Christianity in relation to Freethought, Scepticism, and Faith: Three discourses by the Bishop of Peterborough with special replies by Mr. C. BradlaughBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
Christianity in relation to Freethought, Scepticism, and Faith: Three discourses by the Bishop of Peterborough with special replies by Mr. C. Bradlaugh
And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that
religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to
scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what
is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come back then to that
point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we
saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must
exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own
higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can
justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the
soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning
faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of
that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that
we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is
right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart
of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely
sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which
demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share
with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we
specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the
other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so,
is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how
can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality,
our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we
assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always
conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our
innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our
nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we
feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes
some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the
presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its
gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful
thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an
ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not
in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal
opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that
his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that
was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration,
but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in
saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be
righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become
conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and
spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of
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