George Herbert Curteis

“ But perhaps the pure logician may attempt another reply. Finding us not in the least disconcerted by hearing, once again, the familiar truth that all our faculties are limited, he may attempt to shatter our serenity by an announcement of a more novel kind. He may say: Not only is the imagery with which you clothe, represent, and conceive the Self-existent merely relative and human, but—far more damning fact—it is all a development. It has all grown with the growth of your race. Environment and heredity have supplied you with all your forms of thought. ”

“ Every historical truth is treasured, every literary discussion is welcome, every scientific discovery finds at last a place amid her system. Time and patience are, of course, required to rearrange and harmonize all things together new and old; and a claim is rightly made that new "truths" should first be substantiated as such, before they are incorporated into so vast and widespread an engine of popular education as hers. But, with this proviso, "Theology accepts every certain conclusion of physical science as man's unfolding of God's book of nature." ”

“ The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and atheism overwhelming is upon us. . . . Man has become, in a new sense, the measure of the universe; and in this, the latest and most appalling of his soundings, indications are returned from the infinite voids of space and time that his intelligence, with all its noble capacities for love and adoration, is yet alone—destitute of kith or kin in all this universe of being. ”

“ In fact, we can not anyhow conceive of force without "direction" of some kind; and our instincts imperatively demand of us, when we think of force in the highest and sublimest way we can, that we impregnate that idea with another product of our plastic imagination, and conceive it as efficiently directed to some worthy end—in short, as power and wisdom combined. This may be, and undoubtedly is, quite as human and relative and provisional a conception as that of a pure blind, unguided Force would be. ”

“ How can that most precious result of Christianity, a unity of general conceptions about mankind and about the Great Unknown, be secured without a symbolism of the very broadest and most striking kind? Panoramas can not be painted with stippling-brushes. ”

“ But, for people who live in the open air and sunshine of common life, there is the same necessity for a religion as there is for that mental map of our whereabouts that we all carry with us in our brains. ”

“ We seem, then, already to have made the grand transition from reasoning to conceiving, from destruction to construction, from restless analysis to quiet synthesis, and from logic to belief that the great Unknown is, in one word, Power—"an infinite and eternal energy." ”

“ It is, therefore, a son of man, and not the ordinary sons of men, that we require to aid our minds and uplift our aspirations. Mankind is hardly to be saved from retrograde evolution by superciliously looking round upon a myriad of mediocre realities. It must be helped on, if at all, by a new variety in our species suddenly putting forth in our midst, attracting wide attention, securing descendants, and offering an ideal, a goal in advance, toward which effort and conflict shall tend. ”

“ But while the mind shrinks with unmitigated horror from the notion of "an infinite and eternal Energy," loose as it were in the universe, without any rational purpose or aim, but wielding portentous cosmic forces at hap-hazard, as a madman or a rogue-elephant might do, the mind rests and is satisfied when it can once feel assured that all is guided and has perfect efficiency for (what we can only call) some worthy "design." ”

“ An animating time of action is come, a day requiring the best exercise of skill and knowledge and moral courage. Shall we hear within the camp, at such a moment as this, a treasonable whisper go round: "By one act of mental suicide we may contrive to escape all further exertion; science is perplexing, history is full of doubts, psychology spins webs too fine for our self-indulgence even to think of? ”

“ But how, in the name of common sense and charity, is religion—that special provision for bringing strength to the feeble-minded, elevation to the lowly, and wisdom to the ignorant—to be brought home to all mankind, without the use of even coarse symbolism, which is as "relative" to the masses for whom it is intended as scientific conceptions are to philosophers? ”

“ What student does not know how the heat of love for truth not yet attained breaks up a heap of prejudices and fixed ideas, and gives a sort of molecular instability to the mind, preparing it for the most surprising transformations? Who has not observed the development of almost a new eye for color, or a new ear for refinements in sound, by the mere constant presentation of a higher æsthetic ideal? ”

“ Nor, indeed, does any sort of painter aim to compete with the bald truthfulness of photography. He does not imitate—he merely hints. He throws out things φωνᾶντα συνετοῖσιν. He summons the imagination of the spectators themselves to his aid and awakens their finer susceptibilities. And by this means a "picture," which is in itself the most unreal of all unrealities, becomes in skillful hands a fruitful reality for good, perhaps, to a hundred generations. ”

“ And since, in these days, we have all of us "evolution" upon the brain, it was not to be expected that any other line of thought should be attempted. Indeed, it may be fairly conceded that, amid our modern scientific environment, no other method of inquiry is just at present possible. We belong to our own age. And while other ages have taken grand truths en bloc and have deftly hammered them out into finer shapes for practical use, the special delight and the crowning glory of our own age consist rather in a power of tracking things backward. ”

“ If, then, there are questions into which mere analytic reasoning can not enter, if Logic is powerless, for instance, before a musical score, and is struck dumb before the self-devotion of Thermopylæ, or the unapproachable self-sacrifice of Calvary, by what right are we forbidden to employ these other faculties which help us, and whose constructive help brings joy and health and peace to our minds? The many-colored poetical aspect of things is, assuredly, no less "pure" and far more interesting than the washed-out and colorless zero reached by interminable analysis. ”

“ Reason is one thing; but imagination is also another. If analysis is a power of the human mind, so also is synthesis. If you can not think at all without using the one, neither can you without employing the other. ”

“ And this must be attempted by a brave and telling proclamation of the great Christian doctrines—that the awful self-existent "I AM" is none other than "our Father in heaven"; that Christ, the blameless Son of man, is the best image of his person; and that his pure Spirit, brooding over the turbid chaos of human society, offers the surest means and pledge of a future Cosmos, where "life" may perhaps transcend these baffling veils of space and time, and, in forms "undreamed of by our philosophy," display the boundless riches of nature and of God.—Contemporary Review. ”

“ If, then, any scientific man does not for himself need rituals and symbols, still let him remember how invaluable an aid these things are to the mass of mankind. Let him reflect how the purest and loftiest ideas of the Eternal lie enshrined within every form of Christian adoration, and how the most touching memories speak in every Christian sacrament. ”

“ How can it ever be consonant to his will that the members of his brotherhood should conspire together to make believe that white is black at the bidding of any man on earth? The Church of England, at any rate, has no such treason to answer for. Her doctrinal canons, by distinctly asserting that even "General Councils may err and have erred" and by a constant appeal to ancient documents, universally accepted, but capable of ever-improving interpretation, have averted the curse of a sterile traditionalism. No new light is at any time inaccessible to her. ”

“ Crude, and only semi-moral, after all, as was this earliest humanizing effort, still human it was—not mechanical nor bestial. And it opened the way for Socrates to bring down philosophy, too, from heaven to earth, for Plato to discuss the mental processes in man, and apply them (writ large) to the processes of nature, and for Moses to elaborate with a divine sagacity a completely organized society, saturated through every fiber with this one idea—the unity of all the nature-forces, great and small, and their government, not by hap-hazard, or malignity, or fate, but by what we men call law. ”

“ Let any one recall his sensations when he has at any time been overtaken in a fog or a snow-storm, and when all his bearings have been blotted out, then he will readily understand the need which all men feel for a theology of some kind, and he will appreciate what the old-school divines meant when they said that "Theology was the queen and mistress of the sciences," harmonizing and gathering up into architectonic unity all the multifarious threads that the subordinate sciences had spun. ”

“ Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, ingulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. ”

“ But if so, it seems that agnosticism—if allowed to develop freely on its own lines, without artificial hindrance—must needs become a "Christian agnosticism." And it only remains to ask, why in the world should not such an agnostic "go to church," fall in with the religious symbolism in ordinary use, and contribute his moral aid to those who have taken service under the Christian name on purpose to purify gross and carnal eyes, till they become aware of the Great Unknown behind the veil, and so come to relatively know what absolutely passes knowledge? ”

“ As well resolve to suppress the Gulf Stream or the eccentricity of the earth's orbit! If the horizon of man's thought is bounded on all sides by mystery, it is in simple obedience to the law of his nature that he gives some shape to that mystery. ”

“ Dull fate, dumb, sullen, and impracticable, had been renounced as infra-human and unworthy. Let stocks and stones in the mountains and the forests be ruled by it; not free, glad, and glorious men! Brute, bestial instinct also had been renounced, as contemptible and undivine in the highest degree. And so, at last, the culminating point was attained. The human-divine of Asiatic speculation, and the divinely-human of European philosophy, met and coalesced ”

“ To stop there is to see but the surface of things; for it still remains to ask how mankind have effected this transformation of a metaphor (or a dream) into a god, and what mysterious force has pushed them into making the transition.... In order to change any sensuous impression into a god, there must have previously existed the idea of a god. ”

“ A man of sense will rather say: Let us by all means retain and—with insight and trust—employ the homely traditional forms of these sublime truths: let us forbear, in charity for others, to weaken their influence, and so to cut away the lower rounds of the very ladder by which we ourselves ascended: and let us too, in mercy to our own health of character, decline to stand aloof from the world of common men, or to relegate away among the lumber of our lives the ἕπεα φπνᾶντα συνέτοισιν [29] that we learned of simple saintly lips in childhood. ”

“ The forces of nature, then, have become to him once more, as in the infancy of his race, almost a terror. And poised midway, for a few eventful hours, between an infinite past of which he knows a little and an infinite future of which he knows nothing, he is tempted to despair of himself and of his little planet, and in childish petulance to complain, "My whilom conceit is broken; there is nothing else to live for." ”

“ For no reasonable man, who accepts the modern doctrine of the eternity and identity of energy, can entertain a doubt that religion—the most powerful human stimulant we know of—must have pre-existed somehow in the bosom of the unknown, though it only revealed itself at a certain fitting stage in the development of the world. ”

“ The mind of the supreme Buddha is swift, quick, piercing, because he is infinitely "pure." Nirwana is the destruction of all the elements of existence. The being who is "purified" knows there is no Ego, no self; all the afflictions connected with existence are overcome, all the principles of existence are annihilated, and that annihilation is Nirwana.
[22] The Churchman, therefore, holds himself so far justified in claiming the modern atheist as his ally. They are at least traveling both together on the high-road which leads from a destructive nihilism toward a constructive religion. ”

“ Of course, no origin is ever really described, simply because there is no such thing in nature as "an origin." If there were, at that point all hunt upon the traces of evolution would abruptly come to an end; whereas, by the usual scientific hypothesis, evolution knows neither beginning nor end. ”

“ Indeed, to a large and increasing number of Churchmen the evolution hypothesis appears, not only profoundly interesting, but probably true. They find there nothing to shake their faith, and a good deal to confirm it. Man is what he is, in whatever way he may have become so. And how atheists can persuade themselves that this beautiful theory of the divine method helps their denial of a deity, the modern school of theologians is at a loss to understand. ”

“ And it is surely the establishment of a continuous, as distinct from an intermittent, agency in nature which forms the leading point of interest both to science and to the Church, at the present day, as against a shallow deism. If, therefore, man's imaginative and moral faculties, as we know them now, are a development from former and lower—yes, even from savage, from bestial, from material—antecedents, what is that to us? Of man's logical powers the self-same thing has to be said. ”