Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. JohnAlexander, William
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. John
Alexander, William
Bible. Epistles of John -- Commentaries
(1) There is almost, if not quite, without exception the instinct
which may be generally described as the instinct of the Divine. In the
wonderful address where St. Paul so fully recognises the influence of
geographical circumstance and of climate, he speaks of God "having
made out of one blood every nation of men to seek after their Lord,
if haply at least" (as might be expected) "they would feel for
Him"[157]--like men in darkness groping towards the light. (2) There
is the instinct of prayer, the "testimony of the soul naturally
Christian." The little child at our knees meets us half way in the
first touching lessons in the science of prayer. In danger, when the
vessel seems to be sinking in a storm, it is ever as it was in the
days of Jonah, when "the mariners cried every man unto his God."[158]
(3) There is the instinct of immortality, the desire that our
conscious existence should continue beyond death.
"Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather swallow'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night?"
(4) There is the instinct of morality, call it conscience or what we
will. The lowest, most sordid, most materialised languages are never
quite without witness to this nobler instinct. Though such languages
have lien among the pots, yet their wings are as the wings of a dove
that is covered with silver wings and her feathers like gold. The most
impoverished vocabularies have words of moral judgment, "good" or
"bad;" of praise or blame, "truth and lie;" above all, those august
words which recognise a law paramount to all other laws, "I must," "I
ought." (5) There is the instinct of _sacrifice_, which, if not
absolutely universal, is at least all but so--the sense of impurity
and unworthiness, which says by the very fact of bringing a victim. "I
am not worthy to come alone; may my guilt be transferred to the
representative which I immolate."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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