We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man's hand.Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest barbarities of thought.We are only beginning to realize that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually;we perceive him and then again we are blind to him.God is the last thing added to the completeness of human life.To most His presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us for ever from the sun.All this appeared now so clear and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.
In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives.That is an unreasonable desire.There is no permanent exaltation of belief.It is contrary to the nature of life.One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day.If it were possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy.
But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance.Even Jesus himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such immediate convictions.That is in the constitution of life.Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing.It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
"We don't know directly," Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture of the hand, "we don't see.We can't.We hold on to the remembered glimpse, we go over our reasons."...
And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver, because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love, there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and special forms of service to justify a priesthood."God is God," he whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed.God is his own definition; there is no other definition of God.Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite.It were as reasonable to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree.He had imagined God as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun.The vision of his drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible.Of that he was now sure.He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible likeness.He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all such presentations were false.Just as much and just as little was God the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky.
These riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of common living.They were beyond the needs of common living.He was but a little earth parasite, sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal functions on a minor planet.Within the compass of terrestrial living God showed himself in its own terms.The life of man on earth was a struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and within.So long as men were men, so would they see God.Only when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond.So we knew God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain and pleasure.
(12)
Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of the immediate presence of God.He floated in that realization.He was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated every recess of his mind.He spread out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.
