What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul

by Richard La Rue Swain

This is pantheism, says another. No, pantheism though containing many beautiful truths is, nevertheless, a golden mist. Its advocates have eliminated personality, they have broken the mast of their ship, and all the riggings have fallen down with it. Being the perpetual cause of all things, Self-conscious Will is the greatest fact in the universe. There is a clear distinction between God and His deeds, even as there is a distinction between myself and what I am now thinking and doing. This Creative Will is what the intelligent Christian means by the term God. He conceives of this Will of the universe as being the Father of all other wills. We are not to think of God as making a dirt planet which He has tossed off into space as something separate from His will. He never put His children on such an isolated Earth as that would be, to roam about and care for themselves as best they might. The world is the complex energy of His will never-ceasing, with which He enfolds His children. He carries them in His loving powers and will not let them go. This is His cosmic relation to us; but it is by no means the only relation which He sustains to His children. His more personal relationship is equally beautiful and necessary.

Something like this twofold relationship exists between man and man. We know that it is best for us to build railroads, though many are sure to be killed by them however careful we may be. Yet we should be something more than railroad operators; we should be personal friends and, if occasion should arise, minister to the wants of those who are injured by our railroads.

So God must either will a cosmos, or not will it. He cannot obliterate a part of the world, every time one of His wilful or ignorant children gets in the way. It is not even best for His children that He should do so. It is far better to have a definite and orderly world, though it may hurt many. Yet God never forsakes His injured children, but leads them out of their injuries into something better, if they are willing.

Comforting as these thoughts are, we must yet travel a long way before we come to a completely satisfying idea of God. However, this is not discouraging, because we like to travel when the prospect grows more pleasing at each stage of the journey.

Some think there must be a dirt world because they see it. In a way I seem to see my wife when I look at her picture; yet I only see a bit of paper irregularly faded. Likewise a shining light appears to be a complete thing in itself, whereas the sun, doubtless, is as dark as blackness. The light which the scientist studies is waves of energy, traveling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, but that is not the sweet something that we experience as light. The light coming from the sun is not shiny until our sensations are added. And even then, it is our feelings that are brilliant because our nerves were struck by these rapid waves of energy. When we think we see a real face, it is only a shadow on the retina of the eye; which eye is only another bundle of energies, and not the substance that it appears to be.

We live in a picture world, produced by God's energies beating upon other energies which He has intimately associated with our wills. We thank God for these pictures because they are the visible language of "loving intelligent wills," wills that in themselves are silent and invisible. Yet these wills are known in consciousness as a bit of final reality. They are like unto God who causes the vital energies that result in the pictures of a living, rational experience. Experience, therefore, with its inner consciousness and its outer symbol, or picture, is all we know. So when they would take us out of personal experience into a universal "substance" called spirit, they are offering to take us out of the known into the unknown; for they do not know whether there is any substance.

"Why, then," some may ask, "does God combine His energies to form a poisonous rattlesnake?" God has expressed everything imaginable; the beautiful and ugly, the safe and harmful, the pleasant and painful, the gentle and terrible, and all these are but the alphabet of a soul. If He had given us nothing but abstract definitions, we never should have learned the meaning of anything; and scarcely more, if He had given us only the beautiful and pleasant without their opposites. But He has made us feel the meaning, so that it may be real to us. From this marvelous alphabet which He has provided, we learn to spell, then to read, and finally to live. When we have learned the meaning of poison and its opposite, we may kill the rattlesnake, or cause its energies to dissolve and pass into something more beautiful and safe. Thus we become more and more immune from all that is ugly and harmful, and more appreciatively attached to all that is beautiful and good. The ugly and harmful were desirable things to know in contrast with the beautiful and good, that we might reject the one, and cleave to the other. The deeper meaning of things thus learned will give significance to our beautiful world long after we have passed beyond the evil which we have come to loathe. I am entirely convinced that this so-called evil world with its epidemics, earthquakes, and cyclones is the best conceivable place in which to begin a soul; not the best possible world as yet, for it is our business to help make it better. Neither should we forget that the terrible is often the overture to us of some mighty, beneficent energy which we have not yet learned to use.

Again we affirm that God is doing everything that occurs in the universe, except those things which are being done by His children. Nothing ever occurs that is not directly or indirectly the act of some will.

5. If the Ancients made their gods, how do we know that we are not making our God?

Doubtless, the great fallacy in this question is the supposition that the Ancients made their gods. No one ever made his God or his gods; for all men have the same identical God, living and moving and having their being in Him. They have Him regardless of whether they know either His name or His character. Since there is no other God or thing to have, all must have Him. Neither can they avoid being conscious of Him, nor escape having opinions concerning Him. All religious opinions, however sane or grotesque, are about the same God. The Ancients, being conscious of our God and their God, were sometimes comforted by His presence, while at other times they were greatly frightened. As they could not escape Him they tried to explain Him; and in the act of explaining, they made a theology and not a god. Whoever expresses a religious opinion is guilty of starting a theology. Even the Ancients were moved by an objective reality, and not by a mere idea. Though their idea often failed to describe the reality with accuracy, yet if the reality had disappeared, the idea would have perished from among them. It seemed to them that there was a god of thunder and, according to our interpretation of the universe, there was; for if our God had not been there thundering, they never would have thought of a god of thunder. Neither were they mistaken when they thought there was a god of harvest; because our God was there making their harvests grow as He does ours, and was feeding them as He feeds us. We all make worse mistakes than that. These crude men may be excused for thinking that a crashing thunderstorm was a big enough task for one god; or that the fructifying of all vegetation was ample employment for another.