The spirit on the waters Author:Edwin Abbott Abbott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 1 How to avoid a wrong conception of God When using words about God we are not so much attempting to define God as to ... more »feel our way towards communion with Him. Whatever we say of Him is true only in metaphor and by way of " correspondence " : that is to say, our words are not the truth, but they are correspondent or proportional to the truth.1 1 This thought will help to explain many religious phenomena. When the Buddha was addressing a multitude of diverse-speaking people, we are told that " each of the countless listeners thought that the sage was looking towards himself and was speaking to him in his own tongue, though the language used was Hajadhi." In the same way, Clement of Alexandria explains the " gift of tongues" (described briefly and scarcely intelligibly in the Acts, but perfectly intelligible as we find it in St. Paul's Epistles): " There was one sound, but those who understood it heard many languages." The mystic Blake, being asked how he cou d have had an interview with Virgil, since the latter would speak Latin, replied, " It might have been Latin when it left Virgil's lips ; but it was English when it reached my ears." To the blind man, sight may seem "a long finger." The deaf may describe hearing as " an eye that can see round corners and through thin walls." Both are wrong, as to facts; both right, so far as their notions " correspond " to facts. So it is between us and God. In comparison with Him, Galileo was blind and Handel deaf. We shall never, while we live, attain to the truth about Him. We may attain to something that " corresponds " to the truth. Unless vivified by faith, even true words about God produce the effect of falsehood. Even when thus vivified, all words about God partake of the nature of f...« less