Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
He was the great teacher of the poverty of riches, and the wealth of
nothingness. He knew as no other had ever known, and saw as no other had
ever seen, the symbolism of nature. Always His vision pierced behind the
appearance to the thing in itself. He loved "the reality that abides
beyond the shadows." He directed our spiritual vision to this reality,
telling us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on
the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal
fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain
that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on
the outside of things. The materialist is in prison.
He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to
be discerned only by the spiritual eye. For Him the earth was a symbol,
and the whole realm of nature a parable.
I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the
Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as
though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the
substance it enshrines is retained intact. Without it, the
substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry
formula, dead as the moon.
Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from
which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of
transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible
equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and
becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.
Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the
world, short of "those radiant conceptions of God, of man, of the
universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity."
"Liberty," says Edouard Le Roy, "is rare; many live and die and have
never known it." And Bergson says, "We are free when our acts proceed
from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit
that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between
the artist and his work."
This, I think, is what Dr. Jacks means when he speaks of Christianity
bestowing liberty--a new mastery over fate and circumstance. It calls
forth not only the affection of a man, and not only the intelligence of
a man, but the whole of his intuitions as well. The entire personality,
the entire field of consciousness, the entire mystery of the ego, is
bidden to throw itself upon the universe with confidence, with
gratitude, with love unspeakable, recognising there the act of a
Fatherhood of which, in its highest moments, the soul is conscious in
itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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