Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation: Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert SpencerJones, Jesse Henry
Religion
Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation: Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer
He possesses within himself the laws and
ideals of his action. As such, and created, he is near of kin to that
august Being in whoso image he was created. His laws are the created
person's laws. The end of the Creator should be that also of the
created. But God is infinite, while the soul starts a babe, an
undeveloped germ, and must begin to learn at the alphabet of knowledge.
What nobler, what more sublime and satisfactory occupation could this
being, endowed with the faculties of a God, find, than to employ all his
power in the contemplation of the eternal laws of the Universe, _i. e._
to the acquisition of an intimate acquaintance with himself and God; and
to bend all his energies to the realization by his own efforts of that
part in the Universe which God had assigned him, _i. e._, to accord his
will entirely with God's will. This course of life, a spiritual person
standing in his normal relation to an animal nature, would pursue as
spontaneously as if it were the law of his being. But this which we have
portrayed is not the course which human beings do pursue. By no means.
One great evil, at least, that "the Fall" brought upon the race of man,
is, that human beings are born into the world with the spiritual person
all submerged by the animal nature; or, to use Paul's figure, the spirit
is enslaved by the flesh; and such is the extent of this that many,
perhaps most, men are born and grow up and die, and never know that they
have any souls; and finally there arise, as there have arisen through
all the ages, just such philosophers as Sir William Hamilton and Mr.
Spencer, who in substance deny that men are spiritual persons at all,
who say that the highest knowledge is a generalization in the
Understanding, a form of a knowledge common to man and the brutes, and
that "the highest achievements of science are resolvable into mental
relations of coexistence and sequence, so cooerdinated as exactly to
tally with certain relations of coexistence and sequence that occur
externally." It is this evil, organic in man, that Paul portrays so
vividly; and it is against men who teach such doctrines that he thunders
his maledictions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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