Our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale: they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation.
Silesian Horseherd.
I cannot bring myself to take much interest in all the controversies that are going on (1865) in the Church of England.... No doubt the points at issue are great, and appeal to our hearts and minds, but the spirit in which they are treated seems to me so very small. How few men on either side give you the impression that they write face to face with God, and not face to face with men and the small powers that be. Surely this was not so in the early centuries, nor again at the time of the Reformation?
Life.
We live in two worlds; behind the seen is the unseen, around the finite the infinite, above the comprehensible the incomprehensible. There have been men who have lived in this world only, who seem never to have felt the real presence of the unseen: and yet they achieved some greatness as rulers of men, as poets, artists, philosophers, and discoverers. But the greatest among the great have done their greatest works in moments of self-forgetful ecstasy, in union and communion with a higher world: and when it was done, such was their silent rapture that they started back, and could not believe it was their own, their very own, and they ascribed the glory of it to God, by whatever name they called Him in their various utterances. And while the greatest among the great thus confessed that they were not of this world only, and that their best work was but in part their own, those whom we reverence as the founders of religions, and who were at once philosophers, poets, and rulers of men, called nothing their own, but professed to teach only either what their fathers had taught them, or what a far-off voice had whispered in their ear.... The ancient religions were not founded like temples or palaces, they sprang up like sacred groves from the soil of humanity, quickened by the rays of celestial light. In India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, not even the names of the earliest prophets are preserved. And, if in other countries the forms and features of the authors of their religious faith and worship are still dimly visible amidst the clouds of legend and poetry, all of them, Moses as well as Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed, seem to proclaim with one voice that their faith was no new faith, but the faith of their fathers, that their wisdom was not their own wisdom, but, like every good and perfect gift, given them from above. What should we learn from these prophets who from distant countries and bygone ages all bear the same witness to the same truth? We should learn that though religions may be founded and fashioned into strange shapes by the hand of man, religion is one and eternal. From the first dawn that ever brightened a human hearth or warmed a human heart, one generation has told another that there is a world beyond the dawn; and the keynotes of all religion—the feeling of the infinite, the bowing down before the incomprehensible, the yearning after the unseen—having once been set to vibrate, have never been altogether drowned in the strange and wild music of religious sects and sciences. The greatest prophets of the world have been those who at sundry times and in divers manners have proclaimed again and again in the simplest words the simple creed of the fathers, faith in the unseen, reverence for the incomprehensible, awe of the infinite, or, simpler still, love of God, and oneness with the All-Father.
Life.
I have endeavoured to make clear two things, which constitute the foundation of all religion; first, that the world is rational, that it is the result of thought, and that in this sense only is it the creation of a being which possesses reason, or is reason itself (the Logos); and secondly, that mind or thought cannot be the outcome of matter, but on the contrary is the prius of all things.
Silesian Horseherd.