Chapter VI: The Eternal

How much is in a name! When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these things make it all the more real to us.

The word “God” has so long stood for the conception of a being who sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe, God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation. It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation.

The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in terms of our own psychology, we get into trouble. We cannot measure the Infinite by the standards of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims are not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which I use the term, does not plan and design and adapt means to ends as does man. God is no more the maker than He is the thing made. How natural for us to think that the air was made for us to breathe, the water for us to drink, the light for us to see, and the earth for us to inhabit! But these things are older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing in the fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid the rails, but was not the fence there before it was?

There is design in Nature, but not in the sense that there is design in human affairs and contrivances. There is no designer. There are living machines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution is a vital process. Man’s course is a right line, Nature’s is a circle. Man aims to cut out the waste, the pain, the failures. How does Nature trim her trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only by a survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every branch that dies and decays and falls from the tree does so at the risk of the health and well-being of the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See how evenly the pine and spruce and hemlock and oak forests get planted by Nature’s haphazard method, but think of the time involved! But what is time to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and gets his forest quickly. He trims his wood and avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood. He selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and avoids the dangers of the struggle to survive. He takes the side of the weak against the strong, but Nature favors only the strong.

The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The weather goes its way irrespective of you and me. Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine, are no respecters of persons. The seasons came and went before man appeared, just as they do now. The Eternal never takes sides as man takes sides, but because it does not, should we lose faith? The Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not otherwise. The light shines for all. Providence is a universal beneficence. The clouds go their way. The beneficence is seen in the slow amelioration of meteoric conditions through countless æons, till the cloud and the bow appeared, and with them conditions favorable to life. The impartial rains are oblivious to our human needs, but, as I so often say, they are on the side of life. They are on the side of development. They made the sublime drama of evolution possible.

The weather favored us æons before we were born, because it favored life. Therefore, when we say that the Eternal is neither for us nor against us, we mean in our special human sense. He is on the side of the righteous only when the righteous live according to the rule of Nature or rightness, or in harmony with the eternal order. And he is against the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In vain do we pray for victory on the eve of battle, except in so far as prayer puts courage into our hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the physical and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is from the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the fruit of the order which It established, or, rather, which It is.

As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot get away from the Eternal. He sticketh closer than a brother, closer than the blood in our own hearts, not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder and depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often struggle, tears, defeat.

Not by placing God afar off in the heavens--a supersensuous, supermundane, supernatural being--do we make the problem easier. Not till we bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the old myth of Christ again), and identify Him with everything without us and within--not till God becomes man--do we see a light under the feet of Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood and brotherhood and sacrifice and humility and beneficence and altruism in Nature. When we see man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of God.

In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation--human virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature. If this is a hard gospel, still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live other than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see the sources of our power, our help, our health. We know the conditions of our well-being. We know the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and inevitably. Their fountainhead is in Nature.

Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not lose faith. We know that Nature is still Nature. If disease and pestilence and famine rage, we know that there are weapons with which to fight them. We know that order comes out of chaos, that life comes out of death. We have neither to curse our gods nor to praise them, neither to do penance nor to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use wisely the gifts they bestow.