Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
Let us suppose that the whole Church of Christ was engaged in teaching
men this high mystery, this open secret, that all such great
associations as the Christian Students' Movement, the Adult Sunday
School Movement, the World Association for Adult Education, and all the
numerous Missionary Societies throughout the whole earth--let us suppose
that the entire Church of Christ was at work in the world teaching
Christ's teaching, _educating_ men, bringing it home to the heart and
mind of humanity that "life is mental travel," that it is in our
thoughts we live and by our thoughts we are shaped, that flesh and blood
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, that all terrestrial values are
radically false, that to hunger and thirst after anything is to get it,
that the power of "the dominant wish" is our fate, that in love alone
can we live to the full stature of our destiny, that the Kingdom of God
is within us, that the engine of faith has not yet been exerted by the
whole human race in concert, that conquests await us in the spiritual
world before which all the conquests of the material world will pale
into insignificance, that we are spirits finding our way out of the
darkness of an animal ancestry into the Light of an immortal inheritance
as children of God; let us suppose that this, and not dogma was the
Voice of the Church; must we not say that by such teaching the whole
world would eventually be rescued from our present chaos and in the
fulness of time be born again into the knowledge of spiritual reality?
I believe it is only when a man realises that in its final analysis the
whole universe is invisible, and ceases to think of himself as an animal
and becomes profoundly sensible of himself as a spirit, and a spirit in
communion with a spiritual reality closer than hands and feet, that it
is possible for him to fulfil the two great commandments on which hang
all the Law and the Prophets. And without that fulfilment there must
always be chaos.
If the Church will not teach the world, modern science will inspire
philosophy to take up anew the teaching of Plato, and the world will go
forward into the light, but with no creative love in its soul to save it
from itself. "If therefore," said Christ, "the light that is in thee be
darkness, how great is that darkness."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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