CHAPTER VII

THE LIKENESS OF GOD

In my last chapter I endeavoured [sic] to show that each livingbeing, whether animal or plant, throughout the world is acomponent item of a single personality, in the same way as eachindividual citizen of a community is a member of one state, or aseach cell of our own bodies is a separate person, or each bud ofa tree a separate plant.We must therefore see the whole variedcongeries of living things as a single very ancient Being,of inconceivable vastness, and animated by one Spirit.

We call the octogenarian one person with the embryo of a few daysold from which he has developed.An oak or yew tree may be twothousand years old, but we call it one plant with the seed fromwhich it has grown.Millions of individual buds have come andgone, to the yearly wasting and repairing of its substance; butthe tree still lives and thrives, and the dead leaves have lifetherein.So the Tree of Life still lives and thrives as a singleperson, no matter how many new features it has acquired duringits development, nor, again, how many of its individual leavesfall yellow to the ground daily.The spirit or soul of thisperson is the Spirit of God, and its body-for we know of no soulor spirit without a body, nor of any living body without a spiritor soul, and if there is a God at all there must be a body ofGod-is the many-membered outgrowth of protoplasm, theensemble of animal and vegetable life.

To repeat.The Theologian of to-day tells us that there is a God,but is horrified at the idea of that God having a body.We saythat we believe in God, but that our minds refuse to realise[sic] an intelligent Being who has no bodily person."Wherethen," says the Theologian, " is the body of your God?" We haveanswered, "In the living forms upon the earth, which, though theylook many, are, when we regard them by the light of their historyand of true analogies, one person only." The spiritual connectionbetween them is a more real bond of union than the visiblediscontinuity of material parts is ground for separating them inour thoughts.

Let the reader look at a case of moths in the shop-window of anaturalist, and note the unspeakable delicacy, beauty, and yetserviceableness of their wings; or let him look at a case ofhumming- birds, and remember how infinitely small a part of Natureis the whole group of the animals he may be considering, and howinfinitely small a part of that group is the case that he islooking at.Let him bear in mind that he is looking on the deadhusks only of what was inconceivably more marvellous [sic] whenthe moths or humming-birds were alive.Let him think of thevastness of the earth, and of the activity by day and nightthrough countless ages of such countless forms of animal andvegetable life as that no human mind can form the faintestapproach to anything that can be called a conception of theirmultitude, and let him remember that all these forms have touchedand touched and touched other living beings till they meet backon a common substance in which they are rooted, and from whichthey all branch forth so as to be one animal.Will he not in thisreal and tangible existence find a God who is as much more worthyof admiration than the God of the ordinary Theologian-as He isalso more easy of comprehension?

For the Theologian dreams of a God sitting above the clouds amongthe cherubim, who blow their loud uplifted angel trumpets beforeHim, and humour [sic] Him as though He were some despot in anOriental tale; but we enthrone Him upon the wings of birds, onthe petals of flowers, on the faces of our friends, and uponwhatever we most delight in of all that lives upon the earth.Wethen can not only love Him, but we can do that without which lovehas neither power nor sweetness, but is a phantom only, animpersonal person, a vain stretching forth of arms towardssomething that can never fill them-we can express our love andhave it expressed to us in return.And this not in the uprearingof stone temples-for the Lord dwelleth [sic] in temples made withother organs than hands-nor yet in the cleansing of our hearts,but in the caress bestowed upon horse and dog, and kisses uponthe lips of those we love.

Wide, however, as is the difference between the orthodoxTheologian and ourselves, it is not more remarkable than thenumber of the points on which we can agree with him, and onwhich, moreover, we can make his

meaning clearer to himself thanit can have ever hitherto been.He, for example, says that manhas been made in the image of God, but he cannot mean what hesays, unless his God has a material body; we, on the other hand,do not indeed believe that the body of God-the incorporation ofall life-is like the body of a man, more than we believe each oneof our own cells or subordinate personalities to be like a man inminiature; but we nevertheless hold that each of our tributaryselves is so far made after the likeness of the body corporatethat it possesses all our main and essential characteristics-thatis to say, that it can waste and repair itself; can feel, move,and remember.To this extent, also, we-who stand in meanproportional between our tributary personalities and God-are madein the likeness of God; for we, and God, and our subordinatecells alike possess the essential characteristics of life whichhave been above recited.It is more true, therefore, for us tosay that we are made in the likeness of God than for the orthodoxTheologian to do so.

Nor, again, do we find difficulty in adopting such an expressionas that "God has taken our nature upon Him." We hold this asfirmly, and much more so, than Christians can do, but we say thatthis is no new thing for Him to do, for that He has taken fleshand dwelt among us from the day that He first assumed our shape,some millions of years ago, until now.God cannot become man moreespecially than He can become other living forms, any more thanwe can be our eyes more especially than any other of ourorgans.We may develop larger eyes, so that our eyes may come tooccupy a still more important place in our economy than they doat present; and in a similar way the human race may become a morepredominant part of God than it now is-but we cannot admit thatone living form is more like God than another; we must hold allequally like Him, inasmuch as they "keep ever," as Buffon says,"the same fundamental unity, in spite of differences of detail- nutrition, development, reproduction" (and, I would add,"memory") "being the common traits of all organic bodies."Theutmost we can admit is, that some embodiments of the Spirit ofLife may be more important than others to the welfare of Life asa whole, in the same way as some of our organs are more importantthan others to ourselves.

But the above resemblances between the language which we canadopt intelligently and that which Theologians use vaguely, seemto reduce the differences of opinion between the two contendingparties to disputes about detail.For even those who believetheir ideas to be the most definite, and who picture tothemselves a God as anthropomorphic as He was represented byRaffaelle, are yet not prepared to stand by their ideas if theyare hard pressed in the same way as we are by ours.Those who saythat God became man and took flesh upon Him, and that He is nowperfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and human fleshsubsisting, will yet not mean that Christ has a heart, blood, astomach, etc., like man's, which, if he has not, it is idle tospeak of him as "perfect man." I am persuaded that they do notmean this, nor wish to mean it; but that they have been led intosaying it by a series of steps which it is very easy tounderstand and sympathise [sic] with, if they are considered withany diligence.

For our forefathers, though they might and did feel the existenceof a Personal God in the world, yet could not demonstrate thisexistence, and made mistakes in their endeavour [sic] to persuadethemselves that they understood thoroughly a truth which they hadas yet perceived only from a long distance.Hence all thedogmatism and theology of many centuries.It was impossible forthem to form a clear or definite conception concerning God untilthey had studied His works more deeply, so as to grasp the ideaof many animals of different kinds and with no apparentconnection between them, being yet truly parts of one and thesame animal which comprised them in the same way as a treecomprises all its buds.They might speak of this by a figure ofspeech, but they could not see it as a fact.Before this could beintended literally, Evolution must be grasped, and not Evolutionas taught in what is now commonly called Darwinism, but the oldteleological Darwinism of eighty years ago.Nor is this againsufficient, for it must be supplemented by a perception of theoneness of personality between parents and offspring, thepersistence of memory through all generations, the latency ofthis memory until rekindled by the recurrence of the associatedideas, and the unconsciousness with which repeated acts come tobe performed.These are modern ideas which might be caught sightof now and again by prophets in time past, but which are even nowmastered

and held firmly only by the few.

When once, however, these ideas have been accepted, the chiefdifference between the orthodox God and the God who can be seenof all men is, that the first is supposed to have existed fromall time, while the second has only lived for more millions ofyears than our minds can reckon intelligently; the first isomnipresent in all space, while the second is only present in theliving forms upon this earth-that is to say, is only more widelypresent than our minds can intelligently embrace.The first isomnipotent and all-wise; the second is only quasi-omnipotent andquasi all-wise.It is true, then, that we deprive God of thatinfinity which orthodox Theologians have ascribed to Him, but thebounds we leave Him are of such incalculable extent that nothingcan be imagined more glorious or vaster; and in return for thelimitations we have assigned to Him, we render it possible formen to believe in Him , and love Him, not with their lips only,but with their hearts and lives.

Which, I may now venture to ask my readers, is the true God-theGod of the Theologian, or He whom we may see around us, and inwhose presence we stand each hour and moment of our lives?