Читать книгу A Rebel's Vision Splendid - James H. G. Chapple - Страница 3
ОглавлениеTHE CULTURE OF THE GLAD-EYE
It is necessary to give a keynote to this book on “The Vision Splendid.” It is done without hesitation, for the writer is an optimist. The best way to cultivate this optimism is to try and understand the universe, then to try and understand God, without the orthodox limitations, and finally to try and understand our relations to both God and the universe. To see man, that is, Divine man creating the new earth by the Universal Divine Spirit within him. The result of this understanding is a radiant optimism. The new world being created in this age of science means that in the near future disease will be gone, poverty will be gone, war will be gone, and insanity will be gone. So the reader of this book will now know that the writer has diligently cultured the glad-eye. A right understanding develops optimism. A wrong understanding means pessimism. As an orthodox parson he was a pessimist, for he ever referred to the world as having been created six thousand years ago. Now he has learnt the world has never been created at all, but is being created. That creation never ceases! The divinity in man is the creator; man is now co-operating with God; the world is in the making, and we are learning at last our social responsibilities, and the improvement of society is our happy work. To help God create a world of sunshine for everybody. In this duty we learn the deep sense of our importance and we can join in the great adventure. The cause of so much gloom and misunderstanding is the forgetting that man himself is responsible for the creation of the better world. Man himself is responsible for the social injustices as they stand. God wills the happiness of all, while man, assisted by the orthodox creeds, crushes the divinity within him and prefers to dwell on the depravity within. Man at present is a victim of competitive capitalism, and this evil system interferes with God’s goodness. God’s moral law of happiness is thus interfered with, but when man learns to co-operate with God he will find that God’s benevolence leads on to Communism, but not the fictitious Communism abroad to-day—that of force, violence and dictatorships, but the Communism of love and brotherhood.
While the writer of “The Vision Splendid” is a radiant optimist, yet he fully knows the agonies to be suffered during the birth of the new age which is upon us. The mother of the expected child also anticipates the travailing, but she is an optimist and knows the result will be worth it. If it was an ordeal too easy, the sense of the ultimate value would be lost or at least lessened. So with the birth of the new era; we have to endure the throes, they are overdue and almost upon us, but the results will be worth it; the agonies endured in the process will be as nothing compared to the new world, where the unity of all human creatures is recognised and where the well-being of each is the well-being of all, and vice versa.
At the present time our system—and we are all more or less the victims of it—the capitalist system—interferes with God’s law of happiness. The social habit of rent, interest and profit perverts God’s moral law. Capitalism pulls awry, like the perturbations of Neptune. There is a Divine law of natural obligation, and it cannot be fulfilled under present conditions. It was Ruskin who taught that all interest is usury if it burdens anyone. Well, it does—it burdens ninety out of every hundred. We must away with the whole moral code, away with it because it is immoral, and not of God. Under its baneful influence poverty and crime can be forecasted as accurately as the moon’s eclipse. We refuse to bend God’s moral law to fit a crooked society. We refuse to conform further to the evil and immoral system. It is an evil and wicked thing, and we are responsible for its existence; we have the power, by the divinity within us, to lessen the evil, to wipe it out, and thereby to increase the common good. The person who refuses to join us in this, the person who wilfully defends the present immoral social injustices, is a mental and moral pigmy; he suffers with a mental and moral cataract. His mental attitude must be changed and this book of “The Vision Splendid” is written for the purpose of opening the windows of the soul. God’s universe is good! There is more light than shadow! Through man’s selfish and so-called sacred (?) laws of property, there is a temporary eclipse; society is darkened by the nationalist, imperialist, capitalist and military monsters, who make life hardly worth living. They fill society with the slimy shapes of jealousy—the muddy forms of fear—the vampires of worry—and reptilian class hate. While at the same time God’s splendid universe is full of light and love, and it is free for everybody; yes, and free of income-tax, too, if people will only leave the frosty side and walk in the sun. The frosty side cannot be left until the social order is radically changed.
The tree of capitalism cannot be trimmed, clipped or pruned; it has to be uprooted. Otherwise humanity cannot be happy, for the pleasures of yesterday were spoilt by fret and to-day is spoilt by the fear of to-morrow, so man is ever to be, but never is blest. Yet God is Love!
The letter fails—the systems fall!
And every system wanes!
The spirit overbrooding all;
Eternal Love remains!
My object in starting this book by writing a chapter on “The Culture of the Glad-eye” is to point out that a true Divine optimism ends in serenity. Someone has truly said the last lesson of culture is serenity. To thinking people who at times are perturbed by the thought of the volcanic disturbances of the near future, to such let me say, there is a real optimism that ends in bringing about that beautiful jewel: “Calmness,” the result of an attitude of mind—a mental poise. Emerson cultured it during the American Civil War. Compare this calmness of soul with the opposite state of fuss, fume, worry and so on, where there is little or no poise of mind. Contrast it with the uncontrolled passion, the ungoverned grief, or the tempestuous anxiety so often seen amid the crash and turmoil of things. There is something very attractive about the right mental poise. The Carpenter of Nazareth surely had it when the storm was raging and he, asleep! Yes, there is an attraction here, for we all reverence strength of that sort. Most of us are not admirers of the late Andrew Carnegie, but a visitor sleeping in Skibo Castle saw on the mantlepiece these lines:
Sleep sweetly
In this quiet room,
O thou
Whoe’er thou art:
And let
No mournful yesterday
Disturb thy peaceful heart,
Nor let to-morrow
Scare thy rest
With dreams of coming ill.
Thy Maker is thy Changeless Friend;
His Love surrounds thee still—
Forget thyself and all the world,
Put out each glaring light—
The stars are watching overhead.
Sleep sweetly, then;
Good Night!
This is fine philosophy, and shows that even a millionaire can be troubled with a flash of reason at times, although very few of them have that Divine flash. It is more often found with a Buddha, a Socrates, a Jesus, or a George Fox. Why? Because the mental poise of serenity is the result of The Vision Splendid. After all, these so-called impractical visions or ideals are the seedlings of realities, just as the oak sleeps in the acorn, or the bird in the egg. To be candid, the visionary idealists are the world’s saviours, and ever have been and ever will be, and he who cherishes the ideal is aware of it by a higher intuition and besides he is apt to realise it:
Mind is Master-power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The Tool of Thought, and shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass,
Environment is but his looking-glass.
All this leads me to and opens up the subject of this book on “The Vision Splendid.” Our thoughts, our ideals, can affect circumstances; the thoughts and ideals we weave within will help to weave the circumstances without, for the Divinity that shapes our ends is very much within—good thoughts cannot produce bad results, nor bad thoughts good results. When one says of a fallen friend: “It was a sudden fall!” Just retort: “No”—it was preceded by long secret thoughts and wrong ideals. The mind is a garden or a wilderness—plants or weeds—and plants are the result of culture. A man may not altogether choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and thoughts shape his circumstances. He can go down to a selfish and evil brutism, or he can rise to The Vision Splendid and cultivate the Divinity within:
The human WILL, that force unseen,
The offspring of a deathless soul,
Can hew a way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene.
So let us see that man is a growth by mental law, and the future God-like man will be the result of the law of continued right thinking, we will:
Be not impatient of delay,
But wait as one who understands;
When spirit rises and commands
The gods are ready to obey.
