ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the 

 failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in 

 nature and life do not suffice to break or mar the 

 'vast general beneficence; the flowing universal good 

 is obvious above all. 



So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our 

 experience — of the knowledge of concrete things 

 and beings which life discloses to us — we are in- 

 volved in contradictions. The ancients visualized 

 their gods and goddesses — Jove, Apollo, Minerva, 

 Juno, and all the others. Shall we do this for the 

 Eternal and endow it with personality? Into what 

 absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the un- 

 seeable, the unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet 

 the most obvious fact that life yields to us ! Nearer 

 and more vital than our own bodies, than our own 

 parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently 

 denied, passionately accepted, scoffed, praised, 

 feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism, atheism, 

 pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyr- 

 dom, the great Reality in which we live and move 

 and have our being, and yet for that very reason, 

 because it is a part of us, or rather we are a part of 

 it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality 

 apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as 

 we use gravity to overcome gravity, so we use God 

 to deny God. Just as pure light is of no color, but 

 split up makes all the colors that we see, so God 

 divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we 



14 



