Gaius Glenn Atkins

“ We may deny, if we are so minded, any freedom of the will at all, so involving ourselves in an inevitable sequence of cause and effect as to make us also simply weather-vanes driven east or west by winds of inheritance and environment which we have no power to deflect and to which we can only choose to respond. But to deny us the freedom to sin and so to shut us up to a determinism of goodness is no more in accord with the facts than to deny us the power to be good and shut us up to a determinism of sin. If we are free at all we are free in all directions. ”

“ If the discarnate still live they must remember and desire. Death does not end affection on our side. It should not end affection on their side. There must be, moreover, what one may call a discarnate status—an order, that is, of relationships and activities in which discarnate personality realizes and expresses itself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead are quenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its assurances. From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of the Mohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled it with their dead. ”

“ We have been blind enough and stupid enough but we are, after all, not unteachable and out of our experience and our reflections we have created the whole splendid and dependable body of human knowledge. What we know about pain is itself the outcome of all the suffering of our kind. We began with no developed philosophy nor any presuppositions about anything. Experience reflects encompassing realities which we are able to escape only as we make their laws our ministers. We did not give fire the power to burn, we discovered that only in the school of the touch of flame. ”

“ But one may well wonder whether if religion did no more than this it would have maintained itself as it has and renew through the changing generations its compelling appeal. More strong than any purely intellectual curiosity as to a first cause or controlling power, more haunting than any wonder as to the source and destiny of life, more persistent than any loneliness of the questing soul is our dissatisfaction with ourselves, our consciousness of tragic moral fault, our need of forgiveness and deliverance. This longing for deliverance has taken many forms. ”

“ There are, according to this theory, in the unseen world—wherever and whatever that may be—an order of beings akin to ourselves, either less or more highly developed, mischievous or benign. This is an old, old belief; it has pervaded animistic religions, fathered witchcraft, persisted in the belief of demoniac control, enriched folk lore, filled the friendly silences of the night with terror and haunted humanity. Now it has found its renaissance in the full blaze of Twentieth Century Science. ”

“ If we should take out of much of our finest poetry suggestions akin to the suggestions of Pantheism at its best, we should leave even Western poetry strangely poor, and we have beside, particularly in the contemplation of rare natural beauty, a feeling of kinship with the spirit which clothes itself in dawn and twilight, or speaks through the rhythmic beat of sea waves, or lifts itself against the skyline in far blue mountain summits, which helps us to understand this old, old faith. ”

“ But just as the East casts the glamour of its speculation over the processes by which we have come to be where and what we are, so it casts the glamour of its speculation over the process of our release. The West stakes everything on the issue of one individual life even if death ends it, or else it assumes a conscious continuity of life rich in memory and persistent in individuality in whatever progress lies beyond the grave. ”

“ Pantheism is never scientific in the accepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explains by personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to the temper which finds some animating spirit in all natural phenomena. The flow of waters, the growth of things, the drift of clouds across the sky are all, for Pantheism, simply the revelation of the action of some indwelling spirit or other, without which they could neither exist nor go on. ”

“ Any movement which gains a considerable number of adherents is pretty sure to win the respect of the people who have been taught to judge a cause by the number of those who can be persuaded to adopt it. This generally unstable temper, superficial, restless, unduly optimistic, open to suggestion and wanting in the solid force of great tradition has joined with the recasting of Science, Theology, Psychology and Philosophy, to open the door for the entrance of new religions, and in general, to so unsettle the popular mind as to make almost anything possible. ”

“ Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to its devotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurance that their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured through the sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only the sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We have great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves but from the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer some explanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, above all, justify the ways of God with men. ”

“ Those intimations of unfailing force, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and reality toward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of the very presence and method of God, and they have found in just such regions as these new material for their faith. They have dealt reverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms which Christianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduring experiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality is the finality of the deep things of the soul itself. ”

“ All of which proves at least that life is bigger than our theories about it and in the end subdues those who would make the best of it, to communities of experience and understanding in which we are all strangely kin. For, after all, unpleasant things cannot be thought out; they must be fought out and dug out and lived out. The whole redemptive force of society in thoroughgoing and far-reaching ways must be brought to bear upon the very sources of all the evil side of life, and the bare philosophy of Christian Science is not equal to this task. ”

“ Theosophy undertakes to explain for us how "the One beyond all thought and all speech" has become us and our universe. It attempts also to provide a way by which we, who are entangled, to our pain and sorrow, in the web of things thus woven, may escape from it and lose ourselves again in the One. It takes the wheel for its symbol in more senses than one. Everything is a turning and returning and we ourselves are bound upon the wheel, carried down or up and finally to be set free, only by the acceptance of a certain discipline of life. ”

“ But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheism itself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and the creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try to explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all that there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute and sometimes ungodlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not of creation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather of emanation. ”

“ Our democracies and our humanitarian movements have shown us that the keys both to liberty and progress are still in human nature and not in forms of organization and government. As our civilizations have grown older and particularly as they have wasted themselves in war, some shadow of the age-old weariness of the East has begun to fall across our Western world. We have also reacted strongly against materialism in thought and life; we have begun to see, as has been said, how the need and force of personality have the right to assert themselves against the dominance of things. ”

“ It was the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphant Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution. Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulæ, sure of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's hand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere a general agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benign development. The world seemed particularly well in hand. ”

“ It needs history, philosophy, economic understanding and a wealth of racial experience to give to any people either the power to quickly discriminate between the truth and the half-truth, or to carry itself with poise through a transitional period. But one may not dispose of the distinct hold of Christian Science upon its followers by such generalizations. The real inwardness of no religion can ever be known from its theology. A sincere devotion may attend a most deficient theology and we need to be charitable in judging the forms which other people's faith takes. ”

“ In general, society, through such influences, has grown impatient of discipline, scornful of old methods, contemptuous of experience and strangely unwilling to pay the price of the best. The more unstable have surrendered themselves to the lure of the short cut; they are persuaded that there are quick and easy roads to regions of well-being which had before been reached only through labour and discipline and much travail of body, mind and soul. ”

“ There is a transcendence of spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us pause. If, in the murky ways which have been brought to our attention, spirit can transcend matter, we have at least one more reason for affirming its supremacy and one more suggestion of a force or a reality which may be able to survive even the dissolution of matter itself. In other words, here is a line of testimony, richly suggestive, though by no means clear, to the power of the soul to make its own conditions, and what is immortality but just this? ”

“ There has been of late a new interest in Mysticism, itself a border-land word, strangely difficult of definition yet meaning generally the persuasion that through certain spiritual disciplines—commonly called the mystic way—we may come into a first-hand knowledge of God and the spiritual order, in no sense dependent upon reason or sense testimony. Some modern movements are akin to mysticism but they cannot all be fairly included in any history of mysticism. Neither can they be included in any history of Christianity; some of them completely ignore the Christian religion ”

“ In other words, there is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape at any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism. Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through endless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a moment accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls the divine Mind ”

“ In the end a religion is permanent as it meets the great human needs and adjusts itself to their changing phases. It is imperial and universal as it meets these needs supremely. If in addition it be capable of organization, if there be within it room for expansion, and if, on the whole, it justifies itself by the outcome of it in life and society it will persist, and if it persists through a long period of time and creates for itself literatures, dogmas and authorities, it becomes as nearly fundamental as anything can be in this world. ”

“ If religion cures your disease and you are twice persuaded, once that you really are cured and once that religion has done it, then you have something concrete enough to satisfy anybody. Or if, perplexed by death and with no faith strong enough to pierce that veil through a persuasion of the necessity of immortality established in the very nature of things, you are offered a demonstration of immortality through the voices and presences of the discarnate, then, once more, you have something concrete enough, if only you were sure of it, to settle every doubt. ”

“ And I am inclined to think that the error of forgetting that spirit in order to be real or that principles, whether of morality, religion or knowledge, must be exemplified in temporal facts, is a no less disastrous error than that of the sciences which have not learned that the natural, when all the meaning of it is set free, blossoms into the spiritual like the tree into flower. ”

“ If we were to awake in a totally strange world where nothing was in any degree at all similar to the world in which we went to sleep, we might find ourselves so sadly puzzled as to doubt our own identity, even though memory persisted in its identifying suggestion. And if in addition to this we found ourselves without the contribution of physical sensation to which we have always been used—sightless, soundless, touchless—one can easily imagine a shock in the face of which even the most strongly centered personality would give way. ”

“ Any system which has sickness for its field and credulity for its reinforcement and a specious show of half truth for its philosophic form and religion to give its sanction and authority is assured, to begin with, of a really great following. Its very weaknesses will be its strength. It will work best as it is neither clear nor simple—though it must make a show of being both. And if, in addition, there is somewhere at the heart of it force and truth enough to produce a certain number of cures it will go on. What it fails to do will be forgotten or ignored in the face of what it really does do. ”

“ It creates cultures, shapes civilizations, colours art, establishes ideals and fills the whole horizon of its devotees.
If a religion is to endure it must meet a wide range of need; it must be plastic and yet invest itself with the sanctions of History. For the conservative it must possess the note of authority and at the same time promise freedom to the liberal. It must persuade the forward-looking that it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. It must offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practically minded and deliverance to the despairing. ”