A Preface to Morals > Chapter II. God In the Modern World > An Indefinite God
It may be that dear and unambiguous statements are not now possible in our intellectual climate. But at least we should not forget that the religions which have dominated human history have been founded on what the faithful felt were undeniable facts. These facts were mysterious only in the sense that they were uncommon, like an eclipse of the sun, but not in the sense that they were beyond human experience. No doubt there are passages in tile Scriptures written by highly cultivated men in which the Divine nature is called mysterious and unknowable. But these passages are not the rock upon which the popular churches are founded. No one, I think, has truly observed the religious life of simple people without understanding how plain, how literal, how natural they take their supernatural personages to be.
The popular gods are not indefinite and unknowable. They have a definite history and their favorite haunts, and they have often been seen. They walk on earth, they might appear to anyone, they are angered, they are pleased, they weep and they rejoice, they eat and they may fall in love. The modern man uses the word 'supernatural' to describe something that seems to him not quite so credible as the things he calls natural. This is not the supernaturalism of the devout. They do not distinguish two planes of reality and two orders of certainty. For them Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin and was raised from the dead as literally as Napoleon was Emperor of the French and returned from Elba.
This is the kind of certainty one no longer finds in the utterances of modern men. I might cite, for example, a typically modern assertion about the existence of God, made by Mr. W. C. Brownell, a critic who could not be reproached with insensitiveness to the value of traditional beliefs. He wrote that "the influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism." I do not suppose that Mr. Brownell meant to admit the least possible doubt. But he was a modern man, and surreptitiously doubt invaded his certainty. For electromagnetism is not an absolutely solid reality to a layman's mind. It has a questionable reality. I suspect that is why Mr. Brownell chose this metaphor; it would have seemed a little too blunt to his modern intelligence to say that his faith was founded not on electro-magnetism, but as men once believed, on a rock.
The attempts to reconstruct religious creeds are beset by the modern man's inability to convince himself that the constitution of the universe includes facts which in our skeptical jargon we call supernatural. Yet as William James once said, "religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light.... It is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well." James himself was strongly disposed toward what he so candidly described as "overbeliefs"; he had sympathy with the beliefs of others which was as large and charitable as any man's can be. There was no trace of the intellectual snob in William James; he was in the other camp from those thin argumentative rationalists who find so much satisfaction in disproving what other men hold sacred. James loved cranks and nails and sought them out for the wisdom they might have. But withal he was a modern man who lived toward the climax of the revolutionary period. He had the Will to Believe, he argued eloquently for the Right to Believe. But he did not wholly believe. The utmost that he could honestly believe was something which he confessed would "appear a sorry underbelief" to some of his readers. "Who knows," he said, "whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor overbeliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?" Who knows? And on that question mark he paused and could say no more.