p. 112The question of sacrifice we disposed of last month.—We considered it: it is not easily disposed of, do you think?
Well, I do not say it is easily disposed of, for it rests upon very subtle considerations, which it is not easy to make palpable. But I think we disposed of it so far as the exhibition and application of these principles render the subject intelligible.—I might be disposed to admit that. Still, I wish the subject were plainer.
It will become plainer with familiarity.—I hope so. You would not be inclined to insist on your objections?—No: the whole subject of God and the subject of the Bible are so strongly supported by reason that I think myself bound to surrender all minor difficulties, especially when I think I see a sufficient glimmer of explanation as to make it probable that any difficulty I feel about them may be due to my own lack of understanding. p. 113 That is a reasonable attitude to take. It is the attitude belonging to all the points you have raised: the other points besides sacrifice I mean.
You have not yet gone over all the points.—Nearly, I think.
The greatest difficulty to my way of thinking has not been touched.—What was that?
The smallness and localness of the recorded manifestations of the Deity. The boundless magnitude of the universe seems inconsistent with the idea of God coming down to speak with Abraham, or dwelling in a temple, or taking Christ to His right hand. That was how I expressed it, and how it strikes me.
Oh yes, I remember. Well, that is how it may appear on the surface view, but you will admit that the surface view is not always the correct view.—Undoubtedly.
The surface view is that the stars are lamps hung out in the sky, as you expressed it. They look like that, but you know the real fact is very different from that.—Quite so.
It is so in the subject of God’s manifestation as recorded in the Bible. There is a very local and petty look I grant about God walking and talking with Abraham, and going down to see Sodom, and appearing in a flaming bush to Moses, and residing in a tabernacle, and afterwards in a temple in Israel’s midst, and so on; but we must look at these incidents in their connection with the whole conception of God presented to us in revelation. When we do this, they lose their pettiness and become features of a system of unutterable sublimity.—I shall be delighted to be made to see that.
You can do so by getting hold of and applying the first principles of the subject. There is no other p. 114 method of understanding the details of any matter.
What would you call the first principles of the subject?—Well, the primary and elementary truths concerning God as revealed. It is revealed that He is One, and that He is everywhere present. Realize these two points first.
It is rather difficult.—Not impossible. Unity and universality are conceivable ideas.
Conceivable but not realizable.—There may be a difficulty about the realizability, but that need not trouble you. There are many things that we know to be true that we cannot realize. The earth hanging on nothing, for example; or the endlessness of time and space; or the action of electricity on the telegraph, or of gravitation in the movements of the heavenly bodies. Your inability to realize these things does not interfere with their receivability. You receive them trustfully and conceive of them in a certain way though unable to form what is called a “mental concept” of them. Just allow yourself to be similarly exercised in this greater and far more important subject. Universality is a fact, and something fills that universality. Space is not empty space literally, for the whole universe is enwrapped in one energy. I now speak of the aspect of things to the scientific mind, and as they must appear to even the common mind on reflection. There is something between star and star, system and system, that holds all together as one system. Scientists do not know what it is, and are at a loss for a term of definition. The latest conception is “ether,” which they conceive of as something finer than electricity—finer than light. It is a mere speculation, but valuable as the recognition of a fact. Now this fact the Bible terms “Spirit.” “Whither shall I flee from thy Spirit?” “Do not I fill p. 115 heaven and earth?” “Can any hide himself from Me?” Here is a first principle that we have nothing to do but just to receive with the docility of helpless reason.
But I understood you to speak of God; now you speak of Spirit.—The two terms are not separate, “God is Spirit.” So Jesus told the woman at Jacob’s well.
I do not quite follow you there. You seemed to introduce Spirit as the synonym of what I might call the passive force of the universe scientifically conceived of as ether. Am I to understand that this is the Bible idea of God?—Only in part: the Bible reveals what science could not know—that this universal force or spirit has nucleus in a personal Father who centres in Himself the power and faculty potentially latent in the Spirit everywhere. Conceive of this glowing Father-centre as a unit with the diffused power that fills the universe, and you have one God, the Bible idea of God, and the first principle essential to the understanding of those records of manifestations of Deity that trouble you. He is ONE GOD and One Spirit—not two. The One God is One Spirit in His totality of Central Being and universal Spirit in diffusion.
The idea is difficult to grasp. What am I to understand by the One Father-centre being a unit with the diffused power that fills the universe?—The idea is that both form the One Being in whom no part can be separated from another part.
I do not follow you easily.—The idea can best be conveyed by illustration. Take the sun that shines in mid-day. He is one object: the light that streams from him seems to be another, yet the two are so indissolubly associated that you cannot separate them. p. 116 When the sun sets, the light disappears with him. The sun and his light are one though apparently and in a sense really two. If I say that the sun is a unit with his diffused light, you will gather what is meant by the Father being a unit with His diffused power, energy of the Spirit filling the universe. One God thus filling immensity while dwelling in heaven: and in Him, all things live and move and have their being. This is the first principle which affords a key to the interpretation of what you have called the local and petty forms of Deity-manifestation.
It may be so: but at present it seems to me to increase the difficulty, for how can a great God embracing the universe have come down to earth and had dealings with men in the local way recorded?—We shall go into that if we are spared to meet again next month.