He was the great teacher of the poverty of riches, and the wealth of nothingness. He knew as no other had ever known, and saw as no other had ever seen, the symbolism of nature. Always His vision pierced behind the appearance to the thing in itself. He loved "the reality that abides beyond the shadows." He directed our spiritual vision to this reality, telling us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist is in prison.
He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to be discerned only by the spiritual eye. For Him the earth was a symbol, and the whole realm of nature a parable.
I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the substance it enshrines is retained intact. Without it, the substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry formula, dead as the moon.
Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.
Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the world, short of "those radiant conceptions of God, of man, of the universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity."
"Liberty," says Edouard Le Roy, "is rare; many live and die and have never known it." And Bergson says, "We are free when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work."
This, I think, is what Dr. Jacks means when he speaks of Christianity bestowing liberty—a new mastery over fate and circumstance. It calls forth not only the affection of a man, and not only the intelligence of a man, but the whole of his intuitions as well. The entire personality, the entire field of consciousness, the entire mystery of the ego, is bidden to throw itself upon the universe with confidence, with gratitude, with love unspeakable, recognising there the act of a Fatherhood of which, in its highest moments, the soul is conscious in itself.
Thus is man made free of illusion. No longer can the outside of things deceive him, or the defeats of the higher by the lower deject, much less overwhelm him. He sees the reality behind the appearance. He dwells with powers which are invisible and eternal—with justice, with virtue, with beauty, with truth, with love, with excellence. More to him than any house built with hands, more, much more even than the habitation of his own soul, is the invisible life of that soul, its delight in beauty, its immediate response to truth and goodness, its longing for the flight of the One to the One, its almost athletic sense of spiritual fitness.
Dr. Jacks will have no element of fear in this religion. He finds no room in the universe for an offended God. Belief in God can mean nothing else but love of God. All our troubles have come upon us from the failure of the Church to live in the radiant atmosphere of this belief, to make belief a life, a life that needs no dogmas and expresses itself by love.
But this was not to be. The Church cultivated fear of God, and could not bring itself to trust human nature.