William Scott Palmer

“ They enter history only in sharing that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they are parts.
I, on the other hand, have a life of my own; I am a maker, shaper, creator. I am a master-worker and freeman in a world of relative necessity. Yet my wonderful living body, through which I do my work, depends for its support on the green blades of grass and corn and the green leaves of the trees. Further—every cell of the millions and millions in my body is like the amoeba and the cells of the plant in consisting of protoplasm. ”

“ For the Christian the barrier that finally checks the advance of life is not death but a self-concentrated self. It is freedom misused and lost, freedom turning against the life that has striven to bring it to birth. Perversity builds that barrier and human life cannot pass it or—shall we not say with the Christian?—God cannot pass it. This alone thwarts the divine purpose for man and brings about the 'second' and only true death.
We have nothing to urge against this teaching of religion; we see the second death beginning in every man who is perverting freedom from its life-furthering office. ”

“ We do not really, or at least readily and spontaneously, admire any man who does things from self-interested motives. We may admire the things he does, but we do not admire the man. If, for example, we are religious ourselves, and however much we wish other people to be so too, we do not admire the man who, we know, is religious because he sees his profit in religion either for this world or the next. We do not admire the kind of artist who clutches at beauty because it feeds that deadly appetite which is no other than aesthetic greed. ”

“ Philosophy is alive, sitting at our banquets, walking in our streets, even writing books that ordinary men, living each his own extraordinary life, can read. We are able to call in our philosopher, then, as we have called in the bio-chemist, knowing him to be one who reckons to the full with science, that he may tell us what he can and will concerning life and living. ”

“ But I have power and I use it to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that I endure, I last, and that all my changes and experiences endure, last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other. ”

“ My reason and my will are myself. I am not a thing and I do not produce like a thing. I give and I communicate my very self in giving and communicating my knowledge, my purpose, my will. And in so far as you receive these and take them into yourself you receive me—spirit and life—as person. By harmony between us our wills and reason, our selves, coalesce; they become identical in the concrete, vital identity peculiar to persons, impossible to things, and dependent for its maintenance on the maintenance of harmony by their own free activity. ”

“ Man comes into his heritage. He inherits, we may allow ourselves to say, from the habits of elements and from the habit-memories of cells, single and corporate. He inherits from the habit-memories of every living creature in his ancestry. And each habit-memory of them all has contributed to his setting free. Now he is so far master that life has put into his hands the choice between a greater freedom still towards which its impulsive purpose has been directed from the first, and a new slavery that the man himself is able to make for himself. ”

“ I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing was long of building up ”

“ We who have learnt our lesson from science as well as from philosophy should be sure friends to the prophet. We have learnt enough of the story of life to see that from its beginning on the earth it strove towards liberty, towards the indetermination by circumstance and the freedom of choice that man has reached. We have seen life lost in mere material size and crushed by the weight of material protective armour; and we know what these things mean. We know, too, what entanglement in habit means for our own selves. We are good and sure friends of the prophet. Or we may be, if we will. ”

“ Yet the philosopher reminds us that indeed this gain began with the beginning of love. Self-forgetfulness began before man came to show himself called by spirit and life to die daily. Yet in and by him they call with an emphasis and solemnity new in the tale of creation. He is to die to the struggle and the desire to live; he is to give himself and grow by self-giving. That is his proper way.
Not without reason does the philosopher tell us that the supreme secret of life begins to be revealed in the plant which surrenders its own life for its seed. ”

“ Already we human creatures, incomplete though we are, reveal life as an impulsive, enriching and creative power given in us and become ourselves—a power by which we may continue the line of a direct advance and pass on in a creative evolution which reasonably should have no end. What wonders may we not reveal, what wonders may we not discover thus, in that advance? But only if for the true life that is ourselves, the life which as ours is manifest in its use of body and brain and of the inheritance they bring, there is a triumph over the last of the many obstacles it encounters upon earth. ”

“ We look along the ages and cease to be surprised. In his long-drawn education man has but slowly learnt to find God in more and more of his own life and the world. Step by step he has felt his way, led by the spirit given him, to the knowledge of the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the incarnate and redeeming God of all men, the God who comes to indwell all things. Only now, in a new fulness of time, are the teaching of Jesus and the revelation of his life and death finding a new context in new knowledge and reflective thought. ”

“ He is supposed to be free, but not to have the capacity to grow in freedom. 'Freedom of the will,' according to this, is like the right to a vote. It is a thing-character, ready-made, in a man, as the right to a vote is a thing-character assured to a man of a certain age and standing. A man does not advance towards spiritual freedom and grow in it; he has it as a diamond has a degree of hardness that enables it to cut glass. It is, in fact, a natural quality, not a growing achievement of growth that still goes on. ”

“ The true artist paints or sings for the love of it, and because he must; and wins his joy, even though in and with the artist's pain, and the man's self-seeking. The spirit within him drives him on; no outward necessity, no carnal attraction, no mere self-seeking, is adequate to force or draw him. Art, however skilled and taught, however marred by human weakness, is spontaneous as love. We are in presence here of that of which only faint adumbrations can be discerned in any other creature than man. ”

“ The shutting-down, the extinction, of a man—for this is what it amounts to—who is capable of an indefinite advance in freedom and life, in love and wisdom and knowledge—that is, in God and fellowship—is a catastrophe with which the blotting-out of all the mighty beasts of the past is incomparable. Consider, if he were the only man? Yet is he the less what he is because he is one of millions? For one man, the Christian says, Christ would die, though it is for all men that he died. ”

“ When we look at man through the eyes of the philosopher we see life clearly as a spiritual impulse, an impulse of a higher order than the animal, at least as much higher as that is than the material, and ever driving on. Man is not content; he is not fulfilled. He is fully awake; and he is not only conserving his long past but peering into the distances of his future. His brain is flexible, and able to provide a multitude of new structural arrangements; it is therefore an instrument of such choice as gives him leave to shape his future. ”

“ Worship is no pious luxury: it is a necessity of the spiritual life. Every man who is growing in the spirit is a worshipper of God. He may never use the name, he may be one of those who would say 'Lord, when saw we thee?' but his love is showing him the true God in his own spirit and his own truth, and, in showing him too the divine way of Love with men, commands his worship. He has discovered the marvel of self-giving, and in that discovery the marvel of the divine way he cannot but adore ”

“ I must grow if my neighbour is to become for me 'as myself' and be loved as myself. So that love of myself which is evil when confined to interests solely mine, becomes good as it expands. So the contracting of life within my narrow boundaries is escaped, and although I still love myself I love a self that grows out and forth to the inclusion of all, even to the inclusion of God, whom then I shall love with the ardour which in the contracted self is the very torment of its hell. ”

“ But more often nowadays the philosopher's God is like the Christian's in that he both transcends his universe and indwells it; for the philosopher has begun in good earnest to reckon with life and with science and human experience at large. God indwelt Jesus Christ, and he knew God as lover and father both. He spoke as though God had communicated himself to him in a fulness we do not know among ourselves. There was an identity of will, it seems, recognized by him, between himself and God, and an identity of reason and knowledge. ”

“ And the end to which all these lives are moving, of every flower that blooms, of every bird that sings, is also the central principle of the entire evolution of the universe—the embodied Word of God. For the purpose of the whole is nothing other than the incarnation of the divine, the participation of the created in the eternal life of the uncreated, of which the God-man is the perfect revelation.... If God be indeed the end of all existence, he must needs fill all things with his being. ”

“ Science and philosophy and religion are met together as they have never in the history of the world been met before, open-eyed, conscious of the common heritage of training in the battle of the world and in the struggles of practical life, which has biased every one of us and been the chief agent in turning the common search after truth by men of good will into a war of opinions.
To confess that we are all, in so far as we are honest seekers, 'builders of Jerusalem' after our own manner and degree, is the first and perhaps the hardest step to take towards full co-operation between us. ”

“ We have seen that one function of the life of plants gives to the whole world of living creatures access to the energy of the sun. Yet as regards intelligence and conscious relation with other creatures the plant may be said to be asleep; it carries on its vital functions and builds up its manifold and admirable structures, working as though in sleep. Its whole activity, varied though it be, is like that of a dreamer. Confined within a wall of cellulose, the plant-cell works out its life as though, for its awareness, no other creature lived. ”

“ The life-current continues to flow, a gathering wave of conscious life grown to self-consciousness and world-consciousness. It flows on from this point of conquest through generation after generation of men in and to whom its spiritual character is now plainly revealed. For each man it is a rill from the great human river of life—life natural and spiritual, spiritual because so fully natural—which has become his own and is indeed himself. ”

“ A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our self-conscious, self-creative abilities on the one hand, and, on the other, that first humble yet awe-inspiring revelation by elements generated, perhaps, within a white-hot star. Science has nothing to do with meanings and purposes and values in our lives or with our concern for them. ”

“ The popular forms of Christianity do not show this congruity. Even the officially instituted forms have, according to the manner of institutions, overlaid that truth and encumbered spiritual and moral life with tradition, habit, heritage that are become its burdens instead of its instruments of expression. Therefore we have to go to the prophet and learn of him, drink from his clear fountain of living waters. There, unquestionably, we find what we seek, religion in touch, in more than touch, with life. It is one with life, this religion given and shown us in the prophet of Nazareth. ”