Thoughts on Life and Religion - Friedrich Max Müller 3 стр.

If we have learnt to look upon Christianity, not as something unreal and unhistorical, but as an integral part of history, of the historical growth of the human race, we can see how all the searchings after the Divine or Infinite in man were fulfilled in the simple utterances of Christ. His preaching, we are told, brought life and immortality to light. Life, the life of the soul, and immortality, the immortality of the soul, were there and had always been there. But they were brought to light, man was made fully conscious of them, man remembered his royal birth, when the word had been spoken by Christ.

We must never forget that it was not the principal object of Christ's teaching to make others believe that He only was divine, immortal, or the son of God. He wished them to believe this for their own sake, for their own regeneration. 'As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God.' It might be thought, at first, that this recognition of a Divine element in man must necessarily lower the conception of the Divine. And so it does in one sense. It brings God nearer to us, it bridges over the abyss by which the Divine and the human were completely separated in the Jewish, and likewise in many of the pagan religions. It rends the veil of the temple. This lowering, therefore, is no real lowering of the Divine. It is an expanding of the concept of the Divine, and at the same time a raising of the concept of humanity, or rather a restoration of what is called human to its true character,a regeneration, or a second birth, as it is called by Christ Himself. 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.'

There is a constant action and reaction in the growth of religious ideas, and the first action by which the Divine was separated from and placed almost beyond the reach of the human mind, was followed by a reaction which tried to reunite the two. This process, though visible in many religions, was most pronounced in Judaism in its transition to Christianity. Nowhere had the invisible God been further removed from the visible world than in the ancient Jewish religion, and nowhere have the two been so closely drawn together again and made one as by that fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the Divine sonship of man.

Christ spoke to men, women, and children, not to theologians, and the classification of His sayings should be made, not according to theological technicalities, but according to what makes our own heart beat.

The yearning for union or unity with God, which we see as the highest goal in other religions, finds its fullest recognition in Christianity, if but properly understood, that is, if but treated historically, and it is inseparable from our belief in man's full brotherhood with Christ. However imperfect the forms may be in which that human yearning for God has found expression in different religions, it has always been the deepest spring of all religions, and the highest summit reached by Natural Religion. The different bridges that have been thrown across the gulf that seems to separate earth from heaven and man from God, may be more or less crude and faulty, yet we may trust that many a faithful soul has been carried across by them to a better home. It is quite true that to speak of a bridge between man and God, even if that bridge is called the Self, is but a metaphor. But how can we speak of these things except in metaphors? To return to God is a metaphor, to stand before the throne of God is a metaphor, to be in Paradise with Christ is a metaphor.

The Christian religion should challenge rather than deprecate comparison. If we find certain doctrines which we thought the exclusive property of Christianity in other religions also, does Christianity lose thereby, or is the truth of these doctrines impaired by being recognised by other teachers also?

Lovesuperseding faithseems to be the keynote of all Christianity. But the world is still far from true Christianity, and whoever is honest towards himself knows how far away he himself is from the ideal he wishes to reach. One can hardly imagine what this world would be if we were really what we profess to be, followers of Christ. The first thing we have to learn is that we are not what we profess to be. When we have learnt that, we shall at all events be more forbearing, forgiving, and loving towards others. We shall believe in them, give them credit for good intentions, with which, I hope, not hell, but heaven, is paved.

Our religion is certainly better and purer than others, but in the essential points all religions have something in common. They all start with the belief that there is something beyond, and they are all attempts to reach out to it.

How little was taught by Christ, and yet that is enough, and every addition is of evil. Love God, love menthat is the whole law and the prophetsnot the Creeds and the Catechism and the Articles and the endless theological discussions. We want no more, and those who try to fulfil that simple law, know best how difficult it is, and how our whole life and our whole power are hardly sufficient to fulfil that short law.

Christ's teaching is plainly that as He is the Son of God so we are His brothers. His conception of man is a new one, and as that is new, so must His conception of God be new. He lifts up humanity, and brings deity near to humanity, and He expresses their inseparable nature and their separate existences by the best simile which the world supplies, that of Father and Son. He claims no more for Himself than He claims for us. His only excellence is that which is due to HimselfHis having been the first to find the Father, and become again His Son, and His having remained in life and death more one with the Father than any one of those who professed to believe in Him, and to follow His example.

If Jesus was not God, was He, they ask, a mere man? A mere man? Is there anything among the works of God, anything next to God, more wonderful, more awful, more holy than man? Much rather should we ask, Was then Jesus a mere God? Look at the miserable conceptions which man made to himself as long as he spoke of gods beside God? It could not be otherwise. God is one, and he who admits other gods beside or without Him degrades, nay, denies and destroys the One God. A God is less than man. True Christianity does not degrade the Godhead, it exalts manhood, by bringing it back near to God, as near as it is possible for the human thought to approach the ineffable and inconceivable Majesty of the true God.

If I ventured to speak of God's purpose at all, I should say, that it is not God's purpose to win only the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the souls that find happiness in self-sacrificethose are His alreadybut to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, or better still, to win them both. It would be an evil day for Christianity if it could no longer win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, and it seems to me the duty of all who really believe in Christ to show that Christianity, if truly understood, can win the highest as well as the humblest intellects.

DEATH

Trust in God! What He does is well done. What we are, we are through Him; what we suffer, we suffer through His will. We cannot conceive His wisdom, we cannot fathom His love; but we can trust with a trust stronger than all other trusts that He will not forsake us, when we cling to Him, and call on Him, as His Son Jesus Christ has taught us to call on Him, 'Our Father.' Though this earthly form of ours must perish, all that was good, and pure, and unselfish in us will live. Death has no power over what is of God within us. Death changes and purifies and perfects us, Death brings us nearer to God, where we shall meet again those that are God's, and love them with that godly love which can never perish.

Would that loving Father begin such a work in us as is now going on, and then destroy it, leave it unfinished? No, what is will be; what really is in us will always be; we shall be because we are. Many things which are now will change, but what we really are we shall always be; and if love forms really part of our very life, that love, changed it may be, purified, sanctified, will be with us, and remain with us through that greatest change which we call death. The pangs of death will be the same for all that, just as the pangs of childbirth seem ordained by God in order to moderate the exceeding joy that a child is born into the world. And as the pain is forgotten when the child is born, so it will be after deaththe joy will be commensurate to the sorrow. The sorrow is but the effort necessary to raise ourselves to that new and higher state of being, and without that supreme effort or agony, the new life that waits for us is beyond our horizon, beyond our conception. It is childish to try to anticipate, we cannot know anything about it; we are meant to be ignorant; even the Divina Commedia of a great poet and thinker is but child's play, and nothing else.... No illusions, no anticipations; only that certainty, that quiet rest in God, that submissive expectation of the soul, which knows that all is good, all comes from God, all tends to God.

As one gets older death seems hardly to make so wide a gapa few years more or less, that is allmeantime we know in whose hands we all are, that life is very beautiful, but death has its beauty too.

We accustom ourselves so easily to life as a second nature, and in spite of the graves around us, death remains something unnatural, hard and terrifying. That should not be. An early death is terrifying, but as we grow older our thoughts should accustom themselves to passing away at the end of a long life's journey. All is so beautiful, so good, so wisely ordered, that even death can be nothing hard, nothing disturbing; it all belongs to a great plan, which we do not understand, but of which we know that it is wiser than all wisdom, better than all good, that it cannot be otherwise, cannot be better. In faith we can live and we can diecan even see those go before us who came before us, and whom we must follow. All is not according to our will, to our wisdom, but according to a heavenly will, and those who have once found each other through God's hand will, clinging to His hand, find each other again.

If we are called away sooner or later we ought to part cheerfully, knowing that this earth could give no more than has been ours, and looking forward to our new home, as to a more perfect state where all that was good and true and unselfish in us will live and expand, and all that was bad and mean will be purified and cast off. So let us work here as long as it is day, but without fearing the night that will lead us to a new and brighter dawn of life.

Annihilation is a word without any conceivable meaning. We arethat is enough. What we are does not depend on us; what we shall be neither. We may conceive the idea of change in form, but not of cessation or destruction of substance. People mean frequently by annihilation the loss of conscious personality, as distinct from material annihilation. What I feel about it is shortly this. If there is anything real and substantial in our conscious personality, then whatever there is real and substantial cannot cease to exist. If on the contrary we mean by conscious personality something that is the result of accidental circumstances, then, no doubt, we must face the idea of such a personality ceasing to be what it now is. I believe, however, that the true source and essence of our personality lies in what is the most real of all real things, and in so far as it is true, it cannot be destroyed. There is a distinction between conscious personality and personal consciousness. A child has personal consciousness, a man who is this or that, a Napoleon, a Talleyrand, has conscious personality. Much of that conscious personality is merely temporary, and passes away, but the personal consciousness remains.

One look up to heaven, and all this dust of the highroad of life vanishes. Yes! one look up to heaven and that dark shadow of death vanishes. We have made the darkness of that shadow ourselves, and our thoughts about death are very ungodly. God has willed it so; there is to be a change, and a change of such magnitude that even if angels were to come down and tell us all about it, we could not understand it, as little as the new-born child would understand what human language could tell about the present life. Think what the birth of a child, of a human soul, is; and when you have felt the utter impossibility of fathoming that mystery, then turn your thoughts upon death, and see in it a new birth equally unfathomable, but only the continuation of that joyful mystery which we call a birth. It is all God's work, and where is there a flaw in that wonder of all wonders, God's ever-working work? If people talk of the miseries of life, are they not all man's work?

Great happiness makes one feel so often that it cannot last, and that we will have some day to give up all to which one's heart clings so. A few years sooner or later, but the time will come, and come quicker than one expects. Therefore I believe it is right to accustom oneself to the thought that we can none of us escape death, and that all our happiness here is only lent us. But at the same time we can thankfully enjoy all that God gives us, and there is still so much left us, so much to be happy and thankful for, and yet here too the thought always rushes across one's brightest hours: it cannot last, it is only for a few years and then it must be given up. Let us work as long as it is day, let us try to do our duty, and be very thankful for God's blessings which have been showered upon us so richlybut let us learn also always to look beyond, and learn to be ready to give up everything,and yet say, Thy Will be done.

It is the most painful work I know looking through the papers and other things belonging to one who is no more with us. How different everything looks to what it did before. There is one beautiful feature about death, it carries off all the small faults of the soul we loved, it makes us see the true littleness of little things, it takes away all the shadows, and only leaves the light. That is how it ought to be; and if in judging of a person we could only bring ourselves to think how we should judge of them if we saw them on the bed of death, how different life would be! We always judge in self-defence, and that makes our judgments so harsh. When they are gone how readily we forget and forgive everything, how truly we love all that was lovable in them, how we blame ourselves for our own littleness in minding this and that, and not simply and truly loving all that was good and bright and noble. How different life might be if we could all bring ourselves to be what we really are, good and loving, and could blow away the dust that somehow or other will fall on all of us. It is never too late to begin again.