Article December 7, 1918 Issue

Humanity is so unaccustomed, indeed so unable, to think...

The Christian Science Monitor

Humanity is so unaccustomed, indeed so unable, to think metaphysically that it permits the evidence of facts, under its very eyes, either to escape it entirely, or else it is guilty of misconstruing it. An illuminating example of this may be found in its own changeableness. Now this changeableness is no modern phase of human character. The Athenians ostracized Aristides because they grew tired of hearing him called just. Five centuries later, in this same Athens, Paul found the people still pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of the unfamiliar: "For," as the chronicler of "The Acts" writes, "all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing."

Now, as a matter of fact, whether the world has eyes to see it or not, this wearying for something new is the most complete evidence of the unreality of matter. Men do not weary of truths when they understand them, and until they understand them they are not truths to them. This is the secret of the hold religion obtains on men. The dogmas they adhere to may be utterly untenable, their practice may conflict with every word of the Sermon on the Mount; but, nevertheless, the undeveloped spiritual perception of these people has laid hold on the fact of Spirit, and the fact is impervious to argument. Such men were the early Christians, the Lollards, the first Protestants, the Puritans, and many others. It is easy enough to point to the inconsistencies, the excesses, the actual ignorance embedded in very much that they taught. But they had somehow, no matter if without metaphysical discernment, laid hold of Christ, and no mortal argument could shake that hold. For, what God, Truth, hath joined together, the material man cannot put asunder.

Where, of course, the great world gets wrong in its conception of God, Truth, is in joining together two things God never joined, matter and Spirit. When the world insists that God, Spirit, made matter, it makes matter spiritual, and Spirit material. It is a dilemma from which there is no possible escape, and it is an error in the premise which renders unsound every conclusion drawn from it. Amongst the innumerable errors entailed by it, is the human being's love of change. The creation of God becomes a kaleidoscope of material phenomena, by a change from one to the other of which the individual, drunk with physical sensations, endeavors to stimulate his own jaded appetites. Here was the occasion for the altar "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD," or, as Huxley, appropriating the Greek term, "ATNUET" translated inferentially, the God of Agnosticism.

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