Chapter I
THE UNKNOWN GOD
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“Whom therefore ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto
you.”
--Acts 17:23.
[9] When a
noted scientist spoke of God as
“The Unknowable,” either he
had never read, or he quite overlooked,
the declaration of Jesus that a knowledge
of God is an essential necessity. A
perception of God is as imperative to the
soul as is the knowledge of mathematics
in the ordinary affairs of life; for what
mathematics is to the regulation of
system and order in the outer world,
divine metaphysics is to the maintenance
of peace and power in the mental
realm.
When
Job’s comforters asked of him,
“Canst thou by searching find out
God?” “Canst thou find out
the Almighty unto perception?” he
answered, “Surely, I would
speak to the Almighty, and I
desire to reason with God.”
A less courageous [10] soul would have
concluded that the ways of the Infinite
are past finding out and, like the great
majority, Job would have contented
himself with the belief that “there
is a God,” and let it go at
that.
The most
common attitude of mind is that which
admits the reality of God, but which, at
the same time, declares Him to be
incomprehensible. If God is, God
can be known. Only that is unknown and
unknowable which does not exist; for it
is alone the non-existent which cannot be
known. All discovery and all invention
are based upon the conviction that,
“if a North Pole exists, it can be
discovered,” or, “if a truth
exists, it can be understood.”
It has been
said that Nature has no secrets which the
bold spirit may not learn. The trouble is
not with Nature that she does not more
readily impart her information; but it is
with man that he does not more
strenuously wrest it from her. The
trouble is not with God, that He does not
more frequently make himself known to the
children of men; it is that they do not
seek after Him with sufficient
intensity.
How else
does man find out anything except by
searching? “He that seeketh,
findeth,” whether it be in the
kingdom of heaven, in the depths of the
earth, or on the other side of the mighty
ocean.
If men would
seek after the Christ Truth as Columbus
sought after this continent they would
surely find It; for it is not that Truth
is undiscoverable, [11] but that they are
not sufficiently intrepid and earnest in
their search.
For one man
who digs a well a million may drink of
its waters, but “the water of
Life,” which is the knowledge of
God, is a something which no man can
drink for us and quench our thirst.
Another’s knowledge of mathematics
avails me little; I must learn it for
myself if I would be proficient.
Another’s understanding of a
foreign language helps me in so far as it
enables me to acquire it also. In like
manner it avails me nothing if saints and
sages walk and talk with God if I am
ignorant of His whereabouts, His
character and His law. Something within
tells me, as it told Job, that I must
“converse with the
Almighty.”
I am not
satisfied to believe in the existence of
God as I believe in the existence of
Australia, or as a something afar off;
neither am I content to believe that all
I shall ever know of God is what I see of
Him in nature. When the Bible tells me
“Acquaint now thyself with God, and
thereby be at peace,” I want to
begin this acquaintance, if possible, for
peace is the soul’s most sincere
desire.
With all the
gods that man has worshiped, and in which
he has believed, there has always been
reserved a place for that in which he
believes, but which, so far, he has not
discovered.
When Paul
was led out to Mars Hill in order that
the Greeks might hear something new,
since it was their custom to give
everything a hearing, [12] even though
they rejected it afterward, he was
impressed by the great number of altars
erected and dedicated to the many gods of
Greece. Bacchus, Venus, Pan and many
others were distinguished by the
inscriptions upon them, and upon one was
inscribed “To the Unknown
God,” and it was this inscription
which particularly attracted Paul’s
attention.
With all
that the Greeks knew about the gods there
was still room in their philosophy for
the acceptance of something which they
did not know. The very act of dedicating
an altar to the Unknown God was,
in itself, evidence of the fact that they
did not consider that they possessed all
knowledge. They are an object lesson to
us in modesty, a rebuke to bigotry, and a
revelation of the necessity of having
always a place in the mind for the
reception of a new and higher idea. If
Paul had carefully prepared an oration to
deliver on the famous hill of Areopagus,
he did not deliver it, for the reason
that he received an inspiration for a new
one, as a result of his observations
along the way.
When all
were assembled and attentive, Paul said:
“Ye men of Athens, I perceive that
in all things ye are too superstitious.
For as I passed by and beheld your
devotions I found an altar with this
inscription: ’To the Unknown
God.’ Whom, therefore, ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto
you.” He then asserted God to be
the One eternal Cause, as against
the superstitious belief in many
causes, represented by the many [13] gods
in the religious worship of the Greeks.
He declared this Cause to be at work
everywhere in the universe, by assuring
his hearers that “In Him we live,
and move and have our being.” He
assured them of man’s relation to
this Great First Cause by reminding them
of certain statements made by their own
poets, which said, “For we are also
His offspring.” He admonished them
to seek the Lord, if haply ye might
feel after Him and find Him,
though He be not far away from
every one of us.”
The
proximity of God was Paul’s great
declaration. If men sought after God
outside of their own spiritual natures
they were like men looking for their own
spectacles when all the time they had
them on their faces. Were Paul here today
he might tell us, who, as Christians,
feel that we believe in the one true,
living God, that we are altogether too
superstitious. He might offend our
religious sense of things by telling us
that God is not what we think He is. He
might even ridicule some of the altars
which we have dedicated to Him as the
“Great Unknowable,”
“The Inscrutable,” “The
Mysterious.” He might even tell us
that the Greeks were more consistent than
we, for while they erected an altar to
“The Unknown God,” they never
felt that He was
”Unknowable.”
He might
take exception to our belief in God as an
anthropomorphic personality, and he might
also explode the theory of three persons
in one person as a sufficient explanation
of the [14] Blessed Trinity. What a shock
it would be to most of us to be told that
we are altogether too superstitious, and
then to have some of our most precious
and time-worn theories about God and man,
heaven and earth, exploded by the simple
Truth about all of these.
It is said
that when Paul concluded his oration on
Mars Hill “some mocked, while
others clave unto him.” Should it
happen that some will mock our method of
declaring God, others will accept what
seems to them a rational definition of
Deity. I know that certain theologians
hold to the opinion that “A God
defined is a God dethroned,” and
that “Deity defies
definition;” but when I have
learned to my own satisfaction that
theology is not the last word on sacred
subjects I dare to differ with its dicta
whenever these are not consistent with
Truth.
If “To
know God is Life eternal,”
then there is no other way out of it than
to know Him scientifically. Deity has
been written and spoken of under many
titles or synonyms. Prior to the time of
Moses God was spoken of as Elohim; after
that as Jehovah. To Plato God was known
as Mind, or the home of Ideas; to Jesus
as Spirit and Father, and to John as
Love. From the pagan conception of many
gods, these more or less after the
likeness of men, and representative of
different emotions, to the Jewish
conception of one God comprising
all these emotions, human thought
gradually advanced to the conception of
[15] God as a loving Father, the
Universal Spirit, and Omnipresent Love.
But, like the waves of the sea, the waves
of thought receded from the shores of
science until superstition again clothed
God with human form, endowed Him with
human attributes, and banished Him from
the earth to a heaven, the whereabouts of
which not even theology can explain.
Today, in
the stress and storm of things, as never
before, men and women are asking if there
is a God. To them it seems inconceivable
that a good God, who is supposed to be
omnipresent and omnipotent, should permit
such atrocities as have lately taken
place in the objective world. With a
conception in the mind of a man-like God,
ruling this planet from the center of all
the planets, looking upon all this evil
and suffering, and yet permitting it to
continue when He might, in exercise of
His omnipotence, put an instantaneous
stop to it all, it is difficult to
understand the so-called goodness of God.
It is these inconsistencies which drive
men either away from God or compel them
to seek other interpretations of His
nature and law than those which are
commonly projected.
As the mind
of man evolves in the direction of
spiritual consciousness, Calvin’s
conception of God, and others like it,
become obsolete by reason of their
brutality. Just as the damning of
unbaptized infants and the consigning of
such to eternal torment has become a
doctrine too horrible for acceptance, so
shall some of our pleasant [16] theories
in the light of advancing knowledge
become too foolish for consideration.
The day will
come when the unknown God, whom we
ignorantly worship on the one hand, and
fear on the other, shall be declared unto
us. If today we worship God as a fickle
personality observing all the unholy
slaughter that has taken place in Europe,
yet doing nothing to end it, the day will
come when God shall be declared unto us
as that immutable Principle of Being
which beholds no evil and cannot look
upon iniquity. (Hab.1:13.)
To the man
who believes that God sees all the evil
that is at present being enacted in this
world, and permits it for some wise and
inscrutable purpose of His own, it will
come in the nature of a shock to have it
declared unto him that God knows nothing
at all about it. When He, Whom we have
ignorantly worshiped as a person, in an
anthropomorphic sense, is perceived as
the ever changeless Principle of all
Reality, we shall see that it is no more
possible for God to see the evil that so
disturbs the world than it is for the
principle of mathematics to see, and be
moved by, the tears of children at
school, or the throbbing brains of expert
accountants.
If the word
Principle, for Deity, seems cold and
abstract, it is so only because we have
not become familiar with it; yet, after
we accustom ourselves to it we marvel
that it has not been used before. We can
understand how God can be [17] everywhere
in His entirety and omniscience and yet
not know iniquity, when we think of the
principle of mathematics being everywhere
in its entirety--in the school room,
counting room, at home, on trains, or on
the streets--and yet not conscious of the
struggles of the children of men to solve
their mathematical difficulties.
If the
principle of mathematics seems cold and
heartless to those who are experiencing
difficulties, the fault is not with the
principle of mathematics. On the contrary
it is most beneficent, for it places its
whole, undivided and omnipresent self at
the disposal of all who understand it and
use it intelligently. The beauty and
strength and usefulness of the principle
of mathematics lie not in its knowledge
of our mistakes, but in its support of
our correct solutions. It neither chides
nor rebukes us for our errors, and it is
for this reason that we may turn to it
again and again after each successive
mistake, and find it tirelessly ready to
answer every intelligent demand we may
make upon it.
When the
unknown God Whom we ignorantly worship,
and Whom we dread to meet because we
believe that He “remembereth our
iniquities” and will condemn us for
them, is understood as the Principle of
eternal Love, we shall know that a sin
forsaken is a sin forgiven. God can no
more be angry than the principle of
mathematics can be angry. When we stop
making mathematical mistakes, we will
find the principle of mathematics our
most efficient helper; when we [18] stop
making moral mistakes, commonly called
sins, we will find the Principle of Being
not a bending reed, but a staff upon
which to lean. Until we can view the
unknown God from the standpoint of
Principle, our forward movements are
likely to be interfered with by the
belief that God remembers our past.
The
individual's most anxious inquiry is: Can
God forget the mistakes of the past? To
such an one it must be comforting to know
that the hitherto unknown God is the
understandable Principle of Life which
“forgiveth all our iniquities and
healeth all our diseases,” when he
applies this Principle and works in
harmony with it. The principle of
mathematics says to the man who has had
no mathematical advantages, or has failed
to make use of them, “Learn of me,
and I will smooth out all your
mathematical difficulties;” and in
like manner the Principle of Being says,
“Though thy sins be as scarlet,
they shall be made whiter than
snow.”
When we can
understand that God is that omnipresent
Principle of Life in which we live and
move and have our being, we can, in the
measure of our understanding, utilize
this Principle, for there is a sense in
which man utilizes God, even as God
utilizes man. May it not be true that God
never utilizes man except as man utilizes
God? Every breath we draw, every movement
we make, every good deed we perform is a
conscious or unconscious using of Divine
energy; [19] and this being the case we
shall one day use it more consciously,
more constructively, more intelligently.
Just as we apply the principle of
mathematics to the solution of our
mathematical problems, we shall apply the
Principle of Truth to those moral and
physical mistakes which we call sin and
sickness. These shall be overcome, not so
much by resisting evil as by knowing that
God is all in all. By knowing that there
is no error in the principle of
mathematics, and by obeying its rules,
the tendency to err is minimized and
finally overcome; by knowing that in the
Principle of Being there is neither sin
nor sickness, and by applying the rules
of right thinking to these mistakes, the
tendency to indulge in the one and suffer
from the other grows beautifully
less.
As the
unknown God is made known to us as the
Principle of Being from which we sprang,
and in which we exist, it becomes closer
to us than our nearest friend. It is a
covert from the storm, and an
ever-present help in time of trouble. To
be able to look away from our mistakes
and to meditate for one brief moment on
that omnipresent Principle in Which there
are no mistakes, and to Whom mistakes are
unknown, is for us to become refreshed
and invigorated. It is to realize that
the “tabernacle of God is with men,
and that He dwells with them, and that
they are His people, and that God Himself
is with them, and is their God.” To
know God as the Divine Principle of Love
is to know that this [20] Principle, when
understood and applied, “shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes; and there
shall be no more death, neither sorrow
nor crying, neither shall there be any
more pain, for the former things are
passed away,” with our former
misconceptions of God.
Chapter
2
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
