MYSTICISM/PART 2

 

II.

 

 

 

THE GOD-IDEA.

 

 

 

 

 

FRIENDS:

 

I have as subject this evening ‘The God-Idea’, and I mean by that title to indicate the many ideas of God which have been held during the evolution of mankind; and to try, if I can, to show you how in all the great religions there has existed at one time or another a lofty conception of God; that out of the past of all the great religions an idea of God may be distinguished, grasped and under­stood, which becomes the Mystical Idea as man seeks to know God directly in the fashion of which I spoke on Sunday last; that in all the great religions we shall find indications of a magnificent idea of God as the Life of the Universe; that we may see that emerging from time to time with other lower ideas found in the same religion, because the minds of men are many and each man’s idea of God can only be that which his own mind is able to fabricate, which satisfies the yearnings of his own heart; that wherever we go we shall find traces of the higher idea, though often en­cumbered with lower notions and ignorant conceptions, and that we may, if we will, find that there really does exist a universal  testimony to the highest that we can conceive of God, bodied out in the thoughts of the most highly developed spiritual men, and left on record for the teaching and the inspiration of the world from the earliest dawn of history down to our own day.

 

Now during the last century, when the science of what was called Comparative Mythology had its birth and its development, the western world of thought was startled as the many great religions of the elder world, and the younger world which was not western, came gradually within its purview. Every­where men found that the varied religions of the world, living and dead, taught many of the same ideas, proclaimed many of the same doctrines, bore testimony to the same universal truths. By the labours of the antiquarian and  the archaeologist; by the researches of the students of philology and of ancient civilisations, there was gradually unrolled before the minds of the educated and the thoughtful a mass of information, stretching back for thousands upon thousands of years, recorded in fragments of ancient cities, unburied from long-covered temples and, monuments, emerging from civilisations that long ago had vanished from the stage of history; and all of them bore testimony to religious truths which in their main outlines were identical. Looking at the whole of these and comparing these records of the past, there was gradually built up a science, built out of the discovered facts which, as far as the facts went, none could challenge. Startled at this wide identity of thinking, marvelling at the enormous wealth of the religious past that thus had been unrolled, men naturally began to speculate as to the reason for the identity, and sought for the explanation of these countless like­nesses emerging from every faith, as I said, living and dead.

 

Not unnaturally, I think, for the conclusion was drawn at a time when the educated world was far more sceptical than it is today; not  unnaturally, in view of the great triumphs in unveiling the history of organisms which grew out of the studies of Darwin, Wallace and others; not unnaturally, the students of Comparative Mythology imagined that in the past men must have been much less evolved than they are today and that the child nations of antiquity could not have formulated for themselves the conceptions that were found in the literature of some of the most ancient peoples. They concluded that before those spiritual and philosophic religions there must have been a long period of unrecorded history in which, from the ignorance of the savage, from the ignorance of the barbarian personi­fying the powers of nature, terrified by the destructive agencies he was unable to control, there gradually grew up out of the sense of helplessness and terror the primary ideas of God. They found that this view was, to some extent, from their standpoint, strength­ened by the fact that among the savages of our own time there are found various forms of religion - those called animistic and the like - where the ideas, if they can be called ideas, of God are of the lowest and least  developed character. Many researches into what those savage peoples really thought were not at first available. There were the records of travellers, the statements of ex­plorers, who told us roughly the superficial views that they gathered from the savages whom they found in the countries to which they went. It was not then, I think, unnatural that they should see in the beliefs of those savage peoples, in their low and barbarous ideas of divine agencies, the origin of religion. It was not unnatural that they should imagine that the great philosophic and spiritual ideas of God had, by some process which they did not stop to work out or to prove, evolved from the primary ignorance of the savage. And so they traced back the identities in  religion, the likenesses in religion, to this dark time of savage ignorance, to this personification of the powers of Nature, and, putting forward the science of Comparative Mythology based on irrefutable facts but bound together by an assumption which was not proved, they came to the idea that all thought of God, as all other religious truth, was but an evolution from the past, and that we must regard that childish ideal as the origin of the later and loftier views of God.

A little later, more careful researches into savage beliefs revealed one startling and puzzling fact. You will find, I think in a book by Dr. Andrew Lang a most interesting account of the knowledge which was gradually gathered by sympathetic travellers who were trying to understand something of the thought of savage peoples. And the records that came from these later investigations all bore testimony to the fact to which I alluded, which were startling when it came out, in view of the deductions of Comparative Mythology. It was that in the background of every savage faith, kept as a sacred thing, to be spoken of only with reverence and with awe, behind all those superficial beliefs in gods and devils, behind all those thoughts of sacrifices to propitiate hostile powers, there was one Being ever believed in whose only  symbol was the over-arching sky, who had no image, who had no likeness, to whom no prayers ever went up, to whom no sacrifice were ever made, a mighty all-embracing Life, spoken of sometimes as the Great Spirit, spoken of sometimes by no special name but only by symbol; indications of an idea so foreign from the savage of modern thought that man began to ask how could this idea have arisen, how could it have come into the mind of the savage, how could a conception so great and all-embracing come from these undeveloped brains, these crude unevolved barbarians?

 

And about this time another view was put forward to account for the identities found in religions, the idea that they did not grow out of savage ignorance, but that they came from an identity of origin, from Teachers, highly developed spiritual men, who came forth into the world from time to time to give out the ever-same ideas in a form suited to the needs of the time. The idea was put forward that the child-nations of the past, the undeveloped and the unevolved, were taught by those who knew, by those who by their own evolution had reached the point where the loftier vision of the Supreme was seen; that there were traces through history that the highest ideas given to the world were always given as the basis of a new religion, and not as an evolu­tion out of the past from the days of savagery and of ignorance; that these ideas came from the mouths of men who spoke with authority of that which they knew, and were not the dreams of savages, awe-stricken before a Nature too mighty to oppose, in which destructive agencies were rife.

 

And they who put forward the idea claimed for evidence the scriptures of the oldest religions of the world as well as those of the more modern: they pointed to books that went back into the night of time, the Vedas of the Hindus, the sacred books of the, Zoroastrians and of the Egyptians, and of the peoples who bordered the Mediterranean Sea; they pointed to these as containing the loftiest conceptions possible to men so far of the Nature and the Being of God. And they showed that, as the religions went on, these conceptions tended to materialise instead of, keeping their original and lofty spirituality. And they based all that on evidence that could not be denied, the most ancient scriptures as yet known to the world of men.

 

They pointed to these, then, as evidence that the teaching about the Divine Nature was a teaching always the same, and that the traces of that still found among savage peoples, these ideas of a Great Spirit symbolised by the arching sky, were the faint remnants in degenerate nations, the dying out fragments in the remains of mighty; civilisations of the past, of the original teach­ings which they had received in the days when they were civilised, when they were strong.

 

And gradually people are beginning, I  think, to realise that the savages of today are remnants of dead civilisations, and not the crude forms from which men have evolved; that the ancient savages, the primeval savages, if I may say so, were really childlike people, infant nations, willing to learn and glad to be taught, and that to them came the great Instructors, to them the mighty Teachers; and that we can point first to the scriptures that remain, admittedly ancient, going back thousands upon thousands of years, and then to these surviving beliefs in the remnants of the gradually dying out barbarian nations, ideas that they most certainly could not give birth to, but that still stand as landmarks of a God Idea mightier than they now could conceive, and practically with no influence on their religion or their lives.

Two chief types of religion come down from the great race that preceded the fifth, or the Aryan, those that are called Solar Worship and Nature Worship; and we realise that in  those elder days the teaching to the more ignorant, the more childish peoples was given in  the form of symbol, largely drawn from Nature around them, not teaching that the natural  object was God, but rather that through the outer object God was revealed, and that all Nature was but a veil of Divinity; that the power, the might, the splendour of God spoke out through the objects of His world, and that they were symbols of the Divine.

 

The mightiest of these symbols was, as was natural, the Sun, the source of light and heat and life on our globe. And so you find the Sun as symbol, constantly shown as image, constantly appearing in legend and in myth, as the symbol of the Supreme, the Universal God. You find the Sun as a great golden disc still to be found in the temples that have been unburied, still to be found in the legends of the nations that have well-nigh passed away. Take ancient Peru as an example before the Spaniards had trampled out that splendid civilisation by fire and sword. You find the Incas called the Children of the Sun; you find that royal family regarded as the offspring of the Sun; and all through their worship, a worship of joy and of happiness, in which the sacrifices were flowers and the hymns were songs, you find the Sun as the symbol of the God they worshipped, and to whom went up the hearts of grateful men, the symbol in the lower world of the all-nourishing, all-irradiating life of God.

 

And so you find in the Hindu religion, where I shall have to draw your attention presently to some of the most sublime concep­tions of the God-Idea that have ever been made known to our humanity, that the Sun stands as the physical symbol of God; you find how “the God in the Sun”, as He is called, is the object of daily greeting by the millions of Hindus who bathe on the banks of their rivers before sunrise, and then, as the Sun is rising, turn to it with the famous prayer: “Thee, O Sun, we worship, the glory of God resplendent; may thy light illumine our intelligence”. No physical light of the Sun can illumine the intelligence of men, and that famous prayer, most sacred to all Hindus, uses the Sun as symbol of the God-Idea, the Light and Life of the world as God is the Life and Light of the Spirits that come forth from Him.

 

And so you find right through the history of religions traces of this symbolism of God under the form of the Sun.

 

And you find wherever the human element comes into the God-Idea, as it does in every great religion, that humanity is taken up as it were to deity; you find that the story of the God made man follows the course of the Sun throughout the solar year; you find the  festivals of every religion, including your own, are marked by solar positions, and that one  side of the story of the Christ is a repetition of the story of all the God-men of the past, born amid danger, passing through childhood in danger, coming on to manhood at a period marked by the relation of the Sun and the Moon, dying on a date which every year is fixed by the astronomical observation, rising again after that to a renewed life, and ascend­ing into the heavens, whence His beams pour down for the ripening of the corn and of the grape, the bread and wine of human life. And as you recognise it, it does not make you disbelieve in the historical existence of the Christ, but it tells you that every mighty man that human life has deified goes through a marked succession of events, alike in every great faith, drawn from what are called the myths of the past, the myths which are the great spiritual truths thrown into a story-form for the helping and the teaching of men.

 

And you find, again, Nature Worship per­meating all great faiths without exception, in  which the creative power of Deity is seen repro­duced in the creative power of humanity, and  God as the Universal Father, the Giver of Life, the Sustainer of Life, is shown out in symbols - innocent and beautiful in the minds of a people not yet corrupted into evil - and  still persisting, as you have them, in the symbol of the Cross, known to every great religion of the past and most sacred of symbols in the Christendom of today.

That hasty but broad outline of religions that are well-nigh lost in antiquity and are only seen in their later forms in the most ancient living faiths, brings us to the next great stage of the God-Idea, in which religions were national, and the God of the religion was worshipped specially by the nation in which the religion was proclaimed. In that stage of religious proclamation, you find three great religions of the far-off historical past; I might say before history, but I take it as historical because a literature remains; and while you are unable to fix the furthest off limit for the date of that literature you are able to say that it cannot be more modern than such and such a date. In the ancient world, then, looking backward to this stage, you find religion, as I said, national. The­ oldest of those is, of course, Hinduism, where you have a faith that still is living, funda­mentally a religion but also a social polity; a social organisation, just as you find also in the Hebrew religion that the social organisation and the religious are closely intertwined, and that many a law which is purely a sanitary or hygienic law is made part of the religion, so that it might have the binding force that comes from the fulfilment of a religious obliga­tion. Hinduism fundamentally, of course, as were the other two great religions of Egypt and the Mediterranean borders, and the ancient Persian or the faith of Zarathustra, the Zoro­astrian as we generally call it, is Pantheistic. Now religious Pantheism and philosophic Pantheism are constantly confused; but their effects upon the mind of the devotee and the mind of the philosopher are quite different. Philosophic Pantheism only postulates one existence whereof all beings are modes; one infinite eternal existence, and all universes, all worlds, all separate existences of mineral, of plant, of animal, of man, modes of that one existence. Outside of such manifestations, in philosophic Pantheism, God is not; He is expressed in a universe but not outside it. He is conterminous with whatever universes or worlds are existing, their fundamental life, but entirely what would now be called impersonal. This is appealing only to the intellect and not to the heart, the self-­existence whereof all else is but mode, inaccessible to form of prayer or entreaty, a unfit for any emotion, save the purely Intel­lectual delight of a splendid theory, but in no sense religious, if you take religion as the searching of man for God and God’s answer to the searching. But when you come to pantheistic religion, then all is changed. That which is behind all forms of life is Himself the Life, the Consciousness, the Power. All forms are but an expression of part of His existence, and beyond and above all forms He Himself, in His infinite being, remains.

 

And where religion is pantheistic, there you always find accompanying it what the West has called Polytheism, the expression of God in many forms. Now there is a profound difference between this as seen by the Eastern, and the view which you often call Polytheism in the West, founded chiefly I think on your knowledge of the Greek and of the Roman faiths, and on your very superficial knowledge of the great religions of the East, in which you imagine that the word God implies to the Eastern the same as it implies to you. Now that it is not so: The word that the Eastern uses for God is a word equivalent to your “angel” or “archangel”, not the One Supreme Being whom you alone speak of under that name. When the Hindu speaks of the Deva so and so, it only means Shining One, the very word that John Bunyan applied to the angels in the Pilgrim's Progress. And if you want to be sure of that, let me - although later I shall be giving you some quotations that prove it to demonstration - quote but one single verse regarding this with a couple of verses before it that show the scope of the whole. A great Hindu philosopher in one of the Upanishads is said to have been asked by his wife to explain to her the Wisdom of the Self. “The Self” is the word used for the all-per­vading, all-irradiating, all-vivifying, all-sus­taining Life of God. He went on to explain it to her as the one Life of the Universe, and to tell her that all that there was of love and of beauty were but the scattered reflections of the one Self. And then he went on, in the words I want you to note:

 

Not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self is the husband dear;

 

Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear, but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear;

 

Not for the sake of the son is the son dear, but for the sake of the Self is the son dear;

 

Not for the sake of the Gods are the Gods dear, but for the sake of the Self are the Gods dear.

 

 

I am using there the word “Gods” because that is the usual translation, but if you put the word “angels” you will have the idea of the speaker. In all the manifestations of the one Life, husband, wife, son - and he gives many others that I did not quote - including those spiritual intelligences, the Shining Ones of higher worlds; those are only dear, only beautiful, only loving, because of the One all­-pervading Life in whom alone they live.

 

That is the religious Pantheism, with which, as you see, what is called Polytheism goes. It is not the idea of a number of Gods, as you mostly think of it; it is the idea that in a world in which everything embodies the life of God, there is nothing existing that does not share in His beauty, in His strength, and in His life. When the Hindu wants to put his view of the place of the woman in the home, he says: “Thou art Lakshmi - the Goddess of prosperity - the Light and Goddess of the home”. He uses the word in order to point out that every form - human, animal, vegetable mineral, - is God-vivified, is an embodiment of the life of God. And so, as that Life is embodied in myriads of forms some of which as I said, you would speak of as ‘angel’ or ‘archangel’, God comes forth into His world so that He can appeal to the hearts of men, however ignorant, however degraded, however evil. And to the polytheist it is the life of God in the form, which to him is beautiful and fit to be worshipped. It is the idea that everything in the world has the life of God within it, and that we should recognise that Life wherever it manifests itself in form. And so that Polytheism, which is Pantheism in action, irradiates the whole world with the splendour of a divine life, and there is no human activity, no human occupation, nothing that men can do of useful and of good, that has not the benediction of God behind it, in which man is not exercising a divine function, and bringing the life of God into the life of men.

 

And that is also true of the old Egyptian faith and the old Zoroastrian faith. They all see the world as much larger than the physical, inhabited by many grades of beings, some higher and some lower than man.

 

And as a child would ask his father to reach him down from the mantelshelf something that he is not yet tall enough to grasp for himself, and that prayer of the child to the father is not thought to touch the unity of God, and the help of the father to the child is  not regarded as being against the laws of Nature; so the prayers of men to those above  themselves in power and in helpfulness go up as the prayers of children to their fathers,  asking for a help they themselves are unable to compass, and, as Sir Oliver Lodge has  pointed out, there is nothing in that against the laws of Nature, but only a dependence and interdependence that spread throughout the whole of Nature which is animated by one divine life, in which the elders help the youngers and answer their requests. And you can have your prayers answered either by knowledge, which subdues the laws of Nature to your purpose, or by an appeal to those Beings who are behind every natural force and every natural law, and who, for love’s sake, will help, and do constantly help, in the daily lives of men.

 

Leave for a moment those religions of which I have spoken, which I have glanced over in their national view and their general teaching, and come to the Hebrew faith, passing as it did through two remarkable and distinct phases. There again it is a national religion as all the religions of the past were national, very much in many ways to the benefit of the  people; for where every nation had its own religion there was no need to go about making  proselytes, and trying to convert a man of one nationality and of one faith to your faith;  because they could then no more change faith than you could nationality without losing all  that made them what they were, and so the world had much more religious peace than it has had in later days. Now in the Hebrew faith at first we find the God Idea was that of a national or tribal God, limited as you can see in the older books of the Hebrew Old Testament. Read Genesis, read any of the five books called Books of Moses, read the book of Joshua or read the book of Judges, and you will find quite clearly in these older remnants of the Hebrew scriptures that you are face to face with a God who has many other Gods around him, and that superiority is claimed for him by his own nation and his own people. When you read in the third chapter of Genesis of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, or when you read of the Tower of Babel, when the people were going to build up a tower that was to reach unto Heaven, and God said if they did that there was nothing they would not be able to do; so he went down among them and confounded their speech, so that they should not be able to  understand each other; when you read in the Book of Judges that the Lord was with Judah,  and he drove out the inhabitants of the valley but could not drive out those of the mountain  because they had chariots of iron - when you read things like that, you realise at once that  you are in the presence of a conception of God which is local and national, and you realise  that many of the commands that were given to inflict the most cruel and brutal punishments upon the Jew who turned renegade to his faith were chiefly intended to preserve the Jews as a nation, for it was treason that was punished; for to dally with any other form of religion was really treason, as the Gods of the nations around them were enemies of their own God, and therefore to turn to them was treason to the State belong­ing to the tribal or national God. And that view continued till the Captivity: then the Jews were carried out into the ancient civilisations, Assyrians, Babylonians, etc. And when they come back again to Judea you find that in the remnant that returns the God Idea has assumed a wider, greater, and far more splendid form. They bring back with them the idea of immortality; they bring back with them the idea of one God, the universal, the all-pervading. You have such a splendid; phrase as that spoken in the Psalms, in a post-Babylonian Psalm: “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter most parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me”. There is nothing like that in the older books, no conception of that thought until the post-Babylonian days; and then instead of the God who walked m the garden in the cool of the day you have “the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose Name is Holy”. The splendour of that phrase ‘who inhabiteth eternity is separated by an age of thinking from the conception of the God who walked in a little garden - utterly different; a sub­limely spiritual idea instead of a local and a material one.

 

And then you pass on to the God-Ideas that are found in what we may call the universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, the three comparatively modern re­ligions of the world. They are not national; there are no limitations in them to a special form of social order intended for the develop­ment of a particular nation; they can pass from one nation to another and be adapted to any civilisation into which they come. Now in southern Buddhism there cannot be said to be any Idea of God. In northern Budd­hism you find the Idea of God again appear­ing as the celestial Buddha, the boundless Buddha, but in the southern church it is the Lord Buddha Himself who is the object of worship, to whom flowers are brought, to  whom love goes out, the Man who has risen into God.

 

When you take Christianity, there you have as the central God-Idea the Idea of the Father of Spirits. That is one of the great contribu­tions of Christianity to the religious thought of the world, a universal Father, who is really the Father of men. But in Christianity itself you have a trace of Pantheism more than once, as you must have in all religion that seeks to be reasonable, philosophic, intelligible. You read in one of the Epistles of S. Paul the statement, after saying that all things are to be subdued to the Son: “Then shall the Son Himself be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all”. You find the same thought coming out when it is declared: “In Him we live and move and have our being”. And  while it is true that, owing to many historical conditions and the gradual growth of civilisation out of the darkness which followed the destruction of the Roman Empire up to our own time, that deeper doctrine of Pantheism has been overlaid and you only find it now and again in some lecture delivered philosophically to philosophers, as by Mansell, where he finds himself landed, as he says, in the pathless desert of Pantheism, led there by his reason which finds it impossible to deny; that side is left out entirely in popular Christianity, and the conception of the Father is the one most dwelt upon, with those other aspects of deity in the Son and the creative intelligent Spirit.

 

When you come to Islam, there the God-Idea is more the Monarch than the Father, rather the Ruler of nations than the Lover of men. I am not forgetting that there are some most exquisite statements as to the love of God in Islam from the mouth of the great Prophet himself, as well as from the mouths of some of his followers; but the main conception, the conception that dominates popular Islam, is rather the idea of the mighty Ruler, the one supreme authority, than the nearer and tenderer conception you find in Christianity as coming from the mouth of the Christ. And never forget, when you think of Him as God, that He recalled to the men of His day according to the account which is left of Him, that older conception of the Hebrew faith, calling all the sons of God. “I said: Ye are Gods and ye are all the children of the Highest”.

 

Passing again from that brief sketch of these three universal religions, separating  them for the sake of clearness from the older national religions of the past, and reminding  you that there were of course many other national religions, although I only spoke  specifically of the three fundamental faiths that branch out into others, let me ask you now to turn for a moment to the highest con­ception of God, the God-Idea at its noblest and its greatest, as it comes out in the great religions of the world belonging to the Aryan race and its branches as far as they have spread. I am using here for convenience sake a little book compiled by myself and issued by the Theosophical Society, the first part of the Universal Text-Book of Religion, and although I am using this for quotations, I may say that all the quotations were taken by me and others from the originals or trans­lations, and have very carefully been left in their own complete sense, so that you should be able to judge of the teachings of the religions of the world, arranged as they are here under the heads of the great doctrines. I am taking here those which are put under The Unity of God, in order to put to you those great central Ideas of God, so marvel­lously alike, so sublimely spiritual, as we find them in the greatest of our race. I take first only the oldest, drawn from the Hindu scriptures:

 

“I will declare that which is to be known, that which being known immortality is gained, the beginningles supreme Brahman.”

 

 That, remember, is the Hindu name for the supreme God, “the One only without a second”, and then a description comes from a Upanishat:

 

“Unseen He sees, unheard He hears, unthought of He thinks, unknown He knows; none other than He is the Seer, none other than He is the Hearer, none other than He is the Thinker, none other than He is the Knower; He is the Self, the Inner Ruler, immortal, that which is other perishes.”

 

 

And again:

 

“I am the Self, seated in the heart of all beings; I am the beginning, the middle and also the end of all beings … nor is there ought moving or unmoving that may exist bereft of Me. … Whatsoever is glorious good, beautiful and mighty, understand thou that to come forth from a fragment of my splendour. … Having pervaded this whole universe with one fragment of myself, I remain.”

 

And again:

 

 “When darkness was not, when there was neither day nor night, neither being nor non-being, then there the All-Blessed even alone. None is able to comprehend Him in the space above, in the space below, in the space between. For Him whose name is infinite glory there is no likeness. Not in the sight abides His form; none beholds Him with the eye; those who by love and wisdom know Him as dwelling in the heart, they become immortal.”

 

 

There you have the Hindu Idea of God, not, I think, surpassable in magnificence in any scripture or in any thought. And that has permeated the Indian people, is familiar to the peasant even as it is thought of by the philosopher.

 

“Manifest, near, dwelling verily in the heart, is the great goal; on Him is founded all that moves, breathes and closes the eyes. Him you know as what exists and exists not, who is to be adored, who is beyond the know­ledge of creatures, who is greatest. Luminous, more subtle than the subtle, on whom the worlds are founded and their inhabitants.”

 

“He is great, divine, of a nature not to be conceived by thinking, more subtle than the subtle; He shines in many ways; He is more distant than the distant, and also near in this body; for the open eyed He dwelleth here, even in the heart. He is not apprehended by the eye, nor by speech, nor by the other senses, nor by devotion nor rites, but he whose reason is purified by the light of wisdom, he by meditation beholds Him who is partless.”

Now there is no reasonable challenge as to the most modern date that can be given to these. The Zoroastrians that followed them are said by a great Orientalist of the West to go back to some five thousand years before the Christian era; and how much beyond these writings go no historian may dare definitely to say. Two only of these quota­tions were taken from a comparatively modern scripture, though still one which is thousands of years old, the Bhagavad-Gita. The rest were taken from the Upanishats, which are of unknown antiquity.

 

Now if you take the Zoroastrian faith, you find there an idea that later appears in the Hebrew:

 

 

“My first name is Ahmi - I am. Thou, first great Thinker, whose splendour pervades all light, who through His intellect is the Creator of all, who supports righteous­ness and the good mind. Thou Spirit Mazda, Thou who art ever the same. His origin, none can know, except Himself, who can comprehend him? He is living and wise and powerful and independent and just; His know­ledge extends over all that is heard or seen or that exists. All existence is visible to His knowledge at once, without time, and from Him nothing is hid.”

 

 

In the earlier Hebrew period there is only one passage that touches this loftier view; in Exodus: “I am that I am”, the statement of pure existence. The fundamental truth, the unity, is loudly proclaimed: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”. But later on you find the lofty idea: “I am the Lord and there is none else. There is no God beside me”. “The Lord is the true God, He is the living God and a King of Eternity.” “He is the living God and steadfast for ever; and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed and His dominion shall be even unto the end.” There the wider, nobler idea appears.

 

Then when you come to the Christian religion, you have the phrase in the Acts: “He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. As certain also of your own poets have said, We are also his offspring, . . . We are the offspring of God”. And you get also there a splendid ascription: “Now unto the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever”.

 

And when you come to Islam, here we are suffering somewhat from the badness of trans­lation, for the great book of Islam has never been translated by a believer in Islam, as it should be, and therefore you have difficulty. But still even through the wooden translation you can catch the splendour of one of the passages from the Quran: “God, there is no God but He, the ever-living, the ever-subsist­ing. Slumber seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth. Who is he that should intercede with Him unless by His permission? He knows what has been before them, and what shall be after them, and they shall not compass aught of His knowledge save what He willeth. His throne is extended over the heavens and the earth, and the care of them burdeneth Him not, for He is the High, the Mighty”.

 

And when you come to the teachings of the Prophet, as preserved in his sayings trans­lated by one of his own people, you have some beautiful conceptions of the Nature of God:

 

 

“Whoso seeketh to approach me one span I seek to approach one cubit; whoso seeketh to approach him two fathoms, and whoso walketh towards Me, I run towards him.”

 

“God saith: O man, only follow thou my laws and thou shalt become like unto Me, and then thou shalt say ‘Be’, and behold it is.”

 

“The person I hold as a beloved, I am his hearing by which he heareth; I am his sight by which he seeth; I am his hands by which he holdeth; I am his feet by which he walketh.”

“There was God when there was nothing. He knoweth all things before and after their existence. He is light without darkness, life without death, knowledge without ignorance. As He is today so He will remain for ever.”

 

 

Now those are but a few of the God Ideas, as you find them in the scriptures of the world, the higher of course - deliberately taken out of the highest and the noblest, for the highest is the test of all religions and not their lowest, as they are lived out by ignorant and foolish men.

 

And I submit to you that brief testimony, and you can multiply it a hundredfold if you will. Read your own scriptures at length, and not only these little jewels that I have picked out in order to show you specimens of the wealth that those religions contain; and you will realise that you only want one thing, which comes out so strongly in the Hindu quotations, in order to turn those loftiest ideas into the Mystical Idea of God. You notice how over and over again, when speaking of God as distant, He is also spoken of as near, and then it is ever said he dwelleth in the heart. It is in the heart that the Mystic sees Him. For if there is One life and only One life without a second, then your lives and mine, however poor and weak and childish and undeveloped they may be, are the Life of God Himself, and all that He is we can from within ourselves unfold. “The kingdom of God is within you” quoth the Christ, the great revealer of God to the western world. It is in your own hearts, in the depths of your own being, in the profoundest depths of your own existence, that you must seek if you would find and know the God whose knowledge is Eternal Life. If you cannot find Him there, you will never be sure of Him anywhere. But if once you catch a glimpse of the Eternal within you, then the Eternal around you will shine out clearly before your eyes. And think what that means of strength and of splendour to every one of you who has found out by direct knowledge that God is hiding within you, as He is manifest in the wondrous life of the wondrous universe around you. Nature is but a veil behind which is shining the eternal smile of God.

 

And think what it means if Nature is to you not a soulless mechanism but a living  organism; if God is no longer an abstraction of theology but a Living Spirit, the Friend and the Lover of Men; if He is no longer to you a Name but is a Life. That is the glory of the Mystic; that is the joy of the one who knows. Wherever you go you see Him shining; wherever you look you recognise the traces of His being. You look at the wonder of Nature spreading out before you and in the whole of that manifested beauty, as in the tiniest fragment that you can take in your hand, you see it all irradiated by the Perfect Beauty that is God. You see Him in the blue of the sky or the ocean; you see him in the radiant snow on the mountain peak; you hear Him singing in every bird; you see Him smiling in every flower; and most of all you see Him in the heart and in the intellect and in the love of men. You see Him in the love of the mother for the babe; you see Him in the love of the youth for the maiden; you see Him in the strength of the athlete; you see Him in the patience of the saint; you see Him in the righteousness of the most holy, and you see Him hiding in the heart of the basest, illuminating it now and then with some touch of human love, which is the nearest of all things to God, whose very Nature is Love and Bliss.

 

Do you wonder then that anyone of us who has caught but one glimpse of that infinite and splendid beauty that enwraps the worlds, longs that all others should likewise catch if it be but a passing glimpse of that supernal beauty? for what can there be of fear and grief to those who know, of their own knowledge, that God is, and that the Self of All is One?

 

 

NEXT CHAPTER 

THE CHRIST-IDEA