FINDING GOD

I have been reading tonight a book on science which, I think, tends to kill all spiritual hope and attributes everything to the material; taking away our dreams of miracles, crushing our hopes in the Beyond and tearing down the belief of a divine intuition within us. It explains all these things as springing entirely from pathological causes and seems to feed the intellect while it starves the Soul. I think so much has been said in this generation about science, so much has been questioned and delved into about it that I cannot help feeling that science will eventually encompass and satiate the world—that is, if we let it engulf us completely and turn our hearts and souls into rocks and machines; and insist in believing that the still silent voice within us, which we once called God, is merely the emotion caused by a craving for food or sleep or air, or some other physical necessity— which will cease when we last close these weary eyes of ours. It is indeed true to call this the age of science and “The Iron Age,” for what could tend to make men’s hearts more thoroughly iron than to tell them to stifle and kill all their emotions and that we are, after all, only a part of the scheme of the Whole, and must not look forward because there is no Beyond? “Where there is no vision the people perish.” So in this age when men seek and in answer find only a golden frame—with no color picture inside to brighten the rooms of life— but instead cold dismal facts, perhaps then it is well that thousands of these poor men should be killed off and not taste the bitter poison to the end. And yet, is it not the irony of fate that science again with its machine guns, its poisoned gas and all other improved and advanced diabolical warfare should be the hand to slay them? Men’s ears that can only listen to the roar of machinery, cannot hear the song of the birds; men’s bodies and feet that are so well clothed, cannot feel the clay of the earth nor the poetry of the wind and sun on their bodies; men’s eyes that are tired straining in the research room or the laboratory cannot see the stars, and men’s hearts that lead themselves into believing that from the decay of these poor bodies there is no future, cannot see God. And by these words I do not mean to refute the great and everlasting good that science has done for the world, nor do I forget the vast progress for the benefit of humanity in surgery, hygiene and medicine, and the advancement toward comfort, economy of time and manual labor which it has donated to us by the efforts and sacrifices of wonderful and brave men. To all those who have toiled and still have been able to Believe, I should like to write a eulogy. But it is to those who, in their search in science, have lost their ideal and come to live so scientifically that their souls, as it were, have dried up and left only the workings of their brains— it is from these, that I would turn my face away. To live really it is impossible to live scientifically. We must live by the emotions to survive and find God, because it is only by and through the emotions that we truly palpitate and feel ... and reaching out we extend our hands and lean far into the Vast Space of the Infinite!