The Crown of Thorns: A Token for the SorrowingChapin, E. H. (Edwin Hubbell)
Religion
The Crown of Thorns: A Token for the Sorrowing
Chapin, E. H. (Edwin Hubbell)
Consolation
The Christian's faith is an Infinite Father and an immortal life, and
though he cannot see them, cannot come in material contact with them, he
believes them to be the greatest of all realities, and he sees them by
faith, a medium as legitimate as that of sight. They are mysteries,
but everything contains a mystery; they demand of him what every day's,
every hour's events demand of him--faith. Let us understand, however,
that faith is not the surrendering of our minds to that which is
irrational and inconsistent. These terms should not be confounded with
the mysterious and the incomprehensible. That the earth moves and yet
stands still is not a proposition that demands faith. It is in the
province of reason to say that it cannot move and stand still at the
same time. It is an inconsistency. But how the earth moves on its axis,
what is that law that makes it move, is an incomprehensibility. An
incomprehensibility is one thing, an inconsistency is another thing.
The one conflicts with our reason, the other is beyond it. In that which
conflicts with our reason we cannot have faith, but as to that which is
beyond it we exercise faith every day; for we literally walk by faith
and not by sight.
Who shall say, then, that God, immortality, and those high truths
revealed by Jesus, are inconsistent? Do they not conform to the highest
reason? Do not our deepest intuitions demand that these revelations
should be true? Consult your nature, examine your own heart, consider
what you are, what you want, what you feel, deeply want, keenly feel,
and then say whether the Revelation of a God, a Father, and an immortal
life, satisfies you as nothing else can. Take them away, and would there
not be a dreary and overwhelming void? And because you have not seen
God, because you have not realized immortality, because they reach
beyond your present vision, because the grave shuts you in, because they
are high and transcendent truths, will you reject them? Do so, and try
to walk by sight alone. With that nature of yours, so full of love, with
that intellect of yours so limitless in capacity, you are apparently a
child of the elements, a thing of physical nature, born of the dust,
and returning to it. With desires that reach out beyond the stars, with
faculties that in this life just begin to bud, with affections whose
bleeding tendrils cling around the departed, wrestle with death, and say
to the grave, "Give up the dead! they are not thine, but mine; I
feel they must be mine forever," with all these desires, capacities,
affections, you walk--so far as mere sight helps you--among graves and
decay, with nothing more enduring, nothing better, than three-score
years and ten, the clods of the valley, the crumbling bone, and
the dissolving dust! Because God and immortality are mysterious,
incomprehensible, reject them, and walk only by sight? The humblest
outpouring of human affection rebukes thy skepticism; the most narrow
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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