To make my position clearer, and to avoid the subject of religion, let
me add that, inferring from the Bible that there is a Father, a Son, and
a Holy Ghost, I did not feel it imperative on my part to go beyond this
use of terms. Merely to abstain from definition was like a load taken
off my mind. How the Son was begotten of the Father, or the Holy Ghost
proceeded from them both, or what eternal mysteries were symbolised in
this purely human phraseology, were, it seemed to me, matters with which
I need not concern myself, seeing that they passed all my comprehension.
Not the Trinity should come first to powers so limited as mine--but God.
It dawned on me, too, that God need not necessarily be to me what He is
to others, nor to others what He is to me. Of the Infinite the finite
mind can only catch a finite glimpse. I see what I can see; another sees
what he can see. The visions may be different, and yet each vision may
be true. Just as two painters painting the same landscape will give
dissimilar views of it, so two minds contemplating God will take of Him
only what each is fitted to receive. Water poured into differently
coloured glasses will take on the colour of the cup which it fills, even
though it be the self-same water in them all. If I find God for myself I
shall probably not behold in Him exactly what anyone else in the whole
world or in all time has ever beheld in Him before.
I saw, too, that from a certain point of view the stand of the agnostic
is a right one. We cannot know God in the sense of knowing His being or
His "Personality," any more than we can know the essence of the
life-principle. Just as we know the life-principle only from what it
does, so we know God only from such manifestations of Himself as reach
our observation. Everything else is inference. Because we see something
of His goodness we infer that He is good; because we experience
something of His love we infer that He is loving; because we behold
something of His power we infer that He is almighty. It is first of all
a matter of drawing our conclusions, and then of making those
conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is
independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is
"unknowable" to us has to be admitted.
I make this statement now in order not to be misunderstood when later I
may say that God must be this or that. Though I shall do so for the
sake of brevity it will always be in the sense that, if God is what we
have inferred from His manifestations, He must be this or that. In other
words, having to some degree worked my own way out of fear I must tell
how I came to feel that I know the Unknowable, doing it with the inexact
phraseology which is all I find to hand.
VI
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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