Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/40

38 to the growth one is trying to nourish, as are the leaves of a tree to its growing stem, temporary and vanishing. But still like the leaves they are necessary to growth. If one is anxious to train others in a belief that God is the creator of the world, he will have to use the Hebrew or Greek idea of the world in one age, the Ptolemaic idea in another age, or the commonly accepted Copernican idea of the world in this age. Now all of these ideas are, from the point of view we are taking, false; and yet through them men have in different ages had established in their lives the same vital and fundamental belief that God is the creator of the world. Now granting that God can influence the interests of men, he must in doing so make use of the ideas of men, ideas always different in different ages. His aim must be, like that of the teacher, to establish fundamental attitudes rather than the truth of the passing ideas used by him. He must even use one set of ideas at one time, and another set at another time, all of which may be false in the sense that they could not be used successfully now, to awaken the same vital attitude.

Then any one in seeking to know God’s will, either immediately or through the scriptures in which men have written clown their own impressions of his will, must always be discriminating and looking for the truly concrete reality, the vital thing, the grains of wheat among the supporting leaves. The supporting leaves, once so necessary to the growth of the wheat, become chaff, and there is danger that the wheat may be confused with the chaff and cast away with it.

But God, in seeking to develop man’s cultural environment or civilization by efforts at such immediate development of the interests of men would be handicapped by another limitation. While God differs from man only in degree and not in kind, as our whole attempt to construct an idea of his relationship to men in terms of the experience of men implies, he is far in advance of us in power, and knowledge, and love. His interests could not specifically be like the interests of men. He would seem to be able to advance the interests of men only through the help of those who have interests in common with men. Our studies suggest that God could know and value sentient realities before they were born into this earthly stage of growth, and that he would be very apt to select some from among these to be leaders, or centres of life for men, and that he would place them in the midst of peoples prepared by their consciously felt needs to assimilate their lives. Thus it is quite possible that the leaders in, man’s advancing civilization, such as Moses, Plato, Shakspere [sic],