Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real LifeWelldon, J. E. C. (James Edward Cowell)
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Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life
Welldon, J. E. C. (James Edward Cowell)
Endowed public schools (Great Britain) -- Fiction; Friendship in youth -- Fiction
There is no mistake in religion so great as that of being too logical.
In the affairs of man and man logic has its place, for they are
confined within the boundaries of the reason. But in the relation
of the Infinite to the finite, in the problem where one factor is
Infinity, logic is the most dangerous, the most fatal of possible
guides. From Augustine to Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, it has been the
vice of theology. Mr. Eversley did not ask himself, Can one man sin and
the consequences for man be everlasting, and shall a God die and the
consequences of His death end for most men with threescore years and
ten?
Strictly considered, the revelation of the Divine Nature is and must
be not single, but twofold. Every truth of God has two sides, like a
medal, and it is impossible to view them simultaneously. The nearest
human approximation to such truth will be found to lie in a harmony of
conflicting propositions. Logical contradictions are an absurdity in
human things; in divine things they are sometimes the only possible
expressions of truth. The divine severity and the divine forgiveness,
like necessity and free will, run in parallel lines which know no
meeting in this life, but may perchance meet in the eternal Life of
Heaven.
Gerald Eversley seems to have had some inkling or presentiment of this
fact, for I find somewhat later a reference to Isaiah lv. 8, 9, as
a passage affording the solution of religious difficulties. ‘For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith
the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’
But it was the last flicker of the dying flame. On the very same page
there is a sentence showing how the bitter herb of unbelief had already
begun to poison the spring of happiness in his life.
For no sooner is the goodness of God denied or doubted than a sense of
dissatisfaction arises in the human mind. Things are well as they are,
if they are the expression of a divine (though inscrutable) will. They
are not well, if judged in and by themselves.
Gerald Eversley found himself impatient (as so many before him) of
the circumstances of his being, nay, of his being itself. Instead of
thanking God for his creation, he censured his father for it. Questions
such as these welled up in his soul: ‘Why was I born, when it were so
much better not to have been than to be? Τὸ μὴ φῦναι ἃπαντα νικᾷ λόγον.
Why has man no option in his birth? why may he have none in his death?
Where is the right of parents to bring children into life, knowing not
if it will be to them a misery, a curse? How can he who believes that
the vast majority of mankind are predestined to an everlasting woe,
augment, with a light and laughing heart, the number of the damned?’
And again:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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