V


That is a point which we do not sufficiently seize--that God is not
revealed to us by one avenue of truth alone, but by all the avenues of
truth working together. With our tendency to keep the Universal in a
special compartment of life we see Him as making Himself known through a
line of teachers culminating in a Church or a complex of churches; and
we rarely think of Him as making Himself known in any other way. To
change the figure, He trickles to us like a brook instead of bathing us
round and round like light or air.

But all good things must express the Universal; and all discovery of
truth, whether by religion, science, philosophy, or imaginative art,
must be discovery in God. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the
Mount are discoveries in God, but so are the advances in knowledge made
by Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Edison. He shows Himself
through Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, but also through Homer,
Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Darwin, George Eliot, William
James, and Henry Irving. I take the names at random as illustrating
different branches of endeavour, and if I use only great ones it is not
that the lesser are excluded. No one department of human effort is
specially His, or is His special expression. The Church cannot be so
more than the stage, or music more than philosophy. His Holy Spirit can
be no more outpoured on the bishop or the elder for his work than on the
inventor or the scientist for his work. I say so not to minimise the
outpouring on the bishop or the elder, but to magnify that on everyone
working for progress. This, I take it, is what St. John means when he
says, "God does not give the Spirit with limitations." He who always