Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute
omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the
Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the
race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man,
the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from
germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine
and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in
personality.
Pure mind alone is face,
Brute matter surface all;
As souls immersed in space,
Ideal rise, or idol fall.
III.--PERSON.
The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime
part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But
rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity,
triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal
Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we
claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the
mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom
throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is
divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so
deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the
comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind
makes upon the senses,--these inclining always to idolatry,--is it
surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure
thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable
number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any
school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force,
law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending
logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality,
free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for
man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and
worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is
disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.[J]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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