The Expositor's Bible: The Prophecies of Jeremiah: With a Sketch of His Life and TimesBall, C. J. (Charles James)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Prophecies of Jeremiah: With a Sketch of His Life and Times
Ball, C. J. (Charles James)
Bible. Jeremiah -- Commentaries
May we not recognise in this great fact of human nature a sure index
of a great corresponding truth? Can we avoid taking it as a clear
token of the reality of revelation; as a kind of immediate and
spontaneous evidence on the part of nature that there is and always
has been in this lower world some positive knowledge of that which far
transcends it, some real apprehension of the mystery that enfolds the
universe? a knowledge and an apprehension which, however imperfect
and fragmentary, however fitful and fluctuating, however blurred in
outline and lost in infinite shadow, is yet incomparably more and
better than none at all. Are we not, in short, morally driven upon the
conviction that this powerful instinct of our nature is neither blind
nor aimless; that its Object is a true, substantive Being; and that
this Being has discovered, and yet discovers, some precious glimpses
of Himself and His essential character to the spirit of mortal man?
It must be so, unless we admit that the soul's dearest desires are a
mocking illusion, that her aspirations towards a truth and a goodness
of superhuman perfection are moonshine and madness. It cannot be
nothingness that avails to evoke the deepest and purest emotions of
our nature; not mere vacuity and chaos, wearing the semblance of an
azure heaven. It is not into a measureless waste of outer darkness
that we reach forth trembling hands.
Surely the spirit of denial is the spirit that fell from heaven, and the
best and highest of man's thoughts aim at and affirm something positive,
something that is, and the soul thirsts after God, the Living God.
We hear much in these days of our physical nature. The microscopic
investigations of science leave nothing unexamined, nothing
unexplored, so far as the visible organism is concerned. Rays from
many distinct sources converge to throw an ever-increasing light
upon the mysteries of our bodily constitution. In all this, science
presents to the devout mind a valuable subsidiary revelation of
the power and goodness of the Creator. But science cannot advance
alone one step beyond the things of time and sense; her facts belong
exclusively to the material order of existence; her cognition is
limited to the various modes and conditions of force that constitute
the realm of sight and touch; she cannot climb above these to a higher
plane of being. And small blame it is to science, that she thus lacks
the power of overstepping her natural boundaries. The evil begins
when the men of science venture, in her much-abused name, to ignore
and deny realities not amenable to scientific tests, and immeasurably
transcending all merely physical standards and methods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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