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Other symbols there are which _have_ intrinsic value--works of art,
lives of heroes, death itself, in all of which we may see Eternity
working through Time, and become aware of Reality amid the passing
shows. Religious symbols are the highest of all, and highest among these
stands Jesus of Nazareth. "Higher has the human Thought not yet reached:
this is Christianity and Christendom; a symbol of quite perennial,
infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew
enquired into, and anew made manifest." In other words, Jesus stands for
all that is permanently noble and permanently real in human life.
Such symbols as have intrinsic value are indeed perennial. Time at
length effaces the others; they lose their associations, and become but
meaningless lumber. But these significant works and personalities can
never grow effete. They tell their own story to the succeeding
generations, blessing them with visions of reality and preserving them
from the Babel of meaningless words.
2. _Body and Spirit._--Souls are "rendered visible in bodies that took
shape and will lose it, melting into air." Thus bodies, and not spirits,
are the true apparitions, the souls being the realities which they both
reveal and hide. In fact, body is literally a garment of flesh--a
garment which the soul has for a time put on, but which it will lay
aside again. One of the greatest of all the idolatries of appearance is
our constant habit of judging one another by the attractiveness of the
bodily vesture. Many of the judgments which we pass upon our fellows
would be reversed if we trained ourselves to look through the vestures
of flesh to the men themselves--the souls that are hidden within.
The natural expansion of this is in the general doctrine of matter and
spirit. Purely material science--science which has lost the faculty of
wonder and of spiritual perception--is no true science at all. It is but
a pair of spectacles without an eye. For all material things are but
emblems of spiritual things--shadows or images of things in the
heavens--and apart from these they have no reality at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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