With regard to the supposed new Laws of the Spiritual World--those Laws,
that is, which are found for the first time in the Spiritual World, and
have no analogies lower down--there is this to be said, that there is
one strong reason against exaggerating either their number or
importance--their importance at least for our immediate needs. The
connection between language and the Law of Continuity has been referred
to incidentally already. It is clear that we can only express the
Spiritual Laws in language borrowed from the visible universe. Being
dependent for our vocabulary on images, if an altogether new and foreign
set of Laws existed in the Spiritual World, they could never take shape
as definite ideas from mere want of words. The hypothetical new Laws
which may remain to be discovered in the domain of Natural or Mental
Science may afford some index of these hypothetical higher Laws, but
this would of course mean that the latter were no longer foreign but in
analogy, or, likelier still, identical. If, on the other hand, the
Natural Laws of the future have nothing to say of these higher Laws,
what can be said of them? Where is the language to come from in which to
frame them? If their disclosure could be of any practical use to us, we
may be sure the clue to them, the revelation of them, in some way would
have been put into Nature. If, on the contrary, they are not to be of
immediate use to man, it is better they should not embarrass him. After
all, then, our knowledge of higher Law must be limited by our knowledge
of the lower. The Natural Laws as at present known, whatever additions
may yet be made to them, give a fair rendering of the facts of Nature.
And their analogies or their projections in the Spiritual sphere may
also be said to offer a fair account of that sphere, or of one or two
conspicuous departments of it. The time has come for that account to be
given. The greatest among the theological Laws are the Laws of Nature in
disguise. It will be the splendid task of the theology of the future to
take off the mask and disclose to a waning scepticism the naturalness of
the supernatural.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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