The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884 — John Shaqi
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul.
I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our
vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense
I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was
thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to
me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest
Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can
bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even
in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's
being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's
mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to
silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense--or,
as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a
fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God,
has that conviction from inspiration. Many people have it, or think they
have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded
and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those,
perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their
supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason
seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their
hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no
reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though
it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now
established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some
things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the
world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge
is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an
activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his
animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him; he sees, he
hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure; by his human soul, he reasons,
he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics;
by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his
attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him
because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as
yet, only imperfectly active. The reality of the spiritual soul, the
vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has
for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it
will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening,
faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet
some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed
their development to the point that most men will reach millions of
years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life--that we shall
do perhaps in a few thousand years--but to this planet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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