So earth, sea, and air are for ever
trafficking together; and their interchange of riches and force is
complicated ten thousandfold by the activities of innumerable living
things, all adapting themselves by some internal energy to the ever
varying balance of heat and cold, moisture and drought, light and
darkness, chemical action and reaction. And all this has been going on
for untold millions of years; nor is there any sign of weariness now.
[Sidenote: Sympathy thus awakened with the old Pantheistic Aspiration to
find the One in the Many.]
In the mood engendered by such familiar experiences of a holiday
saunter, it may well occur to anyone to think with interest and sympathy
of the poets and seers who, thousands of years ago, first dared to
discern in this maze of existence the varied expression of one
all-embracing and eternal Life, or Power. Such contemplations and
speculations were entirely uninfluenced by anything which the Christian
Church, recognises as revelation.[2] Yet we must not on that account
suppose that they were without religion, or pretended to explain
anything without reference to superhuman beings called gods and demons.
On the contrary, they, for the most part, shared, subject to such
modifications as were imperatively required by cultivated common sense,
the beliefs of their native land. But the difference between these men
and their unthinking contemporaries lay in this; that the former
conceived of one supreme and comprehensive divinity beyond the reach of
common thought, an ultimate and eternal Being which included gods as
well as nature within its unity.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25