Mankind has always experienced a relationship with the Unseen which
has seemed like communion of soul with Soul. When a psychologist like
Professor James, of Harvard, reduces to its most general terms this
religious Fact which has been practically universal in the race, he
puts it thus: "Man becomes conscious that this higher part (his
spiritual life) is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same
quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which
he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of
and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the
wreck." No experience of man is more common in occurrence, more
tremendous in result than this. From the mystics whose vivid sense of
God canceled their consciousness that anything else was real, to plain
folk who in the strength of the divine alliance have lived ordinary
lives with extraordinary spirit, mankind as a whole has known that the
best in man is in contact with a MORE.
One does not need to be of a mystical temperament, given to raptures,
to know what this means. Let him consider his own experience of love
and duty, how he is bound by them to his ideals and woven into a
community of personal life not only with his friends but with all
humanity, until this spiritual life of his becomes the most august and
commanding power he knows. When in our bodies we so discern a physical
nature, whose laws and necessities we did not create, and whose power
binds us into a community of need and labor with our fellows, our
conclusion is confident. This experience is the basis of our assurance
that a _physical universe is really here_. When, likewise in our
inner selves we find a spiritual life, which man did not create, in
obedience to which alone is safety, and peace, and power, what shall
we conclude? That there is a _spiritual universe_ as plainly
evidenced in man's soul as the physical universe is in the body! And
when we note the attributes of this Spiritual Order, how it demands
righteousness, rebukes sin, welcomes obedience and holds out ideals of
endless possibility, it is plain that we are talking about something
close of kin to God. As in summer we beat out through some familiar
bay, naming the headlands as we sail, until if we go far enough, we
cannot prevent our eyes from looking out across the unbounded sea, so
if a man moves out through his own familiar spiritual life far enough,
he comes to the Spiritual Order which is God. Man has not drifted into
his religion by accident or fallen on it merely as superstition; he
has moved out from his inner life to affirm a Spiritual Order as
inevitably as he has moved out from his bodily experiences to affirm a
physical universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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