And in this fashion he returns to us. He is not the same God as of old (we listen to the pictures of this Old God as He is so often described from the pulpit, in contemptuous amazement, tinged by disdain), but a far greater God than He—greater, for the reason that we have become greater too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of happiness—the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His presence. We know that we shall only find Him in our hours of loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair. Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some spirit within us, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned towards the stars. He is the "Dream" which is clearer to us than reality, none the less clear because it is the "Dream" which never in life comes true. He belongs to us and to the whole world. He is everywhere, yet nowhere. He is the "soul" in Man, the silent message in beauty, the miracle in all Nature. He is not a Divinity, living in some far off bourne we call the sky. He is just that "spirit" in all men's hearts which is the spirit of their self-sacrifice, of their charity, of their loving kindness, of their honesty, their uprightness and their truth. It is the "spirit" which, if men be Immortal, will surely live on and on for ever. Nothing else is worthy immortality.
The Will to Faith
I wish that the great Shakespeare had not written that "immortal" line:
"The wish is father to the Thought."
It haunts you throughout your life. Like a flaming sign of interrogation it burns upon the Altar of Faith Unquestioning, before which, in your perplexity, Fate forces you—at least once in your life—to bow the head. It makes us wonder if we should believe all the evidences of Immortality we do—were Immortality really a state of Punishment and not of Happiness unspeakable. It is so hard, so very hard, to disentangle our own desires from our own beliefs; so easy to confuse what we ought to believe with what, beyond all else, we want to believe. It sometimes makes one chary of believing anything—in questions Human as well as Eternal. The "Personal Bias"—ever in our heart of hearts can we at all times decide where it ends and impartiality begins? Even our so-called impartiality is tinged by it—or what we fondly believe to be our impartial Faith. Doubt strikes at the root of Justice and of Love—not the doubt that is the half-brother to Disbelief, but the doubt which wonders always and always if we believe most easily what we want to believe, and if our firmest conviction against such Belief is not, more than anything else, yet one more manifestation of what we desire so earnestly to doubt.
Sometimes I am in despair regarding the whole question of my own individual Faith.
I am firmly convinced that there ought to be a God and a Life Hereafter. But my faith in such facts is paralysed by the haunting doubt that they may both be such stuff as dreams are made of, after all.
On the whole, I believe the best way is not to think about them at all—or as little as we may. The one question which really and truly concerns us—and most certainly only concerns God, if there be a God—in His relation to ourselves, is this life and what we make of it for ourselves and for other people. Don't ask yourself always and for ever if there be a God? Act as if He existed! So far as possible, play His part on earth. Then all will surely be well with your Immortal Soul in the Long Here After!
And, if the reward of it all—if "reward" is what you seek—be but a Sleep Eternal, do not weep. If you have done your best, you will have left the world happier and better, and so more beautiful. To those around you, to those who walked with you a little way along the Road of Life, you will have brought Hope where before you came there was only resignation and despair; you will have brought laughter to eyes long dimmed by tears; you will have brought Love into lives so lonely and so desolate until you came. God surely can ask of no man more than this.
That, at least—is my Faith. That is also my "religion." Theology is unimportant: FACTS, concerning the reality of God and a Life Hereafter—matter little or nothing at all.