Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
world be at peace, just as the real world of science is, however much its philosophers
sift and pull to pieces each other’s theories until thoroughly verified by facts.—No
virulence or contention, however, startles the votaries of that shrine, save when with
jaundiced eyes there steps into the arena some one who longs to hold to his dear old
pious myths, as of God’s sudden creation of the world “out of nothing in six days,”
and his destruction of all in forty! This is to weave a link of straw in a chain of iron,
and to grumble because the iron links and their mechanists, cannot see its value.—
To know the truth, we must, owing to the past faultiness of our education and circumstances,
begin, as Descartes said he found himself compelled to do, by unknowing and
questioning everything. Yet are there havens for anchorage. “Truth,” says G. M.
Lewes, in his History of Philosophy (I. xxxi.), “is the correspondence between the
order of ideas and the order of phenomena, so that the one is a reflection of the other
—the movement of Thought following the movement of Things.” Thus, from the
order of our ideas regarding a falling body, and the order of its phenomena which we
constantly observe, we obtain a Law of Truth.
The man of business and even the man of ordinary lore will still exclaim that my
subject is abstruse, and of no practical interest, just as not many years ago he said the
same of the poor chemist manipulating in his laboratory with a magnet and some
acids, from which, however, has sprung the girdle which now all but encircles the
earth. Why yet should not one faith in the one great Father of all men and
nations “fill the earth”? 1
To bring about this we have only got to look and speak of Him alone, and to put
aside our own little national gods, Fetishes and idiosyncrasies, and not condemn or
contemn each other in those things of which we are still so ignorant.—On the one
broad basis of the eternal Brahm and of his two eternal moral laws, “to love Him, and
to love our neighbour,” known long ere inscribed in Christian writ, all men and all
nations are theoretically agreed, and it but remains that we educate and persuade each
other to love Him and all His creatures. “A Belief,” especially such as theologians
mean by this word, is not ours to control. 2 It follows laws as fixed as those which
govern the world of matter, and as it is not in our power to will a belief, far less to
will a true belief, so no just God can punish us for that regarding which we are
irresponsible. We can be, however, nay are, held justly responsible for the diligence and
care we exercise or fail to exercise in arriving at the truth, reasons, and causes of our
beliefs; we are responsible for accepting them simply because of the locality or circumstances
of our birth, or because “we feel they are true,” or because we like the leaders
or followers of the Belief. He only then sins, and that heinously, who refuses to use
1 Colenso truly says:—Let us “receive devoutly”
not only the revelations of the past, but
also welcome joyfully the revelations of the
present day, “each good and perfect gift coming
down from the Father of Light.”
2 See “Reign of Law in Mind as in Matter,” by
Charles Bray.—Scott’s Series, 1874.