PART II
CHAPTER I
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has
closed himself up, till he sees all things through
narrow chinks of his cavern.
Blake.
As we looked at chlorophyll, at colloids and the sea-urchin's egg, so let us look at Christian habits and beliefs. And in the first place we will fix our attention on the central 'mystery' of worship in the Christian Church. All the world over and from the first days of Christian apostles and brethren, a man going into one of their places of assembly would at some hour or another find their devotion apparently gathered about common, familiar, bread and wine, or, sometimes, bread alone. They would tell him that this bread 'is no longer common bread.' Nevertheless, in the ordinary or the scientific sense, it is, just as much 'common bread' as chlorophyll is the common colouring matter of the green wheat. They will tell him, too, that it is a 'sacramental' means of communion between God and themselves and between them and Christ, the Anointed Son of God. Just as we insist scientifically upon the fact that chlorophyll is the meeting-point between the power of the sun and our living selves, so Christians insist that the sacramental bread, whatever else it is or does, constitutes a meeting-point between them and God and his Christ. No doubt (they may say, if they understand such matters), for the mathematical physicist, bread, like everything else, may be finally reduced to a series of dynamical equations. Or it may be taken as ether and electrons; or as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and so forth; or, roughly, as what it comes to be at last, gases, water, and dust, like the bodies of us all. But each of these ways of looking at bread manifestly, even to the mind of that scientific man, leaves out something of its richness and fails to reckon with its use and purpose for life. By ordinary persons it is known as the 'staff' of life; and these ordinary persons, when they say it is this, are speaking poetry. In fact if you are to do justice to bread you must be something of an artist; you do it gross injustice—that is, you leave out of your account the most valuable thing about it—when you do not go beyond the scientific man's idealistic or abstract summing up. The poet's vision does better when he mates in the corn and the grape the glories of the sun and the expectancy of earth, and sees the bringing forth and revealing and communicating, through the grain and the wine, of a concealed and straining life. But the philosopher also has his contribution to a fulness of justice. He insists, after his manner, on 'spirit and life'; he disdains mechanism; he opens gates that science cannot pass, and shows that all real things have depth it cannot reach—a third dimension where it has discovered only two. He solidifies the schematic diagrams of the scientific man and gives reasons for the faith of the religious man, who goes further still.
Here in the Christian Sacrament, where the Christian says that the fullest justice is done to bread and wine in lifting them up to be a means of communion between God and man, science and philosophy, religion and art, may meet together.