God, the Invisible King

GION OF

CIENTIFI

true God, the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducin

ature of Man," in which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about life. They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our discussion of sin, they will be referred to again. But it is not Professor Metchnikoff's intention to provide material for a religious discussion. He sets out his

of theology is modified through these changes. When he comes from his own world of modern biology to religion and philos

changes that biological science has wrought almost imper

uper-individual, maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death of its constituent individuals. Natural History, which began by putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere classificatory division

de of descendants. But the species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions under which it lives. The conflict of life is a continu

with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and misguidance. How co

single argument to support it, and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the whole range of human knowledge. On the other hand, re

omplete as to be absolute release from the individual's burthen of KARMA. Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY. The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to lose one's self. But Prof

es to the Buddhist I do not know what it is. He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate. We are to be glutted by living to six score and ten. We are to rise from the table at last as g

koff never faces that question. And again, what of the man who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty? What does the pr

ongation of life gives place to sheer self-sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy."

The mere fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon (Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will lessen luxury and the evil that comes fr

thy bread with joy

; for God now acce

ways white; and le

ully with the wife

of thy vanity, whic

the days of thy van

e, and in thy labou

tsoever thy hand f

or there is no wo

dom, in the grave,

normal life ending in natural death. In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts.

essary first, to frame the ideal, and thereafter

his ideal must be founded on scientific principles. And if it be true, as has been assert

nothing less than the fundamental proposition of the religious life translated into terms of materialistic science, the prop

like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an inquiry setting

can claim as an altar to our God-an

FICE IMP

said that a religious writer would say-except that God is not named. Religious metaphors abound. It is as if they accepted the living body of religion but denied the bones that held i

"ether" is real or a formula. Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things, which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only by an int

ing more than the formula that sati

oral and spiritual phenomena. The former has encountered him, the other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses. One says God's will is so; the other that Right is so. One says God moves me to do this

is reaction from Catholicism he displays a resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff's, to deny that anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in life except happiness, or any guide but "science." But-and here immediately he turns east again-he is careful not to

retence of justifying their inertness. Why, they ask, should we stir at all? Is there such a th

who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life. Certainly modern culture-science, history, philosophy, and art-finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man. A great chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine 'a

dividuals may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a collective aim. I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment-as genial and generous as possible-of individual variations for common good. Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste react on each individual. So we raise again, i

ag

eeds and philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that height-just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no

ag

ner sentiments of our generation, but the glow which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy which is linking the scattered children

that passage sounds as if he were half-way

lise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the Catholic Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be lured back

AN EXTER

f God's service as to be broadly identical, then indeed God, like the ether of scientific speculation, is no more than a theory, no more than an imaginative externalisation of man's inherent good will. Why trouble abou

t. He has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man. His exaltation is self-centred, is priggishness, his fall is unrestrained by any exterior obligation. His devotion is only the good will in himself, a disposition; it is a mood that may change. At any moment it may

e forms of truth and not divinity. The religion of the atheist with a God-shaped blank at its heart and the persuasion of the unconverted theologian,

lf, and infinitely greater and stronger than I. It is the immortal and I am mortal. It is invincible and steadfast in its purpose, and I am weak and insecure. It is no longer that I, out of my inherent and remarkable goodness, out of the excellence of my quality and the benevolence of my heart, give a considerable amount of time and attention to the happiness and welfare of oth

RELIGIOUS

onception of God as an immortal being arising out of man, and external to the individual man. He has been discussing that well-known passage of Kant's: "T

itchell presently comes to this most

ct that the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single man or in any single nation. It is the work of the blood and tears of long generations of men. It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and his religion. Its creation an

ether we call Him "Man's Great Achievement" or "The Son of Man" or the "God of Mankind" or "God." So far as the practica

ell and the position of this book. In this book it is asserted that GOD RESPO

ECTURE BY PROFES

it is remarkable too for its blindness to the possibility of separating quite completely the idea of the Infinite Being from the idea of God. It is another striking instance of that obsession of modern minds by merely Christian theology of which I have already complained. Professor Murray has

. We find it everywhere in the unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded self-revelations of the most severe and conscientious Atheists. Now, the Stoics, like many other schools of thought, drew an argument from this consensus of all mankind

precisely one of those points on which Stoicism, in company with almost all philosophy up to the present time, has gone astray through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human m

e spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages. We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there-the pack which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack

a belief very diff

ssage and th

ain is an inadvertent wit

dividual difference. But nearly every animal, and certainly every mentally considerable animal, begins under parental care, in a nest or a litter, mates to breed, and is associated for much of its life. Even the great carnivores do not go alone except when they are old and have done with the most of life. Every pack, every herd,

beast. Why should his desire for God be regarded as the overflow of an unsatisfied gregarious instinct, when he has home, town, society, companionship, trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? Why should gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class carriage and the public-house? Why should gregariousness

individualised, and is it not possible that this that Professor Murray calls "instinct" is really not a vestige but a new thing arising out of our increasing understanding, an intellectual

heism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate understanding of indivi

GION AS

the God of the Heart, Sir Harry uses "God" for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have spoken of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word "God" is of late theological origin; t

that the end of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, happiness and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled to identify the reactionary forces of brute Nature with the anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, the power of darkness resisting the power of light. But

n to any one of us would be the chipping out, the cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should feel as little remorse or pity for the sc

more than ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply horrid, and so, "Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom." He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD. He presents a conception of religion relieved of its "n

he direct teaching of Christ-and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by the confirmation of science. An excellent remedy for the nonsense which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter Monson's 'Service of Man,' which was pu

space. There is no help nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the "Service of Man"