Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876Flint, Robert
Religion
Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876
Flint, Robert
Theism
in antagonism to mine--one always better than mine--one which demands
from me an unvarying and complete obedience. It comes to me and speaks
to me in defiance of my will; when my will is set against hearing it,
and still more against obeying it; when my will is bent on stifling
and drowning its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes
me, against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate or
deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an absolute right
to rule over me, to control and sway all my faculties; which searches
me and knows me; which besets me behind and before. Whose is this
perfect, authoritative, supreme will, to which all consciences, even
the most erring, point back? Whose, if not God's? Those who object that
this argument is a mere verbal inference, or that it rests on a double
meaning of the word law, do not understand it, simple as it is. They
may be honest enough disputants, but their objection is strangely
superficial. In the utterly irrelevant criticism of a word they
lose sight of a great fact, and so necessarily fail to perceive its
momentous significance. From no mere word, whether law or any other,
but from that consciousness of moral dependence which no moral creature
can shake off, which conscience implies in every exercise, which
reveals itself in a thousand ways in the hearts and lives of men, do
we conclude that there is One on whom we morally depend, that we have
a holy Creator and Judge to deal with. Reason takes no mere name, but
it takes the fact that man feels himself under a law of duty, that he
is conscious of obligation and responsibility, that he has a conscience
which does not counsel but which commands him to do what is right and
to resist what is wrong; and it finds this fact inexplicable, this
consciousness a delusion, this conscience a false witness--unless there
be a holy God, a Moral Governor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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