|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 10
An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies
experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's
Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all,
the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our
heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures
his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong
religious habit." Such people exclude themselves from the power and
peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living
God.
Indeed it is not conceivable that a man can have really tasted
fellowship with the Most High without acquiring an appetite for more of
Him. The same psalmist who speaks of his soul as satisfied in God, at
once goes on, "My soul followeth hard after Thee." He who does not
become a confirmed seeker for God is not likely ever to have truly found
Him. There is something essentially irreligious in the attitude
portrayed in the biography of Horace Walpole, who, when Queen Caroline
tried to induce him to read Butler's _Analogy_, told her that his
religion was fixed, and that he had no desire either to change or to
improve it. A believer's heart is fixed; his soul is stayed on God; but
his experience is constantly expanding.
Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man's intercourse
with the Invisible. Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this
intercourse is characterized by
tidal movements of devoutest awe
Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt.
And in the world's life there are ages of faith and ages of criticism.
Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary. Professor Royce
asserts that "a study of history shows that if there is anything that
human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an
occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt." And in
individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is
freed from folly and attains reasonableness.
Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to
admit that its knowledge is but in part. Our knowledge of God, like the
knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but
no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and
earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are
constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack
what Keats calls "negative capability"--"that is, when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a
fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery,
from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have
to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far
as our minds will carry us. We have to accustom ourselves to look
uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light.
"They see not clearliest who see all things clear."
But to many it seems all darkness, and the light is but a phantom of the
credulous. How do we know that we _know_, that the inference we draw
from our experience is correct, that we are in touch with a living God
who is to any extent what we fancy Him to be? Our experience consists of
emotions, impulses, aspirations, compunctions, resolves; we infer that
we are in communion with Another--the Christian God; but may not this
explanation of our experience be mistaken?
Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious. God is as real
to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or
to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master. Men
are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights
and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the
Invisible.
The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.
Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the
Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in
solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the
thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it
beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression. There are similar
moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or
suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the
incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in
acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the
supremely Loving--moments when "belief overmasters doubt, and we know
that we know." At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so
vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with
the living God.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|