Читать книгу The Potter and the Clay - Arthur F. Winnington Ingram - Страница 8

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GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD[4]

"God is my King of old; the help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself."—Ps. lxxiv. 12.

God is either non-existent or His existence is the greatest fact in the universe. Either the secularist is right, and there is nothing but the strong hand and the keen brain of man and woman to better the condition of world, or, if there be a Person who created the great blazing suns that we call stars, whose imagination is so vast that He controls the movements of history, and yet whose knowledge is so detailed that the welfare of the smallest child in a great city is of infinite interest to Him, then the existence of that Person is the greatest fact in all the world. No question is so urgent as what He thinks about a problem; nothing is so vitally important as to know what His mind is, for instance, as to the issue of a great war. No one is quite so foolish as the man or woman who either plans his or her own life, or who propounds schemes for the improvement of the world, without taking the greatest Fact in all the world into account, or keeping in touch with what must be on this hypothesis the ultimate Source and Fount of all power and the Mainspring of all energy. If there be such a Person at all, the wires might as well expect to convey a message apart from the electric current as for the human instrument to avail without God.

Now, I think it is quite likely that among so many busy people, whose brains are all full of practical schemes, there may be some whose minds may have but little hold on God, and may be troubled by doubts, such as I remember my own mind was in the days of my youth. After all, one mind is very much like another; and in speaking to women I have long learnt to speak as if I was speaking to men, and in this I never found myself very much astray. If I tell you, then, how the reality of God gradually dawned upon one mind, it is only in the hope that through what may be similar clouds of vagueness and doubt the light may shine upon another.

1. I think undoubtedly that Nature was, and always will be to most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words, Nature drives us not only to God, but to a very strong God and a very present God. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we are "up against"—to use a cant phrase of the day—we are up against the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."

2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of God lies next through the conscience. What is it, this indistinct knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate self-interest?

Why must the boy leave his brilliant prospects and put himself under the bullets and shells in the trenches? Why must the mother let him go? It is only a shallow thinker, I believe, who can remain long under the impression that the "categorical imperative," as Kant called it, or, as we might say, this insistent, imperious voice, can be produced by any process of evolution at all. It speaks like the voice of a person; it argues like a person; it refuses to be silenced like a person. And the argument is more than justified that, if there is a Person who made the world and still carries it on, it is more than probably the same Person who is speaking to us in conscience. The fact that by His warnings and encouragements He clearly cares so much for righteousness is a standing witness that the Person who swings the stars is more than a strong and clever devil, which the author of the material universe alone might conceivably be, but a Person with a passion for goodness. Otherwise, as Dr. Chalmers said, He would not have placed in the breast of every one of His children, of every one of His created beings, a reclaiming witness against Himself.

We have come, then, a good way out of sceptical vagueness when we have arrived at a Person of appalling power, and yet of equally appalling righteousness, who is thundering His will through every conscience in the world, as though standing in the midst of the universe and striking at the same time four hundred million gongs; not leaving it for someone else to do, but doing it Himself.

But, alas! we are still far from loving Him, for indeed He is still far from being lovable. Love is the only thing which we cannot command at will and which we cannot give at will; and the world would be in a sorry plight so far as loving God is concerned, if nothing more had been done by God than this.

3. After all, there are many things which might make us inclined to hate this immensely strong and righteous Person. With all His strength and with all His righteousness, there is a terrible amount of suffering in the world. The old question that some of your children may have asked you who are mothers has far more in it than appears upon the surface: "Oh, mother, why does not God kill the devil?" The world is filled with injustice and cruelty, and especially so to-day. Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, as I have seen with my own eyes, are in ruins. So are thousands of homes in Belgium, France, and Poland, and yet not one single thing was done by the innocent inhabitants to deserve this fate. Who is going to give life again to the hundreds shot in cold blood in Louvain and Aerschott and elsewhere, and seen shot by one of the clergy of the diocese of London; or honour again to the outraged women and girls; or restore the dead children—born and unborn—to the mothers who lost their children in the last Zeppelin raid? Where is the God of the fatherless and of the widow? It is all very well to say, "It is God in His holy habitation." But why does He sit up there in His holy habitation while such things are being done upon earth? Is He reclining, as Tennyson pictured the ancient gods,