Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 2 [of 3]Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
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Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 2 [of 3]
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
England -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
‘Ah!’ wrote Wentworth to her, ‘we need not despair of Divine mercy.
Christ is bigger and broader than the Church. You in your way, and I in
mine, have wandered far in search of such happiness as earth can give,
and found it to be of little worth, and the sects look on us as sinners,
because we refuse to bow to the image they have set up, or to utter their
Shibboleth. I know not that it matters much. I know not that it matters
anything at all. How can any man or any set of men pretend to have
penetrated the full meaning of Scripture, or that they can bid stand back
those as humble and patient in the pursuit of truth as themselves?’
One day when Robert Hall had been having a conversation with Sir James
Mackintosh, he told a friend: ‘Sir, it was the Euphrates pouring itself
into a teapot.’ If a great orator like Hall could say that of a
fellow-man, what can we say of such Divine revelation as comes to us
either by the experiences of actual life or by the world of nature around
us, or by the written Word which was and is Life? How can we grasp it?
How can we cut it up into dogmas and creeds? How can we say to any
brother man, Believe as I believe, or be damned? The Churches have tried
to do so and failed, even when they had at their back the terrors of
Inquisition or the sword of the Civil Magistrates. They are beginning to
understand that it is all up with priestcraft, and that the Church as it
exists to-day everywhere is in danger; that they cannot stop the onward
march of the people; that they cannot say to the waves of free thought,
‘Hitherto shall ye come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves
be stayed.’ It is a kindly light that leads on, and we cannot stop.
Take all the creeds, pile them one upon the top of another, and there is
still a void, for the finite cannot grasp the Infinite, and man cannot by
searching find out God. At the best we can but guess; at the best, and
may we ever be that, we are but children crying for the light. Here we
see through a glass darkly; let us humbly do our duty, and wait the time
when all mystery shall be unravelled, when we shall stand face to face,
when we shall know even as we are known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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