Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, Judge not the LORD by feeble sense, His purposes will ripen fast, The bud may have a bitter taste, Blind unbelief is sure to err, God is His own interpreter, XII. THE EYE OF THE SOUL. Life is the one universal soul, which, by virtue of the enlivening Breath, and the informing Word, all bodies have in common, each after its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess, and man as an animal. But in addition to this, God transfused into man a higher gift and specially imbreathed;-even a living (that is, self-subsisting) soul, a soul having its life in itself. And man became a living soul. He did not merely possess it, he became it. It was his proper being, his truest self, the man in the man. None then, not one of human kind, so poor and destitute, but there is provided for him, even in his present state, a house not built with hands; ay, and spite of the philosophy (falsely so called) which mistakes the causes, the conditions and the occasions of one becoming conscious of certain truths and realities for the truths and realities themselves—a house gloriously furnished. Nothing is wanted but the eye, which is the light. of this house, the light which is the eye of this soul. This seeing light, this enlightening eye, is reflection. It is more, indeed, than is ordinarily meant by that word; but it is what a Christian ought to mean by it, and to know too, whence it first came, and still continues to come-of what light even this light is but a reflection. This, too, is thought; and all thought is but unthinking that does not flow out of this, or tend towards it. In the state of perfection, perhaps all other faculties may be swallowed up in love, or superseded by immediate vision; but it is on the wings of the Cherubim, that is (according to the interpretation of the ancient Hebrew doctors), the intellectual powers and energies, that we must first be borne up to 'the pure empyrean.'—It must be seraphs, and not the hearts of imperfect mortals, that can burn unfuelled and self-fed. Give me understanding (is the prayer of the royal Psalmist), and I shall observe Thy law with my whole heart. Thy law is exceeding broad-that is, comprehensive, pregnant, containing far more than the apparent import of the words on a first perusal. It is my meditation all the day. It is worthy of especial comment that the Scriptures are distinguished from all other writings pretending to inspiration by the strong and frequent recommendation of knowledge and a spirit of inquiry, without reflection it is evident that neither the one can be acquired nor the other exercised. XIII. DOUBT A PREPARATION FOR BELIEF. Where there is a great deal of smoke and no clear flame, it argues much moisture in the matter, yet it witnesseth certainly that there is fire there; and therefore dubious questioning is a much better evidence, than that senseless deadness which most take for believing: men that know nothing in sciences have no doubts. He never truly believed, who was not first made sensible and convinced of unbelief. Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the disposition to believe, and doubt in order that you may end in believing the truth. I will venture to add in my own name and from my own conviction the following: He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. XIV. REASON. Reason is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves. Its presence is always marked by the necessity of the position affirmed: this necessity being conditional, when a truth of reason is applied to facts of experience, or to the rules and maxims of the understanding; but absolute, when the subject. matter is itself the growth or offspring of reason. Hence arises a distinction in reason itself, derived from the different mode of applying it, and from the objects to which it is directed: accordingly as we consider one and the same gift, now as the ground of formal principles, and now as the origin of ideas. Contemplated distinctively in reference to formal (or abstract) truth, it is the Speculative Reason; but in reference to actual (or moral) truth, as the fountain of ideas and the light of the conscience, we name it the Practical Reason. Whenever by self-subjection to this universal light, the will of the individual, the particular will, has become a will of reason, the man is regenerate: and reason is then the spirit of the regenerated man, whereby the person is capable of a quickening intercommunion with the Divine Spirit. And herein consists the mystery of Redemption, that this has been rendered possible for us. And so it is written; the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam a quickening spirit (1 Cor. xv. 45.)—we need only compare the passages in the writings of the apostles Paul and John concerning the spirit and spiritual gifts, with those in the Proverbs and in the wisdom of Solomon respecting Reason, to be convinced that the terms are synonymous. In this at once most comprehensive and most appropriate acceptation of the word, Reason is pre-eminently spiritual, and a spirit, even our spirit, through an effluence of the same grace by which we are privileged to say, Our Father. X V. FAITH. The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and to that the whole man is to be harmonized by subordination, subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and mission. But the will of God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable bearingwitness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God. This brings me to the last and fullest sense of Faith, that is, as the obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh as opposed to the super-sensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the infinite, in the póva xxó, in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal will as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in love of the creature, as far as it is opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the love of God. Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists in the synthesis of the reason and in the individual will. By virtue of the latter, therefore, it must be an energy, and inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents, faculties and tendencies;—it must be a total not a partial; a continuous, not a desultory or occasional energy-and by virtue of the former, that is, reason, faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore-Faith must be a light originating in the Logos or the substantial reason, which is co-eternal and one with the Holy Will, and which light is at the same time the life of men. Now as life is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is faith the source and the sum, the energy and the principle, of the fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his human will, in all provinces of his nature, to his reason, as the sum of spiritual truth, representing and manifesting the will Divine. XVI. INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY. 1. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem, Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 2. The Rainbow, comes and goes, The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. 3. Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, As to the tabor's sound, To me alone there came a thought of grief: The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; |