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CHAPTER VII
THE WISDOM OF BOOKS

Therefore the man got books and read them. He read books on Hinduism, many of them; he read the Vedas and the sacred hymns. He learnt of Vishnu and Siva, of Krishna and the milkmaids. He found books on caste and read them, of how these were originally four castes which subdivided. He read of suttee and the car of Juggernauth. He then turned to Mahommedanism and the life of Mahommed. He read the Koran. He learned the early history of the faith, of its rise, of the glory of its result, of the fall of its great Empire. He saw it had much to do with Judaism, there were great similarities, there were also differences. He read of Parseeism, that taught by Zoroaster which they call fire worship; he read of Jainism, of the cult of the Sikhs, of many another strange faith; he learned of the spirit worship of the aboriginal tribes among the mountains, of Phallic worship and its monstrosities.

He read of Confucius and his teachings, of Laotze and his doctrines, of ancestor worship among the Chinese, of Shintoism in Japan.

Most of all he read about Buddhism. There was something here that attracted him more than in all the rest. In the life of Gaudama the Buddha he found a beauty that came to him as a charm, in the teachings of the Great Teacher there seemed to him a light such as he had not seen. Mystery and miracle and the supernatural had always jarred on him, they had an unpleasant savour, as of appeals to the lowest elements in the minds of the credulous and ignorant. Truth he thought should not need such meretricious attractions. Here was a faith that needed none of these things. It could exist without them. It contained explanations, not dogmas. It was reasonableness instead of hysteria, it denounced mysticism and the cult of the supernatural.

It took the man several years to read these books, and he lived those years much alone. His house lay half up a mountain side. Below him lay tangled masses of hills clothed with dense forest, with here and there a clearing. Before him was a jagged mountain wall, behind a great bare dome of rock. It was always wonderful to sit and watch, to see the sun rise in gold and crimson behind the peaks, while all below lay in a white mist; to watch the sun rays fall and the mist grow thinner, showing faint outlines of tree clump and hill contour, till all the mist was gone and the world was full of golden light. Daily he saw the marvel of the dawn. He learnt to love it as the most beautiful of things, most beautiful because full of the promise of untold glory. For the most part his life was very lonely. There were the labourers who worked for him, the black, half-nude people who came in gangs in May and left in February of each year. They were not of his world. He directed their work, he paid them, but he did not know them. He wondered at them, that was all, and there were scattered here and there throughout the hills other Europeans, who lived much the same life as he did, and whom he met occasionally at their houses or his, or at the club ten miles away. He liked them, some of them were his best friends, a great part of his life was theirs also.

But there was, aside from his friends, aside from the merry meetings, the games, the chaff, the laughter, another life apart. There was a life he lived to himself, in another world it seemed. His world was of the mountain and the fell, of the brooks that laughed down the precipice, of the giant trees, the tangled creepers, the delicate orchid far above. His thoughts were with them and with his books, for they should be brothers. He read and he watched, and he tried to understand; he asked of nature the meaning of these religions, to tell him the secret that he would know. What is the truth of things – what do you mean? And I – What do I mean? What is the secret of it all?

The mountains and the trees answered him and told him secrets, the secrets of their hearts, but not the secret he would know. They murmured to him of many things, of beauty, of love, of peace, of forgetfulness. They sang the world's slumber song.

But of whence, of how, of whither they told him nothing, only they ceased talking when he asked, they ceased their song and there was silence. They could not tell.

So he lay upon the rocks and read, and the hills and trees wondered because they knew not of what he read. "Take care," they whispered; "why trouble? Life is so short, surely it were wise to make the best of it; for no one can answer what you ask. We die and fall and new trees grow again, the hills are newly clad each year. The old return in new forms. We can tell of ourselves, we are not afraid. Our lives are full of delight. Death has no terror for us. But you? Of you we know nothing. We have no echo to your words."

Yet the man read on. He dreamed and read and dreamed again.

"I have three wants," he said. "I would know whence I came, I would have some rule to live by, I would know whither I am going. Religions, many religions profess to tell men these things, surely somewhere there will be truth. Nearly all men are satisfied with their religion, cannot I find one that satisfies me? It is so little that I ask, I have here so many answers. Amongst them I will be able to find what I want." Therefore he read on. But in the thoughts of many teachers there is not clearness, but confusion. In a multitude of counsellors there is not wisdom, only mist, only the strange shadows made by many lights. He found that he did not gain. "Sometimes," he said, "I agree with one, sometimes with another. No one seems to be altogether true. There is Truth, perhaps, but not the whole Truth. This will not do."

At last he said to himself that he would make a system. He would take certain ideas from various faiths, he would put them together, he would compare them one by one and see what he learnt.

There is, he said, the First Cause. What do religions say about this First Cause? There is Brahma, and Jehovah, and Ahriman, with Ormuz; there is the Buddhist doctrine of Law, there is the Christian Trinity. These are some of the chief ideas. What can be made of them? Have they a common truth? Are the great religions utterly at variance about this First Cause, or can they agree? I will take this point and consider it first. What is the First Cause? Then I will pass to another. What does life mean? Why are we here? Is there any explanation of this? For what object does man exist? To what end? He did not mean what is the end of man, but what is the object of man, of life? To whom is it a benefit that man exists? To God – if there be a God? If not, to whom? It cannot be that existence is an aimless freak, that it has no object. But what can this object be? What was to be gained by creating man at all? That was question number two. There is no answer to this question.

There were many other questions that he asked. And when he had framed a question he sat down to his books to find the answer. He worked at them as problems to be solved. He sought in the various faiths described in his books the answers to these problems. What he found will be shown in the next few chapters; but let it be understood again how and why he sought.

He had been born in a faith and brought up in it, and had abandoned it. He left it because he sought in it certain helps to thought and to life that it seemed to him religion ought to give. More, it seemed to him that these answers were of the very essence of religion. His fathers' faith gave him answers he could not accept, it gave him a rule of life he could not follow, that seemed to him untrue. Yet would he not be satisfied with ignorance, he would search further. He wanted a religion, a belief, and he would find it.

For I want it to be understood very clearly that he was no scoffer, no denier of religion. It was the very reverse. He so much wanted a faith, it seemed to him such an eminently necessary thing, that he would not be content till he had one that he could really accept and believe. He hated doubt and half acceptance. He wanted a truth that appealed to him as a whole truth, that held no room for doubt.

"All men," he said, "have religion. They love their faiths, they find in them help and consolation and guidance, at least they tell me so. Why am I to be left out? Men say that religion is a treasure beyond words. Then I, too, would share in the treasure. But I cannot take what has been offered me. It does not seem to me to be true. I cannot believe it. This religion repels me. I cannot say how greatly it repels me. They say it is beautiful. It must be so to some. It is not so to me. Its music to me is not music, but harshest discord. It is not surely that I have no desire for religion, no eye for beauty, no ear for harmony, I know it is not that. No man loves beauty more than I do. There are things in this faith I have rejected that appeal to me. I see in other faiths, too, ideas that are beautiful. But no one seems all true, and none answers my three questions. Yet will I look till I find.

"And meanwhile there are the hills and the woods. These are my dreams.

"But surely in my scheme I shall discover something."

CHAPTER VIII
GOD

Sitting on the hillside when the hot season was coming near its end he saw the thunderstorms come across the hills. From far away they came, black shadows in the distance, and the thunder like far off surf upon the shore. Nearer they would grow and nearer, passing from ridge to ridge, their long white skirts trailing upon the mountain sides, until they came right overhead and the lightning flashed blindingly, while the thunder roared in great trumpet tones that shuddered through the gorges. The man watched them and he saw how gods were born. It was Thor come back again – Thor with his hammer, Thor with his giant voice. Thus were born the gods, Thor and Odin, Balder God of the Summer Sun, Apollo and Vulcan, Ahriman and Ormuz, night and day.

So were born all the gods. You can read of it in Indian, in Greek, in Roman, in Norwegian mythology, in any mythology you like. You can see the belief living still among the Chins, the Shans, the Moopers; for them the storm-wind and earthquake, the great rivers and the giant hills, all these have causes, and they who cause them are gods. From these have grown all the ideas of God that the peoples hold now. They were originally local, local to the place, local to the people, and as the people progressed so did their ideas of God.

It seemed to the man lying on his hillside easy to follow how it all arose; for, indeed, was it not going on about him? Did not the forest people speak of a god in the great bare rock behind him? Were there not gods in the ravines, gods in the hidden places of the hills? It was so easy to realise as he watched the storm-cloud bursting before him, as the lightning flashed and the thunder trumpet sounded in the hills, that men should personify these. Nay, more, he saw the wild men about him actually personifying them. He could understand.

God was the answer to a question; as the question grew so did the reply.

The savage asks but little. He does not ask "Who am I?" "Who made the world, and why?" Such questioning comes but in later years. He fears the thunder; it is to him a great and wonderful and overpowering thing. It forces itself upon his notice, and he explains it as the voice of a greater man, a God. He lives in the heavens, for His voice comes from thence. The giant peaks that swathe themselves in clouds, the volcano and the earthquake, the great river flowing for ever to the sea, with its strange floods, its eddies, its deadly undertow, in these too must be gods. These are the first things that force themselves upon his dim observance. He wonders, and from his wonder is born a god. But as he grows in mental stature, in power of seeing, in power of feeling, he observes other forces. How is the heaven held up, the great heavy dome as he imagines it? It is Atlas who does so. There is a god of the Autumn and Spring, of the Summer and Winter. So he personifies all forces he perceives but does not understand. For he has no idea of force except as emanating from a Person, of life which is not embodied in some form like his own or that of some animal. Whenever anything is done it must be Some One who does it, and that Some One is like himself, only greater and stronger.

There is not in the savage god any conception differing from that of man. There is not in any god any realisable conception different from that of man. The savage god is hungry and thirsty, requires clothes and houses, has in all things passions and wants like a man. That makes the god near to the man. With later gods is it different? God can be realised only by means of the qualities He shares with man. Deduct from your idea of God all human passions, love and forgiveness, and mercy, and revenge, and punishment, and what is left? Only words and abstractions which appeal to no one, and are realisable by no one. Declare that God requires neither ears to hear nor eyes to see, nor legs to walk with, nor a body, and what is left? Nothing is left. When anyone, savage or Christian, realises God he does so by qualities God shares with man. God is the Big Man who causes things. That is all. To say that God is a spirit and then to declare that a spirit differs in essence from a man is playing with words. No realisable conception does or can differ.

The conception of force by itself is but a very late idea. As one by one the phenomena of nature attract man's observation he personifies them. It will be noticed that unless a force intrudes itself on him he does not personify it. What people ever personified gravity? And why not? Surely gravity is evident enough. Every time a savage dropped a stone on his toes he would recognise gravity. But no. That a stone falls to the ground because a force draws it is an idea very late to enter man's brain. It seems to him, as he would say, the nature of a stone to fall. And then gravity acts always in the same way. It is not intermittent – like lightning, for instance. Therefore he never conceives of gravity as a force at all. When men had come to perceive that it was a force, they had passed the personifying stage. But the savage personified each force as he perceived it. First the sun and storm, till at last he came to himself and began to study his own life. He had good and bad luck; that was Fortune. Evil deeds are done, and good; he is beginning to classify and generalise; there are gods of Good and Evil. He has come to Ormuz and Ahriman little by little; as his power of generalising progresses, he drops the smaller gods. They disappear, they are but attributes of greater gods. And as he grows in mental grasp and makes himself the centre of his world, so does the God of Man become the God of Nature too. The greater absorbs the lesser.

The God who cared for man, the God of his past, of his present, of his future, is become the great God. He rules all the gods until he alone is God.

So it seemed to the man that God arose, never out of reason, always out of instinct. There was no difference. It is all the same story. There is innate in all men a tendency to personify the forces they cannot understand. Because they want an explanation, and personality is the only one that offers at first. To attribute effects to persons is aboriginal science. To attribute them to natural laws is later science. Each is the answer to the same question. Men personify forces in different ways according to their mental and emotional stature, to their capacity for generalising. They express their ideas in different ways according to their race and their country. The Hindu began with a god in each force, to represent each idea, and so the lower people still remain, afraid of many gods. But those of mental stature gradually generalised, till at last they came to one God, Brahm, and the lesser gods as emanating from him. This was a hierarchy; and then finally the greatest thinkers came to one God only, and the idea that the lesser gods are but representatives of His manifold nature. You can see all the stages before you now. It is simply a question of brain power, and the sequence remains the same. First the lesser, then the greater. It is never the other way on.

So does Christian mythology personify three ideas of God, as a Trinity, as three Persons in One, and a Devil. The Hindu would express such a conception of God by a god with three heads. Christianity, rejecting such crude symbolism, does so by a mystical creed. The Devil is being dropped. But the Jew and the Mahommedan have only one God. All force emanates from Him. He is the Cause of all things. He is One.

And yet it is not a reasoned answer, but an instinctive one. The savage, no more than the Christian, does not reason out his God. The feeling, the understanding of God is innate, abiding – never the result of a mental process. The idea of God is a thing in itself; it grows with the brain, but it is not the result of any process of the brain; just as a forest tree grows the greater in richer soil.

As the idea of gods increased in majesty, as the numbers decreased and became merged in three, in two, or in one, so did their power increase. The gods were at first but local, local to the place, local to the tribe. So was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who was jealous of the other gods. And gradually their local god or gods grew into the God of the whole world. It was only a question of mental development, of the power of generalisation in conception. Man conceived a ruler of the world in the Roman Emperor before he conceived an all-powerful God. The man as he meditated, as he watched, would see the stages before his eyes. There was the savage, the Kurumba and Moopa with his many gods in the hills all about; there were the Hindus, the traders whose temples shewed white in the groves beneath, many steps higher in civilisation with their supreme Brahm and minor gods emanating from him; there was the Moslem with his "God is God." He had the stages before his eyes.

Therefore when he came to consider this question of God he found in God-worship in Hinduism, Parseeism, Mahommedanism, Judaism, Christianity, no differing conception. They held all the same idea in different shapes. There was nothing new. God, one or multiple, made the world according to His own good pleasure, ruled it according to His will. The savage knew most of God, because his god was but a man enlarged and the nearer to him for that. With greater contemplation the crudities have been removed, the manlike qualities disappear one by one, until with the few greatest thinkers they are all gone. God has become a "Spirit," an abstraction, an unthinkable, incomprehensible God that is of no use to anyone; for He cannot be influenced by prayer, He has no passions to be roused, He has become lost in the heavens, an inscrutable force. Such was the evolution of God.

Only when he came to Buddhism was there a new thing. He found no longer God or gods, but Law. That was indeed new, that was indeed very different from the other faiths. The world came into being under Law, it progressed under Law, it would end, if it ever did end, under Law. And this Law was unchanged, unchangeable for ever. Let me consider, he said, these two conceptions, Personality and Law.

What is this world to the Buddhist? It is a place that has evolved and is evolving under Law. He does not speak of God creating one thing or another, but of a sequence of events. The Buddhist was Darwin two thousand years before Darwin. He saw the rule of Law long before our scientific men found it in the stars. I do not think it is so easy to follow the origin of this idea as it is of the idea of God. With the latter we have the stages before our eyes, but how the Buddhist idea of law arose we can only conjecture. It is not, I think, an instinct like the knowledge of God. It is more of a mental process, like the reasoning of science. It is a negation as opposed to an assertion. It is the negative pole. It must surely have arisen like modern science from the observation of facts. I do not say that the idea of law is absent from other faiths. You see it in the Commandments. Certain sequences were recognised, but with Judaism they were ascribed to the order of a Personality. Buddhism, like science, knows of no Personality. The laws of a Theocracy were always liable to change and correction. The laws of the Buddhist are inviolable. The Christian thinks laws can be violated, the Buddhist knows they are inviolable.

You cannot break a law. It is true that many declare otherwise, that Charles Kingsley in a famous lecture declared you could break the law of gravity. "The law is," says he, "that a stone should fall to the earth; but by stretching out your hand you can prevent the stone falling. Thus you can break the law." So argued Charles Kingsley, so think mistily many men because they have never troubled to define the words they use. There is no law that a stone should fall to the earth. The law of gravity is that bodies attract each other directly as their mass, and inversely as the square of the distance. You do not break this law by holding a stone in your hand. Nay, you can feel it acting all the time you do so. You cannot break this law. You cannot break any law. Law is another word for the inevitable. Whom did the Greeks put above all the gods? It was [Greek: anachkê], Necessity. Did, then, the Greeks see that behind all their personification of forces Law ruled? It may be so. They have the two ideas, God and Law. It is perhaps the old battle of free will and destination. And which is true? To the Greek Necessity was behind God, to the Theist God is behind Law. The laws are but His orders. He can break them and change them and modify them. And yet, it is so hard to see clearly how Theists can avoid the difficulty. If God's laws are perfect truths they cannot be alterable. Only the imperfect would be changed. Yet if God's laws are perfect, is not He, too, bound by them? And if He be bound, is not His free will, His omnipotence limited? Surely God cannot transgress His own laws of righteousness; is there not "necessity" to Him too? But if this be so, then where is the need of any knowledge beyond the knowledge of law? If it be indeed eternal, as the Buddhists say, what need for more? In the science of nature we need not go beyond, we cannot. In the science of man, who is but part of nature, why should we do so? Is it not better, truer, more beautiful to believe in everlasting laws of righteousness that rule the world than to believe that a Personality has to be always arranging and interfering? Would we not in a state prefer perfect laws to a perfect king, who, however, was imperfect in this that his laws were imperfect and had to be checked in their working? Which is the more perfect conception? Surely that of law. If crime and ignorance, if mistake and waywardness brought always inevitably their due punishment and correction, where is a ruler needed? It is imperfection that requires changing.