To repeat. The Theologian of to-day tells us that there is a God, but is
horrified at the idea of that God having a body. We say that we believe
in God, but that our minds refuse to realise [sic] an intelligent Being
who has no bodily person. "Where then," says the Theologian, "is the
body of your God?" We have answered, "In the living forms upon the
earth, which, though they look many, are, when we regard them by the
light of their history and of true analogies, one person only." The
spiritual connection between them is a more real bond of union than the
visible discontinuity of material parts is ground for separating them in
our thoughts.
Let the reader look at a case of moths in the shop-window of a
naturalist, and note the unspeakable delicacy, beauty, and yet
serviceableness of their wings; or let him look at a case of
humming-birds, and remember how infinitely small a part of Nature is
the whole group of the animals he may be considering, and how infinitely
small a part of that group is the case that he is looking at. Let him
bear in mind that he is looking on the dead husks only of what was
inconceivably more marvellous [sic] when the moths or humming-birds were
alive. Let him think of the vastness of the earth, and of the activity
by day and night through countless ages of such countless forms of
animal and vegetable life as that no human mind can form the faintest
approach to anything that can be called a conception of their multitude,
and let him remember that all these forms have touched and touched and
touched other living beings till they meet back on a common substance in
which they are rooted, and from which they all branch forth so as to be
one animal. Will he not in this real and tangible existence find a God
who is as much more worthy of admiration than the God of the ordinary
Theologian-as He is also more easy of comprehension?
For the Theologian dreams of a God sitting above the clouds among the
cherubim, who blow their loud uplifted angel trumpets before Him, and
humour [sic] Him as though He were some despot in an Oriental tale; but
we enthrone Him upon the wings of birds, on the petals of flowers, on
the faces of our friends, and upon whatever we most delight in of all
that lives upon the earth. We then can not only love Him, but we can
do that without which love has neither power nor sweetness, but is a
phantom only, an impersonal person, a vain stretching forth of arms
towards something that can never fill them-we can express our love and
have it expressed to us in return. And this not in the uprearing of
stone temples-for the Lord dwelleth [sic] in temples made with other
organs than hands-nor yet in the cleansing of our hearts, but in the
caress bestowed upon horse and dog, and kisses upon the lips of those we
love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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