An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of AssentNewman, John Henry
Religion
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
Newman, John Henry
Faith; Theism
To feel the true force of an argument like this, we must not confine
ourselves to abstractions, and merely compare notion with notion, but
we must contemplate the God of our conscience as a Living Being, as
one Object and Reality, _under_ the aspect of this or that attribute.
We must patiently rest in the thought of the Eternal, Omnipresent, and
All-knowing, rather than of Eternity, Omnipresence, and Omniscience;
and we must not hurry on and force a series of deductions, which, if
they are to be realized, must distil like dew into our minds, and form
themselves spontaneously there, by a calm contemplation and gradual
understanding of their premisses. Ordinarily speaking, such deductions
do not flow forth, except according as the Image,(19) presented to us
through conscience, on which they depend, is cherished within us with
the sentiments which, supposing it be, as we know it is, the truth, it
necessarily claims of us, and is seen reflected, by the habit of our
intellect, in the appointments and the events of the external world.
And, in their manifestation to our inward sense, they are analogous to
the knowledge which we at length attain of the details of a landscape,
after we have selected the right stand-point, and have learned to
accommodate the pupil of our eye to the varying focus necessary for
seeing them; have accustomed it to the glare of light, have mentally
grouped or discriminated lines and shadows and given them their due
meaning, and have mastered the perspective of the whole. Or they may be
compared to a landscape as drawn by the pencil (unless the illustration
seem forced), in which by the skill of the artist, amid the bold
outlines of trees and rocks, when the eye has learned to take in their
reverse aspects, the forms or faces of historical personages are
discernible, which we catch and lose again, and then recover, and which
some who look on with us are never able to catch at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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