Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing,
And out of it as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Again there echo about us out of the past those ancient questions to which the mind of man is ever framing answers, ever finding unsatisfying those which others have made. How then can religion help, if even with its presence those answers still remain incomplete?
When faith comes into our hearts, the mystics may tell us, uncertainty does not go out of them. We are still facing an unknown future, and have no more knowledge of the past than have our fellows. But a new factor has come into our consciousness. We are able to go back and face the old questions, and lo, they no longer seem to cut, as once they did, at the roots of our being. We have hold of something which goes deeper than doubt can reach, or fear can fall to. And strangely enough, the very same metaphor which Omar uses to express his despair comes from the lips of faith, but with how different a meaning:
"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell [p.119] whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the spirit."
Beneath the unanswered question now, there is the abiding sense of the reality that endures, a conviction that, though we do not understand its purpose, life is not purposeless, and that though we cannot lift the veil of death it is only a covering which hides from our eyes a wider and greater world than ours.
It may be that some will feel that all such talk of faith is meaningless to them. Religion and faith convey no such notions to their minds as they seem to imply to others. What they want is the clear demonstration, which a physicist might give us. If life goes on after death there must surely be some proof of it.
If we try and look at life merely from the stand-point of the physiologist, we do indeed perceive that we only observe it in connection with certain structures of organic matter, and that, as far as we are able to see, every act of human conscious ness is accompanied by certain processes and changes in the grey tissues of the brain. When those tissues are injured, the expression of this consciousness is interfered with, and when a certain condition of the brain material comes about life ceases, as far as our observation goes. So far as we can observe, indeed, every act of life is accompanied by and connected with some material condition, or at least some material concomitant. But this is as far as the physi- [p.120] ologist can take us. What life is he is still unable to say. To speak of life as energy, and to say that energy is a potential property of matter, is only to hide from ourselves with words the fact that life can only be explained to us in terms of life: the physicists cannot tell us what life is.
If we admit that we cannot explain what it is in its ultimate nature, we are yet all of us conscious enough of what we mean ourselves by life. The word has a real significance to us, although we cannot define it or explain it in any way.