In their endeavor thus to think of God in terms of personality, some
are perplexed because in their imagination a person is inseparable
from flesh. "I think of God as a personal being," writes a college
student. "A personal being would have a form that you could see or
touch." But this would be true only if the grossest materialism were
accepted, and the spiritual life declared to be the product of brain
as digestive fluids are of salivary glands. On any other basis,
personality is not indissolubly bound to body nor by it necessarily
delimited. A man cannot hear without his ear, but he is not his ear;
he cannot hear without the auditory nerve, but he is not the auditory
nerve; he cannot hear without the temporal lobe of the brain, but he
is not the brain nor any portion of it. These may be the instruments
which he uses; he is free when they are well, hampered when they are
broken, and at last he is separable from them all. John Quincy Adams
at the age of eighty met a friend upon a Boston street. "Good
morning," said the friend, "and how is John Quincy Adams today?"
"Thank you," was the ex-president's reply, "John Quincy Adams himself
is well, quite well, I thank you. But the house in which he lives at
present is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering upon its foundation.
Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty well
worn out. Its walls are much shattered and it trembles with every
wind. The old tenement is becoming almost uninhabitable and I think
John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is
quite well, quite well." Such a conception of man as _being_ a
permanent personality and _having_ a temporary body is essential to
any worthy meaning when we use personal terms about God.
With such an elevated thought, however, of what personality does mean,
it soon is evident that no other reality with which we deal is so
worthy to be the symbol of an Eternal Spirit. Is one perplexed that
God, who is invisible, should be pictured in the similitude of human
persons? But _we_ are invisible. The outward husks and fleshly
garment of our friends we indeed have seen, but upon the friend
himself--consciousness, love, purpose, ideal, and character--no eye
has looked. No mirror ever has been strong enough to show us to
ourselves. In every homely conversation this ineffable miracle is
wrought: out of the unseen where I dwell, I signal by word and gesture
to you back in the unseen where you dwell. We are inhabitants now of
the intangible and unseen world; we are as invisible as God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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