Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are
all their spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost
any other than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel
and its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are they any
other than mental studies and performances? What are all the gifts of the
gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit who must be
worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the spirit everything
to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one among you who shall
pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you in the name of Jesus!
What is the life of man but art and science? Is it meat and drink? Is not
the body more than raiment? What is mortality but the things relating to
the body which dies? What is immortality but the things relating to the
spirit which lives immortally? What is the joy of Heaven but improvement
in the things of the spirit? What are the pains of Hell but ignorance,
idleness, bodily lust, and the devastation of the things of the spirit?
Answer this for yourselves, and expel from amongst you those who pretend
to despise the labours of art and science, which alone are the labours of
the gospel. Is not this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think
at all, and not pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build
Jerusalem, and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her
builders? And remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in
another, calling it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the
giver of every mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving
hypocrites as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not
sin in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.' I have given the whole of
this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought, it is
little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound thoughts,
in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else, they are
always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and again. 'I care
not whether a man is good or bad,' are the words they put into the mouth
of God, 'all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off
holiness and put on intellect.' This cultivated life, which seems to us so
artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious
re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of the simple
world in which Christ taught and lived, and its lawlessness is the
lawlessness of Him 'who being all virtue, acted from impulse and not from
rules,'
And his seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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