The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold;
Above the cloud, beneath the clod,
The Unknown God, the Unknown God."
—WILLIAM WATSON.

One great function of poetry is to keep open the road which leads from the seen to the unseen world, and as the last echoes of this noble poem die away, it would seem as though a door had been opened in heaven and an unearthly vision had been revealed to our wondering eyes. It is as though some strange inspiration had fallen upon one suddenly, like that which the seer in the Apocalypse felt when he said, "And immediately I was in the spirit". The truth is we have been led into the invisible world, we have gained with the poet "a sense of God". The strange, undefinable attraction of the infinite is upon us.

Perhaps we have not yet learnt how strong that fascination is; how that it is not only the source of that inner light which we see reflected in the countenance of the philosopher and saint, but that it is powerful to arrest the attention of men who are for ever saying that no such reality exists, or, that even if it does, man need no more concern himself about it. Has he not the solid earth and the realm of sense? Why should he seek what is beyond it? O caecas hominum mentes! Man cannot help himself. Well does the ethic master say, "What is the use of affecting indifference towards that about which the mind of man never can be indifferent?" And why not? Because man came thence? There is that in us "which drew from out the boundless deep". In some incomprehensible way the infinite is in us, and we are therefore restless, dissatisfied ultimately with all that is not it. "The eye is not filled with sight nor the ear with hearing," for in us there is the capacity, and therefore, in our best moments, the yearning to see and hear something which sense can never give. Greater than all that is here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature," says Pascal in the PensÉes, "but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not mass its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water may destroy him. But even though the world should fall and crush him he would still be more noble than his destroyer because he knows that he dies, but the advantage which the world possesses over him—of that the world knows nothing." And, therefore, the universe is nothing to him who is conscious that there is that in man which made all worlds and shall unmake them—the eternal Mind, one and identical throughout the realm of intelligence.

This is no dreaming, but an interpretation of man and nature necessitated by the undeniable facts of life. The finite does not exhaust man's capacities, it cannot even satisfy them. He was made for something vaster. He is ever seeking the boundless, the infinite. Hence the most positive, the most scientific of philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, believes that there is one supreme emotion in man, utterly indestructible, the emotion of religion; and what is religion but the yearning I have described for communion, not with the world, vast and entrancing as it is; not with humanity, admirable, even worshipful in its highest estate; but with that which transcends them and all things, the enduring reality which men call Divine? Spencer and Emerson are at one. Nothing but the Infinite will ultimately satisfy man.

Such are the thoughts awakened by the music of this poet's song, which haunts one with a sense of the mystery of the illimitable. I do not read it as a confession of agnosticism, save in the sense in which all philosophers are ready to admit that our knowledge of the ultimate reality of existence is as mere ignorance compared with what we do not, and cannot, know of it. I read it rather as a profession of the higher theism, or, if you will, of the higher pantheism, for it is immaterial how far we go in maintaining the Divine immanence, provided we safeguard the sovereign fact of individuality and abstain from all confusion of the human personality and the Divine.

There is prevalent a most erroneous impression that the Divine immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that to assert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the honorific title of person. Man is a person, because a subsistent, self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. A fortiori is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not self-sufficing, then nothing or nobody is. Hence we have to point out in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality, the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the omnipresence of the Divine, because—

In my flesh his spirit doth flow
Too near, too far for me to know;

because, to use Emerson's language, "God appears with all his parts in every moss and every cobweb," or Mr. Spencer's, which comes to identically the same thing, "All the forces operative in the universe are modes or manifestations of one Supreme and Infinite Energy"—because of these momentous facts we ascribe personality to the Infinite, with no detriment to its immanence, since of no other being could they by any possibility be true. Theist or pantheist, it matters very little by what name men call themselves so long as they do not imprison themselves within the walls of the false version of the philosophy of relativity, which binds them over to acknowledge nothing beyond their five external senses, to identify the unseen with the unknown, and thereby to stunt and ultimately to atrophy the sublime powers, transcending the insignificant senses we share with the animal world, as the sky towers above earth, whereby this noble poem of the "Unknown God" was given us by William Watson.

And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only rightful basis of religious idealism.

In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the voice of the senses is still, that we "gain a sense of God" at all. It is a vision of the mind—of mind knowing Mind, of soul transcending all distinctions and recognising itself. It is the sublime region of the higher unity into which subject and object are taken up and their distinction forgotten or lost. It is at night-fall, in sight of the awful pathway of the stars which, one would think, should fill man with a sense of his immeasurable littleness, it is then that he realises that this boundless splendour is nothing compared to him, for something more than a million worlds is with him, in the eternal Mind whence all this majestic vision rose.

When, overarched by gorgeous night,
I wave my trivial self away;
When all I was to all men's sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God.

But of what God? for there are gods many and lords many. There is the known God, of whom the Western world has heard so much now these two thousand years, the God of the most ancient Hebrew Scriptures, themselves acclaimed as his unique and authentic revelation, the embodiment of absolute truth. That God has not been forgotten yet. Just now his temple is thronged with worshippers.[1] Ministers of religions in America, archbishops in Spain, are eager in their invocations, and if we may believe our newspapers, the Cardinal of Madrid guaranteed the harmlessness of American cannon and rifles to those who will implore his assistance through the intercession of saints. It is the war-cry of old: "The Lord is a Man of War!"

But the moral sense, the Divinity within, as contrasted with the Divinity in the skies, tells the poet that this old-world god is an idol, a glorified image of man in his "violent youth," a "giant shadow hailed Divine".

Not him that with fantastic boasts
A sombre people dreamed they knew;
The mere barbaric God of Hosts
That edged their sword and braced their thew:
A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm
Of neighbour gods less vast of arm.

He is well known, this "God of Hosts". Doubtless once he was the Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently transformed into the god of battles, who ranged himself on the side of his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even knavery, the god of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line, of him who afterwards was preached as the god of devil and hell. What has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?—

A God like some imperious King,
Wroth, were his realm not duly awed;
A God for ever hearkening
Unto his self-commanded laud;
A God for ever jealous grown
Of carven wood and graven stone.

No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emancipation of the Western world from its degrading belief in a "God of Hosts". It is only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the "sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the emancipation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature, together with an equally painstaking research into the history of kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion—the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial religion an impossibility to all who are at pains to inform themselves of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that—

God whose ghost in arch and aisle
Yet haunts his temple—and his tomb;
And follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom;
A God of kindred seed and line;
Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.

And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-god such as this!

O streaming worlds, O crowded sky!
O life, and mine own soul's abyss,
Myself am scarce so small that I
Should bow to Deity like this!
This my Begetter? This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.

The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the image of God," but now we see that the—

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle-line—

he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!—[2]

we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord God of Hosts," "the Man of War," "the God of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose amongst men, and that the day must come when it will be finally abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-god is not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for—

This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.

This god was made in the image of man.

And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of his God, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, "far above music," could tell of his God, then would he be but the idealised image of himself. He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.

The God I know of, I shall ne'er
Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
Raise thou the stone and find me there,
Cleave thou the wood and there am I,
Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.

I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear associated with the emotion, but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. "Raise thou the stone . . . cleave thou the wood," and we are in the presence of the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world.

Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.

Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth, to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is passing away.

Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

The melancholy Heraclitus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas. Seneca, centuries ago, noted the same of our own bodies; the process of dissolution is continuous, until at length the restorative power itself will desert us and the process will be complete.

But at the heart of this universal impermanence there is a soul of reality which the poet discerns amid the fleeting atoms of the stone and the fibre of the growing tree. It is as though we found ourselves in a vast hall, filled to repletion with machinery in every condition of motion, from the slowest and scarcely perceptible movements of the hour hand of a watch up to the incalculable rapidity of a fly-wheel. All is flux, change, consumption of energy, wear and tear of the machinery itself. We know it must run down sometime, we know one day it must all be renewed. But amid all this instability we are well aware that there is a secret source of power, a centre whence a renewal of energy ceaselessly arises. Without its incessant action not one single movement in that vast hall could be obtained. It is the one real thing amidst a world of others which are wearing and wasting away and therefore in a true sense unreal. The secret spring whence the energy is generated may be invisible, but we know it is somewhere, and if any one denied its existence we should not take the trouble to answer him. A faint, halting symbol is this of the eternal and unchanging reality at the heart of the worlds—a dim light whereby to illustrate the most solemn of truths, that always and everywhere, in the lightest as in the greatest movements of nature, in the fragrance of a flower, the iridescence of a crystal, or the fierce energies which shoot up mountains of hydrogen flames hundreds of miles high from the crater of the sun, we have the revelation of "a Power without beginning, without end," [3] permanent while all is in a condition of ceaseless flux and change, living while all around are hastening to their deaths, the one only truly existent Being anywhere, the hidden source of all existence and life.

So far, we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to give as to the method of such action as has been described on the part of the invisible and universal Energy, for we cannot even explain the nexus between an act of human volitional energy and the raising of an arm. There are the facts, demonstrable and undeniable, but the how of those facts, no man on this earth knoweth or perhaps ever will know. Well may Browning profess himself content to endure in patience the ignorance which is our lot here, if only at length "thy great creation-thought thou wilt make known to me". The "great creation-thought" cannot be known now. Watson is as sure of it as his spiritual ancestor:—

I trust it not this bounded ken.

But though the "creation-thought" cannot be fathomed, though we cannot comprehend the nature of the ultimate Reality, the fact of the great existence and omnipresence is clearly apprehensible, and therefore must be acknowledged as a demonstrated fact by every man.

And, if such be the case, in what sense is God "unknown"? Unknown, certainly, in the sense that he is unseen, but we now know that the only real things are those of the invisible world. God is unknown because incomprehensible, now and always, here and hereafter, in this life and in all possible lives. The Infinite must ever be beyond the comprehension of the finite.

Though saint and sage their powers unite
To fathom that abyss of light,
Ah! still that altar stands.[4]

But the Divine is not beyond the apprehension of man's mind, and as far as I can by diligent reading of Mr. Spencer attain to his innermost meaning, I do not think he denies this fact, as he most unquestionably does not deny the validity of religious motion, which, arguing against the Positivist philosophy, he rightly contends cannot, in its highest sense, be associated with any being other than the Highest of all beings. "What's in a name?" I ask, and whether a man calls himself theist or agnostic—so that he does admit something greater than man, and does give us scope and opportunity for the exercise of those powers and emotions which refuse to be bounded by, or satisfied with, the merely phenomenal and transitory, but are ever seeking for communion with the Noumenal and the Eternal—in my judgment matters very little. There is a higher synthesis in which partial truths are being constantly taken up and reconciled in some fuller and more luminous expression, and I have no doubt that that scientific reconciliation of materialism and spiritualism which is now progressing so rapidly will eventually be effected between those who now call themselves theists and agnostics.

To ethical idealists the great question is this: Does your belief make for reverence; does it subdue your soul with a sense of the wonder and mystery which are everywhere so conspicuous in nature; does it foster the growth of your spiritual powers as opposed to the merely animal instincts of your body; does it make you more moral, fill you with an increasing enthusiasm for the good life for its own sake? Or, on the other hand, does what you profess dishearten you, fill you with melancholy and foreboding and a sense of the unprofitableness of things, of the apparent aimlessness of all that is going on or being done, of the fruitlessness of all human endeavour? Is the sigh of the inspired sceptic, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," ever and anon rising from your heart, and are you losing your faith in yourself and humanity? That is the test of a faith—what it does for you, and you could have no better one. The fact that he worships an "Unknown God" means no shrinking of enthusiasm in him who believes that that everlasting Power, which science no less than philosophy commands him to believe, is identical with that very Power which is conspicuously working in the universe for universal aims which also are good. Outside a handful of men of no consequence amid the thundering assent of the overwhelming masses of mankind, the course of things here is upwards. Instinct suggests it, reason proclaims it, history confirms it. But there are no two supreme powers, and therefore that Power I reverence—

The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold—

is also the everlasting "Power which makes for righteousness," that is, for moral progress, the only progress ultimately worth caring about.

Men crave to see God. "Behold I show you a mystery." There are two incarnations. There is the incarnation of God in flesh and blood, in Chrishna in India, in Jesus in Palestine. Men have, men do worship these men as gods. But there is a higher incarnation, a sublimer theophany. There is that before which all incarnations, all saviours, have ever bowed down in lowliest adoration; there is that whose obedience they would not surrender if "the whole world and the glory thereof" were given to them. There is that which is older than man and his redeemers, higher than the stars, vast as the Immensities, ancient as the Eternities themselves, and in this incarnation man may see God. What is it? It is the moral law, the eternal sanction crowning the right, inborn in rational man, the very soul of reason within him, inborn in things—the law which no man ever invented, which never had beginning, which can know no end, because it is the Divine order revealed to earth. It is the necessary nature of the one essential Being, and we recognise it because "we are his offspring," because like him we are Divine.

"Unknown God!" Yes, but not here. As long as I have the instinct of ethics, as long as I feel myself constrained to bow down in the dust before goodness, to deem myself unworthy to tie the latchet of the shoes of the hero or the saint; so long as I see the course of the world steadily, undeniably, ascending the sacred hill of progress, so long must I confess that the Power behind the veil, behind the world, is a moral Power, that that Power recognises the validity of moral distinctions as I do, that the ethic law is his law, that when I live by that law I see God—

The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold,
Above the cloud, beneath the clod,
The Unseen God, the Unseen God.

[1] These words were written during the opening days of the late Spanish-American war.

[2] Recessional, Rudyard Kipling.

[3] Herbert Spencer, First Principles, passim.

[4] Mrs. Barbauld's fine hymn, "As once upon Athenian ground".