Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality — John Shaqi
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
Let me explain at the outset that Unitarianism admits of a certain
diversity of faith. There are Unitarians who think and speak only of
God. There are others who lay their insistence on the humanity of Jesus,
exalting Him solely as the chief est of teachers. There are others who
choose to dwell on the uniqueness of Jesus, who feel in Him some
precious but quite inexpressible, certainly quite indefinable, spell of
divinity, and who love to lose themselves in mystical meditations
concerning His continual presence in the human spirit. Dr. Jacks, I
think, is to be numbered among these last. But, like all other
Unitarians, he makes no credal demands on mankind, save only the one
affirmation of their common faith, with its inevitable ergo: God is
Love, and therefore to be worshipped.
Robert Hall said to a Unitarian minister who always baptised "in the
Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," attaching a
very sacred meaning to the words, "Why, sir, as I understand you, you
must consider that you baptise in the name of an abstraction, a man, and
a metaphor." More simple was the interpretation of a Japanese who, after
listening with a corrugated brow to the painful exposition of a recent
Duke of Argyll concerning the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in
Trinity, suddenly exclaimed with radiant face, "Ah, yes, I see, a
Committee."
Dr. Jacks leaves these perplexities alone. For him, God is the Universal
Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which
reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father
of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution. And Jesus, so far as
human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of God, the
Revealer both of God's Personality and man's immortality, the great
Teacher of liberty. What else He may be we do not know, but may discover
in other phases of our ascent. Enough for the moment of duration which
we can human life to know that He unlocks the door of our prison-house,
reveals to us the character of our Father which is in Heaven, and the
nature of the universe in which we move and have our being.
If this should appear vague to the dogmatist who finds it impossible
either to love God or to do the will of Christ without going into the
arithmetic of Athanasius, and reciting an unintelligible creed, and
celebrating in Christian forms the rites of those mystery religions
which competed with each other for the superstition of the Greco-Roman
world in the third century, he will find no vagueness at all in Dr.
Jacks's interpretation of the teaching of Jesus. He may perhaps find in
that interpretation a simplicity, a clarity, and a directness which are
not wholly convenient to his idea of a God Who repents, is angry, and
can be mollified.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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