Nature naturing would be the cause, and Nature natured would be the effect. God was both.
“God is the immanent”—indwelling—“but not the transient cause of all things” … “Thought and Extension are attributes of the one absolute substance which is God, evolving themselves in two parallel streams, so to speak, of which each separate body and spirit are but the waves. Body and Soul are apparently two, but really one and they have no independent existence: They are parts of God. … Were our knowledge of God capable of present completeness we might attain to perfect happiness but such is not possible. Out of the infinity of his attributes only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to us while the modes of these attributes, being essentially infinite, escape our grasp.”
So this was the truth about God. In spite of the queer words it was very simple. Much simpler than the Trinity. God was not three incomprehensible Persons rolled into one, not Jesus, not Jehovah, not the Father creating the world in six days out of nothing, and muddling it, and coming down from heaven into it as his own son to make the best of a bad job. He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The God of Baruch Spinoza was the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about. Thinking about him—after the Christian God—was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light.
And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about God. Even the Encyclopaedia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism. He got into a temper about it and said it was monstrous and pernicious and profoundly false and that the heart of man rose up in revolt against it. He had begun by talking about “attempts to transgress the fixed boundaries which One wiser than we has assigned to our intellectual operations.” Perhaps he was a clergyman. Clergymen always put you off like that; so that you couldn’t help suspecting that they didn’t really know and were afraid you would find them out. They were like poor little frightened Mamma when she wouldn’t let you look at the interesting bits beyond the place she had marked in your French Reader. And they were always apologising for their God, as if they felt that there was something wrong with him and that he was not quite real.
But to the pantheists the real God was so intensely real that, compared with him, being alive was not quite real, it was more like dreaming.
Another thing: the pantheists—the Hindu ones and the Greeks, and Baruch Spinoza—were heathen, and the Christians had tried to make you believe that the heathen went to hell because they didn’t know the truth about God. You had been told one lie on the top of another. And all the time the truth was there, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Who would have thought that the Encyclopaedia could have been so exciting?
The big puce-coloured books stood in a long row in the bottom shelf behind her father’s chair. Her heart thumped when she gripped the volumes that contained the forbidden knowledge of the universe. The rough morocco covers went Rr‑rr‑rimp, as they scraped together; and there was the sharp thud as they fell back into their place when she had done with them. These sounds thrilled her with a secret joy. When she was away from the books she liked to think of them standing there on the hidden shelf, waiting for her. The pages of “Pantheism” and “Spinoza” were white and clean, and she had noticed how they had stuck together. Nobody had opened them. She was the first, the only one who knew and cared.
III
She wondered what Mark and her mother would say when they knew. Perhaps Mark would say she ought not to tell her mother if it meant letting out that the Bible said things that were not really true. His idea might be that if Mamma wanted to believe in Jehovah and the Atonement through Christ’s blood, it would be unkind to try and stop her. But who on earth would want to believe that dreadful sort of thing if they could help it? Papa might not mind, because as long as he knew that he and Mamma would get into heaven all right he wouldn’t worry so much about other people. But Mamma was always worrying about them and making you give up things to them; and she must be miserable when she thought of them burning in hell forever and ever, and when she tried to reconcile God’s justice with his mercy. To say nothing of the intellectual discomfort she was living in. When you had found out the real, happy truth about God, it didn’t seem right to keep it to yourself.
She decided that she would tell her mother.
Mark was in the Royal Field Artillery now. He was away at Shoeburyness. If she put it off till he came home again she might never do it. When Mamma had Mark with her she would never listen to anything you had to say.
Next Sunday was Epiphany. Sunday afternoon would be a good time.
But Aunt Lavvy came to stay from Saturday to Monday. And it rained. All morning Mamma and Aunt Lavvy sat in the dining-room, one on each side of the fireplace. Aunt Lavvy read James Martineau’s Endeavours After the Christian Life, and Mamma read “The Pulpit in the Family” out of the Sunday at Home. Somehow you couldn’t do it with Aunt Lavvy in the room.
In the afternoon when she went upstairs to lie down—perhaps.
But in the afternoon Mamma dozed over the Sunday at Home. She was so innocent and pretty,
