The Universality of Belief in God’s Existence as a Manifestation of Spiritual Life

You ask: «But how is it that you say all people have the spirit with the manifestations you describe, when there are no few peoples who do not know God?» Those peoples do not know what the true God is, but that He exists—all confess. Believing that God exists and wishing to define more precisely what He is, they went astray and called by the name of God what is not God: some the sun, some the moon or stars or something else. Not all, however, strayed so crudely. When God dispersed the peoples across the face of the earth after the confusion of tongues, they all carried with them the sound ideas about God that had up to then been handed down: God as the invisible Spirit, Creator, Providence, Judge, and Rewarder. That He is Creator, Providence, and Rewarder was preserved by all; but that He is an immaterial Spirit was not preserved by all—they «changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four-footed beasts, and creeping things» (Rom. 1:23). They knew God—that is, they knew that God exists—but did not glorify Him as God (Rom. 1:21). Among the eastern peoples, the Persians and Indians (both Asian and American) have more exalted conceptions of God. The Greeks and Romans diminished God, so to speak. The American Indians, for example, call God the universal spirit—invisible, all-encompassing. This is a very lofty conception, and left to itself the spirit cannot go further than this. The Asian Indians delved more deeply into the comprehension of God, and, having retained the idea of His invisibility, omnipotence, and universal activity, when they undertook to define His creative and providential actions more precisely they tangled in much that was untenable and wrote down many fanciful tales.

That, then, is the sense in which there are those who do not know God—not in the sense that there are peoples who do not confess the existence of God. Some travellers gave testimony that they had encountered peoples and small tribes who did not know God at all and did not render Him worship. What is true in that testimony is only that they did not hear a confession of faith and did not see worship rendered to God—but that there was neither the one nor the other… For that they would have had to live among those peoples for a longer time. Baker in our own day lived for a whole month among some people—near the lakes through which the Nile flows—and did not observe any worship of God. «But,» he says, «the new moon came—and I see the king preparing to go somewhere, the elders gathering too, a bull being made ready. The appointed day arrived—they went to some hillock and offered the bull as a sacrifice.» «Had I left,» says Baker, «two or three days earlier, I could in all sincerity have testified that this people does not worship God.»

So banish entirely from your mind the idea that there are those who do not acknowledge the existence of God. There are certain scholars who think to get along without God and hold forth and talk about it and write books—but while their tongue and pen are busy producing such empty talk, their own hearts say something different. They puff themselves up to appear as non-believers in God, but it is very doubtful that they finally succeed in this even before their own conscience.

Knowing God, all people display conscientiousness, and they honor God, and they pray to Him, and they await the life to come, in which each will be recompensed according to his deeds. The power that sustains all such beliefs and convictions is the spirit. Let us, then, accept as given—you and I—that in every person there is a spirit: the highest aspect of human life, a power drawing him from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal, from the creature to the Creator, characterizing the human being and distinguishing him from all other living creatures on earth. This power can be weakened to various degrees, its requirements can be misinterpreted, but it cannot be entirely stifled or destroyed. It is an inalienable attribute of our human nature, and it manifests itself in every person in its own way.

See where your question has led me! But not to any harm. What I actually intended to write to you about was not this, but rather what has occurred and is occurring in the soul as a result of the spirit’s action upon it, through their union. But that—until next time.