Gods and love alike are but an idea, A kind of fiction.” *
This is, so it seems to me, the inevitable conclusion of the religious mind that no longer conceives the possibility of spiritual intuition or supernatural revelation. It is driven back upon the lower type of religious experience, which primitive man possessed when he worshipped the daimonic powers that seemed to rule his life. And yet, even so, Lawrence’s position is not wholly consistent, for even the lower type of religious experience is in a real sense spiritual.
It is the result of a spiritual intuition, even though that intuition is, as St. Paul says, in bondage to ” the weak and beggarly elements “
of nature. The religion of the blood of which Lawrence writes, the religion of pure sense and animal instinct, can only be attained by the unreflecting animal soul. If we were conscious of it, we should not have it. It is a true spiritual instinct which prompted Lawrence to revolt against the tyranny of ” the white mind ” and to seek a deeper wisdom than that of the rational consciousness; but, owing to the denial and repression of true spiritual intuition, it has been deflected into a false cult of the primitive and * Pansies, pp. 65-66.
51 D2
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
the physical which can afford no true solution of his problem.
This is fully realised by another writer, who has considerable sympathy with his point of view and who also seeks escape from the present impasse in a religious experience. Mr. J.
Middleton Murry not only admits the possibility of a spiritual intuition, but makes it the centre of his whole theory of life.
He recognises the insufficiency of the modern scientific point of view that identifies reality with the physical and biological world. The human mind can only achieve unity with itself and harmony with the universe on the higher ” metabiological” plane, in an experience which transcends both sensible and rational knowledge. This experience finds its highest expression in the life of Jesus, and thereby Jesus was the creator of a new series of values and the starting-point of a new phase in the evolution of humanity.
Nevertheless, Mr. Murry holds that the reality that is apprehended in this way is not metaphysical or transcendent ; it is simply the organic unity of nature, the unity of biological being There is no eternal and transcendent being which we can think of as divine, but only the natural organism which is the product of the evolutionary process. For Mr. Murry is 52