酷兔英语
    当前位置:
  1. 首页
  2. 文章
  3. 娱乐英语
  4. 原版小说
  5. 正文

God The Invisible King-Part2_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

0 收藏 0 分享 0 赞

章节正文
文章总共2页
not us but dealing with us and through us, he has an aim and that

means he has a past and future; he is within time and not outside



it. And they point out that this is really what everyone who prays

sincerely to God or gets help from God, feels and believes. Our



practice with God is better than our theory. None of us really pray

to that fantastic, unqualified danse a trois, the Trinity, which the



wranglings and disputes of the worthies of Alexandria and Syria

declared to be God. We pray to one single understanding person.



But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at Nicaea, who stuck

their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this world; this was



no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy Mystery full

of magicalterror, and few religious people have thought it worth



while to revive these terrors by a definitecontradiction. The

truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the



comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to

the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patentabsurdities of the



official creed. But one magnificent protest against this

theological fantasy must have been the work of a sincerely religious



man, the cold superbhumour of that burlesque creed, ascribed, at

first no doubt facetiously and then quite seriously, to Saint



Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond its original

intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the church.



The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing

to its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become



least patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new

believers are very definitely set upon a thoroughanalysis of the



nature and growth of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has

grown up a practice of assuming that, when God is spoken of, the



Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea is meant. But that God trails with

him a thousand misconceptions and bad associations; his alleged



infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange preferences, his

vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even make a



caricature of the True God; they compose an altogetherdifferent and

antagonistic figure.



It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has

led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite



qualities for their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the

mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and



fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic

dogmas, and the extremepoverty and confusion of the circle of ideas



within which they thought. Many of these makers of Christianity,

like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his



election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church

from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and



personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the

struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed



their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions. There

was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than



there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of

educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,



either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population

of Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the



Christian God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, "in hoc

signo vinces," and the argument so natural to the minds of those



days and so absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all

knowledge, and existed for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to



set up any other god against him. . . .




文章总共2页
文章标签:名著  

章节正文
Copyright © 2023 Qeto All rights reserved.
商务合作 | 联系我们 | 关于我们 | 版权声明 | 隐私条款 | 如果智培

京ICP备05059198号-1 京公网安备 11011202003401号