Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not
think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her,
then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values,
of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of
perilous superstitions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it,
and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a
world against which it is good to oppose oneself--the Children of Light
against the Children of Darkness.
What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the
spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and
mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over
the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal
the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his
interpreters can exclaim:
Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego
takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm
secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into
birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the
wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible
shiver of running water through the mossy shades of the caves. I
dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of
being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents,
breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The
question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self,
each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which
is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have
resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits
no form of number.
How much greater the joy of him who knows that Reality is God, and that
God is Father.
The open secret flashes on the brain,
As if one almost guessed it, almost knew
Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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