A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said, "The stamper of the skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me? "
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
"Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light."
One can readily understand that some readers might be shocked by what would seem to them to be idolatrous images. Yet does not the whole poem show something more than the fact that men worship images of God after their own likeness? Beneath the grossest idolatry there [p.8] may be at least some sense of contact with the Unseen. Though man, like his fellow-creatures, cannot behold unveiled the vision of the Eternal, somewhere under every imperfect picture which our dogmas have framed of Him does not there lie at least some trait of faint resemblance? And, however much we may endeavour to remove from our minds all anthropomorphic conceptions we needs must think as men. Our most abstract thoughts are but spiritualised metaphors, the ghosts and shadows of the fully-coloured language of our earlier days or of a more primitive people. The moment we think of the origin and meaning of words, we realise that this is so; when we speak of conceiving a thought, grasping an idea, abandoning an argument, we are using metaphors which were once bold and vivid but are now scarcely perceived as such at all. And so in all our formulated thoughts of the Unseen we may be said to be in a sense idolaters. But only sinfully so, if we wilfully cleave to the lower forms when we have had vision of a higher. The fact that we express our thoughts on religion through the medium of the terms of the material world does not mean that the religious truths which they express are dependent upon, and are evolved out of, the physical world, any more than the intellectual processes of conception and perception are dependent on or derived from the physical processes after which they are named. But it does surely mean that we must recognise the necessary [p. 9] imperfection of our efforts to express the unseen realities, whether in religious creed or philosophical dogma. If we are convinced that there is a real unity underlying the religious life of every sincere man, whether he call himself religious or no, how can we best promote the growth of this sense of unity, so that in every form of faith the best may be strengthened and drawn into a sense of membership of a wider whole?
In the first place we must endeavour to be faithful to the best ideal of our own party, of our own church or creed, to insist on the positive side of what it teaches rather than its negations. The true protestant, for instance, should be zealous to protest for a living ideal which he feels to correspond to his needs, and not, as too often has been the case in the past, merely to protest against evils and mistakes connected with another ideal.