All nations have had a god or gods, though no two of them have been identical. Nor has the conception of a god remained unchanged with any people for any great length of time. Were each person to define his idea of a god, there would be nearly as many different ideals as there are individuals in the nation, thus showing that all knowledge is relative or symbolic. As there can be but one god conceived of under our proposition, the question arises how so many can be held up before the Christian world, and each claimed to be “the only true god.” In the solution of this will be found the chief burden which ignorance and superstition use to load the mind with their absurdities. Freed from this burden, the mind would form a true conception of the unity in diversity of nature, and recognize God as infinite and eternal. It will be readily admitted that God is indestructible. So, too, is matter. Then we have from the beginning two indestructibles—or, at least, for the present, it must be assumed they are two—God and Nature, Spirit and Matter, or Power and Resistance. These embrace “the Whole,” from which nothing could have been taken away or added thereto. As God, therefore, was All in All at the beginning, so he must ever remain the same; and this is true also of Nature.
Reasoning thus from this basis it must be found that every power has its origin in the first power—God, the mainspring of all action. Life, then, may be said to be motion making itself manifest under the influence of power—to what? It may be difficult for the mind to accept so broad an application of this all-pervading power, but it confesses it without comprehending it whenever it declares that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. The world little thinks of the extent of such an assertion, for it breaks down all the Christian ideas of that antagonism known as the Powers of the Devil; it banishes the possibility of creation proving a partial failure and enables the soul to recognize an ever-present, all-pervading, though inscrutable God.
It may then be asked, Is God omnipotent? If believers in an incarnation of Evil answer yes, what becomes of the foundation for such a belief? If no, what becomes of their God? If He be omnipotent, He must be not only the source of all power, but All Power. To assert otherwise is to declare that there are two infinites—an assertion which contains its own refutation. While the mind can conceive that God is All in All, it cannot at the same time conceive that He is not All in All, or that the Devil is a part of the All in All, in opposition and contradistinction to God. Those, therefore, who believe that God is All in All, and also believe in a Devil, believe an impossibility, for two persons or things cannot be the same, or occupy the same place at the same time. The absurdity, then, of the divisibility of the Supreme Power becomes at once apparent. The argument is of importance as it furnishes a well-defined basis, which meets every difficulty and arrays it in support of the unity of all things and the supremacy of God.
The question, what and where is God? has been often asked; but the various attempts to answer the unanswerable, have only given the unreflecting mind another’s idea instead of a just and comprehensive conception of God’s complete existence. In reasoning on so important an inquiry, the mind should soar above principles and ideas, and in one vast grasp say that God is the whole. Where is God? He is everywhere. In this answer we have no clearer solution of the query than we have when we say God is incomprehensible to the human mind; still the form is such as the mind can use in measuring its relative parts.
From the Great First Cause, and from it alone, has come the present in all its beauty and variety, material and spiritual. Though the effects may continue to increase in number throughout an infinite future, the sum of them can never amount to the First Cause. God must and will forever remain superior to all the effects of the workings of this power.
The material universe, science tells us, is composed of some sixty-four or more elementary parts. An element cannot be resolved into two or more different substances. These elements combine under certain conditions and in certain proportions with each other to form compounds differing materially from their component parts. Everything we see in nature is formed of these elementary materials; yet, extensive as these compounds are, they are fashioned according to universal and unchangeable laws. While the existence of any of the elements uncombined is rare, their combinations fill all space, and are co-extensive with the Divine Spirit. Spirit and Matter—God and Nature, seem, therefore, to be forever united.
But how have all these things come? What is this inexhaustible power everywhere manifested, and what the laws governing its application? Go back to the time when no compound bodies existed on this planet, and what was there? God was there in all his absoluteness, all his infinity. All the elements of matter were there in the same proportions and quantities as now exist, but uncombined. In an abstract sense, an element is a unit mass, without life, power or motion. What constitutes it an existence, gives it life, power and motion, and the capacity of combining with other diverse existences? We cannot conceive of matter, even in its simplest form, as devoid of all active life principles, for that would be to conceive a place, occupied by matter, where God is not. Each element, therefore, contains its portion of the Eternal Spirit, without which it would not even be a substance, but with which it can unite with other similarly endowed simples. It seems impossible not to conclude, then, that the life, power and motion found in all material substances, is that life and power we call Infinite.
To further illustrate this indwelling life principle, we quote from a celebrated author, who, speaking of the “winds and currents of the sea,” says: “Men try to explain everything by the wind and the current. Now there is in the air a force which is not wind, and in the water a force that is not current. This force, the same in the air as in the water, is effluvium. The air and the water are two masses of liquid nearly identical and changing mutually into each other. * * * The effluvium is alone fluid; the wind and the current are only impulses. The effluvium is a steady stream * * * and is invisible. Yet from time to time it says, ‘There I am;’ and its way of saying so is a thunder clap. The sea is as much magnetic as watery. An ocean of forces floats unknown in the ocean of currents. To see in the ocean only a mass of water is not to see it at all.” To which we would add, that to see in the manifestations of nature, nature only, is not to see it at all, for the power producing it is not recognized. What is seen is not the reality, but that through which the reality makes itself known.
What has thus far been considered may be consolidated into this comprehensive proposition: That there is a power existing everywhere, of which we can know nothing absolutely except that consciousness tells us it is. At the same time we are conscious of our incapability to define or comprehend it, and that all we can ever know of this power is its physical manifestations. Hence the knowledge of what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is abstractly symbolic and relative, the only absolute knowledge we can possibly have—if knowledge it be—is a consciousness of our infinite existence. In this view of the existence of God, which is the basis of all religious ideas, religion may be said to be superior to science, because it remains immovable in consciousness. Religion belongs to the unknowable; science deals with the knowable, which is the manifestation of the unknowable. Therefore, viewed philosophically, religion and science stand for the subjective and objective whose relations comprise the whole. The presence, then, in consciousness, of what we can by no means account for, must be the actual presence of that of which consciousness is made up—the elementary spiritual principles representative in us as individual existences of the great Infinite existence.
Ambiguity in the use of terms leads to confusion of ideas and thought, and is one great general cause of the ignorance and superstition still existing among apparently enlightened nations. Many terms, supposed to convey certain well-defined ideas, are found to be deficient when analyzed, and others stand for nothing in substance. Many are in common use whose meaning the man of religion, science or philosophy would be embarrassed to explain. Chief among these are: The Infinite, The Absolute, Causation and Effect, Power, Motion, Matter, Space, Time, Resistance, Eternity, Immortality, Good, Evil, Heat, Light, Rewards, Punishment, Justice, Law, Order. As the argument proceeds it will be seen how nearly the whole of these and many similar terms are resolvable into the few which convey realities.