Kitabı oku: «The Universe a Vast Electric Organism», sayfa 12
The statement is often made to the prejudice of religion that religion has been the cause of most of the wars and cruelties that have desolated the earth since the commencement of human history. This is unjust and misleading. Until the formation of our government, church and state were united among all nations and politics and religion were blended, and a purely religious war was impossible. As to the miracles of the New Testament, if they were all discredited the immaculate teachings of the gospel would remain. The peculiar glory of Christianity is the regeneration it brings to man, putting him under the law of love; and without miracles we would still have vital, uplifting, heaven-inspiring Christianity.
As to the infallibility of science, she has nothing to boast of over religion. Science has been groping her devious way from colossal blunder to blunder, and championing as many absurdities and superstitions through all the ages as ever the religious devotee dreamed or the religious concept propagated. She is still teaching some of the grossest superstitions and incredible absurdities. Science has received nearly every fundamental truth from religion, and is at last steadily developing and proving the true religious concept of the universe, in showing that all visible things are the product of invisible spirit, invisible law and invisible force; that the spiritual and invisible world is the supreme reality; that its Creator and Ruler must be the Father of Spirits, and virtually re-echoes the words of Christ, "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." It teaches universal love, helpfulness and equality, which was demonstrated by Christ when He called for water and washed the feet of those who worshiped Him. This was His last object lesson, so little understood in Christian philosophy. But ethical and psychic science have lifted it to be the glory of perfected civilization, and endorsed the exalted truth, "Let him that is greatest among you be the servant of all."
All knowledge and truth are in a sense inspired revelation from God, whether written in nature or the human soul. There is scientific revelation written in physical facts and recognized by the senses; there is God's revelation written in the secret conscience and reasoning power of man, and they naturally sustain and supplement each other and the revealed truths of the Scriptures.
It may be that the first chapter of Genesis was not intended so much as an infallible record of the divine order in the creation of the world as to teach the vastly higher spiritual truth that creation is the work of God, thus leading men to His worship and away from the lower worship of sun, moon and heathen deities.
The mechanical conception as to the mode of inspiration and revelation tends to give way before a larger conception of the process—that God speaks to man through the experience of the events of life. Thus revelation becomes a living process, and all later history may become a commentary on sacred history, renewing and confirming the primal utterance of God to the soul of man.
The reign of law, which was little understood by the ancients, is now universally accepted and endows the human race with new powers. It also gives new conceptions of the "intelligibility of nature," which is but a modern scientific term for religion or the reliance on the will and wisdom of Creative Deity.
Herbert Spencer's "persistency of matter and force" is but another expression of the reign of law. And as law is the result of an intelligent spiritual concept and impulse, the lawmaker of the universe must be a supreme, intelligent, spiritual personality.
And the reasoning, intelligent soul of man, by discovering the immutable laws of nature, which are the unchanging decrees of Deity, has learned the art of controlling the great powers of nature for the use and convenience of man.
But in the ultimate analysis it is God's spirit and will that control the universe, and man's spirit and will which evolve the art of controlling, and masters the great powers of nature.
Therefore, we must look to the powers of the mind to subdue all other powers. This it does by constructive reason and vitalizing faith. By constructive reason it builds bridges, tunnels mountains, operates engines, telegraphs and all the appliances of modern commerce. By vitalizing faith it renews and strengthens body and soul, and seems to work the miracles of God.
Prof. Osler says: "Faith is a most precious commodity. Faith is the great lever of life. Without it man can do nothing, with it all things are possible. Galen says: 'Confidence and hope do more good than physic.' Faith in the gods or the saints cures one, faith in little pills another, hypnotic suggestion a third, and faith in a plain, common doctor a fourth. In all ages the prayer of faith has healed the sick, and the mental attitude of the suppliant seems to be of more consequence than the powers to which the prayer is addressed."
Miracles, says criticism, belong to an age of ignorance. With the dawn of knowledge they diminish. In its meridian light they disappear.
The Jews were eminently addicted to belief in miracles. With them there was satanic miracle as well as divine. They believed in persons being possessed by devils, and all efforts to disentangle them from the demoniac miracles and to resolve them into cures of lunacy by moral influence was vain.
Comte totally discards belief in God, but, feeling the need of a religion, substituted the worship of humanity. Humanity is an abstraction by itself, but combined with the Christianity and the monotheism of the New Testament, it is the perfection of ethics and religion. They who preach the religion of humanity, morality and true socialism will find it more perfectly taught in the New Testament, with nobler incentives and higher inspiration and spirituality, than elsewhere in human history. And it accords more perfectly with the book of truth, written in the reason and conscience of man.
Prof. C. F. Kent of Yale, says: "There is no conflict between science and religion. The Bible does not pretend to teach science, but does speak with authority with regard to questions of morality and religion.
"The pathetic fact is that the fundamental spiritual truths the Bible narratives seek to teach are lost sight of in the contention for historical accuracy, which was entirely secondary with the authors. The prophets used ancient narratives, the same as Jesus used parables, to illustrate spiritual truths."
Dr. Beet, of Wesleyan College, England, denies that either "the endless suffering or the extinction of the wicked is taught in the Scriptures," and says: "Very few Wesleyans now adhere to Wesley's teachings concerning it."
The essential truths of the Bible are just as true without miracles as with them. Christ said a wicked and perverse generation seeketh a sign or miracle.
Truth is inherently true and needs no miracle to confirm it. And the tendency of all ancient writers, as well as those of the Bible, to exaggerate natural phenomena into wonders and miracles cause many to discard the great truths of revelation. I undertook to show how Joshua might have mistaken a luminous aurora borealis for the sun standing still. And I am inclined to think that a mistranslation is responsible for the story of Jonah and the big fish. Somewhere in ancient history I got the idea that the pirate boats in ancient times were called, "the big fish." If so Jonah might have been captured by the pirates after being thrown overboard, and put in the hole or belly of the boat, and after three days, seeing no prospect of a ransom, was thrown onto the land. God may have prepared the pirates and boat for this purpose and a miracle would be unnecessary. The writers of that day would say Jonah was swallowed by "the big fish," meaning the pirates captured him, and centuries afterwards the translators would make a great miracle out of it. Take many of our modern expressions, as, "the ship and sailors went to Davy Jones' locker;" if centuries hence our language should become obsolete, the translators would say, "the ship was in a great storm, and it and the sailors were all saved by running into David Jones' big chest." That would be a literal translation, but would not state the facts. Take another illustration. In the war, "a company was lost in the woods and was gobbled up by the enemy." A future translation would read, "a company of soldiers was lost in the woods and a ferocious turkey gobbled and eat them all up." Either of these would make a greater miracle than Jonah and the whale.
I mention this to show how easy it is to mistranslate an obsolete language, especially an Oriental language, always so full of figures of speech, hyperbole and parables.
There is the wonderful capture of the city of Jericho. When the Israelites, under Joshua, marched round it seven times, and blew seven long blasts on their ramshorns, the walls fell. Now, the spies may have reported to Joshua the weakness of the walls, and, by marching round them seven times, caused the people of the city to crowd onto the walls, and the vibrations of the horns caused them to fall.
We know that the vibrations of thunder or cannon or any loud noise has caused many a house to fall, and would endanger any weak building or wall. I believe that if every miracle in the Bible was disapproved or shown to be a natural event it would not destroy or affect a single important truth it teaches.
While I believe the brave and honest man will refuse happiness at the expense of truth, I must partly agree with Luckey, the historian, who says we owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge; that superstition appeals to our hopes as well as our fears, and often meets and gratifies the inmost longings of our heart. Imagination, which is altogether constructive, contributes more to our happiness than reason, which is mainly critical and destructive. He says: "The rude charm clasped by the savage, the sacred picture protecting the poor man's cottage, can bestow a more real consolation in the darkest hour of human suffering than the grandest theories of philosophy." This was more distinctly true in the early history of the human race, when ignorance and superstitious wonder dominated all minds and all important events were deemed supernatural or miraculous.
Take the superstitious worship of the Virgin Mary; its beneficence to the human race is beyond all human calculation. It helped to elevate and spiritualize woman and lift her offspring and the generations of men to a higher spiritual plane.
Romantic love between the sexes was never known, so history teaches us, until the worship of the Virgin Mary became universal throughout Christendom. No such sentiment existed in Greece or Rome or any pagan country, and none exists now in any pagan or Mohammedan land. There women are still treated as chattels and denied a soul. We should remember that for man all religions were instituted, all books written, all science formulated, all literature ennobled, all progress inspired, and all art made beautiful.
Human reason, the perfection of the universe and the words of revelation all teach—
Man's soul is part of Deity, and as immortal as its Creative God.
Death is but a shadow across its path of destiny.
To the soul there is no grave; the tomb cannot grasp its viewless form;
Earth is but its birthplace—the cradle of its infancy—
Where it drops its cumbrous wrappings for the wings of immortality.
Time, the vestibule of eternity, is where it points its course and takes its leap
Into the vast unknown toward the Infinite and Eternal, and sweeps
Out upon its endless progression in knowledge and perfection through immensity of worlds.
CHAPTER XIII
LOVE IS THE ELECTRIC LAW OF LIFE: ALL THAT LIVE MUST COME FROM LOVING
God is love, and love is the law of life and the creative force of the universe. The love of God in the soul is the substance and life of all religion. The love of fellow-man in the heart is the foundation of all human kindness and social ethics. As Dante followed his beloved Beatrice from world to world until he found her at the gates of Paradise, so we must follow our loves and ideals through all the tragic incidents of existence until we find them as guardian angels at the gates of celestial glory and creative perfection.
A noble character, a worthy and useful life of service to others is the chief purpose and crowning glory of all earthly existence. Wealth and fame are mere incidents in the fleeting drama of human experience.
All true greatness is in the beauty and grandeur of the soul. It must come from within; external manifestations may shadow it forth, but cannot produce it.
All true gentleness and kindness are a reflex of the inner life of love and willing service. We live in the atmosphere that our thoughts and spirits breathe around us, and by opening the windows and doors of our soul to love we inhale the perfume from other souls, and the breath of life from Deity Himself.
Thoughts are forces, and through them we have creative power; but they must be winged with love to manifest divine energy. Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life and destiny.
Everything in the material universe has its origin first in the spiritual concept or thought, and from this it takes its form. The spoken word and the mighty deed spring from the potency of living thought, and life is a tireless swimmer in an ocean of thought. Thought is the conscious energy of the soul, the subtle, invisible force of the reasoning, resistless mind, and, to be potent with life, must be winged with love. Thought is everywhere and surrounds us like the atmosphere we breathe. When we want a thought we should reach up into the air for it with the caressing hand of love, and it will come like an invisible messenger from spirit land. We should seek thought and wisdom in the intellectual zenith of our own minds, and not from mediums or clairvoyants, for they have never revealed any great truths.
Thus our great poets, sages and prophets have reached up into the spiritual altitudes and gathered wisdom and truth as the stars are gathered and sparkle in the glittering mirror of night's far off and measureless spaces. They come with the speed of light from all suns and spheres in the jewelled crown of God's eternal expanse of love and life, they whisper wonderful things to the listening spirit in the silent chambers of the dreaming soul, and they come like angel faces in the visions of night and paint with the flaming finger of anticipated joy the glorious beatitudes of immortality and love. There is the science of thought which brings wisdom and success, and the science of love that brings peace and joy. It is a beautiful thing to live. Life is the fine art of the soul, the literature of the spirit, where it writes its hopes and achievements.
It is the theatre of all possibilities here and hereafter, but its atmosphere must be magnetic with love and faith where the spiritual forces may battle and exert their powers. We must first love all the world if we would have the world love us. Only what comes from the heart can reach the heart of the world, for mankind will care little for us unless we show we care for mankind. But what man earnestly desires and persistently wills and strives to accomplish through love will finally be attained. Love and goodness are all-powerful and will eventually conquer.
The first cause of all discontent, weariness, bitterness and vanity of life is selfishness. It is the corrosive element that rusts away all the pure gold of energy and aspiration. It is as amazing as sad that we burden ourselves with selfish strivings that are of no consequence, and miss the gladness and exhilaration of living. For no life is successful unless it is radiant with love and usefulness. Emerson says: "Life is an ecstasy and nothing else is really worth living. Happiness is not determined by a bank account or the flattering incense of praise, but is a mental and spiritual condition."
Ye who seek liberty know this; it can only be found in the liberty of your fellow men. Ye who seek happiness know this; ye can only find it in the happiness of others, and if you desire to be happy you must make others happy. This is God's eternal law of compensation—of altruism—love to others; what you do unto others you do unto yourself. Look upon thy fellow man with wisdom and thou shalt have love. Feel for thy fellow man with love and thou shalt have wisdom, and, having wisdom and love, thou hast God and heaven in thy heart. These are the golden rules of the New Testament, written in the reason, conscience and experience of men, as God's living book of wisdom and truth.
Every action has its rebound or echo. Others will return your love or hate as the mountains return an echo, and by the same law. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The hate you send forth will return to you, the love you gave will come back to you, for it is an immortal part of you and a part of Omnipotent Deity.
If you are sick, love! If you are envied, hated and slandered, love! If age and death steal upon you, love! For God is love, and heaven is love, and love is life eternal. This is God's law, this is the law of man's nature, the law of the New Testament, the law of love and life, the law of the universe.
Whatever may be man's misfortune, if he has a love of humanity, a love of literature, art or nature, he has resources of happiness that nothing can remove. With these the poor man is rich, and the rich man can never be poor. For each by love has overcome the world. Therefore believe and love, and hold fast to the conviction that the forces of life are divine and eternal, and their laws written in the reason and consciences of men, and that death is only a transition from our world to another of greater beauty and perfection. The inadequacy of earth-life to satisfy the soul's capabilities is evidence that its career must continue hereafter in brighter worlds of celestial love and destiny.
It is said the common epitaph of humanity is, "They mean well, try a little and fail much." But if love is their guiding star and they obey the dictates of their reason and conscious duty, their lives cannot be failures. Most of our troubles and cares, like echoes, do not exist until we call them forth. But sweet, subdued sorrow, and the tears of love and sympathy that spring from the generous heart to the soulful eyes, are like heavenly dews, and promote the growth of the soul. They should not be classed among the depressing trials. Neither should friendly rivalry, or laudable ambition to excel, be deemed trying aggressions, for they are beneficial phases of growth. Humanity should emancipate itself by hitching its chariot to the star of love, and switching the current of human energy from the circuit of worry and anger, and connecting it with the motors of good thoughts and noble deeds.
All men should realize the fact that anger turns the natural juices of the body into poison as the vibrations of thunder sour the sweetest milk. And every fit of anger is an electric trip-hammer that drives a nail into the coffin of life and shortens human existence. All nature reveals the law of "natural selection and survival of the fittest," and demands in man the highest perfection of love, beauty and self-development.
The culture of the divine essence of the soul, love and ideality will eventually emancipate, exalt and ennoble human life.
Love is the beginning of life. Love is the creative agency of all human and animal existence. Even the vegetable world, trees, shrubs and flowers have their dual, sexual amities, and their male and female blending in the love of unity and the unity of love, and thereby propagate and continue their species in the ever changing cycles of life.
All that live must come from loving. The positive and negative circles of electric and spiritual forces in man and woman must be broken and reunited in a combined circle of dual vitalizing growth and power before God's first command, "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth," can be consummated.
God has so organized the universe that love brings life and continues it, while hatred checks all the sweet gushing juices and joys of hope and life, and, brings death and darkness. Love commands the electric creative forces of human life as God commands them in the boundless heavens. Love is the elemental part of God, and the godly part of man. And he whose soul is diffused with love is enwrapt in the effulgent drapery of Divine goodness and joy.
Woman by Divine right and the Supreme decrees of destiny is the ministering angel of love and life, and is next to God the Creator and Preserver of the human race.
All that live must come from loving
In the hallowed name of wife,
God has set the bounds of being
And the joy of giving life.
Some very strong writers believe man's body is the product of the thought and mental force of his progenitors. If so, the mental impulse of love, and even its lower form of animal passion, is the begetter of the human race. Mrs. Josephine Barton, in "Mothers of the Living," declares, "The history of flesh has its beginning in the male atom, and exists as an unembodied idea in mental solution. Thinking results in ideas and ideas crystallize into form. Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made. The physical gets its breath of life from the mental or spiritual. The first avenue of development after its appearance in form in the male parent is the daily and hourly thinking, exercised in the mentality of the parent. These atoms, though microscopic, are the brain and spinal cord of the atom man. The product of the male element is judgment and will, of the female love and intuition; so the atom man crystallizes only the seat, brain and nerve faculties. This structure—temple of the soul—like the acorn, has inherent within it growth and fruit possibilities."
She arouses useful thought and adds with force and eloquence, "All men are, by their daily thinking, moulding the brain and spinal cords of future men.
"O men of earth! what qualities are you weaving in your thread of thought? Of what substance are you moulding the grand army of the future race? Are you endowing them with the intellect of true manhood, or crystallizing into atoms all manner of distorted brains?
"Our bodies are bulletins of our thoughts, and the male atom is the microscopic beginning of childlife, and when expelled from the loins of their progenitors, become the 'living souls' that people the cities and the plains. The human atom thus formed, when imparted into the custody of the mother, is ready for the breath of life which the mother mind, by love and intuition will breathe into it. The temple for a human soul is thus constructed. The nourishment then given is as pliant to thought as the ocean to a raindrop, and prenatal education is most important. O splendid fact! Be lifted up, thou expectant mother of the living! You are at liberty to take the helm of possibility and steer for the sunlit isles where all sons are gods. The mother should be herself what she would have her child be. She should affirm and reiterate. 'I am the heir of all wisdom, the expression of all beauty, the revelation of love and truth, the life proclamation of the Eternal. I am serene, radiant, valiant, loving, aspiring, knowing.' Then will all conceptions be immaculate and all human life glorious and divine."
I maintain that woman is the prototype of the godmother of the universe, who is the third person of the Trinity, known as the Holy Ghost or Comforter. The Trinity of the theologians—three persons in one—is contrary to all human reason and logic. It contradicts every type of being in universal creation, and would be a monstrosity in natural law and creative experience. It defies all analysis and subverts all law of animate and inanimate nature. God never thus contradicts himself, his own laws, and his created universe, or the book of nature and man's reason; and no such doctrine is taught in the New Testament, when analyzed by a true construction of language.
To deny the Trinity was a crime punished by death a century or two ago in England; and ecclesiastical authority there and elsewhere prescribed what man should believe for centuries, or receive the punishment prescribed by law or the Inquisition. Until recent times men were not allowed to think for themselves.
But reason and truth, written in the soul of man by the finger of Deity, will assert its divine right to correct the blunders of ignorance and superstition.
And as it was many ages before the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was discovered and recognized, so it required modern intelligence and reason to place woman in her true and God-given position; and recognize in God the Father, God the Son and God the Mother, the same natural trinity in heaven as exists on earth in father, mother and child. The book of nature, and the book of man's reason asserts there can be no father or son without a mother. They would be an anomaly in nature, unthinkable and impossible, and if there is a Father and Son in heaven, there is a Divine Mother, who has always been there as the companion and counselor of Deity, and is also the Divine Comforter of all human souls. And if there is sex in all nature, it is reasonable to believe there is sex in the family of Deity. When Christ said, "I and my Father are one," he meant one in purpose and spirit.
Up to the recent centuries, woman was the chattel slave of man, kept in ignorance and degradation, and deemed inferior to man, and the past ages would not recognize her divinity, or her equality with man. But now she stands on a level with man, heart to heart, and brain to brain, and every true man offers her the tribute of love and reverence, and recognizes that in all the realms of earth and stars there is no being so worthy of love and worship, next to Deity, as the mothers of men.
They are the saviors of mankind, whose vicarious suffering has brought forth and redeemed the generations of men. They are the trees of life in God's earthly garden, whose branches, ladened with the fruits of love, have called forth the mysterious blossoms of being to bloom in the fields of time and people the land of immortal spirits.
The beginning of civilization was when the mother bid the rude men of the forest and hill to build the needed shelter in grove or cave to protect her and her helpless offspring. And from that simple shelter or thatched-roofed hut has sprung the vine-clad cottage, and the marble palace, and the family roof-tree of every house in every land. It was the mothers of men who filled up the broken ranks of war, and brought peace, and wove garments, and refined and civilized man and taught him the arts and commerce of civilized life. And could the mothers control the destinies of nations, their loving hearts would banish war, and peace would be universal.
And the most precious heritage of every nation on the green earth is the nobility of its mothers, for without noble mothers, it can have no worthy and manly men.
All nations should recognize this fact, and instead of giving pensions to those who destroy life, they should give them to those who multiply and replenish it, and make a nation worthy of existence and fame. And God will surely bestow on the mothers of men a crown of eternal glory for every life added to his empire and domain of deathless eternities.
The momentous question arises in this busy age of travel and pleasure, when so many seek the luxurious ease of opulence and avoid as far as possible all cares and responsibility, Will the emancipated womanhood of our land deny the law of love and life, written in the heart and conscience of all sentient beings, and decline the angelic ministrations of maternity? Will they refuse to join in the economy of God and nature, or leave this high and holy vocation to the ignorant and superstitious of our foreign element? If so, the citizenship of our beloved nation will degenerate with each succeeding generation.
Will the modern woman seek social pleasures and the flattery of passing admiration in lieu of home life and maternity, and be satisfied to flutter as a gaudy butterfly of fashion? Will her womanly heart find the prattle of a baby voice and the pressure of its chubby hands upon her smiling face, as it crows in her loving arms, a truer, sweeter pleasure than the social triumphs of a few fleeting seasons? A joyous child brings more pleasure to a household than a marble palace with mahogany furniture and an automobile.
This is the all-important woman question of the future—the question of race suicide. For the entrance of woman into all the vocations of business life, the tendency to avoid domestic cares, the laxity of the marriage vows, together with the elimination of homes for boarding houses, and the prevalence of divorces, makes it a serious question for the future. Already this pressing vital question causes the wisest men of France to tremble for the future of their race and nation, for its shrinking population is forcing it from the rank of a first-class power to the humiliation of weakness and decay. Will they listen to France's Macedonian call and the law of love and life written in their womanly natures?
Humanity of the past and present is not final. It shall not cease at the present development. Human society was never static. We are at the beginning of the greatest changes in human history. There will be no shock, but the transforming, silent touch of universal evolution, whose voice speaks thus: "We are the creatures of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will come—one day in the unending succession of days—when the beings now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on this earth as on a footstool, and they shall laugh and reach out their hands among the stars."
