Studies in the Thought World · 17 of 23

Omnipresent Divinity

This is a scientific age. The domain of exact investigation is visibly broadening, and limitations are being pushed back in all directions. There have been other periods noted for their intellectual activity in certain directions, during which lofty climaxes have been reached. Great waves of architectural and artistic accomplishment, and eras of scholastic research in philosophy, theology, ethics, and jurisprudence, have risen to flood-tide, and finally receded to make room for their respective incoming successors. The manuscripts and tomes of the world have been crowded with facts and truths, and these have been heaped up in unrelated piles until their apexes reached as high as the breadth of their respective bases would permit. The artist, philosopher, geologist, astronomer, theologian, physician, scientist, economist, and jurist, each independent of the others, staked out his own territory, surveyed its boundaries, erected a high fence around it, and then proceeded to build thereupon. Imposing intellectual pyramids have thus been reared with painstaking accuracy, but each has been distinct and unrelated. Like a gigantic mathematical puzzle, all these departments have been in irregular-shaped fragments, and no one could fit them together. Facts, when isolated, are not facts, and truths out of relation tell lies.

In the present paper, the fourth and final of this series3 upon the great kingdom of mind and its relations, it seems logical to conclude with a synthetic though concise survey. A study of the parts from the standpoint of the whole is as interesting and profitable as is the converse, and far less common. It is true that some advanced theologians have given us very attractive concepts and glimpses of the “Immanent God;” but much remains to be done to bring this stupendous truth into the narrow, crowded, materialistic consciousness.

While specialty of pursuit is an obvious present characteristic, a deeper survey reveals a remarkable levelling of barriers and a general unification. The world has been crowded with acquired knowledge, so called, ninetenths of which has been not only useless but misleading. To have a great stock of facts at command was to be “learned.” Education consists in packing them in tiers in the human mind. Even if they were rubbish they made an imposing appearance. The man who had the most showy mental storehouse, with its shelves all labelled, towered above his fellows.

But a great change is apparent. The features in high relief at the close of the nineteenth century are interrelation and reinterpretation. A thousand disjointed truths are found to be meaningless; for it is only truths in relation that lead to the Truth. Only when dovetailed together do they acquire value. As Pope aptly observes:— “Not chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,

But as the world, harmoniously confus’d,

Where order in variety we see,

And where, though all things differ, all agree.” The synthetic method constitutes the present renaissance. The leading factors that are involved in the ushering in of the new dispensation are the evolutionary philosophy, the recognition of law as universal, and the 3. Originally used in connection with, and related to, the three preceding. third and greatest,—only yet in its dawn in the human consciousness,—the discovery that the established order is beneficent, and that only. “O happiness! our being’s end and aim!

Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name:

That something still which prompts the eternal sigh,

For which we bear to live, or dare to die.”

The kingdom of heaven is at length philosophically interpreted as a subjective condition rather than an objective locality. Nineteen centuries ago the Christ-quality which found early and complete expression through the personality of Jesus distinctly declared that it “is within you,” but until now the world has hardly been evolved up to the level of such a comprehension. As the law of the spiritual domain is discerned, the subjective elements which constitute that “kingdom”—which though immaterial may be present here and now—are scientifically recognized. The spiritual chemism which selects and intelligently combines the necessary constituents for this grand consummation in man is as exact and orderly as is the material compounding of the laboratory.

Either section of a beautiful polished sphere that has been shattered in twain is no more incomplete and fragmentary than is a science which is unspiritual, or a religion that is unscientific. Each when severed from its counterpart is not only arbitrary and abnormal, but misleading. The outcome in one case is a capricious supernaturalism, and in the other, a pessimistic materialism. Either one, untempered by its complement, is false. Congruity, adaptability, and beauty are set at naught, law dishonored, and the cosmos made to appear chaotic. To constructively bring together in the human mind these apparently ragged fragments in their true unity is the grandest work of this remarkable epoch.

Evolution, for so long regarded as atheistic and irreligious, and even yet tolerated by many only because of its cumulative and irresistible proofs, has done more to build up an intelligent consciousness of the One Infinite Intelligence, Goodness, and Will, than all the dogmatic formulas extant.

Descartes took a few detached facts, and studied them in relation. Darwin fitted in many more. Wallace increased the stock, and Spencer made immense additions on every side. The Great Unit has now grown, so that it is certain that niches will be found for all the fragmentary facts of the past.

But the greatest intuitive mind of modern times, who instinctively saw and felt the oneness and interrelation of all things, was Emerson. He was the fittest channel through which the combined ripened inspiration of the past could become focalized and articulated in the present era. The materialistic evolutionists wrought upon the outer crust among details, while his spiritual perception penetrated through and through. He refined and translated mechanical sequences, and pierced their outer coverings to the divinity within. He also divined that the one great human complement is conformity to law. That genial and spiritual philosopher, Henry Drummond, has also done noble service in the release of the minds of men from a supposed capriciousness of executive will in the spiritual realm.

Omnipresent Divinity, or the Allness of the Good, though taught by the highest and truest interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, and also in sacred writings other than the Hebraic, has been too transcendent a truth to find easy lodgment in the unspiritual, or even in the intellectual understanding. The ancient seers, who in varying degree were spiritual experts, had visions and experiences of it, and it had temporary manifestation in the days of the primitive church. But notably in the time of Constantine, when church and state became allied, there was a decline from spiritual purity and power to an intellectual and scholastic dogmatism, characterized by a great influx of creeds, ceremonies, apologetics, and controversies. The anthropomorphous idea of God was absorbed from the heathen nations, and even yet it is not displaced. A deific “Person” who will change his plans upon importunity, susceptible to improvement upon human suggestion, having various limitations, and working the universe from the outside, has been the mental concept of the Eternal Spirit in the average human consciousness. While with their lips and theories men have spoken of Infinite, Omniscient, Omnipresent Love, Will, and Intelligence, they have held in their thoughts an image, limited, local, and personal, often substantially a telescopic likeness of themselves.

A philosophical and vital at-one-ment with the divine mind and method should supersede the technical, commercial, supernatural, and superreasonable atonement. No artificial objective bargain or purchase through physical blood and suffering can sever cause and effect, or formally restore violated order. Such a belief has made men careless of conformity to divine law, because they counted upon the possession of this magic subterfuge.

To misinterpret the supreme love and goodness of the Divine Mind deranges the beautiful and normal relation between Divinity and humanity. The established order has never been abruptly broken into, and never will be. It is transcendently grand, beautiful, and harmonious. Human wisdom and importunity cannot improve it, for it needs no revision. Only conformity therewith, in thought, understanding, and consciousness, can fill the cup of human satisfaction and felicity. Such a supernal philosophy when thoroughly assimilated will, from its very nature, heal human ills on every plane of expression. Man’s idea of God is the very corner-stone, not only of his wholeness and happiness, but of his very being.

The dogmatic concept of the Holy Spirit as an infrequent supernatural influence “sent” or “poured out” by degrees, in response to importunity, literally means that Omnipresent Divinity is extremely variable in its omnipresence. Man has thus tried to fasten upon God the changeable states of his own consciousness. “But greatness which is infinite makes room

For all things in its lap to lie;

We should be crushed by a magnificence

Short of infinity.”

The scientific (exact, true, and lawful) Holy Spirit is an ever-present, practical, every-day force, which will occupy the soul-consciousness of man as he gives it room. It is a “Present Help,” or only another name for Omnipresent Good.

Can it be said that such a divine philosophy in any way dishonors or undermines religion (from religere, to bind to God) when compared with the past supernaturalism? Just the reverse. It not only honors and confirms everything that is pure and good in religion,—as a life,—but it consecrates all the other departments of human activity, and lifts them to a supernal level. It makes all truth religious truth, and all life divine life. It purifies the whole discordant realm of the “common and unclean” which has so long darkened and benumbed human consciousness.

The fish in the sea might as reasonably bewail the absence of water as for man to theorize about the “withdrawal” of the Spirit. Perhaps the denizens of the deep could not become oblivious to the surrounding medium; but it is quite possible for man, owing to the free moral choice of the ego, to shut even the Universal Entity out of his consciousness. Although immersed in it, yet; measurably, to him it is not only far away, but really non-existent. It was formerly said that it had been “grieved away,” or had “taken its flight,” which means that man had only closed his eyes, or rather his thoughts. The vital importance of the cultivation of the creative thinking-faculty, set forth in a former paper, will be especially manifest in this connection.

Paul’s immortal aphorism, “In him we live and move and have our being,” is no less scientific than religious. The resurrection of modern science will take place when it bestows some attention upon mind as well as matter, thoughts as well as molecules, soul as well as body, the spiritual as well as the material; and when it recognizes that law is as imperiously exact upon the immaterial plane as upon that of sense. Material science is not to be ignored or left uncultivated, but supplemented, rounded out, and interpreted. But when severed from its relations, even its axioms are untruthful.

The limitations of God that have dwelt in the minds of men have been the basis of prevailing limitations in human expression. The kind of a deity that one worships, whether formally or informally, at once determines the status of the worshipper. Idolatry, though unconscious, is perhaps as general in Christendom as elsewhere. Among the so-called “heathen,” at least with all the more intelligent classes, the “graven image” is only a symbol, or a visible fulcrum to aid in mental concentration. Unseen graven images are a thousand-fold more numerous than the visible idols of heathendom. Not only do men “fall down” before the blandishments of wealth, luxury, passion, power, and sensuous pursuit, but they substitute a great variety of blind forces for the One Force, and of unrealities for the ideal Reality.

As the Absolute, Unlimited, and Unconditioned are incomprehensible to the human mind, the highest subjective ideal of which the individual is capable receives the adoration. By immutable law man grows into the likeness and conforms to the quality of his Model. All growth is through ideals, but among them all each man always has one which to him is supreme.

The divine nativity being universal, man is ever restless until he returns to the “Father’s House,” and finds the counterpart and complement of his being. Deeply imbedded in his very constitution, there is a subtle soulhunger which—as demand always presupposes supply—will at length be satisfied. Pursuit in the wrong direction, and ignorant, unsuccessful searches for the normal divine satisfaction, make up those appearances which we call evil, disorder, disease, fear, grief, sin, and pessimism. All these negatives and deficiencies are not entities, but distorted and fragmentary views, delusive and mistaken impressions of the great Ideal. The whole objective cosmos is orderly and good, but the clouded and warped subjective lens colors the universe to the observer. The soul-vibrations are discordant with the chords and tones of the divine economy.

Man is immersed in an infinitude of unmanifested Good (God), and it presses in upon him in order that he may embody and express it. Vibration with its harmonies makes him transparent in soul, so that it shines through him without obstruction. Materialism clouds and thickens such clearness into opacity, and friction is the result.

The bewildered mentality evolves its own spectres, and clothes and arms them with fantastic terrors; and they people the thought domain, and, in due time, press forward for ultimate or physical expression. These dark shadows—for they have no positive reality—have all been named, crowned, and subjectively materialized, until they have become a great host of leering demons. For ages we have been descending to their own plane, and there waging an unsuccessful and perpetual warfare against them. We have vainly expected to conquer demons with demons, evils with evils, and shadows with shadows. We have fought with rusty and untempered material weapons, but have left in its scabbard the keen and glittering “sword of the Spirit.”

Among the latest therapeutic refinements, we essay to drive out diseases with their own kind and relation slightly toned down through “cultures.” We even poison the blood of our innocent and unsuspecting equine servitors, and then transfuse this abnormal sanguinary abomination (anti-toxine) into our own economy, expecting to cast out evil with evil. It has also been reserved for this highly developed age to torture animal sensibility—in the name of science—with wholesale vivisection, in order to study prolonged agony. We may well exclaim with Madame Roland (slightly paraphrased), “Science! Science! how many crimes are committed in thy name!” Cultures of disease-germs are made, multiplied, and sent out in the interest of so-called science. Evil will never be exterminated by sowing its seeds broadcast, even though they be somewhat diluted in quality. Only light can dispel darkness, and only good can drive out its opposite. “God made man upright” (ideally and potentially), “but they have sought out many inventions.”

To open the recesses of the soul to the ever-present Universal Goodness is to displace all distorted negatives. They cannot abide the divine companionship. Conscious communion and oneness with exuberant, allabounding Life and Wholeness sweep out all beliefs of the power of evil; for there is but one real objective Power in the universe, and that is Good. If there were other and adverse forces, Good could not be omnipresent and unlimited.

The Rev. A. W. Jackson, in his splendid little work, “The Immanent God,” recalls the impressions of his early childhood regarding the Deity. They are so typical and widely representative that they are of instructive interest. Recounting them, he says: “Over my head, in the first place, was a firm-set Mosaic firmament. Reared on this was a vast oval throne, around which were troops of angels, ever in readiness to praise or serve. Beside this throne, on a lower seat, sat the Christ, with benignity and mercy in his look; and on the throne itself a figure of a man of vast size, with round cheeks covered with beard, sitting in imperturbable majesty, surveying the world and issuing decrees respecting it, and looking down with calm severity upon the deeds of men.”

This may appear childish, yet such a mental picture, refined and expanded in varying degree, has formed the basis of much of the theology of the past. In a crude way it delineates that which has been inferred from dogma, gathered from hymnology, out-pictured by poetry, and interpreted from the superficial letter of Scripture, and by these means firmly lodged in the human mind. Even yet the hard outlines of such materialistic idolatry are but slowly dissolving. In a peculiar sense it is subjectively true that each worshipper creates—in and for himself—his own deity. He pays homage to his individual concept of the Reality rather than to the Reality itself.

It is clearly obvious that an ideal which may be defined as Omnipresent Love, Law, Life, Spirit, and Goodness is higher, purer, and more ennobling than one which would naturally be conveyed by the term “Person.” This is yet further evident when the word takes on additional limitation from its usual representative pronoun “He.” This comment is only made to call attention to the bald poverty of conventional language. We take cheap terms with commonplace associations, and from force of habit stamp them upon the Infinite. The terms employed should be vehicles for the highest ideals, and, so far as is possible, unweighted by limitations.

But even in sacred literature we find deific appellations which are not only limited, but, by association, unmoral, if not immoral. A few of these are Lord, King, Sovereign, Ruler, Judge, and Potentate. The associations connected with the general personal use of these terms have been largely autocratic, despotic, oppressive, vain, and sensuous. They have humanized God, and not spiritualized man. Oriental monarchs and despots left their stamp upon these official titles long before there was any general idea of human brotherhood and unity. Bearing in mind the wonderful moulding power of thought, what a contrast between the past concept of the “dread Sovereign of the skies” and the supreme consciousness of the Universal Life and our oneness with it! The latter ideal, held in the field of mental vision, sends an influx of vital invigoration even down to the subsoil of the physical organism.

When man turns his gaze God-ward, that which he sees is colored by subjective states and prejudices. Jealousy, wrath, and anger have been looked upon as divine features; and the crude pictures of the Deity that have crowded the human mind have represented him as cruel, as mocking at calamity, fond of flattery, and with innumerable other human foibles and prejudices. Under the discordant and depressing mental idolatries of the past, it is not strange that such a general nightmare has brought into manifestation a great host of mental and physical inharmonies and disorders. The idea, or the ideal, of God shapes the deep formative basis of human expression. A distorted view of the “All in All” produces a universal eclipse of Goodness, and renders normality and sanity almost impossible.

In the light of the great truth that universal law is beneficent, adversity disappears, discord is transformed, evil dissolves, the Sun of righteousness (right thinking) arises, illness is healed, and darkness flees away. We are backed by the forces of the universe if we adopt its methods and vibrate with its harmonies. The host of subjective spectres, demons, and torments are only bats and shadows which disappear into nothingness when the white light of Omnipresent Divinity floods the consciousness. This is not poetic imagery, but belongs to the new scientific recognition of the higher thought. To “practise the presence of God” is no strange, illogical exercise, but a rational, every-day accomplishment.

Everything is secular, and everything divine, and all life is included in the One Life. Heaven is neither more nor less than conformity to law upon every plane. It involves a displacement of all negatives and deficiencies with an overshadowing consciousness of the All-Good. In proportion as divinity at the soul-centre is recognized and held as normal, the visible circumference, with all its dependent relations, will fall into line. In the profoundest sense there is but One Mind and Life, and all individuated expressions of this Universal become dry and barren when out of conscious connection with their great Primal Fountain. With open conduits ever maintained, the supply is perennial and overflowing.