Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.MacDonald, George
Religion
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George
Sermons, English -- 19th century
But there is a region perhaps not so high as this from the scientific
point of view, where yet the word truth may begin to be rightly
applied. I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is
there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that
all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously. True, we
cannot think of any one fact thus, except as we find the soul of
it--its fact of God; but from the moment when first we come into
contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things
seen, by which we come to know the things unseen. How should we imagine
what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible
sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God
without the sky? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the
God that sent it out to our eyes. If you say the sky could not but be
so and such, I grant it--with God at the root of it. There is nothing
for us to conceive in its stead--therefore indeed it must be so. In its
discovered laws, light seems to me to be such because God is such. Its
so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is
thinking and loving and walking inside them.
We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science,
open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman--a
region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has
often to go to fetch them. For things as they are, not as science deals
with them, are the revelation of God to his children. I would not be
misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a
law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and
tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not
reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or
law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the
intent, and there God--not in the laws themselves, save as his means.
For that same reason, human science cannot discover God; for human
science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's
science, works with its back to him, and is always leaving him--his
intent, that is, his perfected work--behind it, always going farther
and farther away from the point where his work culminates in
revelation. Doubtless it thus makes some small intellectual approach to
him, but at best it can come only to his back; science will never find
the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like
Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the
spring-head of his science. Analysis is well, as death is well;
analysis is death, not life. It discovers a little of the way God walks
to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself
behind. I do not say the man of science does so, but the very process
of his work is such a leaving of God's ends behind. It is a following
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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