If ignorant yet devout speculation may be borne with here, I venture
to say that I think the change of some kind that was necessary somehow
before the body of the Son of Man could, like the Spirit of old, move
upon the face of the waters, passed, not upon the water, but, by the
will of the Son of Man himself, upon his own body. I shall have more to
say concerning this in a following chapter--now I merely add that we
know nothing yet, or next to nothing, of the relation between a right
soul and a healthy body. To some no doubt the notion of a healthy body
implies chiefly a perfection of all the animal functions, which is,
on the supposition, a matter of course; but what I should mean by an
absolutely healthy body is, one entirely under the indwelling spirit,
and responsive immediately to all the laws of its supremacy, whatever
those laws may be in the divine ideal of a man. As we are now, we find
the diseased body tyrannizing over the almost helpless mind: the healthy
body would be the absolutely obedient body.
What power over his own dwelling a Saviour coming fresh from the closest
speech with him who made that body for holy subjection, might have, who
can tell! If I hear of any reasonable wonder resulting therefrom, I
shall not find it hard to believe, and shall be willing to wait until I,
pure, inhabit an obedient house, to understand the plain thing which
is now a mystery. Meantime I can honour the laws I do know, and which
honest men tell me they have discovered, no less than those honest
men who--without my impulse, it may be, to speculate in this
direction--think such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty
with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so
absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to
know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of
something that _might_ be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a
human heart to be true, I expect to find true--in greater forms, and
without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain
of the purest thinker. Why should I not speculate in the only direction
in which things to me worthy of speculation appear likely to lie? There
is a wide _may be_ around us; and every true speculation widens the
probability of changing the may _be_ into the _is_. The laws that are
known and the laws that shall be known are all lights from the Father
of lights: he who reverently searches for such will not long mistake
a flash in his own brain for the candle of the Lord. But if he should
mistake, he will be little the worse, so long as he is humble, and ready
to acknowledge error; while, if he should be right, he will be none the
worse for having seen the glimmer of the truth from afar--may, indeed,
come to gather a little honour from those who, in the experimental
verification of an idea, do not altogether forget that, without some
foregone speculation, the very idea on which they have initiated their
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