The Incarnate Purpose: Essays on the Spiritual Unity of LifePercival, G. H.
Religion
The Incarnate Purpose: Essays on the Spiritual Unity of Life
Percival, G. H.
Christianity; Spiritual life
As, within the physical universe, sound-waves,
once set in motion, must circulate for
ever, ripple on ripple, in widening vistas of
echoing reproduction, unless broken in their
course by contact with some barrier capable
of arresting and absorbing the progress of
vibration; so, in spiritual consciousness, the[58]
influences for good and evil which emanate
from all effort, whether individual or collective,
volitionary or involuntary, must circulate for
ever throughout Infinity, unless checked,
broken, absorbed, cancelled by centralization
in some interposing and receptive agent.
And so, within the Communion of Love, the
saints on earth, chosen by God as worthy to
co-operate in the divinely appointed regenerating
purpose of life, may summarise and
transmute the effects of evil into good by
means of their own suffering; may so sanctify
their minds and bodies as temples of the Holy
Spirit, that they may be found worthy to
share the passion of Incarnate Love in the
redemption of the world. It is the Will of
God, it is the Law of Life, that we bear each
other's burdens; that the just suffer for the
unjust, the innocent for the guilty, the pure
for the impure! Not in ourselves or by
ourselves alone can sins of commission and
omission be expiated; not by our own unaided
efforts can we arrest the consequences[59]
of action. Life is a whole, and individual
thought and action touch the whole, and
their effects are felt by the whole. We
derive no virtue in ourselves from ourselves
alone. Do we not owe our very ability to
discriminate between good and evil, our
standard of right and wrong, our civilization,
our culture—nay, in short, the whole of our
evolving realization of the Love of God—to
the collective consciousness of Creation, which
is a continual revelation of God? Do not we
stand to-day as inheritors of wisdom accumulated
by the united efforts of mankind in past
times, and as guardians of this, the world's
increasing consciousness of God, revealed
throughout all Time, throughout all Creation?
According as our forefathers struggled and
attained, do we in our generation enter upon
the inheritance of the earth. Thus the progressive
spiritual consciousness of the world is
at once our inheritance and our trust. We are
debtors to the past and custodians of the future
generations of our kind. Through the infinite[60]
condescension of God in employing mankind
as a medium of His revelation, the privilege
of realising the increasing purpose of His Will
is placed within our keeping. Made in the
image of God, man is endowed with the
creative faculties of his Maker. The Creator
wills that His creatures shall consciously share
in the glory of creation, whereby through the
perfecting of spiritual apprehension is revealed
the Kingdom of God. Are we willing to take
up the cross of sacrifice and suffer gladly with
and in the passion of Incarnate Love? If
we are indeed judged worthy of use in the
elimination of evil by conversion through
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