Читать книгу The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-Van Der Donckt Discussion - B. H. Roberts - Страница 9

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Is there any doubt about men being the sons of God? If I thought there was any in your minds, I would like to read to you the words of an authority upon this question. Paul, in speaking of the unknown God to whom the Athenians had erected an altar, said to them:

God that made the world and all things therein * * * hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.^[A]

[Footnote A: Acts 17:24-29.]

Why ought they not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver, graven by art and man's device? Because the very divinity within them, their own kinship with God, ought to have taught them better than to bow down to images of wood and stone, the creation of man's hands. "Ye are the offspring of God," said the apostle. And David, as quoted a moment ago, said: "I have said: Ye are Gods, and all of you are children of the Most High." Upon which passage, it must be remembered, Jesus fixed the seal of his approval, as shown a moment ago, where he quotes it in controversy with the Jews.

Is it a strange and blasphemous doctrine, then, to hold that men at the last shall rise to the dignity that the Father has attained? Is it "heathenish" to believe that the offspring shall ultimately be what the parent is? My soul, I wonder why men at all conscious of the marvelous powers within themselves should question this part of our faith. Think for a moment what progress a man makes within the narrow limits of this life. Regard him as he lies in the lap of his mother, a mere piece of organized, red pulp—a new-born babe! There are eyes, indeed, that may see, but cannot distinguish objects; ears that may hear, but cannot distinguish sounds; hands as perfectly fashioned as yours or mine, but helpless, withal; feet and limbs, but they are unable to bear the weight of his body, much less walk. There lies a man in embryo, but helpless. And yet, within the span of three score years and ten, by the marvelous working of that wondrous power within that little mass of pulp, what a change may be wrought! From that helpless babe may arise one like Demosthenes or Cicero, or Pitt, or Burke, or Fox, or Webster, who shall compel listening senates to hear him, and by his master mind dominate their intelligence and their will, and compel them to think in channels that he shall mark out for them. Or from such a babe may come a Nebuchadnezzar, or an Alexander, or a Napoleon, who shall found empires or give direction to the course of history. From such a beginning may come a Lycurgus, a Solon, a Moses, or a Justinian, who shall give constitutions and laws to kingdoms, empires and republics, blessing happy millions unborn in their day, and direct the course of nations along paths of orderly peace and virtuous liberty. From the helpless babe may come a Michael Angelo, who from some crude mass of stone from the mountain side shall work out a heaven-born vision that shall hold the attention of men for generations, and make them wonder at the God-like powers of man that has created an all but living and breathing statue. Or a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Handel, may come from the babe, and call out from the silence those melodies and the richer harmonies that lift the soul out of its present narrow prison house and give it fellowship for a season with the Gods. Out from that pulp-babe may arise a master mind who shall seize the helm of the ship of state, and give to a nation course and direction through troublesome times, and anchor it at last in a haven of peace, prosperity and liberty; crown it with honor, too, and give it a proud standing among the nations of the earth; while he, the savior of his country, is followed by the benedictions of his countrymen.

And all this may be done by a man in this life! Nay, it has been done, between the cradle and the grave—within the span of one short life. Then what may not be done in eternity by one of these God-men? Remove from his path the incident of death; or, better yet, contemplate him as raised from the dead; and give to him in the full splendor of manhood's estate, immortality, endless existence, what may we not hope that he will accomplish? What limits can you venture to fix as marking the boundary of his development, of his progress? Are there any limits that can be conceived? Why should there be any limits thought of? Grant immortality to man and God for his guide, what is there in the way of intellectual, moral, and spiritual development that he may not aspire to? If within the short space of mortal life there are men who rise up out of infancy and become masters of the elements of fire and water and earth and air, so that they well-nigh rule them as Gods, what may it not be possible for them to do in a few hundreds or thousands of millions of years? What may they not do in eternity? To what heights of power and glory may they not ascend?

It is idle today to ask men to be satisfied with the old sectarian notions of man's future life, where at best he is to be but one of a minstrelsy twanging harps and singing to the glory of an incorporeal, bodiless, passionless, immaterial incomprehensible God. Such conceptions of existence no longer satisfy the longings of the intelligent or spiritual-minded man.^[A]

[Footnote A: On this subject Sir Robert Ball, the great English astronomer and man of science, and who is feelingly spoken of as "a man with singular capacity for popularizing science without debasing it"—has the following passage:

"The popular notion that man, once escaped from the confinement of the body, does nothing except sit on a cloud and sing psalms to the glory of a God, whose glory is so perfect without him that he was content when man was not in being, rests upon no evidence, whether of reason or revelation, and seems to us derived either from man's long experience of overtoil and misery and his enjoyment, therefore, of their absence, or from the inherent Asiatic dislike of exertion. Why should we not work forever as well as now? If man can live again, and grow in that new life, and exert himself to carry out the always hidden, but necessarily magnificent purpose of the Creator, then indeed, his existence may have some importance, and the insignificance of his place of origin be forgotten. For he has an inherent quality which does not belong, so far as the mind can see what must always remain partially dark, even the Divine; he is capable of effort, and in the effort and through the effort, not only of growing greater than before, but of adding force to an inanimate thing like his own body. What if that power of effort should be slowly aggrandized until man, now a little higher than the monkey, became a really great being?" ("Self Culture" for March, 1899.)]

Growth, enlargement, expansion for his whole nature, as he recognizes that nature in its intellectual, moral, spiritual and social demands, are what his soul calls for; and the systems of theology that rise not to the level of these hopes are unworthy man's attention.

Keep these thoughts in mind for a moment, I pray you. That is, remember the powers in man, what he has attained to in this life, and what it is conceivable for him to attain unto after the resurrection of the dead, when death shall have been removed from his pathway. Keep this in mind, while I bring to bear on the theme under consideration another line of facts.

Let us consider, just for a moment, and in a very simple manner, the universe in which man lives. And let us start with what we know, and keep well within those lines. First of all, then, as to the earth itself: Thanks to the knowledge man now has respecting the earth it is no longer regarded as the center of the universe, around which revolve sun and moon and stars, that in the ages of darkness were thought to have been created for the sole purpose of giving light by day and by night to the earth. No; man has learned the true relation of the earth to these other objects in the universe. He knows that the earth is but one of a number of planets—one of a group of eight major planets, and a larger number of minor ones, that revolve regularly around the sun—and one of the smallest of the group of major planets at that. Outside of this group of planets, with whose motions and laws man has become familiar, is a vast host of what are called "fixed stars;" that is, stars that apparently have no motion, but which really do move, only their orbits are so immense that man with the unaided eye can not discern their movements—hence we call them "fixed stars."^[A] Our astronomers have learned that these "fixed stars" are not like the planets which move in their orbits about our sun, but, on the contrary, are like the sun itself, self-luminous bodies, and doubtless like the sun the center of opaque planetary groups; or at least we may say that reasoning from analogy, that is regarded as a very probable fact.

[Footnote A: "To the unassisted eye, the stars seem to preserve the same relative positions in the celestial sphere generation after generation. If Job, Hipparchus, or Ptolemy should again look upon the heavens, he would, to all appearance see Aldebaran, Orion, and the Pleiades exactly as he saw them thousands of years ago, without a single star being moved from its place. But the refined methods of modern astronomy, in which the telescope is brought in to measure spaces absolutely invisible to the eye, have shown that this seeming unchangeability is not real, but that the stars are actually in motion, only the rate of change is so slow that the eye would not, in most cases, notice it for thousands of years. In ten thousand years, quite a number of stars, especially the brighter ones, would be seen to have moved, while it would take a hundred thousand years to introduce a very noticeable change in the aspect of the constellations." (Newcomb's Astronomy, pp. 464-5.)]

Sir Robert Ball in speaking of these worlds and the probability of their being inhabited says:

We know of the existence of thirty millions of stars or suns, many of them much more magnificent than the one which gives light to our system. The majority of them are not visible to the eye, or even recognizable by the telescope, but sensitized photographic plates—which are for this purpose eyes that can stare unwinking for hours at a time—have revealed their existence beyond all doubt or question, though most of them are almost inconceivably distant, thousands or tens of thousands of times as far off as our sun. A telegraphic message, for example, which would reach the sun in eight minutes, would not reach some of these stars in eighteen hundred years. The human mind, of course, does not really conceive such distances, though they can be expressed in formula which the human mind has devised, and the bewildering statement is from one point of view singularly depressing. It reduces so greatly the probable importance of man in the universe. It is most improbable, almost impossible, that these great centers of light should have been created to light up nothing, and as they are far too distant to be of use to us, we may fairly accept the hypothesis that each one has a system of planets around it like our own. Taking an average of only ten planets to to each sun, that hypothesis indicates the existence, within the narrow range to which human observation is still confined, of at least three hundred millions of separate worlds, many of them doubtless of gigantic size, and it is nearly inconceivable that those worlds can be wholly devoid of living and sentient beings upon them. Granting the to us impossible hypothesis that the final cause of the universe is accident, a fortuitous concourse of self-existent atoms, still the accident which produced thinking beings upon this little and inferior world must have frequently repeated itself: while if, as we hold, there is a sentient Creator, it is difficult to believe, without a revelation to that effect, that he has wasted such glorious creative power upon mere masses of insensible matter. God cannot love gases. The high probability, at least, is that there are millions of worlds—for, after all, what the sensitized paper sees must be but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole—occupied by sentient beings.^[A]