God The Invisible King Part 2

Closely related to this heresy that G.o.d is magic, is the heresy that calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.

The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in "Tartarin in the Alps." You will remember how Tartarin's friend a.s.sured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the creva.s.ses at their worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags. If the mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by specious excuses. Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with incredible daring... . That is exactly the Providence theory of the whole world. There can be no doubt that it does enable many a timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness. And provided there is no slip into a creva.s.se, the Providence theory works well. It would work altogether well if there were no creva.s.ses.

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and escaped.

But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into a creva.s.se?

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.] It is the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in Providence until he was already well advanced in years. He went through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without altogether losing his faith. The loss of a child, an Indian famine, could shake it but not overthrow it.

Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of G.o.d was altogether destroyed. His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less confident lines. It is a book typical of an age and of a very English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true G.o.d cannot be a.s.serted, but how near he came to G.o.d, let one quotation witness.

"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in. But of the existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the world. This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in our existence. It does not always attain to light. In many directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly blocked. In others it only partially succeeds.

But in a few it bursts forth into radiant light. There are few who in some heavenly moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence. We may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it is there." ...

G.o.d does not guide our feet. He is no sedulous governess restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men. If you would fly into the air, there is no G.o.d to bank your aeroplane correctly for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a glacier, no G.o.d nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery places. He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you leave them before an unguarded fire.

Cherish no delusions; for yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own strength; no talisman, no G.o.d, can help you or those you care for. Nothing of such things will G.o.d do; it is an idle dream.

But G.o.d will be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane or the dark ice-cave G.o.d will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed, it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave deaths. He will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up in his victory.

5. THE HERESY OF QUIETISM

G.o.d comes to us within and takes us for his own. He releases us from ourselves; he incorporates us with his own undying experience and adventure; he receives us and gives himself. He is a stimulant; he makes us live immortally and more abundantly. I have compared him to the sensation of a dear, strong friend who comes and stands quietly beside one, shoulder to shoulder.

The finding of G.o.d is the beginning of service. It is not an escape from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the prison of the mortal self. Not to realise that, is the heresy of Quietism, of many mystics. Commonly such people are people of some wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs. They make religion a method of indolence. They turn their backs on the toil and stresses of existence and give themselves up to a delicious reverie in which they flirt with the divinity. They will recount their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully G.o.d has tried and proved them. But indeed the true G.o.d was not the lover of Madame Guyon. The true G.o.d is not a spiritual troubadour wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose.

The true G.o.d goes through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits along the street. We must go out to him. We must accept his discipline and fight his battle. The peace of G.o.d comes not by thinking about it but by forgetting oneself in him.

6. G.o.d DOES NOT PUNISH

Man is a social animal, and there is in him a great faculty for moral indignation. Many of the early G.o.ds were mainly G.o.ds of Fear. They were more often "wrath" than not. Such was the temperament of the Semitic deity who, as the Hebrew Jehovah, proliferated, perhaps under the influence of the Alexandrian Serapeum, into the Christian Trinity and who became also the Moslem G.o.d.* The natural hatred of unregenerate men against everything that is unlike themselves, against strange people and cheerful people, against unfamiliar usages and things they do not understand, embodied itself in this conception of a malignant and partisan Deity, perpetually "upset" by the little things people did, and contriving murder and vengeance. Now this G.o.d would be drowning everybody in the world, now he would be burning Sodom and Gomorrah, now he would be inciting his congenial Israelites to the most terrific pogroms. This divine "frightfulness" is of course the natural human dislike and distrust for queer practices or for too sunny a carelessness, a dislike reinforced by the latent fierceness of the ape in us, liberating the latent fierceness of the ape in us, giving it an excuse and pressing permission upon it, handing the thing hated and feared over to its secular arm... .

* It is not so generally understood as it should be among English and American readers that a very large proportion of early Christians before the creeds established and regularised the doctrine of the Trinity, denied absolutely that Jehovah was G.o.d; they regarded Christ as a rebel against Jehovah and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Jove. These beliefs survived for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held by a great mult.i.tude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew G.o.d. But in this book, be it noted, the word Christian, when it is not otherwise defined, is used to indicate only the Trinitarians who accept the official creeds.

It is a human paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish sweet familiar things, that these things of the True G.o.d should so readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with a light to tend and protect her sleeping child, and setting the house on fire. None the less, right down to to-day, the heresy of G.o.d the Revengeful, G.o.d the Persecutor and Avenger, haunts religion. It is only in quite recent years that the growing gentleness of everyday life has begun to make men a little ashamed of a Deity less tolerant and gentle than themselves.

The recent literature of the Anglicans abounds in the evidence of this trouble.

Bishop Colenso of Natal was prosecuted and condemned in 1863 for denying the irascibility of his G.o.d and teaching "the Kaffirs of Natal" the dangerous heresy that G.o.d is all mercy. "We cannot allow it to be said,"

the Dean of Cape Town insisted, "that G.o.d was not angry and was not appeased by punishment." He was angry "on account of Sin, which is a great evil and a great insult to His Majesty." The case of the Rev.

Charles Voysey, which occurred in 1870, was a second a.s.sertion of the Church's insistence upon the fierceness of her G.o.d. This case is not to be found in the ordinary church histories nor is it even mentioned in the latest edition of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; nevertheless it appears to have been a very illuminating case. It is doubtful if the church would prosecute or condemn either Bishop Colenso or Mr. Voysey to-day.

7. G.o.d AND THE NURSERY-MAID

Closely related to the Heresy of G.o.d the Avenger, is that kind of miniature G.o.d the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a G.o.d and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word "G.o.d" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. G.o.d Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own aims. But indeed, the teaching of G.o.d Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful than an indecent a.s.sault. The reason rebels and is crushed under this horrible and pursuing suggestion. Many minds never rise again from their injury. They remain for the rest of life spiritually crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against G.o.d, thus rendered. He and his h.e.l.l were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of thirteen, by the grace of the true G.o.d in me, I flung this Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that G.o.d himself had done this thing for me, the name of G.o.d meant nothing to me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with this bogey G.o.d of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges, still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place where G.o.d should be. They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances; they dare not look at the causes of things. They are afraid of suns.h.i.+ne, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old watching spider take offence. The voice of the true G.o.d whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven. For the true G.o.d has no lash of fear. And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him! How he loves the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy the happy children of G.o.d! ...

Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children. There is a real wickedness of the priest that is different from other wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange perversions of instinct affect it. Let a former Archbishop of Canterbury speak for me. This that follows is the account given by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation (July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain SOCIETY OF THE HOLY CROSS:

"I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the instruction of very young children. I find, in one of the pages of it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching which is to be found in the book. Now, six to six and a half is certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these statements addressed in the book:

"'It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that G.o.d should forgive him.'

"I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to G.o.d direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to the priest. But the words, to say the least of them, are rash. Then comes the very obvious question:

"'Do you know why? It is because G.o.d, when he was on earth, gave to his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men their sins. It was to priests alone that Jesus said: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." ... Those who will not confess will not be cured. Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into h.e.l.l.'

"That is addressed to a child six years of age.

"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of h.e.l.l.'" ...

Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in their preaching. It is a distinct l.u.s.t. Much n.o.bility and devotion there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of real wors.h.i.+p, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of all, perhaps not of many priests. But there has been in all ages that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.

8. THE CHILDREN'S G.o.d

Children do not naturally love G.o.d. They have no great capacity for an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of G.o.d. While they are still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy for them to feel any great need of G.o.d. All things are still something G.o.d-like... .

The true G.o.d, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no appet.i.te for unnatural praise and adoration. He does not clamour for the attention of children. He is not like one of those senile uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said, "The children adore him." If children are loved and trained to truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the true G.o.d as their needs bring them within his scope. They should be left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the world, as long as they can be.

They should be told only of G.o.d as a Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and know better. That is as much as most children need. The phrases of religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant, something worse than blasphemy.

Yet children are sometimes very near to G.o.d. Creative pa.s.sion stirs in their play. At times they display a divine simplicity. But it does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they may dislike or misinterpret. If by any accident, by the death of a friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a child, then he may begin to hear of G.o.d, who takes those that serve him out of their slain bodies into his s.h.i.+ning immortality. Or if by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at ease by the a.s.surance of his limitless charity... .

With adolescence comes the desire for G.o.d and to know more of G.o.d, and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.

9. G.o.d IS NOT s.e.xUAL

In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very considerable disentanglement of the idea of G.o.d from the complex of s.e.xual thought and feeling. But in the early days of religion the two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary "wrath" of their G.o.d at this or that little dirtiness or irregularity or breach of the s.e.xual tabus. The ceremony of circ.u.mcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian G.o.d. So far as Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the old a.s.sociations. But to this day the representative Christian churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and maliciousness that so often ensue. Nearly every Christian church inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the illegitimate child. They do not treat illegitimate children as unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an incurable taint of SIN. Kindly easy-going Christians may resent this statement because it does not tally with their own att.i.tudes, but let them consult their orthodox authorities.

One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred or sinful in itself and what is held to be one's duty or a nation's duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best thing to do. By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or all of our inst.i.tutions regulating the relations of the s.e.xes may be justifiable.

But my case is not whether they can be justified by these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world. It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise. These s.e.xual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made--with a sense of complete righteousness--to prohibit their discussion. That fury about s.e.xual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis that the Christian G.o.d remains a s.e.x G.o.d in the minds of great numbers of his exponents. His disentanglement from that plexus is incomplete. s.e.xual things are still to the orthodox Christian, sacred things.