souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most
nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic
life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or
action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain
successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as
much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls.
We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions
of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less
non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends
usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate,
and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is
indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of
temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or
short, is certainly nearest to the truth--as regards the form and
vehicle of the experience.
The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our
Religious _Accessions_, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals,
each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually
occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to
their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole)
growing content and worth--hence the Science of Religion. Yet such
Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further
acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are
not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the
other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often
much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline
of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish
Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these
Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises
are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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