What I know and love is of my very being, is, in fact, my knowing and loving self. Quality of knowledge and love determines quality of life, and when I know and love God I am divine. As trees are enrooted in earth, as fishes are immersed in water, and our bodies in air, that they may live, so the soul has its being in God that it may have life, that it may know and love. I become self-conscious only in becoming conscious of what is not myself; and when the not-myself is the Eternal, is God, my self-consciousness is divine. The marvel and the mystery of our being is that self-consciousness should exist at all, not that it should continue to exist forever. But words cannot strengthen or explain or destroy our belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the freedom of the will. The antagonism supposed to exist between scientific facts or theories and religious faith would cease to be recognized as real, were it not for the eagerness with which those who are incapable of profound and comprehensive views, catch up certain shibboleths and hurl them like firebrands upon the combustible imaginations of the unthinking.
To prove, means, in the proper sense of the word, to test, to bring ideas, opinions, and beliefs to the ordeal of reason, of accepted standards of judgment. It is a criticism of the mind and its operations, and hence it may easily happen that to prove is to weaken and unsettle. In what is most vital, in belief in God, immortality, and freedom of the will, in religion and morality, our faith is stronger than any proof that may be brought in its defence; and this is not less true of our faith in the reality of nature and the laws of science; and when this is made plain by criticism, those whose mental grasp is weak or partial, are confused and tempted to doubt. They are not helped, but harmed, and our ceaseless discussions and provings, in press and pulpit, are the source of much of the unrest, religious doubt, and moral weakness of the age. The people need to be taught by those who know and believe, not by those whose skill is chiefly syllogistic and critical. Philosophic speculation is like a vast mountain into which men, generation after generation, have sunk shafts in search of some priceless treasure, and have left in the materials they have thrown out the mark and evidence of failure. But the noblest minds will still be haunted by the infinite mystery which they will seek in vain to explain. Their faith in reason, like that of the vulgar, cannot be shaken, nor can defeat, running through thousands of years, enfeeble their courage or dampen their ardor. Let our increasing insight into Nature's laws fill us with thankfulness and joy. It is good, and makes for good. Let us bow with respect and reverence before the army of patient investigators who bring highly disciplined faculties to bear upon the most useful researches. Let knowledge grow. A nearer and truer view of the boundless fact will not make the world less wonderful, or the soul less divine, or God less adorable. If one should declare that it is contrary to the teachings of faith to hold that conversation may be carried on by persons a thousand miles apart, it would be sufficient to reply that such conversation takes place, and that to attempt to annul fact by doctrine is absurd. There is no excuse for the controversial conflict between science and religion; for science is ascertained fact, not theory about fact, and when fact is rightly ascertained it is accepted of all men. The most certain fact, for each one, is that he knows and loves, and that this power comes to him through communion with what is higher and deeper and wider than himself,—with God.
There was a time when collisions among the masses of the sidereal system were frequent, shocks of unimaginable force by which the celestial bodies were shivered into atoms, so that what now remains is but a survival of worlds which escaped destruction in the chaotic struggle when suns madly rushed on one another and rose in star-dust about the face of God, who was, and is, and shall be, eternal and forever the same. Where there is no thinker, there is no thing. It is in, and through, and with Him that we know ourselves and our environment; and recognize that our particular life is, in its implications, universal and divine. He is the principle of unity which is present in whatever is an object of thought, and which gives the mind the power to co-ordinate the manifold of sensation into the harmony of truth; He is the principle of goodness and beauty, which makes the universe fair, and thrills the heart of man with hope and love. Amid endless change, He alone is permanent, and He is power and wisdom and love, and they only are good and wise and strong who cleave to His eternal and absolute being. But since here and now the real world of matter as distinguished from the apparent is hidden behind the veil of sense, it is vain to hope that the world of eternal life shall be made plain to the pure reason. Religion, like life, is faith, hope, and love, striving and doing, not intellectual intuition and beatific vision. We find it impossible to separate our thought of God from that of infinite goodness and love; but when we look away from our own souls to Nature's pitiless and fatal laws, we realize that this faith in all-embracing and all-conquering love is opposed by seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is a mystery we believe, not a truth we comprehend. Systems of philosophy, morality, and religion, however cunningly devised, cannot make men philosophers, sages, or saints. This they can become only through the communion which faith, hope, and love have power to establish with the living fountain-head of truth, wisdom, and goodness.
The pursuit of knowledge, like the struggle for wealth and place, ends in disillusion, in the disappointment which results from the contrast between what we hope for and what we attain. The greater the success, the more complete the disenchantment. As the rich and famous best see the unsatisfactoriness of wealth and honor, so they who know much best understand how knowledge avails not, how it is but a cloud-built citadel, whose foundations rest upon the uncertain air, whose walls and turrets lose in substance what they gain in height. When we imagine we know all things, we awake as from a dream to find that we know nothing, that our knowing is but a believing, our science but a faith. We are little children who wander in a father's wide domain, seeing many things and understanding not anything, who imagine we are in a real and abiding world, while in truth we are but passing through the picture-gallery of the senses.
Faith, Hope, and Love:—these three
Are life's deep root;
They reach into infinity,
Whence life doth shoot.
But Faith and Hope have not attained
The Eternal best;
While Love, sweet Love, the end has gained,—
In God to rest.
So long as these life-begetting, life-sustaining, and life-developing powers hold mightier sway over the soul of woman than over that of man, so long will woman's heel crush the serpent's head and woman's arms bear salvation to the world. She will not worship the rising sun, or become the idolatress of success, but within her heart will cherish fallen heroes and lost causes and the memory of all the sorrows by which God humanizes the world.
If we consider mankind merely as a phenomenon, the extinction of the race need give us little more concern than the disappearance of Pterodactyls and Ichthyosauri. What repels from such contemplation is not man's physical, but his spiritual being,—that which makes him capable of thought and love, of faith and hope. The universe is anthropomorphized, for whithersoever man looks he sees the reflection of his own countenance. What he calls things are stamped with the impress and likeness of himself, as he himself is an image of the eternal mind, in which all things are mirrored.
An atheist or a materialist, an agnostic or a pessimist, may have greater knowledge, greater intellectual force than the most devout believer in God; but is it possible for him to feel so thoroughly at home in the world, to feel so deeply that, whatever happens, it is and will be well with him? In an atheistic world the spirit of man is ill at ease. He who has no God makes himself the centre of all things, and, like a spoiled child, loses the power to admire, to enjoy, and to love. Genuine faith in God is such an infinite force that one may be tempted to doubt whether it is found.
Undisciplined minds become victims of the formulas they receive, and if what they have accepted as truth is shown to be false or incomplete, they grow discouraged and lose faith; but the wise know that the verbal vesture of truth is a symbol which has but a proximate and relative value. The spirit is alive, and ceaselessly outgrows or transmutes the body with which it is clothed. What we can do with anything,—with money, knowledge, wealth,—depends on what we are. Ruskin prefers holy work to holy worship; but the antithesis is mistaken, for if worship is holy it impels to work, if work is holy it impels to worship. God's most sacred visible temple is a human body, and its profanation is the worst sacrilege.
All true belief, when we come to the last analysis, is belief in God, and the teacher of religion must keep this fact always in view.