Like Ants In The Termitary Of Our Creator

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 193, 16 August 1941, Page 6

Like Ants In The Termitary Of Our Creator

CHANG IS THOMPSON, writing *■ about Shelley, says that "The heavens are littered with his box of toys," and that he is ''gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars." I think the same might be said of Sir James Jeans or of any other gifted astronomer. It is not hard to find God in the heavens, for they "declare Ilis glory," as the Psalmist says.

By Rev. C. W. Chandler

In another direction altogether would I help you to gain a glimpse of Him. I have just read "The Soul of the White Ant." by Eugene N. Marias. He is well known to all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a writer of short stories and verse. As a psychologist rather than as a scientist, he has spent some years investigating the lives and habits of these little inhabitants of the insect world, about whom Maeterlink and Fabre have also written from other angles.

Whoever thought that white ants had souls? I am sure that those whose houses are being attacked by (hem don't think so. By all accounts thev are beginning to get a foothold in the Dominion. Whether these new arrivals are the same species as the termites which build their termitaries in tropical countries I know not; but for hundreds of miles I have seen these weird termitaries standing like grim sentinels over the drrarv "wastes of western Queensland. '

Under Queenly Influence

Marias affirms, and that in a way that somewhat belies the title of his book, that the individual termite has no soid, or psyche, but that as a deaf, dumb, blind, and altogether senseless creature it works undet ihe psvehie influence of the queen who resides in a solitary cavern, some six or seven feet below the ground level of the individual termitary.

Starting off in life as a respectable ant. with wings with which to flyin the open sunlight, she ends up a praciieuliv motionless creature in a dungeon dark and dank. Swelling to prodigious size until she becomes a regular O.S. in the ant kingdom, she is mysteriously moved from cavern to cavern as she grows, and that through a door far too small for a creature u quarter her size to pass through. Still, but for the movement of her head from side to side, she rules in silent state over millions of workers and soldiers —those dumb, blind and sexless creatures who carry out her whole design telepathically. I cannot help feeling that, the results of these investigations touch very closely that world of invisible realities with which religion has so much to do. The removal of the queen from the termitarv means the end of all activity in the colony. Steel plates inserted between her and the rest of the structure make no difference whatever. Her mystic power is transmitted like wireless waves through the densest materials. In her they live and move and have their being—helpless automata.

Prodigious Builders

As architects they execute plans many hundred-fold beyond the summit of our highest possibilities. "The mightiest structures man has built upon this earth; the Pyramids of Egypt, London's underground system, New York's skyscrapers, the Simplon tunnel, the biggest cathedrals, the largest bridges, these, compared with the works of the termite, taking into consideration its size, are as molehills compared with mountains.

"Taking size into consideration, man would have to erect a building as high as the Matterhorn, that is 14,760 ft, if his work was to be equal to a termite tower 40ft in height, such as is often found in Africa." Concerning the matrimonial bond, Marias observes that while the king of the termitary remains in a state of continual youthfulness, the queen grows fatter and fatter. The king remains by the side of his beloved (as he most assuredly does) in face of her gradual degeneracy from a claintv slim-waisted flapper of a flying insect to a loathsome lump of fat. This provides a wonderful example of love and fidelity that we more highly sophisticated mortals might well take heed of. From the foregoing observations you may wonder what spiritual analogy can be drawn.

The Group Soul

Marias speaks of the group soul which governs the termitary and causes all its inhabitants to work in harmonv as parts of one gigantic whole. From this observation it is but one step to the thought that Paul expressed on Mar's Hill, "In Him we live and move and have our being." There is an intimate spiritual unity betwixt the believing soul and God. so that His thoughts are communicated to the furthest reaches of human thought and action.

It is His spirit which works in us or, as St. Paul again has better expressed the thought in his Epistle to the Philippians. "It is God which worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure." If we remove ourselves beyond His influence a process of spiritual atrophy and death immediately commences to operate. This is the over-soul of which Emerson so eloquently speaks.

"O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, everv byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. "Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature. hut one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one."

What is true of a termitary in the terms of white ants and their corporate existence, is also true of our relationship with God. "Ineffahle is the union of man and God in every act of the soul."