Have the pebbles of the fiord a
perception of their combined being?
have they a
consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of
man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us
therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths
presented to our minds in the union of a Material
universe and a
Spiritual
universe,--a
creationvisible, ponderable, tangible,
terminating in a
creation in
visible, imponderable, intangible;
completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by
indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives
equally from the
one and from the other! Let us
mingle in one world these two worlds,
absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact.
However
abstract man may suppose the relation which binds two things
together, the line of
junction is
perceptible. How? Where? We are not
now in search of the vanishing point where Matter subtilizes. If such
were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by
physical relations,
studded with stars at immeasurable distances the heavens which veil
Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why you deny Him the
faculty of giving a body to thought.
"Thus your in
visible moral
universe and your
visiblephysicaluniverseare one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from
substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that
presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us
or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds
perceive, all these
named and unnamed things
compose--in order to fit the problem of
Creation to the
measure of your logic--a block of finite Matter; but
were it
infinite, God would still not be its master. Now, reasoning
with your views, dear
pastor, no matter in what way God the
infiniteis
concerned with this block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and
retain the attributes with which man invests Him. Seek Him in facts,
and He is not; spiritually and
materially, you have made God
impossible. Listen to the Word of human Reason forced to its
ultimateconclusions.
"In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only
two states are possible between them,--either God and Matter are
contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were Reason--the
light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence--
accumulated in one brain, even that
mighty brain could not
invent a
third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God. Let human
philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of ideas, let
religions
accumulate images and
beliefs, revelations and mysteries,
you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose between the two
propositions which
compose it; you have no option, and one as much as
the other leads human reason to Doubt.
"The problem thus established, what signifies Spirit or Matter? Why
trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another,
since the Being who guides them is shown to be an
absurdity" target="_blank" title="n.荒谬,愚蠢;谬论">
absurdity? Why
continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it,
whether
creation is rising towards Spirit or descending towards
Matter, if the questioned
universe gives no reply? What signifies
theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since
whichever side of the problem is man's choice, his God exists not? Let
us for a moment take up the first
proposition, and suppose God
contemporaneous with Matter. Is subjection to the action or the co-
existence of an alien substance
consistent with being God at all? In
such a
system, would not God become a
secondary agent compelled to
organize Matter? If so, who compelled Him? Between His material gross
companion and Himself, who was the arbiter? Who paid the wages of the
six days' labor imputed to the great Designer? Has any determining
force been found which was neither God nor Matter? God being regarded
as the
manufacturer of the machinery of the worlds, is it not as
ridiculous to call Him God as to call the slave who turns the
grindstone a Roman citizen? Besides, another difficulty, as insoluble
to this
supreme human reason as it is to God, presents itself.
"If we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who
put the world upon a
tortoise, the
tortoise on an
elephant, and do not
know on what the feet of their
elephant may rest? This
supreme will,
issuing from the
contest between God and Matter, this God, this more
than God, can He have existed throughout
eternity without
willing what
He afterwards willed,--admitting that Eternity can be divided into two
eras. No matter where God is, what becomes of His intuitive
intelligence if He did not know His
ultimate thought? Which, then, is
the true Eternity,--the created Eternity or the uncreated? But if God
throughout all time did will the world such as it is, this new
necessity, which harmonizes with the idea of
sovereign intelligence,
implies the co-
eternity of Matter. Whether Matter be co-
eternal by a
divine will
necessarily accordant with itself from the
beginning, or
whether Matter be co-
eternal of its own being, the power of God, which
must be
absolute,
perishes if His will is circumscribed; for in that
case God would find within Him a determining force which would control
Him. Can He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His
creation in a past
eternity than in the coming
eternity?
"This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. Let us now
inquire into its effects. If a God compelled to have created the world
from all
eternity seems
inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in
perpetual cohesion with His work. God, constrained to live
eternally
united to His
creation is held down to His first position as workman.
Can you
conceive of a God who shall be neither in
dependent of nor
dependent on His work? Could He destroy that work without challenging
Himself? Ask yourself, and decide! Whether He destroys it some day, or
whether He never destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes
without which God cannot exist. Is the world an experiment? is it a
perishable form to which
destruction must come? If it is, is not God
in
consistent and impotent? in
consistent, because He ought to have seen
the result before the attempt,--
moreover why should He delay to
destroy that which He is to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He
have created an
imperfect man?
"If an
imperfectcreation contradicts the faculties which man
attributes to God we are forced back upon the question, Is
creationperfect? The idea is in
harmony with that of a God
supremely
intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the
degradation of His work, and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect
world is,
necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not
perish, it
could neither advance nor
recede, it would
revolve in the everlasting
circumference from which it would never issue. In that case God would
be
dependent on His work; it would be co-
eternal with Him; and so we
fall back into one of the
propositions most antagonistic to God. If
the world is
imperfect, it can progress; if perfect, it is
stationary.
On the other hand, if it be impossible to admit of a
progressive God
ignorant through a past
eternity of the results of His
creative work,
can there be a
stationary God? would not that imply the
triumph of
Matter? would it not be the greatest of all negations? Under the first
hypothesis God
perishes through
weakness; under the second through the
Force of his
inertia.
"Therefore, to all
sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the
conception and
execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God,
is to deny God. Forced to choose, in order to
govern the nations,
between the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have
preferred this
solution of it. Hence the
doctrine of the two
principles of Magianism, brought from Asia and adopted in Europe under
the form of Satan warring with the Eternal Father. But this religious
formula and the
innumerable aspects of
divinity that have
sprung from
it are surely crimes against the Majesty Divine. What other term can
we apply to the
belief which sets up as a rival to God a
personification of Evil, striving
eternally against the Omnipotent
Mind without the
possibility of
ultimatetriumph? Your statics declare
that two Forces thus pitted against each other are reciprocally
rendered null.
"Do you turn back,
therefore, to the other side of the problem, and
say that God pre-existed, original, alone?
"I will not go over the
preceding arguments (which here return in full
force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the
questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds;
let us look only at the difficulties
inherent to this second theory.
If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him;
Matter was
therefore drawn from His
essence;
consequently Matter in
itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine
Spirit. If this be so, the World is Eternal, and also it must be God.