Creative Unity | Page 7

is constructive;
one is his home, and the other is his office. With the overwhelming
growth of necessity, civilisation becomes a gigantic office to which the
home is a mere appendix. The predominance of the pursuit of success
gives to society the character of what we call Shudra in India. In
fighting a battle, the Kshatriya, the noble knight, followed his honour

for his ideal, which was greater than victory itself; but the mercenary
Shudra has success for his object. The name Shudra symbolises a man
who has no margin round him beyond his bare utility. The word
denotes a classification which includes all naked machines that have
lost their completeness of humanity, be their work manual or
intellectual. They are like walking stomachs or brains, and we feel, in
pity, urged to call on God and cry, "Cover them up for mercy's sake
with some veil of beauty and life!"
When Shelley in his view of the world realised the Spirit of Beauty,
which is the vision of the Infinite, he thus uttered his faith:
Never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery; That thou,--O awful Loveliness,--
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
This was his faith in the Infinite. It led his aspiration towards the region
of freedom and perfection which was beyond the immediate and above
the successful. This faith in God, this faith in the reality of the ideal of
perfection, has built up all that is great in the human world. To keep
indefinitely walking on, along a zigzag course of change, is negative
and barren. A mere procession of notes does not make music; it is only
when we have in the heart of the march of sounds some musical idea
that it creates song. Our faith in the infinite reality of Perfection is that
musical idea, and there is that one great creative force in our
civilisation. When it wakens not, then our faith in money, in material
power, takes its place; it fights and destroys, and in a brilliant fireworks
of star-mimicry suddenly exhausts itself and dies in ashes and smoke.
VI
Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great
expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said
that these did not belong to reality. But the poet in man knows that
reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from its
obscure depth by man's faith which is creative. There was a day when
the human reality was the brutal reality. That was the only capital we
had with which to begin our career. But age after age there has come to

us the call of faith, which said against all the evidence of fact: "You are
more than you appear to be, more than your circumstances seem to
warrant. You are to attain the impossible, you are immortal." The
unbelievers had laughed and tried to kill the faith. But faith grew
stronger with the strength of martyrdom and at her bidding higher
realities have been created over the strata of the lower. Has not a new
age come to-day, borne by thunder-clouds, ushered in by a universal
agony of suffering? Are we not waiting to-day for a great call of faith,
which will say to us: "Come out of your present limitations. You are to
attain the impossible, you are immortal"? The nations who are not
prepared to accept it, who have all their trust in their present machines
of system, and have no thought or space to spare to welcome the
sudden guest who comes as the messenger of emancipation, are bound
to court defeat whatever may be their present wealth and power.
This great world, where it is a creation, an expression of the
infinite--where its morning sings of joy to the newly awakened life, and
its evening stars sing to the traveller, weary and worn, of the triumph of
life in a new birth across death,--has its call for us. The call has ever
roused the creator in man, and urged him to reveal the truth, to reveal
the Infinite in himself. It is ever claiming from us, in our own creations,
co-operation with God, reminding us of our divine nature, which finds
itself in freedom of spirit. Our society exists to remind us, through its
various voices, that the ultimate truth in man is not in his intellect or his
possessions; it is in his illumination of mind, in his extension of
sympathy across all barriers of caste and colour; in his recognition of
the world, not merely as a storehouse of power, but as a habitation of
man's spirit, with its eternal music of beauty and its inner light of the
divine presence.