Thoughts on Life and Religion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD

Wherever our Father leads us there is our Fatherland.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.'

The real religious instinct or impulse is the perception of the infinite.

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.