have our being, though it is hidden from us by the veil of sensible things. He may even think, like Newman, that the knowledge of the senses has a merely symbolic value ; that ” the whole series of impressions made on us by the senses may be but a Divine economy suited to our need, and the token of realities distinct from them, and such as might be revealed to us, nay, more perfectly, by other senses as different from our existing ones as they are from one another.” *
The one ultimate reality is the Being of God, and the world of man and nature itself are only real in so far as they have their ground and principle of being in that supreme reality. In the words of a French writer of the seventeenth century : ” It is the presence of God that, without cessation, draws the creation from the abyss of its own nothingness above which His omnipotence holds it suspended, lest of its own weight it should fall back therein ; and serves as the mortar and bond of connection which holds it together in order that all that it has of its Creator should not waste and flow away like water that is not kept in its channel.”
* University Sermons, p. 350. In this remarkable passage he develops a parallelism between the symbolic character of sensible knowledge and that of mathematical calculi and musical notation.
31
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
Thus, although God is not myself, nor a part of my being, ” yet the relation of dependence that my life, my powers, and my operations bear to His Presence is more absolute, more essential, and more intimate than any relation I can have to the natural principles without which I could not exist … I draw my life from His Living Life … ; I am, I understand, I will, I act, I imagine, I smell, I taste, I touch, I see, I walk, and I love in the Infinite Being of God, within the Divine Essence and substance… .
” God in the heavens is more my heaven than the heavens themselves; in the sun He is more my light than the sun ; in the air He is more my air than the air that I breathe sensibly… . He works in me all that I am, all that I see, all that I do or can do, as most intimate, most present, and most immanent in me, as the super-essential Author and Principle of my works, without whom we should melt away and disappear from ourselves and from our own activities.” *
Or again, to quote Cardinal Bona, God is ” the Ocean of all essence and existence, the very Being itself which contains all being.
* Chardon, la Croix de Jesus, p p . 4 2 2 , 4 2 3 , in B r e m o n d , Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, viii, pp.
32
HUMANISM A N D RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
From Him all things depend ; they flow out from Him and flow back to Him and are in so far as they participate in His Being.” *
Thus the whole universe is, as it were, the shadow of God, and has its being in the contemplation or reflection of the Being of God.
The spiritual nature reflects the Divine consciously, while the animal nature is a passive and unconscious mirror. Nevertheless, even the life of the animal is a living manifestation of the Divine, and the flight of the hawk or the power of the bull is an unconscious prayer. Man alone stands between these two kingdoms in the strange twilight world of rational consciousness.
He possesses a kind of knowledge which transcends the sensible without reaching the intuition of the Divine.
It is only the mystic who can escape from this twilight world ; who, in Sterry’s words, can ” descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of Time—a bright Infinite in the narrow point of an object, who knows what Spirit means— that spire-top whither all things ascend har-moniously, where they meet and sit connected in an unfathomed Depth of Life.” But the mystic is not the normal man ; he is one who has transcended, at least momentarily, the natural limits of human knowledge. The * Bona. Via Compendii ad Deum.
C.N.A. 33 c