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Mr. Wells,ssss1 if you remember, erected a new trinitarianism, which in broad outlines corresponded with this division. With his particular construction, I do not in many respects agree. But that some form of trinitarianism is a reasonably natural method of symbolizing the inevitable tripleness of inner experience, outer fact, and their interrelation is obvious enough. In the particular trinitarianism of Christianity, the reality apprehended to exist behind the forces of Nature is called the Father, the upspringing force within the mind of man, especially when it seems to transcend individuality and to overflow into what we designate as the mystical, is called the Holy Ghost, and the activity, personal or vicarious, which mediates between the individual and the rest of the universe, reconciling his incompleteness and his failures with its apparent sternness and inexorableness, is called the Son.
Some men lay more weight on one of these aspects than on the others. I know a clergyman of the Church of England who, on being reproached during a theological argument with failure to pay sufficient respect to the doctrine of God the Father, replied: “I am not interested in God the Father”; and I know intellectually-minded men who wish to reject the validity of all religious experience because their minds are so made that they pay more attention to external fact and because their reason refuses to let them agree with the interpretations of fact propounded by most religious bodies. But, for a properly balanced construction, for the finding of something which shall serve not as the basis of a creed for this or that sect, but of a creed for humanity, of something which instead of dividing shall unite, we need all aspects.