The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879Various
History
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
Is it possible for the intellect to be in insurrection against the
heart? In a sense already indicated this is possible. It is possible, in
short, that the moral and intellectual spirit of a belief may still
control the life of one who, so far as his explicit consciousness is
concerned, has renounced it. Rooted as the individual is in a wider life
than his own, it is often but a small part of himself that he can bring
to distinct consciousness. Further, so little are most men accustomed to
self-analysis; that they are seldom aware what it is that constitutes
the inspiring power of their beliefs. Generally, at least in the first
instance, they take their creed in gross, without distinguishing between
essential and unessential elements. They confuse, in one general
consecration of reverence, its primary principles, and the local and
temporary accidents of the form in which it was first presented to them,
and they are as ready to accept battle _à l'outrance_ for some useless
outwork as for the citadel itself. And, for the same reason, they are
ready to think that the citadel is lost when the outwork is taken; to
suppose, _e.g._, that the spiritual nature of man is a fiction if he was
not directly made by God out of the dust of the earth, or that the
Christian view of life has ceased to be true if a doubt can be thrown on
the possibility of proving miracles. Yet however little the individual
may be able to separate the particulars which are assailed from the
universal with which they are accidentally connected, his whole nature
must rebel against the sacrifice which logical consistency seems in such
a case to demand from him. It is a painful experience when the first
break is made in the implicit unity of early faith, and it is painful
just in proportion to the depth of the spiritual consciousness which
that faith has produced in the individual. Unable to separate that which
he is obliged to doubt from that in which lies the principle of his
moral, and, even of his intellectual, life, he is "in a strait betwixt
two;" and no course seems to be open to him which does not involve the
surrender, either of his intellectual honesty, or of that higher
consciousness which alone "makes life worth living," Such a crisis is
commonly described as a division between the heart and the head, for in
it the articulate or conscious logic is on the side of disbelief, and
the resisting conviction generally takes the form of a feeling, an
impulse, an intuition, which the individual has for himself, but which
he is unable to communicate in the same force to another. And, as such
feelings and intuitions of the individual are necessarily subject to
continual variation of intensity and clearness, so the struggle between
doubt and faith may be long and difficult, the objections, which at one
time seem as nothing, at another time appearing to be almost
irresistible. Not seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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