A Scholar’s Parable

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 100, 22 January 1927, Page 17

A Scholar’s Parable

One of the memorable events at the recent Church Congress in England was the reading of the paper by the late Dr. J. George Adami, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. It was written just before his death, and at a time when it seemed certain he would be able to deliver his address on “The Eternal Spirit in Nature” in person. Dr. Adami’s parable created a great impression.

LET me propound to you a parable. As a boy I looked out from my bedroom window, at the top of the house, over the wide ees or water-meadows, of the Mersey, with the sluggish river meandering through them in wide curves, to where, some half-mile away, the old Bridgwater canal crossed both ces and river; the first canal to be constructed in England the better part of two centuries ago. Presently, I found out the significant history of just that section of the canal. “It was here that Brindley, the Duke of Bridgwater’s self-taught engineer, encountered what appeared to be an impossible state of affairs, that presaged the complete failure of the undertaking. No sooner was earth carted to form an embankment to carry the canal across the ees than it was swallowed up, cartload after cartload, by the quicksands. This was long before the days of caissons and cement. The Duke was thrifty and his capital limited. “To suck out the quicksands by huge pumps, or by any other means to get down to rock bottom, and then build a solid causeway across the river-bed, was wholly beyond cither the engineering or the financial resources of those days. So Brindley, after his habit, took to his bed—if I remember aright, for the better part of a week—then he rose and ordered some thousands of loads of brushwood to be brought. “These he laid down over the ees, and in this way floated his embankment and his canal across the water-meadows. Generations have passed, and still that canal remains fulfilling its functions, carrying coal and heavy merchandise between Worslcy and Manchester, and Runcorn and the sea. “That-Js the parable of science and of metaphysics. If you wait until you have reached the rock bottom of absolute truth upon which to build, you may wait, I admit, in most distinguished company, from Plato to Bosanquet, and Bradley and Dean Inge, but you will wait in vain, for you will still be where you were, in the quicksands.

At most, in the process of much digging, you may sharpen your tools to an extraordinary degree. If, on the other hand, you study and take advantage of the properties of quicksands you may build over them—and advance.

“May I conclude by offering you a parallel of which I have lately become acutely conscious? If we read the lives and the writings of the great mystics we shall see that the stages of their ascent may be roughly divided into Christocentric and Theocentric. In their earlier stages many of them confine themselves to meditation upon the life of Christ, His words, passion, and death. Farther on, as a natural sequence, they become so absorbed in the life of God, so penetrated with the Divine Spirit, that they can hardly find words to express it.

“The further they are advanced in spiritual apprehension of the Godhead, the harder it is to explain it. So they employ terms of natural imagery. Air, Light, Heat, Fire, Flame, poor and finite still, yet seeking to express the boundlessness and the majesty of the Spirit whom they have come to realise and to know. So it may be, as I see it, for the student of science, though in reverse order. The more and the longer he ponders upon the workings of the Eternal Spirit, the more, in my opinion, will he be thrust back upon the life of Christ, as the eternal expression of that Spirit.

“And, conversely, if he dares to build in religion as he does in science, and relies upon the experience he has gained, he will find that he will grow into ever wider and wider knowledge of spiritual truth and apprehension—so that, like the Theocentric, mystic words and imagery will fail him. Yet wide and deep as is his knowledge of the Spirit’s workings, it can, indeed, only be expressed in one way. More and more as the years have passed I become convinced that the love of God is everything, and that if a man possesses this, all other things arc secondary.”