If any one say we ought to receive nothing of which we have no
experience; I answer, there is in me a necessity, a desire before which
all my experience shrivels into a mockery. Its complement must lie
beyond. We ought, I grant, to accept nothing for which we cannot see
the probability of some sufficient reason, but I thank God that this
sufficient reason is not for me limited to the realm of experience. To
suppose that it was, would change the hope of a life that might be an
ever-burning sacrifice of thanksgiving, into a poor struggle with events
and things and chances--to doom the Psyche to perpetual imprisonment in
the worm. I desire the higher; I care not to live for the lower. The one
would make me despise my fellows and recoil with disgust from a self I
cannot annihilate; the other fills me with humility, hope, and love.
Is the preference for the one over the other foolish then--even to the
meanest judgment?
A higher condition of harmony with law, may one day enable us to do
things which must now _appear_ an interruption of law. I believe it is
in virtue of the absolute harmony in him, his perfect righteousness,
that God can create at all. If man were in harmony with this, if he too
were righteous, he would inherit of his Father a something in his degree
correspondent to the creative power in Him; and the world he inhabits,
which is but an extension of his body, would, I think, be subject to him
in a way surpassing his wildest dreams of dominion, for it would be the
perfect dominion of holy law--a virtue flowing to and from him through
the channel of a perfect obedience. I suspect that our Lord in all his
dominion over nature, set forth only the complete man--man as God means
him one day to be. Why should he not know where the fishes were? or
even make them come at his will? Why should not that will be potent as
impulse in them? If we admit what I hail as the only fundamental idea
upon which I can speculate harmoniously with facts, and as alone
disclosing regions wherein contradictions are soluble, and doubts
previsions of loftier truth--I mean the doctrine of the Incarnation; or
if even we admit that Jesus was good beyond any other goodness we know,
why should it not seem possible that the whole region of inferior
things might be more subject to him than to us? And if more, why not
altogether? I believe that some of these miracles were the natural
result of a physical nature perfect from the indwelling of a perfect
soul, whose unity with the Life of all things and in all things was
absolute--in a word, whose sonship was perfect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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