THE REASONS WHY I BELIEVE

IN GOD.

LET

I.

ET us begin our search after the rational grounds of our belief in God. Let us seek for proofs, if haply they may be found, that there exists an all-pervading, eternal Unity Divine which embraces both the universe and the soul. Let us try to bring into clear view cogent reasons for believing in a supreme Being, in an ultimate Reality and creative Energy of which matter and mind, force and will, the external world of nature and the inner world of consciousness, are perennial manifestations and purposeful self-revelations. Let us for the moment discard all preconceived beliefs and unbeliefs and in all seriousness and solemnity face the problem of problems, as if we were commissioned by mankind to find a solution to it; as if our age depended on us to give a satisfactory answer to the question, compared with which all other questions dwindle into utter insignificance.

We know two kinds of existence, the external material world of things, of objects, and the internal world of consciousness, of feelings, thoughts, ideas. The most awful mystery of all is this very mystery of existence itself. How comes there to be anything at all, matter and motion, atoms, forces, life inanimate and animate? How comes there to be feeling, sensation, thought, or consciousness? Space and infinitude, the home of all being, time and eternity, the stream in which all that exists and happens moves, rises to the surface and disappears; what are they, why are they, why can not we imagine them as nonexistent? To be, the eternal, indestructible fact of being

in general, of existence universal, beginningless, endless, continuous, that is the question.

We can by no effort of ours bring ourselves to deny that something exists somehow, somewhere. Even if we think that all things outside ourselves are unreal appearances, that this fair world, the heavens and the earth are merely a dream of our mind, yet we doubters and dreamers still exist. You can not think of a time when there was absolutely nothing in existence, nor are you able to think of a time when existence itself shall be annihilated. Take the

wings of imagination and fly from star-system to starsystem to the uttermost bounds of all known galaxies, beyond the region of the faintest and remotest cosmic cloud, even in the heart of eternal night and silence and cold you are still floating on the waves of being, and are unable to break away from your soul's inseparable companion, from the idea of omnipresent existence. Should you fancy space beyond all stellar regions to be absolutely empty, still space is left, space exists. You can put no bound to space in thought. Beyond the uttermost reach of imagination infinitude stretches, one, indivisible, eternal, pregnant with the seeds of star-births, heaving with the throbs of universal force. You can not conceive a limit set to force. You can not say, only to a certain point in space does it go and can not dart beyond a certain fixed boundary line. Where force is, there dwells being, there are beating the pulses of all-pervading energy. Being, then, has no limits in space or time. Existence is infinite and eternal. Well may the idea of infinite and eternal existence thrill us with religious awe, and cause us to observe towards it an attitude of speechless wonder. It is the simplest and surest and most universal fact. It is the taproot of all truths. It underlies all thoughts.

Without the idea of existence nothing is imaginable, thinkable, nothing is possible. Yet it is the mystery of mysteries. We are so near it, it surrounds us, we live,

move, and have our being in it. Still it is inscrutable. We are overwhelmed by the thought that whatever is has always been and forever will be. We prostrate ourselves before the unfathomable mystery that matter and force, the very atoms and energies with which we are everywhere in closest touch, of which we ourselves form a living part, have existed through boundless space from eternity to eternity. Before the race of man was born, before the sun, the moon, and the stars were formed, there was the same essence, the same indwelling power was moving through space, combining, dissolving, blossoming, bearing fruit, decaying and awakening to new life and activity through seeming death.

The same substance, the same force, the same laws existed on and on, indestructible, of the self-same identity, ere the universe blossomed into its present living harmony as at this very hour.

Some of the profoundest religious minds of former days have stood like us in worshiping awe before the unfathomable mystery of beginningless, endless, and universal being. They, too, wrestled with the attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, to express the inexpressible. They adored the infinite and eternal being as the highest Being, as the only Reality. They worshiped it as the supreme Power behind all power, as the permanent essence behind all fleeting appearances. The Bible calls the supreme Being Yahve, "He who is, was, and forever will be." The Most High reveals himself to Moses as "I Am that I Am," "I Am, that is my name." In the theosophical speculations of the later Vedic poets the all-pervading, self-existent essence is worshiped under the name of Brahma. Some of the greatest Greek philosophers called God the Being, to on, or the true Being, to ontos on.

II.

We have so far considered the mystery of existence in itself, in a purely abstract way. We have been dealing only with the bare, though awe-inspiring, fact that something infinite and eternal does exist, that something, be it matter, force, mind, has always been, still is, and forever will be. But the question of questions is: Is all existence of one essence, are all forms of being one being, all forces one force, all manifestations of energy the outpourings of one eternal Energy? Are all minds lights reflected from the effulgence of one infinite Self? Does the chain of natural causes and effects begin and terminate in a highest cause, in an almighty cause of causes? Is there unity and identity of essence in all diversity of being and multiplicity of forms?

May it not be that every atom has from all eternity been an isolated self-existent being, an individual independent center of force? Thus there would be an infinity of eternal, uncaused existences. We would then have no principle of all-pervading, all-embracing unity which we are seeking and which is to be accounted the first cardinal attribute of the one only Being, of the ultimate Reality.

Nature, as known even to the most superficial observers, shows the assumption of an infinite number of unrelated atoms without any communication with one another to be the wildest of errors, the most senseless of all imaginable blunders. The universe does not present itself to the human mind as a host of countless self-imprisoned, unresponsive atoms and forces which have no relation to one another, which exert no influence upon one another, and do not mutually determine one another. If every atom were absolutely shut up within itself, if all were not bound up by an indwelling principle of unity, they would not be able to combine with and interpenetrate one another. There would be no change whatever. For all change is caused by the chemical marriage of atoms with atoms, of

molecules with molecules, and by the thousand other influences which all elements exercise upon all others, be they near or far. There would be no room for the universal play of cause and effect, if there were no eternal kinship, no inborn love between all elements and forces. How could all the parts of the universe, the remotest and the nearest, be connected together as an harmonious whole by the interminable chain of cause and effect, if there subsisted no eternal relationship between them?

The law of causality is of universal validity and admits of no exception. The underlying principle of all science, the supreme truth, upon which all the systems of knowledge rest, is the indestructible belief, that nothing happens within the whole compass of existence, that nothing can take place in the life of nature and man, without an efficient cause. Every fact is the offspring of other facts which have gone before it and stand to it in the relation of parent cause, and every new fact must give birth to

others which in their turn are bound to be the seeds of events to come. Nothing great or small that exists or occurs in the universe stands apart by itself, has the roots of its origin and activity in itself alone. Whatever is or happens is joined together by a chain of cause and effect with every part and force in nature and with the remotest past of the world's life. The whole present with all its countless phenomena, with all its multitudinous forms, is the child of the past by an endless succession of evolutions, which are bound up together and determined by the indestructible ties of universal causation. All the starmyriads and the fulness thereof form a living harmony, a symphony of forces and movements, of action and interaction, of cosmic growth and fruit-bearing. They ebb and flow together with the all-penetrating currents of omnipresent causation. They are interlaced and intertwined by the unbreakable chains of universal order.

Now the question arises: Why must all kinds of existence obey the law of cause and effect? Why are all atoms,