He, the Supreme, no limit has nor end, And what HE is how can _we_ comprehend?
Once did a wise man say: “He only knows God’s nature to whom God His mercy shows.”
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... “About them frisking played All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase In wood or wilderness, forest or den; Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards, Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed His lithe proboscis.” _Paradise Lost_, Book IV.
THE idea of a condition of existence in which all creatures are happy and at peace implies a protest against the most patent fact of life as we see it. Western civilisation inherited from the Roman Empire the hardness of heart towards animals of which the popularity of beast-fights in the Arena was the characteristic sign. It was, however, a Roman poet who first pointed out in philosophical language that the sufferings of animals stand written in the great indictment against Nature no less than the sufferings of men. Not only man is born to sorrow, said Lucretius; look at the cow whose calf bleeds before some lovely temple, while she wanders disconsolate over all the fields, lowing piteously, uncomforted by the image of other calves, because her own is not.
Eighteen hundred years later Schopenhauer said that by taking a very high standard it was possible to justify the sufferings of man but not those of animals. Darwin arrived at the same conclusion. “It has been imagined,” he remarks, “that the sufferings of man tend to his moral improvement, but the number of men in the world is nothing compared with the number of other sentient beings which suffer greatly without moral improvement.” To him, the man of the religious mind whom men lightly charged with irreligion, it was “_an intolerable thought_” that after long ages of toil all these sentient beings were doomed to complete annihilation.
Yes, and to the young conscience of mankind this was also an intolerable thought. And since it was intolerable the human conscience in the strength of its youth shook it off, cast it aside, awoke from it as we awake from a nightmare. Religion has been regarded too exclusively as a submission to Nature. At times it is a revolt against Nature, a repudiation of what our senses report to us, an assertion that things seen are illusions, and that things unseen are real. Religion is born of Doubt. The incredibility of the Known forced man to seek refuge in the Unknown. From that far region he brought back solutions good or bad, sublime or trivial, to the manifold problems which beset man’s soul.