Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

the spiritual faculty, the power to apprehend immaterial and absolute truth,--while they also betray an absence of that sense of things spiritual which is inborn.

From such higher knowledge, or from the inborn sense we refer to, would emanate a power of judgment which might prove a valuable aid to us, if exercised upon the revelations of experience and the observation of life, and more especially upon the results of scientific discovery or of historical research in their relation to the revealed Word of God.

Pre-eminence is, by common consent, given to spirit. The spirit has an independence of the intellect, similar to that which the intellect has of the physical senses. Senses, intellect, and spirit have each their several and separate functions and spheres of action.

Intellect passes judgment upon the evidence of the senses; spirit upon the impressions or opinions of the intellect; they are all reciprocally influential; they have relation the most intimate; but whilst they are necessarily connected, they

are yet absolutely independent, also there is a rise in human faculty up to the elevation of spirit.

In the outer world sensation lives and teaches, but intellect decides and governs.

In this outer world-in its relation to the inner-intellect acquires knowledge, and reveals it; it gives us its revelations of science, its researches of study.

But spirit penetrates into the inner world by a power essentially its own; possesses itself of secrets of hidden truth, which the intellect alone cannot grasp; perceives harmonies or detects inconsistencies, for the discovery of which the mightiest human intellect is insufficient; and, cherishing the intellectual force as the able minister of its agency, reigns supremely over the realm of human thought.

Speculation and divination may be said to divide the world of original thinkers on religious subjects. The former has more of the intellectual element, the latter more of the spiritual. From the earliest days of the Church of Christ

-and perhaps we might say still earlier these distinctive powers have engaged our attention. St. Paul was no mere speculator, yet we refer to him as having a nature favourable to free inquiry; and his teachings were the results of conviction rather than of impression. Marvellous as was the devotion of St. Paul, great as were his powers to explain away fallacies, and to establish reasonable and spiritual belief, St. John best divined his Lord in the harmonies of his majestic spirituality; and to his divining power was imparted and intrusted the final revelation of that Lord.

Speculation must be entertained by man as a legitimate step towards inquiry; only let candid inquiry follow, and let patient awaiting for light attend it, and let us never so mistake the characteristic features of first-class thought as to bow to a mere speculator.

What intellectual inquiry alone will not bring, what physical science will not make clear, it may be given to the divining genius of the spiritual thinker to discover.

The development of the spiritual faculty should be an object of study with us. Arnold defined faith as the "apprehension of the divine."

If such faith advance in proportion as outward knowledge and science progress, we shall indeed obtain light. While waiting for fuller light, may we not accept the Scriptures, as a whole, in implicit confidence, giving liberal support to all candid corrections, and regard the New Testament in particular as the fuller revelation of God, and as the expression or transmission of the mind and sentiment of Christ?

We cannot doubt that the path of the spirit's judgment will open, though we wait long; for God reveals himself to those who reverently seek him, and the things of the spirit are preeminently the things of God. With this brief expression of our sentiments we proceed to the introduction of our Lectures.

Introduction to Essays or

WE

Lectures

E see an endless variety of facts in nature which bear testimony to a more perfect original. We behold this especially in human nature, pre-eminently in the nature of womantherefore, irrespectively of scriptural doctrine, we start with the idea that, antecedently to the present condition of being, there existed conditions higher and more satisfactory. Thus we accept the Fall as a fact, in whatsoever form it may have presented itself, and we believe that the impression of it was deeply seated in the human mind, even if the scriptural details arising perhaps from such an impression be (as is sometimes stated) fabulous. We see that the creation as it stands, or its existing conditions relative to the

« ForrigeFortsett »