Christian fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
“To tell you all that followed, if I could recall and narrate it in
order, would take hours. Suffice it that from that moment I was a
student, a disciple. Soon to me also came then the two questions: HOW DO
I KNOW THAT THERE IS A GOD AT ALL? and--HOW AM I TO KNOW THAT SUCH A MAN
AS JESUS EVERY LIVED? I could answer neither. But in the meantime I was
reading the story--was drawn to the man there presented--and was trying
to understand his being, and character, and principles of life and
action. And, to sum all in a word, many months had not passed ere I
had forgotten to seek an answer to either question: they were in fact
questions no longer: I had seen the man Christ Jesus, and in him had
known the Father of him and of me. My dear sir, no conviction can be
got, or if it could be got, would be of any sufficing value, through
that dealer in second-hand goods, the intellect. If by it we could prove
there is a God, it would be of small avail indeed: we must see him and
know him, to know that he was not a demon. But I know no other way of
knowing that there is a God but that which reveals WHAT he is--the only
idea that could be God--shows him in his own self-proving existence--and
that way is Jesus Christ as he revealed himself on earth, and as he is
revealed afresh to every heart that seeks to know the truth concerning
him.”
A pause followed, a solemn one, and then again Polwarth spoke:
“Either the whole frame of existence,” he said, “is a wretched,
miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, a chaos in which
the higher is for ever subject to the lower, or it is an embodied idea
growing towards perfection in him who is the one perfect creative Idea,
the Father of lights, who suffers himself that he may bring his many
sons into the glory which is his own glory.”
CHAPTER XIX.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.
“But,” said Wingfold--“only pray do not think I am opposing you; I am in
the straits you have left so far behind: how am I to know that I should
not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that which I
should like to be true?”
“Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really is
which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more than the
merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you, for the very
reason that you know not what it is, most rationally doubt. Is a man to
refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash in his own eyes should
deceive him with a vision of morning while yet it is night? The truth
to the soul is as light to the eyes: you may be deceived, and mistake
something else for light, but you can never fail to know the light when
it really comes.”
“What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?” said Wingfold, who,
having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not laid firm
enough hold upon what he had last said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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