Rejected of Men: A Story of To-day

by Howard Pyle

The real man is exactly a different thing. He is of real flesh and blood, and his speech and action depend upon his own volition and not upon your imagination. You may, if you choose, decorate the image in your mind with the laurel wreath of hero-worship, and you may cause the most noble and exalted thoughts to seem to pass through the imagined hero’s mind. But it is not the living man whom you crown, nor do those thoughts really pass through the brain of the living man. That which you crown is only your own idea–your own created image of the man; and the thoughts which seem to pass through his mind are, in reality, only your own thoughts which you cause to pass through your own mind.

So it is exactly with the worship of God.

For let the mind form ever so exalted an image of God, that image is, after all, only the creation of the mind; it is only a dead thing, and not the living fact.

When a man prays to such an image of God, he prays not to the actual living Heavenly Father who created him, but to an image of God which he himself has created.

For that image of God is no more really alive than the imagined hero is really a living man.

And as it is in the case of an imagined hero, so it is with that image of God. For let that image seem to move and to act ever so gigantically, it is, after all, only an idea in your own mind–a thing thinner and more unsubstantial than the thinnest ether–a thought without any real potency or any real life.

The actual and living God is exactly and perfectly different from such an ideal image. He is infinite, the idea in the mind is definite; He is omnipotent, the idea in the mind is impotent to create so much as a single grain of dust; He is omniscient, the idea in the mind knows nothing and thinks nothing excepting such knowledges and thoughts that the man’s imagination is pleased to place within its empty skull. He, the Ancient of Days, exists forever and forever; the idea in the mind continues to live only so long as we kneel to pray, and it vanishes instantly we arise from our knees and go about our earthly business. He is the fountain-head of all human intelligence, and has Himself created the rationality of man; that idea of Him–it crumbles and dissolves away before a five-minute argument with any clever sceptic or agnostic who chooses to assault it with the hard, round stones of reasoning and of fact. He, the Heavenly Father, is the fountain of all life; that idea of Him–what power has it to give life to anything? Can it–such an ethereal nothing, the creation of the mind itself–lift up the soul into a resurrection of life when the body of flesh shall grow cold and die? Can it illuminate that black and empty abyss of death with any radiance of life? What power has it to turn aside those floods of doubt which, now and then, bursting their bonds, sweep down upon and overflow the soul, drowning out even the faint little spark of hope which we all so carefully cherish. That image, like the image of the man-hero, is dead and impotent excepting as the man’s own imagination makes it living and potential. Pray to your imaginary God in such times of black terror, and see how little that empty image can help and aid you. It is as powerless to save you from that flood of doubt as the African’s fetich of wood is impotent to save him from the deluge of water that bursts upon and overflows the world about him. When that black and awful torrent–the fear of annihilation–sweeps down upon the man, it, the image, is torn away from his grasp like a dead fragment of wood and is swept away and gone, leaving him to struggle alone and unaided in the overwhelming flood.

And yet man continues to worship this dead, self-created image. He says that God has this imagined attribute and that imagined attribute; that He thinks and feels thus and so, and does this and the other thing, now being angry and now pleased. But, after all, these things belong only to the image in the mind. What God really thinks and feels and intends is beyond the understanding of the man whom He has created.

Why does man worship an image instead of the reality? It is easy to see why he does so. He worships that image, because in worshipping it he worships himself, it being a part of himself. He loves that image because he himself has made it, and because he loves all the things of his own creation. He is willing to do the supposed mandates of that self-created fetich (provided they are not too difficult of performance), because those mandates spring fundamentally from his own imagination, and because he likes to do as he himself wills to do.