Mystic Immanence, the Indwelling Spirit — John Shaqi
Mystic Immanence, the Indwelling SpiritWilberforce, Basil
Religion
Mystic Immanence, the Indwelling Spirit
Wilberforce, Basil
Immanence of God; Mysticism
In the Christian revelation the words "Absolute," "Infinite Mind," and
the rest, are relieved of impersonality and vagueness. We see that
earth’s teeming millions are not created, designed, or fashioned, or
even generated in the physical sense. They are to God what words are to
thoughts—expressions, utterances of the Infinite Mind of God. Each
human being is an individual vehicle or life-centre in which the
Infinite Mind expresses, manifests itself. Each human life is the
reproduction in an individuality of qualities which the Infinite
Creative Mind perceives within itself and desires to realize. Now, if
the sum-total of these universally diffused qualities of the Infinite
Mind could be specialized in one absolutely perfect individual
life-centre, we should be able to recognize the personalness of the
Infinite Mind and estimate the qualities and principles of the
Originating Spirit. And in Jesus we have this unique specimen, this
concentration in one individual life-centre, and we know what God is
because in Jesus dwelt "all the fulness of the God-head bodily." More
than this. The Universal, specialized in Jesus, enables us to
understand how God is immanent in us; for the Lord Jesus declared that
our relationship to the Infinite Mind was essentially and potentially of
the same nature as His, that we too have "the Father in us." He
emphatically declares: "I go to My Father and to your Father." Thus is
Jesus the Mediator, or Uniting Medium, between God and man. Thus does
"God in Christ reconcile the world to Himself," for in the perfectly
God-inhabited man is revealed the transcendent truth that God and man,
in inherent eternal unity, are one. When we think into this
self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, when we recognize what it
implies—namely, that the personality of Infinite Spirit is manifested in
the objective Christ, and that the mystic Christ is in all, and that
every human being is a potential Jesus—we have realized what it is to be
"in the Lord." If only we could stand fast in this truth! If we
restless, capricious human beings could but exercise our wills, our
power of self-compulsion, in holding our conscious minds fast to this
thought, it would reconstitute the whole of our character and being,
because it would readjust our mental relations with the material
environment and sense-impressions in which we live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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