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The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion, by C. Spurgeon Medhurst, [1905], at sacred-texts.com

p. 39

CHAPTER XXI.

The comprehensiveness of supreme energy is its conformity to the Tao. 1

The Tao considered as an entity is impalpable, indefinite. Indefinite, impalpable, within are conceptions. Impalpable, indefinite, within are shapes. 2 Profound, obscure, within is the essence. This essence being supremely real, within is sincerity.

From the beginning until now it has not changed, 3 and thus it has watched all the essentials. How do I know it has been thus with all principles? By what has just been said.

As the gospels, filled with the presence of the Master, preserve no notes of the disciples' sermons, so the true mystic sees God alone in the universe. Is not the spiritual the home of the physical? Is not conformity to the Tao the comprehensiveness of the Energy which is supreme? "In Him we live and move and have our being." "It is His fullness that filleth all in all." "And by Him all things consist." "But the Lord is in his holy temple: be silent before him all the earth."

Footnotes

39:1 See ch. 38.

39:2 "The cosmos is all-formed—not having forms external to itself, but changing them itself within itself. Since, then, cosmos is made to be all-formed, what may its maker bet For that, on the one hand, He should not be void of all form; and, on the other hand, if He's all-formed, He will be like the cosmos. Whereas, again, has He a single form, He will thereby be less than cosmos. What, then, say we He is?—that we may not bring our sermon into doubt; for naught that mind conceives of God is doubtful. He, then, hath one idea, which is His own alone, which doth not fall beneath the sight, being bodiless, and (yet) by means of bodies manifesteth all (ideas). And marvel not that there's a bodiless idea." The mind to Hermes, by G. R. S. Mead, in The Theosophical Review, vol. xxxiii., p. 52.

39:3 Lit.—"Its Name has not departed." Noumenally the Tao is eternal and unchanging; phenomenally It has a beginning and consequently an end.

Next: Chapter XXII