Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principlesSullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Religion
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles
Sullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Conduct of life; Ethics; Religion and ethics
In my flesh his spirit doth flow
Too near, too far for me to know;
because, to use Emerson's language, "God appears with all his parts in
every moss and every cobweb," or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to
identically the same thing, "All the forces operative in the universe
are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite
Energy"--because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the
Infinite, with no detriment to its immanence, since of no other being
could they by any possibility be true. Theist or pantheist, it matters
very little by what name men call themselves so long as they do not
imprison themselves within the walls of the false version of the
philosophy of relativity, which binds them over to acknowledge nothing
beyond their five external senses, to identify the unseen with the
unknown, and thereby to stunt and ultimately to atrophy the sublime
powers, transcending the insignificant senses we share with the animal
world, as the sky towers above earth, whereby this noble poem of the
"Unknown God" was given us by William Watson.
And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do
not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only
rightful basis of religious idealism.
In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the
voice of the senses is still, that we "gain a sense of God" at all. It
is a vision of the mind--of mind knowing Mind, of soul transcending all
distinctions and recognising itself. It is the sublime region of the
higher unity into which subject and object are taken up and their
distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the
awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with
a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises
that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something
more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all
this majestic vision rose.
When, overarched by gorgeous night,
I wave my trivial self away;
When all I was to all men's sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God.
But of what God? for there are gods many and lords many. There is the
known God, of whom the Western world has heard so much now these two
thousand years, the God of the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures,
themselves acclaimed as his unique and authentic revelation, the
embodiment of absolute truth. That God has not been forgotten yet.
Just now his temple is thronged with worshippers.[1] Ministers of
religions in America, archbishops in Spain, are eager in their
invocations, and if we may believe our newspapers, the Cardinal of
Madrid guaranteed the harmlessness of American cannon and rifles to
those who will implore his assistance through the intercession of
saints. It is the war-cry of old: "_The Lord is a Man of War!_"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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