Mr. Wells,[1] if you remember, erected a new trinitarianism, which in
broad outlines corresponded with this division. With his particular
construction, I do not in many respects agree. But that some form
of trinitarianism is a reasonably natural method of symbolizing the
inevitable tripleness of inner experience, outer fact, and their
interrelation is obvious enough. In the particular trinitarianism
of Christianity, the reality apprehended to exist behind the forces
of Nature is called the Father, the upspringing force within the
mind of man, especially when it seems to transcend individuality and
to overflow into what we designate as the mystical, is called the
Holy Ghost, and the activity, personal or vicarious, which mediates
between the individual and the rest of the universe, reconciling
his incompleteness and his failures with its apparent sternness and
inexorableness, is called the Son.
Some men lay more weight on one of these aspects than on the others.
I know a clergyman of the Church of England who, on being reproached
during a theological argument with failure to pay sufficient respect
to the doctrine of God the Father, replied: “I am not interested in
God the Father”; and I know intellectually-minded men who wish to
reject the validity of all religious experience because their minds
are so made that they pay more attention to external fact and because
their reason refuses to let them agree with the interpretations of
fact propounded by most religious bodies. But, for a properly balanced
construction, for the finding of something which shall serve not as the
basis of a creed for this or that sect, but of a creed for humanity, of
something which instead of dividing shall unite, we need all aspects.
The idea of Progress constitutes, as I hope to show, the most important
element in the first part of our construction--that which attempts to
synthesize the facts of Nature; and besides, no inconsiderable portion
of the third, the interrelation of inner and outer.
Readers of Bury’s interesting book on the Idea of Progress[2] will
perhaps, with me, have been surprised at the modernity of that
conception. He shows how, in antiquity, the idea was never a dominant
one, and further that the adumbrations made of it all lacked some
element without which it cannot be styled progress in the sense in
which that word is used to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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