upon to read and to revere in both the manifestations of a
Divine Power.
_Chips._
There are two antagonistic schools--the one believing in a
descending, the other in an ascending development of the human
race; the one asserting that the history of the human mind begins
of necessity with a state of purity and simplicity which gradually
gives way to corruption, perversity, and savagery; the other
maintaining that the first human beings could not have been more
than one step above the animals, and that their whole history
is one of progress towards higher perfection. With regard to
the beginnings of religion, the one school holds to a primitive
suspicion of something that is beyond--call it supernatural,
transcendental, infinite, or divine. It considers a silent walking
across this bridge of life, with eyes fixed on high, as a more
perfect realisation of primitive religion than singing of Vedic
hymns, offering of Jewish sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds
and articles. The other begins with the purely animal and passive
nature of man, and tries to show how the repeated impressions of
the world in which he lived, drove him to fetichism and totemism,
whatever these words may mean, to ancestor worship, to a worship of
nature, of trees and serpents, of mountains and rivers, of clouds
and meteors, of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven, and
at last to a belief in One who dwells in heaven above.
_Chips._
MIND OR THOUGHT
Wherever we can see clearly, we see that what we call mind and
thought consist in this, that man has the power not only to receive
presentations like an animal, but to discover something general in
them. This element he can eliminate and fix by vocal signs; and he
can further classify single presentations under the same general
concepts, and mark them by the same vocal signs.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Language and thought go hand in hand; where there is as yet no word,
there is not yet an idea. The thinking capacity of the mind has its
source in language, lives in language, and develops continually in
language.
_Silesian Horseherd._
All our thoughts, even the apparently most abstract, have their
natural beginnings in what passes daily before our senses. _Nihil
in fide nisi quod ante fuerit in sensu._ Man may for a time be
unheedful of these voices of nature; but they come again and again,
day after day, night after night, till at last they are heeded. And
if once heeded, those voices disclose their purport more and more
clearly, and what seemed at first a mere sunrise becomes in the end
a visible revelation of the infinite, while the setting of the sun
is transfigured into the first vision of immortality.
_Hibbert Lectures._
As the evolution of nature can be studied with any hope of success
in those products only which nature has left us, the evolution of
mind also can be effectually studied in those products only which
mind itself has left us. These mental products in their earliest
form are always embodied in language, and it is in language,
therefore, that we must study the problem of the origin, and of the
successive stages in the growth of mind.
_Science of Thought._
If language and reason are identical, or two names, or two aspects
only of the same thing, and if we cannot doubt that language had
an historical beginning, and represents the work of man carried on
through many thousands of years, we cannot avoid the conclusion
that before those thousands of years there was a time when the first
stone of the great temple of language was laid, and before that time
man was without language, and therefore without reason.
_Science of Thought._
MIRACLES
If once the human mind has arrived at the conviction that
_everything_ must be accounted for, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, that there is uniformity, that there is care and order in
everything, and that an unbroken chain of cause and effect holds the
whole universe together, then the idea of the miraculous arises, and
we, weak human creatures, call what is not intelligible to us, what
is not in accordance with law, what seems to break through the chain
of cause and effect, a miracle. Every miracle, therefore, is of our
own making, and of our own unmaking.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
It is due to the psychological necessities of human nature, under
the inspiring influence of religious enthusiasm, that so many of the
true signs and wonders performed by the founders of religion have
so often been exaggerated, and, in spite of the strongest protests
of these founders themselves, degraded into mere jugglery. It is
true that all this does not form an essential element of religion,
as we now understand religion. Miracles are no longer used as
arguments in support of the truth of religious doctrines. Miracles
have often been called helps to faith, but they have so often proved
stumbling-blocks to faith, and no one in our days would venture to
say that the truth as taught by any religion must stand or fall by
certain prodigious events which may or may not have happened, which
may or may not have been rightly apprehended by the followers of
Buddha, Christ, or Mohammed.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
Our Lord's ascension will have to be understood as a sublime idea,
materialised in the language of children. Is not a real fact that
happened, in a world in which nothing can happen against the will of
God, better than any miracle? Why should we try to know more than we
can know, if only we firmly believe that Christ's immortal spirit
ascended to the Father? That alone is true immortality, divine
immortality; not the resuscitation of the frail mortal body, but the
immortality of the immortal divine soul. It was this rising of the
Spirit, and not of the body, without which, as St. Paul said, our
faith would be vain. It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh
profiteth nothing.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
It will be to many of the honest disciples of Christ a real day of
Damascus, when the very name of miracle shall be struck out of the
dictionary of Christian theology. The facts remain exactly as they
are, but the Spirit of truth will give them a higher meaning. What
is wanted for this is not less, but more, faith, for it requires
more faith to believe in Christ without, than with, the help of
miracles. Nothing has produced so much distress of mind, so much
intellectual dishonesty, so much scepticism, so much unbelief, as
the miraculous element forced into Christianity from the earliest
days. Nothing has so much impeded missionary work as the attempt to
persuade people first not to believe in their own miracles, and then
to make a belief in other miracles a condition of their becoming
Christians. It is easy to say 'You are not a Christian if you do
not believe in Christian miracles.' I hope the time will come when
we shall be told, 'You are not a Christian if you cannot believe in
Christ without the help of miracles.'
_Gifford Lectures, III._
MUSIC
Music is the language of the soul, but it defies interpretation. It
means something, but that something belongs not to this world of
sense and logic, but to another world, quite real, though beyond
all definition.... Is there not in Music, and in Music alone of all
the arts, something that is not entirely of this earth?... Whence
comes melody? Surely not from anything that we hear with our outward
ears and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise.... Here
if anywhere we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from
heaven and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears
to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the
earth, earthy. Melodies are not of the earth, and it is truly said,
'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.'
_Auld Lang Syne._
NATURE
There is nothing so beautiful as being alone with nature; one sees
how God's will is fulfilled in each bud and leaf that blooms and
withers, and one learns to recognise how deeply rooted in one is
this thirst for nature. In living with men one is only too easily
torn from this real home; then one's own plans and wishes and fears
spring up; then we fancy we can perfect something for ourselves
alone, and think that every thing must serve for our own ends and
enjoyments, until the influence of nature in life, or the hand of
God, arouses us, and warns us that we live and flourish not for
enjoyment, nor for undisturbed quiet, but to bear fruit in another
life.
_Life._
When one stands amid the grandeur of nature, with one's own little
murmurings and sufferings, and looks deep into this dumb soul,
much becomes clear to one, and one is astounded at the false ideas
one has formed of this life. It is but a short journey, and on
a journey one can do without many things which generally seem
necessary to us. Yes, we can do without even what is dearest to our
hearts, in this world, if we know that, after the journey we shall
have to endure, we shall find again those who have arrived at the
goal quicker and more easily than we have done. Now if life were
looked upon as a journey for refreshment or amusement, which it
ought not to be, we might feel sad if we have to make our way alone;
but if we treat it as a serious business-journey, then we know we
have hard and unpleasant work before us, and enjoy all the more the
beautiful resting-places which God's love has provided for each of
us in life.
_Life._
In the early days of the world, the world was too full of wonders
to require any other miracles. The whole world was a miracle and a
revelation, there was no need for any special disclosure. At that
time the heavens, the waters, the sun and moon, the stars of heaven,
the showers and dew, the winds of God, fire and heat, winter and
summer, ice and snow, nights and days, lightnings and clouds, the
earth, the mountains and hills, the green things upon the earth, the
wells, and seas and floods--all blessed the Lord, praised Him and
magnified Him for ever. Can we imagine a more powerful revelation?
Is it for us to say that for the children of men to join in praising
and magnifying Him who revealed Himself in His own way in all the
magnificence, the wisdom and order of nature, is mere paganism,
polytheism, pantheism, and abominable idolatry? I have heard many
blasphemies, I have heard none greater than this.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
OBSCURITY
There may be much depth of wisdom in all that darkness and
vagueness, but I cannot help thinking that there is nothing that
cannot be made clear, and bright, and simple, and that obscurity
arises in all cases from slovenly thinking and lazy writing.
_MS._
OLD AGE
Sharing the happiness of other people, entering into their feelings,
living life over once more with them and in them, that is all
that remains to old people. I suppose it was meant to be so, the
principal object of life being the overcoming of self, in every
sense of the word.
_Life._
This is a lesson one has to learn as one grows older, to learn to
be alone, and yet to feel one in spirit with all whom one loves,
whether present or absent.
_MS._
You cannot escape from old age, whether it comes slowly or suddenly,
but it comes unawares, and you suddenly feel that you cannot walk
or jump as you used to do, and even the muscles of the mind don't
hold out as they used. Well, so it was meant to be, and it will
be pleasant to begin again with new muscles, and to take up new
work. After seeing a good deal of life, I still think the greatest
satisfaction is work: I do not mean drudgery, but one's own findings
out.
_Life._
As one is getting old, and looks forward with fear rather than with
hope to what is still in store for us, one learns to appreciate more
and more the never-failing pleasure of recalling all the bright and
happy days that are gone. Gone they are, but they are not lost.
Ever present to our calling and recalling, they assume at last a
vividness, such as they hardly had when present, and when we poor
souls were trembling for every day and hour and minute that was
going and ever going, and would not and could not abide.
_Life._
RELIGION AND RELIGIONS
God is not far from each one of those who seek God, if haply they
may feel after Him. Let theologians pile up volume upon volume of
what they call theology, religion is a very simple matter, and that
which is so simple and yet so all-important to us, the living kernel
of religion, can be found, I believe, in almost every creed, however
much the husk may vary. And think what that means! It means that
above and beneath and behind all religions there is one eternal, one
universal religion, a religion to which every man belongs, or may
belong.
_Last Essays._
True religion, that is practical, active, living religion, has
little or nothing to do with logical or metaphysical quibbles.
Practical religion is life, is a new life, a life in the sight of
God, and it springs from what may truly be called a new birth.
_Last Essays._
Our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest
or the smallest scale: they present to us everywhere the infinite as
their background, and everything that has to do with religion has
sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest
foundation.
_Silesian Horseherd._
I cannot bring myself to take much interest in all the controversies
that are going on (1865) in the Church of England.... No doubt the
points at issue are great, and appeal to our hearts and minds, but
the spirit in which they are treated seems to me so very small. How
few men on either side give you the impression that they write face
to face with God, and not face to face with men and the small powers
that be. Surely this was not so in the early centuries, nor again at
the time of the Reformation?
_Life._
We live in two worlds; behind the seen is the unseen, around the
finite the infinite, above the comprehensible the incomprehensible.
There have been men who have lived in this world only, who seem
never to have felt the real presence of the unseen: and yet they
achieved some greatness as rulers of men, as poets, artists,
philosophers, and discoverers. But the greatest among the great have
done their greatest works in moments of self-forgetful ecstasy,
in union and communion with a higher world: and when it was done,
such was their silent rapture that they started back, and could
not believe it was their own, their very own, and they ascribed
the glory of it to God, by whatever name they called Him in their
various utterances. And while the greatest among the great thus
confessed that they were not of this world only, and that their
best work was but in part their own, those whom we reverence as the
founders of religions, and who were at once philosophers, poets,
and rulers of men, called nothing their own, but professed to teach
only either what their fathers had taught them, or what a far-off
voice had whispered in their ear.... The ancient religions were
not founded like temples or palaces, they sprang up like sacred
groves from the soil of humanity, quickened by the rays of celestial
light. In India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, not even the names of
the earliest prophets are preserved. And, if in other countries
the forms and features of the authors of their religious faith and
worship are still dimly visible amidst the clouds of legend and
poetry, all of them, Moses as well as Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha
and Mohammed, seem to proclaim with one voice that their faith was
no new faith, but the faith of their fathers, that their wisdom was
not their own wisdom, but, like every good and perfect gift, given
them from above. What should we learn from these prophets who from
distant countries and bygone ages all bear the same witness to the
same truth? We should learn that though religions may be founded
and fashioned into strange shapes by the hand of man, religion is
one and eternal. From the first dawn that ever brightened a human
hearth or warmed a human heart, one generation has told another
that there is a world beyond the dawn; and the keynotes of all
religion--the feeling of the infinite, the bowing down before the
incomprehensible, the yearning after the unseen--having once been
set to vibrate, have never been altogether drowned in the strange
and wild music of religious sects and sciences. The greatest
prophets of the world have been those who at sundry times and in
divers manners have proclaimed again and again in the simplest words
the simple creed of the fathers, faith in the unseen, reverence for
the incomprehensible, awe of the infinite, or, simpler still, love
of God, and oneness with the All-Father.
_Life._
I have endeavoured to make clear two things, which constitute the
foundation of all religion; first, that the world is rational, that
it is the result of thought, and that in this sense only is it the
creation of a being which possesses reason, or is reason itself (the
_Logos_); and secondly, that mind or thought cannot be the outcome
of matter, but on the contrary is the _prius_ of all things.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Religion is not philosophy; but there never has been a religion,
and there never can be, which is not based on philosophy, and does
not presuppose the philosophical notions of the people. The highest
aim towards which all philosophy strives, is and will always remain
the idea of God, and it was this idea which Christianity grasped in
the Platonic sense, and presented to us most clearly in its highest
form, in the Fourth Gospel.
_Silesian Horseherd._
There has been no entirely new religion since the beginning of the
world. The elements and roots of religion were there, as far back
as we can trace the history of man; and the history of religion
shows us throughout a succession of new combinations of the same
radical elements. An intuition of God, a sense of human weakness
and dependence, a belief in a Divine government of the world, a
distinction between good and evil, and a hope of a better life,
these are some of the radical elements of all religions. Though
sometimes hidden, they rise again and again to the surface. Though
frequently distorted, they tend again and again to their perfect
form. Unless they had formed part of the original dowry of the human
soul, religion would have remained an impossibility, and the tongues
of angels would have been to human ears but as sounding brass, or as
tinkling cymbals.
_Chips._
In lecturing on the origin and growth of religion, my chief object
has been to show that a belief in God, in the immortality of the
soul, and in a future retribution, can be gained, and not only can
be, but has been gained, by the right exercise of human reason
alone, without the assistance of what has been called a special
revelation. In doing this, I thought I was simply following in the
footsteps of the greatest theologians of our time, and that I was
serving the cause of true religion by showing, by ample historical
evidence, gathered from the Sacred Books of the East, how, what St.
Paul, what the Fathers of the Church, what mediæval theologians,
and what some of the most learned of modern divines had asserted
again and again, was most strikingly confirmed by the records of all
non-Christian religions which have lately become accessible to us. I
could not have believed it possible that, in undertaking this work,
I should have exposed myself to attacks from theologians who profess
and call themselves Christians, and who yet maintain that worst of
all heresies, that during all the centuries that have elapsed and
in all the countries of the world, God has left Himself without a
witness, and has revealed Himself to one race only, the Jews of
Palestine.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places
in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every
religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism that no
religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its
founders and its first apostles. Yet it is but seldom borne in mind
that without constant reformation, _i.e._ without a constant return
to its fountain head, every religion--even the most perfect, on
account of its very perfection, more even than others--suffers from
its contact with the world, as the purest air suffers from the mere
fact of being breathed.
_Chips._
To each individual his own religion, if he really believes in it,
is something quite inseparable from himself, something unique,
that cannot be compared to anything else, or replaced by anything
else. Our own religion is, in that respect, something like our
own language. In its form it may be like other languages; in its
essence, and in its relation to ourselves, it stands alone and
admits of no peer or rival.
_Chips._
Three of the results to which, I believe, a comparative study of
religion is sure to lead, I may here state:--
1. We shall learn that religions, in their most ancient form, or
in the minds of their authors, are generally free from many of
the blemishes that attach to them in later times.
2. We shall learn that there is hardly one religion which does
not contain some truth, some important truth; truth sufficient
to enable those who seek the Lord, and feel after Him, to find
Him in their hour of need.
3. We shall learn to appreciate better than ever what we have
in our own religion. No one who has not examined patiently
and honestly the other religions of the world can know what
Christianity really is, or can join with such truth and
sincerity in the words of St. Paul, 'I am not ashamed of the
gospel of Christ.'
_Chips._
Many are the advantages to be derived from a careful study of
other religions, but the greatest of all is that it teaches us to
appreciate more truly what we possess in our own. Let us see what
other nations have had and still have in the place of religion, let
us examine the prayers, the worship, the theology even, of the most
highly civilised races, and we shall then understand more thoroughly
what blessings are vouchsafed to us in being allowed to breathe
from the first breath of life the pure air of a land of Christian
light and knowledge. We are too apt to take the greatest blessings
as matters of course, and even religion forms no exception. We
have done so little to gain our religion, we have suffered so
little in the cause of truth, that however highly we prize our own
Christianity, we never prize it highly enough until we have compared
it with the religions of the rest of the world.
_Chips._
The spirit of truth is the life-spring of all religion, and where it
exists it must manifest itself, it must plead, it must persuade, it
must convince and convert.
_Chips._
As there is a faculty of speech, independent of all the historical
forms of language, there is a faculty of faith in man, independent
of all historical religions. If we say it is religion which
distinguishes man from the animal, we do not mean the Christian
and Jewish religion: we do not mean any special religion: but we
mean a mental faculty or disposition, which, independent of, nay in
spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite
under different names, and under varying disguises. Without that
faculty, no religion, not even the lowest worship of idols and
fetishes, would be possible; and if we will but listen attentively,
we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle
to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing
after the Infinite, a love of God.
_Science of Religion._
Like an old precious metal, the ancient religion, after the dust
of ages has been removed, will come out in all its purity and
brightness: and the image which it discloses will be the image
of the Father, the Father of all the nations upon earth; and the
superscription, where we can read it again, will be, not in Judæa
only, but in the languages of all the races of the world, the Word
of God, revealed where alone it can be revealed--revealed in the
heart of man.
_Science of Religion._
If we granted that all religions, except Christianity and Mosaism,
derived their origin from those faculties of the mind only which,
according to Paley, are sufficient by themselves for calling into
life the fundamental tenets of natural religion, the classification
of Christianity and Judaism on one side as _revealed_, and of the
other religions as _natural_, would still be defective, for the
simple reason that no religion, though founded on revelation, can
ever be entirely separated from natural religion. The tenets of
natural religion, though they never constituted by themselves a real
historical religion, supply the only ground on which even revealed
religions can stand, the only soil where they can strike root, and
from which they can receive nourishment and life.
_Science of Religion._
The intention of religion, wherever we meet it, is always holy.
However imperfect, however childish a religion may be, it always
places the human soul in the presence of God: and however imperfect
and however childish the conception of God may be, it always
represents the highest ideal of perfection which the human soul, for
the time being, can reach and grasp. Religion therefore places the
human soul in the presence of its highest ideal, it lifts it above
the level of ordinary goodness, and produces at last a yearning
after a higher and better life--a life in the light of God.
_Science of Religion._
I suppose that most of us, sooner or later in life, have felt how
the whole world--this wicked world, as we call it--is changed as if
by magic, if once we can make up our mind to give men credit for
good motives, never to be suspicious, never to think evil, never to
think ourselves better than our neighbours. Trust a man to be true
and good, and, even if he is not, your trust will tend to make him
true and good. It is the same with the religions of the world. Let
us but once make up our minds to look in them for what is true and
good, and we shall hardly know our old religions again. There is no
religion--or, if there is, I do not know it--which does not say,
'Do good, avoid evil.' There is none which does not contain what
Rabbi Hillel called the quintessence of all religions, the simple
warning, 'Be good, my boy.' 'Be good, my boy,' may seem a very short
catechism, but let us add to it, 'Be good, my boy, for God's sake,'
and we have in it very nearly the whole of the Law and the Prophets.
_Science of Religion._
In order to choose between different gods, and different forms of
faith, a man must possess the faculty of choosing the instruments
of testing truth and untruth, whether revealed or not; he must
know that certain fundamental tenets cannot be absent in any true
religion, and that there are doctrines against which his rational or
moral conscience revolts as incompatible with truth. In short, there
must be the foundation of religion, there must be the solid rock,
before it is possible to erect an altar, a temple, or a church: and
if we call that foundation natural religion, it is clear that no
revealed religion can be thought of which does not rest more or less
firmly on natural religion.
_Science of Religion._
Universal primeval revelation is only another name for natural
religion, and it rests on no authority but the speculations of
philosophers. The same class of philosophers, considering that
language was too wonderful an achievement for the human mind,
insisted on the necessity of admitting a universal primeval
language, revealed directly by God to men, or rather to mute
beings: while the more thoughtful and more reverent of the Fathers
of the Church, and among the founders of modern philosophy also,
pointed out that it was more consonant with the general working of
an all-wise and all-powerful Creator that He should have endowed
human nature with the essential conditions of speech, instead of
presenting mute beings with grammars and dictionaries ready-made.
The same applies to religion. A universal primeval religion revealed
direct by God to man, or rather to a crowd of atheists, may, to
our human wisdom, seem the best solution of all difficulties; but
a higher wisdom speaks to us out of the realities of history, and
teaches us, if we will but learn, that 'we have all to seek the
Lord, if haply we may feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not
far from every one of us.'
_Science of Religion._
The study of the ancient religions of mankind, I feel convinced, if
carried on in a bold, but scholarlike, careful, and reverent spirit,
will remove many doubts and difficulties which are due entirely
to the narrowness of our religious horizon; it will enlarge our
sympathies, it will raise our thoughts above the small controversies
of the day, and at no distant future evoke in the very heart of
Christianity a fresh spirit and a new life.
_Science of Religion._
No judge, if he had before him the worst of criminals, would treat
him as most historians and theologians have treated the religions
of the world. Every act in the lives of their founders which shows
that they were but men, is eagerly seized and judged without
mercy; every doctrine that is not carefully guarded is interpreted
in the worst sense that it will bear; every act of worship that
differs from our own way of serving God is held up to ridicule and
contempt. And this is not done by accident but with a purpose, nay,
with something of that artificial sense of duty which stimulates
the counsel for the defence to see nothing but an angel in his
own client, and anything but an angel in the plaintiff on the
other side. The result has been--as it could not be otherwise--a
complete miscarriage of justice, an utter misapprehension of the
real character and purpose of the ancient religions of mankind;
and, as a necessary consequence, a failure in discovering the
peculiar features which really distinguish Christianity from all
the religions of the world, and secure to its founder His own
peculiar place in the history of the world, far away from Zoroaster
and Buddha, from Moses and Mohammed, from Confucius and Laotse. By
unduly deprecating all other religions we have placed our own in a
position which its founder never intended for it; we have torn it
away from the sacred context of the history of the world; we have
ignored, or wilfully narrowed, the sundry times and divers manners
in which, in times past, God spake unto the fathers by the prophets;
and instead of recognising Christianity as coming in the fulness
of time, and as the fulfilment of the hopes and desires of the
whole world, we have brought ourselves to look upon its advent as
the only broken link in that unbroken chain which is rightly called
the Divine government of the world. Nay, worse than this, there are
people who, from mere ignorance of the ancient religions of mankind,
have adopted a doctrine more unchristian than any that could be
found in the pages of the religious books of antiquity, _i.e._ that
all the nations of the earth, before the rise of Christianity,
were mere outcasts, forsaken and forgotten of their Father in
heaven, without a knowledge of God, without a hope of heaven. If a
comparative study of the religions of the world produced but this
one result, that it drove this godless heresy out of every Christian
heart, and made us see again in the whole history of the world the
eternal wisdom and love of God towards all His creatures, it would
have done a good work.
_Science of Religion._
Do you still wonder at polytheism or at mythology? Why, they are
inevitable. They are, if you like, a _parler enfantin_ of religion.
But the world has its childhood, and when it was a child, it spoke
as a child, it understood as a child, it thought as a child, and in
that it spoke as a child its language was true. The fault rests with
us, if we insist on taking the language of children for the language
of men, if we attempt to translate literally ancient into modern
language, Oriental into Occidental speech, poetry into prose.
_Science of Religion._
Religion is inevitable if only we are left in possession of our
senses, such as we really find them, not such as they have been
defined for us. We claim no special faculty, no special revelation.
The only faculty we claim is perception, the only revelation we
claim is history, or, as it is now called, historical evolution. But
let it not be supposed that we find the idea of the Infinite ready
made in the human mind from the very beginning of our history. All
we maintain is that the germ or the possibility, the Not-yet of that
idea, lies hidden in the earliest sensuous perceptions, and that as
reason is evolved from what is finite, so faith is evolved from what
from the very beginning is infinite in the perceptions of our senses.
_Hibbert Lectures._
Each religion has its own peculiar growth, but the seed from which
they spring is everywhere the same. That seed is the perception of
the infinite, from which no one can escape who does not wilfully
shut his eyes. From the first flutter of human consciousness, that
perception underlies all the other perceptions of our senses, all
our imaginings, all our concepts, and every argument of our reason.
It may be buried for a time beneath the fragments of our finite
knowledge, but it is always there, and, if we dig deep enough, we
shall always find that buried seed, supplying the living sap to the
fibres and feeders of all true faith.
_Hibbert Lectures._
Instead of approaching the religions of the world with the
preconceived idea that they are either corruptions of the Jewish
religion, or descended, in common with the Jewish religion, from
some perfect primeval revelation, the students of the science of
religion have seen that it is their duty first to collect all the
evidence of the early history of religious thought that is still
accessible in the sacred books of the world, or in the mythology,
customs, or even in the languages of various races. Afterwards
they have undertaken a genealogical classification of all the
materials that have hitherto been collected, and they have then only
approached the question of the origin of religion in a new spirit,
by trying to find out how the roots of the various religions, the
radical concepts which form their foundation, and before all, the
concept of the infinite, could have been developed, taking for
granted nothing but sensuous perception on one side, and the world
by which we are surrounded on the other.
_Hibbert Lectures._
A distinction has been made for us between religion and philosophy,
and, so far as form and object are concerned, I do not deny that
such a distinction may be useful. But when we look to the subjects
with which religion is concerned, they are, and always have been,
the very subjects on which philosophy has dwelt, nay, from which
philosophy has sprung. If religion depends for its very life on
the sentiment or the perception of the infinite within the finite
and beyond the finite, who is to determine the legitimacy of that
sentiment, or of that perception, if not the philosopher? Who is to
determine the powers which man possesses for apprehending the finite
by his senses, for working up his single, and therefore finite,
impressions into concepts by his reason, if not the philosopher? And
who, if not the philosopher, is to find out whether man can claim
the right of asserting the existence of the infinite, in spite of
the constant opposition of sense and reason, taking these words in
their usual meaning? We should damnify religion if we separated it
from philosophy: we should ruin philosophy if we divorced it from
religion.
_Hibbert Lectures._
Who, if he is honest towards himself, could say that the religion of
his manhood was the same as that of his childhood, or the religion
of his old age the same as the religion of his manhood? It is easy
to deceive ourselves, and to say that the most perfect faith is a
childlike faith. Nothing can be truer, and the older we grow the
more we learn to understand the wisdom of a childlike faith. But
before we can learn that, we have first to learn another lesson,
namely, to put away childish things. There is the same glow about
the setting sun as there is about the rising sun; but there lies
between the two a whole world, a journey through the whole sky, and
over the whole earth.
_Hibbert Lectures._
I hope the time will come when the subterranean area of human
religion will be rendered more and more accessible, ... and that
the Science of Religion, which at present is but a desire and a
seed, will in time become a fulfilment, a plenteous harvest. When
that time of harvest has come, when the deepest foundations of all
the religions of the world have been laid free and restored, who
knows but that those very foundations may serve once more, like
the catacombs, or like the crypts beneath our old cathedrals, as a
place of refuge for those who, to whatever creed they may belong,
long for something better, purer, older, and truer than what they
can find in the statutable sacrifices, services, and sermons of
the days in which their lot on earth has been cast; some who have
learnt to put away childish things, call them genealogies, legends,
miracles, or oracles, but who cannot part with the childlike faith
of their heart. Each believer may bring down with him into that
quiet crypt what he values most, his own pearl of great price--the
Hindu, his innate disbelief in this world, his unhesitating belief
in another world; the Buddhist, his perception of an eternal law,
his submission to it, his gentleness, his pity; the Mohammedan, if
nothing else, his sobriety; the Jew, his clinging through good and
evil days to the one God, who loveth righteousness and whose name is
'I am'; the Christian, that which is better than all, if those who
doubt it would only try it--our love of God, call Him what you like,
the infinite, the invisible, the immortal, the father, the highest
Self, above all, and through all, and in all, manifested in our love
of man, our love of the living, our love of the dead, our living and
undying love.
_Hibbert Lectures._
If we see the same doctrines, sometimes uttered even in the very
same words, by the Apostles, and by what people call the false
prophets, of the heathen world, we need not grudge them these
precious pearls. When two religions say the same thing, it is not
always the same thing; but even if it is, should we not rather
rejoice and try with all our might to add to what may be called the
heavenly dowry of the human race, the common stock of truth which,
as we are told, is not far from every one of us, if only we feel
after it and find it?
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Religion, when looked upon not as supernatural, but as thoroughly
natural to man, has assumed a new meaning and a higher dignity when
studied as an integral part of that historical evolution which has
made man what he is, and what from the very first he was meant to
be. Is it no comfort to know that at no time and in no part of the
world, has God left Himself without witness, that the hand of God
was nowhere beyond the reach of the outstretched hands of babes and
sucklings; nay, that it was from those rude utterances out of the
mouth of babes and sucklings, that is, of savages and barbarians,
that has been perfected in time the true praise of God? To have
looked for growth and evolution in history as well as in nature
is no blame, and has proved no loss to the present or to the last
century; and if the veil has as yet been but little withdrawn from
the Holy of Holies, those who come after us will have learnt at
least this one lesson, that this lifting of the veil which was
supposed to be the privilege of priests, is no longer considered as
a sacrilege, if attempted by any honest seekers after truth.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such
manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
No opinion is true simply because it has been held either by the
greatest intellects or by the largest number of human beings at
different periods in the history of the world. No one can spend
years in the study of the religions of the world, beginning with
the lowest and ending with the highest forms, no one can watch the
sincerity of religious endeavour, the warmth of religious feeling,
the nobleness of religious conduct, among races whom we are inclined
to call pagan or savage, without learning at all events a lesson of
humility. Anybody, be he Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, or Brahman, if
he has a spark of modesty left, must feel that it would be nothing
short of a miracle that his own religion alone should be perfect
throughout, while that of every other believer should be false or
wrong from beginning to end.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The more we study the history of the religions of the world, the
clearer it becomes that there is really no religion which could be
called an individual religion, in the sense of a religion created,
as it were _de novo_, or rather _ab ovo_, by one single person.
This may seem strange, and yet it is really most natural. Religion,
like language, is everywhere an historical growth, and to invent a
completely new religion would be as hopeless a task as to invent a
completely new language. Nor do the founders of the great historical
religions of the world ever claim this exclusive authorship. On the
contrary, most of them disclaim in the strongest terms the idea
that they have come either to destroy, or to build a completely new
temple.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The whole world in its wonderful history has passed through the
struggle for life, the struggle for eternal life; and every one
of us, in his own not less wonderful history, has had to pass
through the same wonderful struggle: for, without it, no religion,
whatever its sacred books may be, will find in any human heart that
soil in which alone it can strike root and on which alone it can
grow and bear fruit. We must all have our own bookless religion,
if the sacred books, whatever they may be, are to find a safe and
solid foundation within ourselves. No temple can stand without that
foundation, and it is because that foundation is so often neglected
that the walls of the temple become unsafe and threaten to fall.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The heart and mind and soul of man are the same under every sky, in
all the varying circumstances of human life; and it would be awful
to believe that _any_ human beings should have been deprived of that
light 'which lighteth _every_ man that cometh into the world.' It
is that light which lighteth every man, and which has lighted all
the religions of the world, call them bookless or literate, human
or divine, natural or supernatural, which alone can dispel the
darkness of doubt and fear that has come over the world. What our
age wants more than anything else is _Natural Religion_. Whatever
meaning different theologians may attach to _Supernatural Religion_,
history teaches us that nothing is so natural as the supernatural.
But the supernatural must always be _superimposed_ on the natural.
Supernatural religion without natural religion is a house built on
sand, and when, as in our days, the rain of doubt descends, and the
floods of criticism come, and the winds of unbelief and despair blow
and beat upon that house, that house will fall because it was not
founded on the rock of bookless religion, of natural religion, of
eternal religion.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Every religion, being the property of the young and the old, the
wise and the foolish, must always be a kind of compromise, and,
while protesting against real corruptions and degradations, we must
learn to bear with those whose language differs from our own, and
trust that in spite of the tares which have sprung up during the
night, some grains of wheat will ripen towards the harvest in every
honest heart.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
In all the fundamentals of religion we are neither better nor worse
than our neighbours, neither more wise nor more unwise than all the
members of that great family who have been taught to know themselves
as children of one and the same Father in Heaven.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
What can a study of Natural Religion teach us? Why, it teaches us
that religion is natural, is real, is inevitable, is universal. Is
that nothing? Is it nothing to know that there is a solid rock on
which all religion, call it natural or supernatural, is founded? Is
it nothing to learn from the annals of history that God has not left
Himself without witness in that He did good, and gave us rain from
heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts, and the hearts of
the whole human race, with food and gladness?
_Gifford Lectures, II._
While on the one side a study of Natural Religion teaches us that
much of what we are inclined to class as natural, to accept as a
matter of course, is in reality full of meaning, is full of God,
is in fact truly miraculous, it also opens our eyes to another
fact, namely, that many things which we are inclined to class
as supernatural, are in reality perfectly natural, perfectly
intelligible, nay inevitable, in the growth of every religion.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
The real coincidences between all the religions of the world
teach us that all religions spring from the same soil--the human
heart; that they all look to the same ideals, and that they are
all surrounded by the same dangers and difficulties. Much that
is represented to us as supernatural in the annals of the ancient
religions of the world becomes perfectly natural from this point of
view.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
To those who see no difficulties in their own religion, the study
of other religions will create no new difficulties. It will only
help them to appreciate more fully what they already possess. For
with all that I have said in order to show that other religions also
contain all that is necessary for salvation, it would be simply
dishonest on my part were I to hide my conviction that the religion
taught by Christ, free as yet from all ecclesiastical fences and
entrenchments, is the best, the purest, the truest religion the
world has ever seen.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
To expect that religion could ever be placed again beyond the
reach of scientific treatment or honest criticism, shows an utter
misapprehension of the signs of the times, and would, after all, be
no more than to set up private judgment against private judgment. If
the inalienable rights of private judgment, that is, of honesty and
truth, were more generally recognised, the character of religious
controversy would at once be changed. It is restriction that
provokes resentment, and thus embitters all discussions on religious
subjects.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
So far from being dishonest, the distinction between a higher and
a lower form of religion is in truth the only honest recognition
of the realities of life. If to a philosophic mind religion is a
spiritual love of God, and the joy of his full consciousness of
the spirit of God within him, what meaning can such words convey
to the millions of human beings who nevertheless want a religion,
a positive, authoritative, or revealed religion, to teach them
that there is a God, and that His commands must be obeyed without
questioning?
_Gifford Lectures, III._
People ask what can be gained by a comprehensive study of religions,
by showing that, as yet, no race has been discovered without some
word for what is not visible, not finite, not human, for something
superhuman and divine. Some theologians go even so far as to resent
the discovery of the universality of such a belief. They are anxious
to prove that human reason alone could never have arrived at a
conception of God. They would much rather believe that God has left
Himself without witness than that a belief in something higher than
the Finite could spring up in the human heart from gratitude to Him
who gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our
hearts with food and gladness.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Physical religion, beginning in a belief in agents behind the great
phenomena of nature, reached its highest point when it had led the
human mind to a belief in one Supreme Agent or God, whatever his
name might be. It was supposed that this God could be implored
by prayers and pleased by sacrifices. He was called the father
of gods and men. Yet even in his highest conception, he was no
more than what Cardinal Newman defined God to be. 'I mean by the
Supreme Being,' he wrote, 'one who is simply self-dependent, and
the only being who is such. I mean that he created all things out
of nothing, and could destroy them as easily as he made them, and
that, in consequence, he is separated from them by an abyss, and
incommunicable in all his attributes.' This abyss separating God
from man remains at the end of Physical Religion. It constitutes its
inherent weakness. But this very weakness becomes in time a source
of strength, for from it sprang a yearning for better things. Even
the God of the Jews, in His unapproachable majesty, though He might
be revered and loved by man during His life on earth, could receive,
as it were, a temporary allegiance only, for 'the dead cannot praise
God, neither any that go down into darkness!' God was immortal, a
man was mortal; and Physical Religion could not throw a bridge over
the abyss that separated the two. Real religion, however, requires
more than a belief in God, it requires a belief in man also, and
an intimate relation between God and man, at all events in a life
to come. There is in man an irrepressible desire for continued
existence. It shows itself in life in what we may call self-defence.
It shows itself at the end of life and at the approach of death, in
the hope of immortality.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
So long as we look on the history of the human race as something
that might or might not have been, we cannot wonder that the student
of religion should prefer to form his opinions of the nature of
religion and the laws of its growth from the masterpiece of Thomas
Aquinas, the _Summa Sacræ Theologiæ_, rather than from the _Sacred
Books of the East_. But when we have learnt to recognise in history
the realisation of a rational purpose, when we have learnt to look
upon it as in the truest sense of the word a Divine Drama, the plot
revealed in it ought to assume in the eyes of a philosopher also,
a meaning and a value far beyond the speculations of even the most
enlightened and logical theologians.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
The question is whether there is, or whether there is not, hidden
in every one of the sacred books, something that could lift up
the human heart from this earth to a higher world, something that
could make man feel the omnipresence of a higher Power, something
that could make him shrink from evil and incline to good, something
to sustain him in the short journey through life, with its bright
moments of happiness, and its long hours of terrible distress.
_Preface, Sacred Books of the East._
It has been truly said, and most emphatically, by Dr. Newman, that
neither a belief in God by itself, nor a belief in the soul by
itself, would constitute religion, and that real religion is founded
on a true perception of the relation of the soul to God, and of God
to the soul.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
It may be truly said that the founders of the religions of the world
have all been bridge-builders. As soon as the existence of a Beyond,
of a Heaven above the earth, of Powers above us and beneath us, had
been recognised, a great gulf seemed to be fixed between what was
called by various names, the earthly and the heavenly, the material
and the spiritual, the phenomenal and nomenal, or best of all, the
visible and invisible world, and it was the chief object of religion
to unite these two worlds again, whether by the arches of hope and
fear, or by the iron chains of logical syllogisms.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
Religion, in order to be _real_ religion, a man's own religion,
must be searched for, must be discovered, must be conquered. If it
is simply inherited, or accepted as a matter of course, it often
happens that in later years it falls away, and has either to be
reconquered, or to be replaced by another religion.
_Autobiography._
Religion is growth, never finished. From the lowest to the highest
stages it is growth, not willed only, nor given only, but both. The
lowest stages may seem very imperfect to us, but they are all the
more important. Language and mythology show us the old path on which
man travelled from Nature to God.
_MS._
There is no lesson which at the present time seems more important
than to learn that in every religion there are precious grains; that
we must draw in every religion a broad distinction between what is
essential and what is not, between the eternal and the temporary,
between the divine and the human, and that though the non-essential
may fill many volumes, the essential can often be comprehended in a
few words, but words on which 'hang all the law and the prophets.'
_Preface, Sacred Books of the East._
Religions were meant to be many, like languages. To us, one language
for the whole human race would seem to be far better; but it was
not to be. Each language was to be a school for each race, a talent
committed to each nation. And so it is with religion. There is
truth in all of them, the whole truth in none. Let each one cherish
his own, purify his own, and throw away what is dead and decaying.
But to give up one's religion is like giving up one's life. Even
the lowest savage must keep his own old faith in God, when he
becomes converted to Christianity, or he will have lost the living
and life-giving root of his faith. If people would only learn to
look for what is good in all religions, how far more beautiful the
world would appear in their eyes. They dig hard enough to get the
ore from out a mine, they sift it, smelt it, purify it, and then
keep the small pieces of gold they have got with all this trouble,
forgetting the _scoriae_ and all the refuse. That is what we must
do as students of religion; but we do the very contrary--we hug the
_scoriae_ and shut our eyes to the glittering rays of gold. Jews
and Christians are worse in that respect than all other people.
It may be because their religions are freer from human impurities
than all other religions. But why should that make them blind to
what is really good in other religions, why should it blind them so
much that they look upon other religions as the work of the Devil?
The power of evil has had its work in all religions, our own not
excepted--but the power of goodness prevails everywhere. Till we
know that, life and history seem intolerable. It would not put an
end to missionary labour, it would only make it more a labour of
love, less painful to those whom we wish to win, not away from their
God, but back to their God, Him whom they ignorantly worship, and
whom we should declare unto them, according to our own light, such
as it is, less dark than theirs on many points, but yet dark, as
those know best who, like St. Paul, have striven hardest to look
through the glass of our own weak human mind.
_MS._
If people would only learn to see that there is really a religion
beyond all religions, that each man must have his own religion which
he has conquered for himself, and that we must learn to tolerate
religion wherever we find it! Christianity would be a perfect
religion, if it did not go beyond the simple words of Christ, and
if, even in these words, we made full allowance for the time and
place and circumstances in which they were spoken--that is, if we
simply followed Christ where He wishes us to follow Him. We have
gone far beyond those times and circumstances in many things, but
in what is most essential we are still far behind the teaching of
Christ. How many call themselves Christians who have no idea how
difficult it is to be a Christian, a follower of Christ! It is easy
enough to repeat creeds, and to work ourselves into a frame of mind
when miracles seem most easy.
_MS._
It was the duty of the Apostles and of the early Christians in
general to stand forth in the name of the only true God, and to
prove to the world that their God had nothing in common with the
idols worshipped at Athens and Ephesus. It was the duty of the
early converts to forswear all allegiance to their former deities,
and if they could not at once bring themselves to believe that the
gods whom they had worshipped had no existence at all, they were
naturally led on to ascribe to them a kind of demoniacal nature,
and to curse them as the offspring of that new principle of Evil
with which they had become acquainted in the doctrines of the early
Church.... Through the whole of St. Augustine's works, and through
all the works of earlier Christian divines, there runs the same
spirit of hostility blinding them to all that may be good, and true,
and sacred, and magnifying all that is bad, false, and corrupt,
in the ancient religions of mankind. Only the Apostles and their
immediate disciples venture to speak in a different and, no doubt,
in a more truly Christian spirit of the old forms of worships....
What can be more convincing, more powerful, than the language of St.
Paul at Athens?
_Science of Language._
Those who believe that there is a God, and that He created heaven
and earth, and that He ruleth the world by His unceasing providence,
cannot believe that millions of human beings, all created like
ourselves in the image of God, were, in their time of ignorance, so
utterly abandoned that their whole religion was falsehood, their
whole worship a farce, their whole life a mockery. An honest and
independent study of the religions of the world will teach us that
it was not so, ... that there is no religion which does not contain
some grains of truth. Nay, it will teach us more; it will teach us
to see in the history of the ancient religions, more clearly than
anywhere else, the _Divine education of the human race_.
_Science of Religion._
The Divine, if it is to reveal itself at all to us, will best reveal
itself in our own human form. However far the human may be from the
Divine, nothing on earth is nearer to God than man, nothing on earth
more godlike than man. And as man grows from childhood to old age,
the idea of the Divine must grow with us from the cradle to the
grave, from grace to grace. A religion which is not able thus to
grow and live with us as we grow and live, is dead already. Definite
and unvarying uniformity, so far from being a sign of honesty and
life, is always a sign of dishonesty and death. Every religion, if
it is to be a bond between the wise and the foolish, the old and
the young, must be pliant, must be high and deep and broad; bearing
all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all
things. The more it is so, the greater its vitality, the greater the
strength and warmth of its embrace.
_Hibbert Lectures._
REVELATION
True inspiration is, and always has been, the spirit of truth
within, and this is but another name for the spirit of God. It is
truth that makes inspiration, not inspiration that makes truth.
Whoever knows what truth is knows also what inspiration is: not only
_theopneustos_, blown into the soul by God, but the very voice of
God, the real presence of God, the only presence in which we, as
human beings, can ever perceive Him.
_Autobiography._
There is nothing in the idea of revelation that excludes progress,
for whatever definition of revelation we may adopt, it always
represents a communication between the Divine on one side and
the Human on the other. Let us grant that the Divine element in
revelation, that is, whatever of truth there is in revelation, is
immutable, yet the human element, the recipient, must always be
liable to the accidents and infirmities of human nature. That human
element can never be eliminated in any religion.... To ignore that
human element in all religions is like ignoring the eye as the
recipient and determinant of the colours of light. We know more of
the sun than our forefathers, though the same sun shone on them that
shines on us; and if astronomy has benefited by its telescopes,
... theology also ought not to despise whatever can strengthen the
far-sightedness of human reason in its endeavour to gain a truer
and purer idea of the Divine. A veil will always remain. But as in
every other pursuit, so in religion also, we want less and less
of darkness, more and more of light; we want, call it life, or
growth, or development, or progress; we do not want mere rest, mere
stagnation, mere death.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
It was the sense of an overpowering truth which led to the admission
of a revelation. But while in the beginning truth made revelation,
it soon came to pass that revelation was supposed to make truth.
When we see this happening in every part of the world, when we can
watch the psychological progress which leads in the most natural way
to a belief in supernatural inspiration, it will hardly be said that
an historical study of religion may be useful to the antiquarian,
but cannot help us to solve the burning questions of the day.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
I believe in one revelation only--the revelation within us, which is
much better than any revelations which come from without. Why should
we look for God and listen for His voice outside us only, and not
within us? Where is the temple of God, or the true kingdom of God?
_Life._
There are Christian mystics who would not place internal revelation,
or the voice of God within the heart, so far below external
revelation. To those who know the presence of God within the heart,
this revelation is far more real than any other can be. They hold
with St. Paul that man is in the full sense of the word the temple
of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth within him, nay, they
go even further, and both as Christians and as mystics they cling
to the belief that all men are one in the Father and the Son, as
the Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father. There is no
conflict in their minds between Christian doctrine and mystic
doctrine. They are one and the same in character, the one imparted
through Christ on earth, the other imparted through the indwelling
spirit of God, which again is Christ, as born within us. The Gospel
of St. John is full of passages to which the Christian mystic
clings, and by which he justifies his belief in the indwelling
spirit of God, or, as he also calls it, the birth of Christ in the
human soul.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
I cannot connect any meaning with a primeval revelation, or with
an original knowledge of God. A knowledge of God is surely at all
times impossible; man can only trust, he cannot know. He can feel
the Infinite, and the Divine, he can never class it or subdue it by
knowledge. The question seems to me, how our unconscious relation
to God, which must be there and can never be destroyed, becomes
gradually more and more conscious; and that is what one can best
learn to understand in the history of the various religions of the
world--so many voyages of discovery, each full of sufferings and
heroic feats, all looking towards the same Pole, each to be judged
by itself, none, I believe, to be condemned altogether.
_MS._
To assume that every word, every letter, every parable, every
figure was whispered to the authors of the Gospels, is certainly
an absurdity, and rests only on human ... authority. But the true
revelation, the real truth, as it was already anticipated by the
Greek philosophers, slowly accepted by Jews, like Philo and the
contemporaries of Jesus, taught by men like Clement and Origen in
the ancient Greek Church, and, in fine, realised in the life of
Jesus, and sealed by His death, is no absurdity: it is for every
thinking Christian the eternal life, or the Kingdom of God on earth,
which Jesus wished to establish, and in part did establish. To
become a citizen of this Kingdom is the highest that man can attain,
but it is not attained merely through baptism and confirmation; it
must be gained in earnest spiritual conflict.
_Silesian Horseherd._
THE RIG-VEDA
The _Veda_ alone of all works I know treats of a genesis of
God-consciousness, compared to which the Theogony of Hesiod is
like a worn-out creature. We see it grow slowly and gradually with
all its contradictions, its sudden terrors, its amazements, and
its triumphs. As God reveals His Being in nature in her order, her
indestructibility, in the eternal victory of light over darkness,
of spring over winter, in the eternally returning course of the
sun and the stars, so man has gradually spelt out of nature the
Being of God, and after trying a thousand names for God in vain,
we find Him in the _Veda_ already saying: 'They call him Indra,
Mitra, Varuna; then they call him the Heavenly, the bird with
beautiful wings; that which is One they call in various ways.'...
The belief in Immortality is only the other side, as it were, of the
God-consciousness, and both are originally natural to the Aryan race.
_Life._
SCIENCE
Every true Science is like a hardy Alpine guide that leads us on
from the narrow, though it may be the more peaceful and charming,
valleys of our preconceived opinions, to higher points, apparently
less attractive, nay often disappointing for a time, till, after
hours of patient and silent climbing, we look round and see a new
world around us.
_Chips._
A new horizon has opened, our eyes see far and wide, and as the
world beneath us grows wider and larger, our own hearts seem to
grow wider and larger, and we learn to embrace the far and distant,
and all that before seemed strange and indifferent, with a warmer
recognition and a deeper human sympathy; we form wider concepts, we
perceive higher truths.
_Chips._
What is natural is divine; what is supernatural is human.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
Man is the measurer of all things; and what is Science but the
reflection of the outer world on the mirror of the mind, growing
more perfect, more orderly, more definite, more great, with every
generation? To attempt to study nature without studying man is as
impossible as to study light without studying the eye. I have no
misgivings, therefore, that the lines on which this College (Mason
Science College) is founded will ever become so narrow as to exclude
the science of man, and the science of that which makes man, the
science of language, and, what is really the same, the science of
thought. And where can we study the science of thought, that most
wonderful instance of development, except in the languages and
literatures of the past? How are we to do justice to our ancestors
except by letting them plead their own case in their own language?
Literary culture can far better dispense with physical science than
physical science with literary culture, though nothing is more
satisfactory than a perfect combination of the two.
_Life._
THE SELF
As behind the various gods of nature, one supreme deity was at last
discovered in India, the Brahmans imagined that they perceived
behind the different manifestations of feeling, thought, and will
also, a supreme power which they called Atma, or Self, and of
which the intellectual powers or faculties were but the outward
manifestations. This led to a philosophy which took the place of
religion, and recognised in the self the only true being, the
unborn and therefore immortal element in man. A step further led
to the recognition of the original identity of the subjective Self
in man, and the objective Self in nature, and thus, from an Indian
point of view, to a solution of all the riddles of the world. The
first commandment of all philosophy, 'Know thyself,' became in the
philosophy of the Upanishads, 'Know thyself as the Self,' or, if we
translate it into religious language, 'Know that we live and move
and have our being in God.'
_Gifford Lectures, I._
The death of a child is as if the flash of the Divine eye had
turned quickly away from the mirror of this world, before the human
consciousness woke up and thought it recognised itself in the
mirror, often only to perceive for a moment, just as it closes its
eyes for the last time, that that which it took for itself was the
shadow or reflection of its eternal self.
_Life._
A man need not go into a cave because he has found his true Self;
he may live and act like everybody else; he is 'living but free.'
All remains just the same, except the sense of unchangeable,
imperishable self which lifts him above the phenomenal self. He
knows he is wearing clothes, that is all. If a man does not see it,
if some of his clothes stick to him like his very skin, if he fears
he might lose his identity by not being a male instead of a female,
by not being English instead of German, by not being a child instead
of a man, he must wait and work on. Good works lead to quietness of
mind, and quietness of mind to true self-knowledge. Is it so very
little to be only Self, to be the subject that can resist, i.e.
perceive the whole universe, and turn it into his object? Can we
wish for more than what we are, lookers-on--resisting what tries to
crush us, call it force, or evil, or anything else?
_Life._
The impression made on me by the look of a child who is not yet
conscious of himself and of the world round him is that of still
undisturbed godliness. Only when self-consciousness wakes little by
little, through pleasure or pain, when the spirit accustoms itself
to its bodily covering, when man begins to say _I_ and the world to
call things _his_, then the full separation of the human self from
the Divine begins, and it is only after long struggles that the
light of _true_ self-consciousness sooner or later breaks through
the clouds of earthly semblances, and makes us again like the little
children 'of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.' In God we live and move
and have our being, that is the sum of all human wisdom, and he who
does not find it here, will find it in another life. All else that
we learn on earth, be it the history of nature or of mankind, is
for this end alone, to show us everywhere the presence of a Divine
providence, and to lead us through the knowledge of the history of
the human spirit to the knowledge of ourselves, and through the
knowledge of the laws of nature to the understanding of that human
nature to which we are subjected in life.
_Life._
To my mind the birth of a child is not a breach of the law of
continuity, but on that very ground I must admit the previous
existence of the Self that is here born as a child, and
which brings with it into this new order of things simply its
Self-consciousness, and even that not developed but undeveloped
potentia, in a sleep. When afterwards a child awakes to
self-consciousness, that is really its remembrance of its former
existence. The Self which it becomes conscious of, remember, is in
its essence not of this world only, but of a former as well as of a
future world. This constitutes in fact the only distinct remembrance
in every human being of a former life. There are besides indistinct
remembrances of his former existence, viz. the many dispositions
which every thinking man finds in himself, and which are not simply
the result of the impressions of this world on a so-called _tabula
rasa_. Unless we begin life as _tabula rasa_ we begin it as _tabula
preparata_, as _leukomata_, and whatever colour or disposition,
or talent, or temperament, whatever there is inexplicable in each
individual, that he will perceive, or possibly remember, as the
result of the continuity between his present and former life.
_MS._
What, then, is that which we call Death? Separation of the Self from
a living body. If so, does the body die because the Self leaves it,
or does the Self leave the body because it dies? What has life to do
with the Self? Has the Self which for a time dwells in a living body
anything to do with what we call the life of that body? Does the
Self take possession of a body because it lives, or does the body
live because the Self has taken possession of it? The difficulty
arises from our vague conception of _life_. Life is only a mode of
existence. Existence is possible without what we call life, not
life without existence. To live means to be able to absorb, but
who or what is able? The Self exists, it is sentient, capable of
perception by becoming embodied. It is perceptive because sentient,
it is conceptive because perceptive. The difficulty lies in the
embodiment. It is there where all philosophy becomes ridiculous.
_MS._
Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve
fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions
of times in a second; they could never produce the sensation of
red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the
translator of these vibrations of ether; this Self that alone
receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say
nothing more than that it exists, that it perceives, and as the
Indian philosophers add, that it is blessed, _i.e._ that it is
complete in itself, serene, and eternal.
_Silesian Horseherd._
Nothing eternal can have a beginning, and there can be no immortal
life after death, unless our true immortal life has been realised
here on earth. Hindu philosophers called those who had realised
their true, immortal, eternal, or divine Self 'free while living.'
_MS._
SORROW AND SUFFERING
How mysterious all this suffering is, particularly when it produces
such prostration that it must lose all that elevating power which
one knows suffering does exercise in many cases. It seems sometimes
as if a large debt of suffering had to be paid off, and that some
are chosen to pay a large, very large sum, so that others may go
free. We have our own burden to bear, but it is a burden that seems
to make other things easy to bear--it strengthens even when it seems
to crush. But how could one bear that complete prostration of all
powers which must make death seem so much preferable to life. And
yet life goes on, and people care about a hundred little things, and
break their hearts if they do not get them.
_MS._
Such trials as you have had to pass through are not sent without a
purpose, and if you say that they have changed your views of life,
such a change in a character like yours can only be a change in
advance, a firmer faith in those truths which have been revealed
to the dim sight of human nature, a stronger will to resist all
falsehood and tampering with the truth, and a deeper conviction that
we owe our life to Him who has given it, and that we must fight His
battle when He calls us to do it.
_MS._
God knows that we want rain and storm as much as sunshine, and He
sends us both as seems best to His love and wisdom. When all breaks
down He lifts us up. But when we feel quite crushed and forsaken and
alone, we then feel the real presence of our truest Friend, who,
whether by joys or sorrows, is always calling us to Him, and leading
us to that true Home where we shall find Him, and in Him all we
loved, with Him all we believed, and through Him all we hoped for
and aspired to on earth. Our broken hearts are the truest earnest of
everlasting life.
_Life._
We must submit, but we must feel it a great blessing to be able to
submit, to be able to trust that infinite Love which embraces us on
all sides, which speaks to us through every flower and every worm,
which always shows us beauty and perfection, which never mars, never
destroys, never wastes, never deceives, never mocks.
_MS._
There is but one help and one comfort in these trials, that is, to
know by whom they are sent. If one knows that nothing can happen to
us without Him, one does not feel quite helpless, even under the
greatest terrors of this life.
_MS._
How little one thinks that many trials and afflictions may come upon
us any day. One lives as if life were to last for ever, and as if we
should never part with those who are most dear to us. Life would be
intolerable were it otherwise, but how little one is prepared for
what life really is.
_MS._
Why is there so much suffering in this world? I cannot think it
improves us much, and yet it must have its purpose. All these are
questions far too high for us--we are like children, and more
than children, when we come to think of them. All we know is that
where we catch a glimpse of God's handiwork, either in the natural
or moral world, it is so wonderfully perfect, so beyond all our
measures, that we feel safe as in a good ship, however rough the sea
may be. Whatever we may believe, or hope, or wish for, will be far
exceeded by that Higher Will and Wisdom which supports all, even us
little souls.
_MS._
The sorrows of life are inevitable, but they are hard to bear, for
all that. They would be harder still if we did not see their purpose
of reminding us that our true life is not here, but that we are here
on a voyage that may be calm or stormy, and which is to teach us
what all sailors have to learn, courage, perseverance, kindness, and
in the end complete trust in a Higher Power.
_MS._
Sorrow is necessary and good for men; one learns to understand that
each joy must be indemnified by suffering, that each new tie which
knits our hearts to this life must be loosed again, and the tighter
and the closer it was knit, the keener the pain of loosening it.
Should we then attach our hearts to nothing, and pass quietly and
unsympathetically through this world, as if we had nothing to do
with it? We neither could nor ought to act so. Nature itself knits
the first tie between parents and children, and new ties through
our whole life. We are not here for reward, for the enjoyment
of undisturbed peace or from mere accident, but for trial, for
improvement, perhaps for punishment; for the only union which can
secure the happiness of men, the union between our Self and God's
Self, is broken, or at least obscured, by our birth, and the
highest object of our life is to find this bond again, to remain
ever conscious of it and hold fast to it in life and in death. This
rediscovery of the eternal union between God and man constitutes
true religion among all people.
_Life._
Every one carries a grave of lost hope in his soul, but he covers it
over with cold marble, or with green boughs. On sad days one likes
to go alone to this God's acre of the soul, and weep there, but only
in order to return full of comfort and hope to those who are left to
us.
_Life._
The sorrows of life, like all other things, pass away, and the
larger the number who await us beyond, the easier the parting from
those we leave behind.
_Life._
Grief is a sweet remembrance of happiness that was.
_MS._
There is the old riddle always before me, why was ... taken from me?
Human understanding has no answer for it, and yet I feel as certain
as I can feel of anything that as it is, it is good, it is best,
better than anything I can wish for. One feels one's own ignorance
why what seems so right and natural should not be, and yet one knows
it could not be. One hides one's head in the arms of a Higher Power,
a Friend, a Father, and more than a Father. Wait, and you will know.
Work, and you will be able to bear it.
_MS._
People think that grief is pain, but it is not so: Grief, the
absorption in the quiet recollection of what was, but is no longer,
is a pleasure, a consolation, a blessing.
_MS._
Those who would comfort us by bidding us forget our grief, and join
their happy gatherings, do not know what comfort is. Hearts which
have suffered have a right to what the world may call grief and
sorrow, but what is really a quiet communion with those whom we
love, and whom we can find no longer among the laughter of the happy.
_MS._
What can we pray for? Not for special gifts, but only for God's
mercy. We do not know what is good for us, and for others. What
would become of the world if all our prayers were granted? And yet
it is good to pray--that is, to live in all our joys and sorrows
with God, that unknown God whom we cannot reason with, but whom we
can love and trust. Human misery, outward and inward, is certainly
a great problem, and yet one knows from one's own life how just the
heaviest burdens have been blessings. The soul must be furrowed if
it is to bear fruit.
_MS._
What is the tenure of all our happiness? Are we not altogether
at the mercy of God? Would it not be fearful to live for one day
unless we knew, and saw, and felt His Presence and Wisdom and Love
encompassing us on all sides? If we once feel that, then even death,
even the death of those we love best and who love us best, loses
much of its terror: it is part and parcel of one great system of
which we see but a small portion here, and which without death,
without that bridge of which we see here but the first arch, would
seem to be a mere mockery. That is why I said to you it is well that
human art cannot prolong our life for ever, and in that sentiment I
should think we both agree. I have felt much for you, more than I
cared to say. We are trained differently, but we are all trained for
some good purpose, and the suffering which you have undergone is to
me like deep ploughing, the promise of a rich harvest.
_Life._
There is a large and secret brotherhood in this world, the members
of which easily recognise each other, without any visible outward
sign. It is the band of mourners. The members of this brotherhood
need not necessarily wear mourning; they can even rejoice with the
joyful, and they seldom sigh or weep when others see them. But they
recognise and understand each other, without uttering a word, like
tired wanderers who, climbing a steep mountain, overtake other tired
wanderers, and pause, and then silently go on again, knowing that
they all hope to see the same glorious sunset high up above. Their
countenances reflect a soft moonlight; when they speak, one thinks
of the whispering of the leaves of a beech forest after a warm
spring shower, and as the rays of the sun light up the drops of dew
with a thousand colours, and drink them up from the green grass, a
heavenly light seems to shine through the tears of the mourners, to
lighten them, and lovingly kiss them away. Almost every one, sooner
or later, enters this brotherhood, and those who enter it early may
be considered fortunate, for they learn, before it is too late, that
_all_ which man calls his own is only lent him for a short time, and
the ivy of their affections does not cling so deeply and so strongly
to the old walls of earthly happiness.
_Life._
We cannot know, we cannot name the Divine, nor can we understand
its ways as manifested in nature and human life. We ask why there
should be suffering and sin, we cannot answer the question. All we
can say is, it is willed to be so. Some help our human understanding
may find, however, by simply imagining what would have been our
life if the power of evil had not been given us. It seems to me
that in that case we, human beings as we are, should never have had
a conception of what is meant by good: we should have been like
the birds in the air, happier, it may be, but better, no. Or if
suffering had always been reserved for the bad, we should all have
become the most cunning angels. Often when I am met by a difficulty
which seems insoluble, I try that experiment, and say, Let us see
what would happen if it were otherwise. Still, I confess there is
some suffering on earth which goes beyond all understanding, which
even the truest Christian love and charity seems unable to remove
or mitigate. It can teach us one thing only, that we are blind, and
that in the darkness of the night we lose our faith in a Dawn which
will drive away darkness, fear, and despair. Much, no doubt, could
be done even by what is now called Communism, but what in earlier
days was called Christianity. And then one wonders whether the
world can ever again become truly Christian. I dare not call myself
a Christian. I have hardly met the men in all my life who deserved
that name. Again, I say, let us do our best, knowing all the time
that our best is a mere nothing.
_Life._
THE SOUL
The name of the immortal element (in man) was not given to man as a
gratuitous gift. It had to be gained, like the name of God, in the
sweat of his face. Before man could say that he believed his soul
to be immortal, he had to discover that there was a soul in man. It
required as great an effort to form such a word as _anima_, breath,
and to make it signify the infinite in man, as to form such a word
as _diva_, bright, and to make it signify the infinite in nature.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
To us the two words 'body and soul' are so familiar that it seems
almost childish to ask how man came at first to speak of body and
soul. But what did he mean by soul? What do we ourselves mean by
soul? Think of the many meanings contained in our word soul. Our
soul may mean the living soul; it may mean the sentient soul; it may
mean the seat of the passions, whether good or bad; it may mean
the organ of thought; and lastly, the immortal element in man. The
question we have to ask is not how man arrived at a name for soul,
but how he came for the first time to speak of something different
from the body.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
The discovery of the soul, the first attempts at naming the soul,
started everywhere from the simplest observations of material facts.
The lesson cannot be inculcated too often that the whole wealth of
our most abstract and spiritual words comes from a small number of
material or concrete terms.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
We see that the way which led to the discovery of a soul was pointed
out to man as clearly as was the way which led him to the discovery
of the gods. It was chiefly the breath, which almost visibly
left the body at the time of death, that suggested the name of
breath, and afterwards the thought of something breathing, living,
perceiving, willing, remembering, and thinking within us. The name
came first, the name of the material breath. By dropping what seemed
material even in this airy breath, there remained the first vague
and airy concept of what we call soul.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
The worship of the spirits of the departed which, under various
forms, was so widely spread over the ancient world, could not but
accustom the human mind to the idea that there was something in man
which deserved such worship. The souls of the departed were lifted
higher and higher, till at last they reached the highest stage which
existed in the human mind, namely, that of divine beings, in the
ancient sense of that word.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
The problem of uniting the invisible and visible worlds presented
itself under three principal aspects. The first was the problem
of creation, or how the invisible Primal Cause could ever come in
contact with visible matter and impart to it form and meaning. The
second problem was the relation between God and the individual
soul. The third problem was the return of the soul from the visible
to the invisible world, from the prison of its mortal body to the
freedom of a heavenly paradise. The individual soul as dwelling in a
material body forms part of the created world, and the question of
the return of the soul to God is therefore closely connected with
that of its creation by, or its emanation from, God.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
When the original oneness of earth and heaven, of the human and
the divine natures, has once been discovered, the question of the
return of the soul to God assumes a new character. It is no longer
a question of an ascension to heaven, an approach to the throne of
God, an ecstatic vision of God, and a life in a heavenly Paradise.
The vision of God is rather the knowledge of the divine element
in the soul, and of the consubstantiality of the divine and human
natures. Immortality has no longer to be asserted, because there
can be no death for what is divine, and therefore immortal, in man.
There is life eternal and peace eternal for all who feel the divine
Spirit as dwelling within them, and have thus become the children of
God.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
No doubt the soul must find it difficult in childhood to accustom
itself to the human body, and it takes many years before it is quite
at home. Then for a time all goes well, and the soul hardly knows it
is hidden in a strange garment till the body begins to be weakly,
and can no longer do all the soul wishes, and presses it everywhere,
so that the soul appears to lose all outward freedom and movement.
Then one can well understand that we long to be gone, and death is
a true deliverance. God always knows best when the right time comes.
_Life._
Let us remember that we do not know what the soul was before this
life--nay, even what it was during the first years of our childhood.
Yet we believe on very fair evidence that what we call our soul
existed from the moment of our birth. What ground have we, then, to
doubt that it was even before that moment? To ascribe to the soul a
beginning on our birthday would be the same as to claim for it an
end on the day of our death, for whatever has a beginning has an
end. If then, in the absence of any other means of knowledge, we
may take refuge in analogy, might we not say that it will be with
the soul hereafter as it has been here, and that the soul after its
earthly setting will rise again, much as it rose here? This is not
a syllogism, it is analogy, and in a cosmos like ours analogy has
a right to claim some weight, in the absence of any proof to the
contrary.
_Last Essays._
There is a question which has probably been asked by every human
heart--Granting that the soul cannot, without self-contradiction,
be mortal, will that soul be itself, know itself, and will it know
others whom it has known before? For the next life, it is said,
would not be worth living if the soul did not recollect itself,
recognise not only itself, but those whom it has known and loved on
earth. Here analogy alone can supply some kind of answer: 'It will
be hereafter as it has been' is not, in the absence of any evidence
to the contrary, an argument that can be treated with contempt. Our
soul here may be said to have risen without any recollection of
itself and of the circumstances of its former existence. But it has
within it the consciousness of its eternity, and the conception of
a beginning is as impossible for it as that of an end, and if souls
were to meet again hereafter as they met in this life, as they loved
in this life, without knowing that they had met and loved before,
would the next life be so very different from what this life has
been here on earth--would it be so utterly intolerable and really
not worth living?
_Last Essays._
When the soul has once reached that union with God, nay, when
it lives in the constant presence of God, evil becomes almost
impossible. We know that most of the evil deeds to which human
nature is prone are possible in the dark only. Before the eyes of
another human being, more particularly of a beloved being, they
become at once impossible. How much more in the real presence of a
real and really beloved God, as felt by the true mystic, not merely
as a phrase, but as a fact? As long as there is no veil between
him and God, evil thoughts, evil words, and evil deeds are simply
impossible to one who feels the actual presence of God. Nor is he
troubled any longer by questions, such as how the world was created,
how evil came into the world. He is satisfied with the Divine Love
that embraces his soul; he has all that he can desire, his whole
life is hid through Christ in God, death is swallowed up in victory,
the mortal has become immortal, neither death nor life, nor things
present, nor things to come, is able to separate his soul from the
love of God.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
THEOSOPHY
This venerable name (Theosophy), so well known among early Christian
thinkers, as expressing the highest conception of God within the
reach of the human mind, has of late been so greatly misappropriated
that it is high time to restore it to its proper function. It should
be known once for all that one may call oneself a theosophist
without ... believing in any occult sciences and black art.
_Gifford Lectures, IV._
There is nothing esoteric in Buddhism. Buddhism is the very opposite
of esoteric--it is a religion for the people at large, for the
poor, the suffering, the ill-treated. Buddha protests against the
very idea of keeping anything secret. There was much more of that
esoteric teaching in Brâhmanism. There was the system of caste,
which deprived the Sûdras, at least, of many religious privileges.
But I do say that even in Brâhmanism there is _no such thing as
an esoteric interpretation of the Sâstras._ The Sâstras have but
one meaning, and all who had been properly prepared by education
had access to them. There are some artificial poems, which are
so written as to admit of two interpretations. They are very
wonderful, but they have nothing to do with philosophical doctrines.
Again, there are erotic poems in Sanscrit which are explained as
celebrating the love and union between the soul and God. But all
this is perfectly well known, there is no mystery in it.
_Life._
TRUTH
What is wanted is the power of sifting evidence, and a simple love
of truth. Whatever value we may attach to our own most cherished
convictions, there is something more cherished than all of them, and
that is a perfect trust in truth, if once we have seen it.
_Last Essays._
True reverence does not consist in declaring a subject, because it
is dear to us, to be unfit for free, and honest inquiry; far from
it! True reverence is shown in treating every subject, however
sacred, however dear to us, with perfect confidence, without fear
and without favour; with tenderness and love, by all means, but,
before all, with unflinching and uncompromising loyalty to truth.
_Science of Religion._
Do we lose anything if we find that what we hold to be the most
valuable truth is shared in and supported by millions of human
beings? Ancient philosophers were most anxious to support their own
belief in God by the unanimous testimony of mankind. They made the
greatest efforts to prove that there was no race so degraded and
barbarous as to be without a belief in something divine. Some modern
theologians seem to grudge to all religions but their own the credit
of having a pure and true, nay any concept of God at all, quite
forgetful of the fact that a truth does not cease to be a truth
because it is accepted universally. I know no heresy more dangerous
to true religion than this denial that a true concept of God is
within the reach of every human being, is, in fact, the common
inheritance of mankind, however fearfully it may have been misused
and profaned by Christian and un-Christian nations.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
If Comparative Theology has taught us anything, it has taught us
that there is a common fund of truth in all religions, derived from
a revelation that was neither confined to one nation, nor miraculous
in the usual sense of that word, and that even minute coincidences
between the doctrines, nay, between the external accessories of
various religions, need not be accounted for at once by disguised
borrowings, but can be explained by other and more natural causes.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
Can there be anything higher and better than truth? Is any kind of
religion possible without an unquestioning trust in truth? No one
knows what it is to believe who has not learnt to believe in truth,
for the sake of truth, and for the sake of truth only.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
It may be quite right to guard against dangers, whether real or
imaginary, so long as it is possible. But when it is no longer
possible, the right thing is to face an enemy bravely. Very often
the enemy will turn out a friend in disguise. We cannot be far
wrong, if we are only quite honest, but if we are once not quite
honest over a few things, we shall soon become dishonest over many
things. In teaching on religion, even on Natural religion, we must
look neither right nor left, but look all facts straight in the
face, to see whether they are facts or not, and, if they are facts,
to find out what they mean.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
Some people say that they can derive no help, no comfort, from what
they call spiritual _only_. Spiritual _only_--think what that _only_
would mean, if it could have any meaning at all. We might as well
say of light that it is light only, and that what we want is the
shadow which we can grasp. So long as we know the shadow only, and
not the light that throws it, the shadow only is real, and not the
light. But when we have once turned our head and seen the light, the
light only is real and substantial, and not the shadow.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
We find in the Upanishads, what has occupied the thoughts of man at
all times, what occupies them now and will occupy them for ever--a
search after truth, a desire to discover the Eternal that underlies
the Ephemeral, a longing to find in the human heart the assurance of
a future life, and an attempt to reunite the bond which once held
the human and the divine together, the true atonement between God
and man.
_Gifford Lectures, III._
We have toiled for many years and been troubled with many
questionings, but what is the end of it all? We must learn to become
simple again like little children. That is all we have a right to
be: for this life was meant to be the childhood of our souls, and
the more we try to be what we were meant to be, the better for us.
Let us use the powers of our minds with the greatest freedom and
love of truth, but let us never forget that we are, as Newton said,
like children playing on the seashore, while the great ocean of
truth lies undiscovered before us.
_Life._
Nothing I like better than when I meet a man who differs from me;
he always gives me something, and for that I am grateful. Nor am I
at all so hopeless as many people, who imagine that two people who
differ can never arrive at a mutual understanding.... Why do people
differ, considering that they all begin with the same love of truth,
and are all influenced by the same environment? Well, they often
differ because one is ignorant of facts which the other knows and
has specially studied.... But in most cases people differ because
they use their words loosely, and because they mix up different
subjects instead of treating them one by one.
_Life._
THE WILL OF GOD
Through my whole life I have learnt this one lesson, that nothing
can happen to us, unless it be the will of God. There can be no
disappointment in life, if we but learn to submit our will to the
will of God. Let us wait for a little while, and to those whose eyes
are turned to God and eternity the longest life is but a little
while,--let us wait then in faith, hope, and charity: these three
abide, but the greatest of these is charity.
_Life._
Whatever happens to us is always the best for us, even if we do not
at once understand and perceive it.
_MS._
Surely everything is ordered, and ordered for our true interests.
It would be fearful to think that anything, however small in
appearance, could happen to us without the will of God. If you
admit the idea of chance or unmeaning events anywhere, the whole
organisation of our life in God is broken to pieces. We are we
don't know where, unless we rest in God and give Him praise for all
things. We must trust in Him whether he sends us joy or sorrow.
If he sends us joy let us be careful. Happiness is often sent to
try us, and is by no means a proof of our having deserved it. Nor
is sorrow always a sign of God's displeasure, but frequently, nay
always, of His love and compassion. We must each interpret our
life as best we can, but we must be sure that its deepest purpose
is to bring us back to God through Christ. Death is a condition of
our life on earth, it brings the creature back to its Creator. The
creature groans at the sight of death, but God will not forsake us
at the last, He who has never forsaken us from the first breath
of our life on earth. If it is His will we may live to serve Him
here on earth for many happy years to come. If He takes either of
us away, His name be praised. We live in the shadow of death, but
that shadow should not darken the brightness of our life. It is
the shadow of the hand of our God and Father, and the earnest of a
higher, brighter life hereafter. Our Father in heaven loves us more
than any husband can love his wife, or any mother her child. His
hand can never hurt us, so let us hope and trust always.
_Life._
Our lives are in the hands of a Father, who knows what is best for
all of us. Death is painful to the creature, but in God there is
no death, no dying; dying belongs to life, and is only a passage
to a more perfect world into which we all go when God calls us.
When one's happiness is perfect, then the thought of death often
frightens one, but even that is conquered by the feeling and the
faith that all is best as it is, and that God loves us more than
even a father and mother can love us. It is a beautiful world in
which we live, but it is only beautiful and only really our home
when we feel the nearness of God at each moment and lean on Him and
trust in His love.... When the hour of parting comes, we know that
love never dies, and that God who bound us closely together in this
life will bring us together where there is no more parting.
_MS._
Our meeting here on earth with those we loved was not our doing. We
did not select our father and mother, and sisters and brothers. We
did not even explore the whole world to discover our friends. They
too were more or less given us, the choice was given us, and the
sphere of choice was determined and limited. Hence we seem to have
a right to say that they were meant for us, and we for them, and
unless we believe in accident, who is there by whose will alone they
could have been meant for us? Hence, if they were meant for us once
by a Divine, not by our own will, that will can never change, and we
have a right to hope and even to believe that _what has been will
be_, and that we shall again meet and love those whom we met and
loved here. This is faith, and this is comfort, but it is greater
faith, and greater comfort still, if we close our eyes in the firm
conviction that whatever will be, will be best for us.
_MS._
WONDER
There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We
have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and
we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind
will not entirely pass away. If we analyse this feeling of wonder
carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we
mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned--that
I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say 'I
wonder' we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret
satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of
hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder
will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple
with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp them, it may
be, know them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at
the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm
conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we
ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from
ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be
called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance which, if we look back at
the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the
mother of all human knowledge.
_Chips._
WORDS
What people call 'mere words' are in truth the monuments of the
fiercest intellectual battles; triumphant arches of the grandest
victories won by the intellect of man. When man had formed names
for body and soul, for father and mother, and not till then, did
the first art of human history begin. Not till there were names for
right and wrong, for God and man, could there be anything worthy of
the name of human society. Every new word was a discovery, and these
early discoveries, if but properly understood, are more important to
us than the greatest conquests of the kings of Egypt and Babylon.
Not one of our greatest explorers has unearthed more splendid
palaces, than the etymologist. Every word is the palace of a human
thought, and in scientific etymology we possess the charm with which
to call these ancient thoughts back to life.
_Chips._
Cannot a concept exist without a word? Certainly not, though in
order to meet every possible objection we may say that no concept
can exist without a sign, whether it be a word or anything else.
And if it is asked whether the concept exists first, and the sign
comes afterwards, I should say no: the two are simultaneous, but in
strict logic, the sign, being the condition of a concept, may really
be said to come first. After a time, words may be dropt, and it is
then, when we try to remember the old word that gave birth to our
concept, that we are led to imagine that concepts came first, and
words afterwards. I know how difficult it is to see this clearly. We
are so accustomed to think without words, that we can hardly realise
the fact that originally no conceptual thought was possible without
these or other signs.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
WORK
If you have found a work to which you are ready to sacrifice the
whole of your life, and if you have faith in yourselves, others will
have faith in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must be done
will be done.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
What flimsy things the so-called pleasures of life are--how little
in them that lasts. To delight in doing one's work is life--that
is what helps us on, though the road is sometimes very stiff and
tiring--uphill rather it would seem than downhill, and yet downhill
it is.
_MS._
A distaste for work is only another name for a distaste for duty,
a disregard for those commandments which hold society together, a
disregard of the commandments of God. No doubt there is that reward
in work that after a time it ceases to be distasteful, and like many
a bitter medicine becomes liked, but that reward is vouchsafed to
honest work only.
_MS._
Work is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or disappointment try
hard work; it will not fail you.
_Autobiography._
No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise, or posthumous
blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries
are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the
great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole
are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far
greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care
for the distant future?
_Autobiography._
Put your whole heart, or your whole love into your work.
Half-hearted work is really worse than no work.
_Last Essays._
Much of the best work in the world is done by those whose names
remain unknown, who work because life's greatest bliss is work,
and who require no reward beyond the consciousness that they have
enlarged the knowledge of mankind and contributed their share to the
final triumph of honesty and truth.
_Chips._
True immortality (of fame) is the immortality of the work done by
man, which nothing can make undone, which lives, works on, grows
on for ever. It is good to _ourselves_ to remember and honour the
names of our ancestors and benefactors, but to them, depend upon
it, the highest reward was not the hope of fame, but their faith
in themselves, their faith in their work, their faith that nothing
really good can ever perish, and that Right and Reason must in the
end prevail.
_Chips._
It is given to few scholars only to be allowed to devote the whole
of their time and labour to the one subject in which they feel the
deepest interest. We have all to fight the battle of life before we
can hope to secure a quiet cell in which to work in the cause of
learning and truth.
_Chips._
What author has ever said the last word he wanted to say, and who
has not had to close his eyes before he could write _Finis_ to his
work?
_Autobiography._
THE WORLD
There is no other Christian explanation of the world than that God
thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought
the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and
hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform
under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this
unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus
what He was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz. children
of God.
_Silesian Horseherd._
I cannot help seeing order, law, reason or Logos in the world, and I
cannot account for it by merely _ex post_ events, call them what you
like--survival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else.
_Last Essays._
Think only what it was to believe in an order of the world, though
it be no more at first than a belief that the sun will never
overstep his bounds. It was all the difference between a chaos and
a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and an intelligible and
therefore an intelligent providence. How many souls, even now when
everything else has failed them, when they have parted with the
most cherished convictions of their childhood, when their faith in
man has been poisoned, and when the apparent triumph of all that is
selfish, ignoble, and hideous has made them throw up the cause of
truth, of righteousness, and innocence as no longer worth fighting
for, at least in this world; how many, I say, have found their
last peace and comfort in the contemplation of the order of the
world, whether manifested in the unvarying movement of the stars,
or revealed in the unvarying number of the petals and stamens and
pistils of the smallest forget-me-not. How many have felt that
to belong to this cosmos, to this beautiful order of nature, is
something at least to rest on, something to trust, something to
believe, when everything else has failed. To us, this perception of
law and order in the world may seem very little, but to the ancient
dwellers on earth, who had little else to support them, it was
everything because, if once perceived, if once understood, it could
never be taken from them.
_Hibbert Lectures._
We must learn to see a meaning in everything. No doubt we cannot
always see cause and effect, and it is well we cannot. It is quite
true that we do not always get our deserts. And yet we must believe
that we do--only if we knew it, the whole fabric of the world would
be destroyed, there would be neither virtue nor vice in the whole
world, nothing but calculation. We should avoid the rails laid down
by the world because we should know that the engine would be sure
to come and mangle us. In this way the world holds together, and it
could not in any other way.
_Life._
There is to me a beauty and mystery and sanctity about flowers, and
when I see them come and go, no one knows whence and whither, I ask
what more miracles do we want,--what better, more beautiful, more
orderly world could we wish to belong to than that by which we are
surrounded and supported on all sides? Where is there a flaw or a
fault? Then why should we fear unless the flaws are within us, and
we will not see the blessing and the rest which we might enjoy if
we only trusted to the Author of all that beauty, order, and wisdom
about us. It is a perfect sin not to be happy in this world, and
how much of the misery which there is, is the work of men, or could
be removed by men, if they would but work together for each others'
good.
_Life._
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as
printed.
Page 81: "There no _chance_ in life ..." The transcriber has
inserted "is".
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Thoughts on Life and Religion - An Aftermath from the Writings of The Right Honourable - Professor Max Müller" ***
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