Yet to
admit it seemed to involve letting the bogey come back, so inextricably
had we managed to mix up belief in the bogey's existence with belief in
the existence of design in the universe.
THE IRRESISTIBLE CRY OF ORDER, ORDER!
Our scornful young scientific and philosophic lions of today must not
blame the Church of England for this confusion of thought. In 1562 the
Church, in convocation in London 'for the avoiding of diversities of
opinions and for the establishment of consent touching true religion,'
proclaimed in their first utterance, and as an Article of Religion,
that God is 'without body, parts, or passions,' or, as we say, an _Elan
Vital_ or Life Force. Unfortunately neither parents, parsons, nor
pedagogues could be induced to adopt that article. St John might say
that 'God is spirit' as pointedly as he pleased; our Sovereign Lady
Elizabeth might ratify the Article again and again; serious divines
might feel as deeply as they could that a God with body, parts, and
passions could be nothing but an anthropomorphic idol: no matter: people
at large could not conceive a God who was not anthropomorphic: they
stood by the Old Testament legends of a God whose parts had been seen by
one of the patriarchs, and finally set up as against the Church a God
who, far from being without body, parts, or passions, was composed of
nothing else, and of very evil passions too.
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