That is my faith. I believe that God is greater than humanity has ever conceived him to be. I think he is “a common sort of fellow,” and I write these words with all the holy reverence of which the soul is capable. I do not mean to imply that I think he is in my form, or in any particular form. But he is Life. And it is his intention and his desire that every living thing that is worthy of life be a part of him. I am almost Indian in this faith. I can hear the buoyant, cheering call of Life in a waterfall. The inspiration of it comes into my own body from out of a whispering tree, from a bush glowing with bloom, from a flower, from the song of a bird, from the rain itself. I find great peace and contentment in my faith that this God is everywhere, and that we may meet him face to face fifty times a day if we throw off the hard shell of our egoism, and realize that all nature is God—and that we, as men and women and children, are a part of that all-embracing nature.
Even now the sun is filtering through the tree-branches upon this partly written page. I look at it, and I see again the inconceivable greatness of the Supreme Power, and my own microscopic littleness. For we of the earth have thought that the earth is great, and that we, having inherited the earth, are of all things greatest. Yet is that sun which warms and lights my page as I write—more than a million times as large as the earth—more than eight hundred thousand miles from one end of its diameter to the other. And the still more stupendous fact is that this sun is itself only a small bit of mechanism in the mighty forces of infinity, for there are a hundred million other suns in space, each lighting and warming its own worlds—innumerable worlds—each peopled with its own type of flesh and blood, and each possessing, perhaps, its own peculiar forms of “civilization” and its own savagery.
Just that great, and vast, and all-embracing is the handiwork of that vital force which rules all infinity—and to which we have given the name of God.
And here I emphasize again that great truth which nature has impressed upon me—that, just so long as man considers himself the one and only chosen part of God, and therefore next to him in greatness, just that long will his egoism and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the faith which might be his. I believe that Christ was a great teacher, that he was a great student of his times, and incorporated into his teachings all that was highest and best in the teachings of other great men who had lived and died before him. And I have always regretted that Christ was unfortunate to have for his historians a set of men who were unequal to their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved by “visions” and superstitions instead of fact, men who believed in all the miracles of the imagination from conversing with angels to stopping the sun,—men utterly incapable of writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty teachings of Christ which, had they been written as they were spoken, would have meant so much for the world to-day. For I believe, in my own heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of nature that history knows of to the present day. I believe that in the many years of his “disappearance,” Christ was not only studying the teachings of the past, but that, close to the breast of nature, he was learning the splendid truths of life—all life—which were afterward the very heart and soul of his messages to mankind.
I believe that Christ, could he return to earth to-day, would say: “My biographers have given you a wrong impression of me, and they have misquoted me. What my soul was called upon to teach nineteen hundred years ago, they have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. For I am a man, even as thee and thine. But I have found the true faith. And that faith, as I told them then, depends utterly upon the dropping of the scales of self from man’s eyes, and his understanding of all life. For that I gladly died.”
The greatest regret I have is that Christ, as a man, did not foresee more clearly the tremendous influence his teachings were to exert upon humanity through the ages. Had he guessed this, he would have written down with his own hand those teachings which were so carelessly left to the mercy of superstitious—frequently fanatical—and at nearly all times incapable biographers. For Christ, of all men that ever lived, was undoubtedly one of the best and the most humble. His teachings came straight from his heart. He did not intend that they should be smothered in hyperbole, metaphor, and rhetorical embroidery until no two living men could agree absolutely upon their meaning. I believe that he spoke simply and directly, for only in that way could he have reached the hearts of the masses. And I believe that the greatest of all his lessons was the lesson of humility. As a man, he had dropped his egoism, had submitted himself to the Master of all life, and in that submission he had found the truth, and the glory of a great faith. The misfortune of the humanity to follow in after-ages was that the world of Jesus Christ was small—so small that by word of mouth he could reach from end to end of it. Had he dreamed that there were still undiscovered worlds so great that in comparison his own was but a handful of dirt out of a wagon-load, I am convinced within myself that the world to-day would not be struggling to understand a faith written in parables and riddles, for Christ would have set his own hand to the task which others so poorly accomplished.
With such a priceless inheritance in the form of Christ’s own handiwork, I am equally sure that humanity would no longer have an excuse for its egoism, or be ashamed of that humility which is necessary to the understanding of life, and essential to the possession of a deep and abiding faith.
I have, at times, heard intelligent people express amazement that I should dare to place human life on an equal level with all other life, that I should so “blaspheme the Creator” as to say that the life in a two-legged animal who can talk is the same as that in a flower or a plant or a tree or some other animal which cannot talk. I have sometimes allowed myself to point out the innumerable advantages possessed over man by many living things which have no language, as we know language. I could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures of the thousands and tens of thousands of advantages which living things outside of man possess over man, and which, if man could achieve, would be stupendous miracles. But man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism to the marvelous attainments of all life that does not walk and talk as he walks and talks. When confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and apparent miracle of other life as compared with his own I have nearly always found that men and women fall back, as a last resort, on the absurd and shallow argument: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul.”