Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
No intelligent observer of the signs of the times can fail to notice among philosophical minds a marked reaction against the dominant scientific materialism of the past century, and a tendency to return to a more spiritual view of human nature and the world at large. Idealism, which has always had a strong hold upon the deepest thinkers of the world from Plato downward, is again coming into prominence, and many of the leading scientists of the day exhibit an inclination to adopt it as furnishing the most satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of nature. The present volume of the author is an attempt to construct a theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental-cure, on the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Its fundamental doctrine is that to think and to exist are one and the same, and that every disease is the translation into a bodily expression of a fixed idea of the mind and a morbid way of thinking. If by any therapeutic device you remove the morbid idea, which is the spiritual image after the likeness of which the body is formed, you cure the malady. The work lays no claim to originality except in the practical application of Idealism to the cure of the diseases of mind and body. It is the culmination of a. life-long study of human nature, and to which the previous volumes of the author may be viewed as introductory.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 508
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
The Divine Law Of Cure
Warren Felt Evans
Contents:
The Divine Law Of Cure
Preface.
Part I. - Relation Of The Divine Life To Human Life
Chapter I. – The True Idea Of Religion.
Chapter Ii. - Religion Is A Development From Within, And Not A Foreign Element Imported Into Our Nature From Without.
Chapter Iii. - The Power Of The Religious Emotions Over The Life Of Man.
Chapter Iv. - All. Religions Useful And Spiritually Medicinal.
Chapter V - The Essential Idea Op Christianity As Unfolded In The Johannean Gospel.
Chapter Vi. - The Presence Of God In The Material World And In The Realm Of Mind.
Chapter Vii - Saving And Healing Gkace, Or Medicine A Sacrament.
Chapter Viii - Origin And Conservation Op Life-Force.
Chapter Ix - The Scriptural Idea Op Health And Disease.
Chapter X - The Birth Of Jesus As Illustrating The General Law Of Conception And The Vital Relation Of Man To God.
Chapter Xi - The Divine Light Within As An Unerring Guide In Human Life.
Chapter Xii - On Divine Revelation As A Past Experience Of Men, And As A Present Need Of The Human Mind.
Chapter Xiii - The Nature And Extent Of Inspiration.
Chapter Xiv - Theopneusty, Or The Divine Afflatus.
Chapter Xv - Inspiration Universal, Or The Philosophy Of Common Sense.
Chapter Xvi - The Therapeutic Value Of Prayer
Chapter Xvii - Christ And Disease; Oe, The Power Of The Spiritual Life Over The Body.
Chapter Xviii - The Antagonism Of The Christ-Principle And Disease, Or The Healing Power Of Jesus.
Chapter Xix - Jesus As A Saviour, Or Health-Giver, Minus The Enchantment That Distance Lends To The View.
Chapter Xx - The Paraclete, Or Christ The Spirit.
Part Ii – The Relation Of Spirit To Matter And Of The Soul To The Body In Man
Chapter I - Matter Has No Existence Independent Of Mind Or Spirit.
Chapter Ii - Visual Language, Or The Spiritual Meaning Of The Objects Of Nature.
Chapter Iii - The Body Is Included In The Being Of The Mind,
Chapter Iv - Matter An Unsubstantial Appearance, And Is Created And Governed By Thought.
Chapter V - The Unconscious Region Of Mental Action.
Chapter Vi - The Mind The Plastic Or Formative Principle Of The Body.
Chapter Vii - Faith Makes Us Whole; Or, The Christian Method Of Cure.
Chapter Viii - Voluntary And Involuntary Action Of The Mind On The Body.
Chapter Ix - The Morbific And Sanative Influence Of Thouoht.
Chapter X - The Divine Function Of Imagination In The Cure Of Disease.
Chapter Xi - Instinct As A Revelation From God And A Guide To Health And Happiness.
Chapter Xii - The Higher Forms Of Mental Life And Action, And Tiieir Durative Influence.
Chapter Xiii - Blessedness And Health, Or To Be Happy Is To Be Well.
Chapter Xiv - The True Idea Of Sin, And Its Relation To Disease.
Chapter Xv - The Nature Of Regeneration And Its Influence Upon The Bodily Stats.
Chapter Xvi - The Creative Power Of Thought, Or Hegel's Philosophy As A Medicine.
Chapter Xvii – Theopathy And Phrenopathy, Or The Union Of The Divine And Human In The Cure Of Disease.
Part Iii - Psycho-Therapeutics, Practical Mental Cure.
Chapter I - On The Method Of Communicating A Sanative Mental Influence.
Chapter Ii - The Influence Of Thought On The Body, And A Practical Use Of It In The Cure Op Disease.
The Divine Law Of Cure, H. Wood
Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck
86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9
Germany
ISBN:9783849643348
www.jazzybee-verlag.de
www.facebook.com/jazzybeeverlag
The Divine Law Of Cure
Preface.
No intelligent observer of the signs of the times can fail to notice among philosophical minds a marked reaction against the dominant scientific materialism of the past century, and a tendency to return to a more spiritual view of human nature and the world at large. Idealism, which has always had a strong hold upon the deepest thinkers of the world from Plato downward, is again coming into prominence, and many of the leading scientists of the day exhibit an inclination to adopt it as furnishing the most satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of nature. The system of Berkeley is undergoing a resurrection, and, in connection with the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg, will have more influence than ever in shaping the metaphysical systems of the future, and in giving direction to the current of human thought. The present volume of the author is an attempt to construct a theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental-cure, on the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Its fundamental doctrine is that to think and to exist are one and the same, and that every disease is the translation into a bodily expression of a fixed idea of the mind and a morbid way of thinking. If by any therapeutic device you remove the morbid idea, which is the spiritual image after the likeness of which the body is formed, you cure the malady. The work lays no claim to originality except in the practical application of Idealism to the cure of the diseases of mind and body. It is the culmination of a. life-long study of human nature, and to which the previous volumes of the author may be viewed as introductory. That its teachings will be fully accepted by all who peruse it is not to be expected. That there is a large and constantly increasing class of minds who are prepared to receive its doctrines, as a dry soil drinks in the vernal rain, he fully believes. To their thoughtful consideration the volume is dedicated, with the sincere prayer that they may find in it something more certain and satisfactory than the current materialistic systems of medication have been able to furnish.
Part I.-Relation Of The Divine Life To Human Life
"There is one God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all."— Eph. iv: 6.
"He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live, and are moved, and have our being." — Acts xvii: 27, 28.
"An indispensable requisite to a blessed life is that this living religion in us should at least go so far as to convince us entirely of our own nothingness in ourselves, and of our being only in God and through God; that we should at least feel this relationship continually and without interruption ; and that, even though it should not be expressed either in thought or language, it should yet be the secret spring, the hidden principle, of all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and desires." — Fichte Popular Works, p. 437.
Chapter I. – The True Idea Of Religion.
In discussing the subject of Religion and Health, and the relation of the one to the other, it is necessary that we form some definite conception of what religion is, and what we mean by health.
Religion is certainly not a mere intellectual state, the belief of a creed however orthodox, or an assent to any number of theological propositions.
It does not consist in outward action, — the performance of the outward mechanism of forms and ceremonies, however grand and imposing, or however humble and simple, from the Roman Catholic ceremonial in the Gothic cathedral down to the forms, or want of forms, in the meeting-house of the Society of Friends. I do not affirm that either of these elements or both — the intellectual assent to some form of belief and the practice of some outward worship — may not enter into it, and be most intimately associated with it, but they constitute no necessary part of its nature and essence. They may be varied in form, like the colors of the chameleon, and are continually changing, while religion remains the same. It is very certain that there may he many gradations of religious intensity in men whose creed is the same, and their outward forms of worship identical. The intellectual state belonging to religion is intuitional, and arises from feeling, and is not merely an act of the logical consciousness. This feeling, when left to itself, like all other feelings, will spontaneously create its outward and appropriate forms of expression.
There are two definitions of religion by two of the religious thinkers of Germany, who knew from their own consciousness what they were saying, both having been educated among the Moravians. These two definitions, when combined, give us a clear conception of the essential nature of religion. " Jacobi, who was first to see the full worth and signification of feeling in the domain of philosophy, defines religion to be a faith, resting upon feeling, in the reality of the super-sensual and ideal. The other is the definition of Schleiermacher, than whom no man ever pursued with greater penetration of mind and earnestness of spirit the pathway of a Divine philosophy, and he places the essence of religion in the absolute feeling of dependence, and of a conscious relationship to God, originating immediately from it." (Morell's Philosophy of Religion, p. 71.) When this feeling rises to a conscious union with God, and to an intuitive perception of the spiritual truths that underlie it, and are naturally associated with it, we have religion in its highest form — its Divine reality. For religion (from re and ligo, to bind together) is the conscious reunion of the soul with God, after having been separated from Him by the disjunctive agency of sin, or it is recovering the lost consciousness that our life is inseparable from that of the Divine Being, and is identical with His. If religion does not " bind " us to God, it is superficial and worthless. It is valuable only so far as it does this.
Sectarian creeds and external and fixed forms of worship are no more a necessary part of religion than warts, tumors, and fungus growths are of the human body. These may seem to have a connection with the body, but they are no essential part of it, and they can be removed, and the patient be all the better for it.
In the religious history of every age and country, we find a certain class of minds who are impatient of ceremonial forms, technical distinctions, and dry, dogmatic formulas, and who have followed the yearnings of their own hearts for something better, and have yielded themselves to the instinctive impulses of the soul to rise from the shadow to the substance, from the sign to the thing signified, from the human to the Divine, the transient to the enduring, and from the non-essential to the essential in religion. Christianity, when properly apprehended, will meet the wants and satisfy the spiritual cravings of all such minds. Its constant aim is to unite the sundered link between man and God, and to bring the finite and infinite into a conscious harmony and felt oneness.
Religion may, and actually does, exist in a thousand different forms and degrees. The highest development of religious thought and feeling is that of a Christian Pantheism, not the cold, intellectual system of Spinoza, but one nearer to that of the warm and loving Fichte, who exhibited the blessedness of a life in God. The Divine inspiration and wisdom of Jesus the Christ, is seen in his placing religion in something above and beyond all ceremonial observances, and in teaching that the highest style of religion is found in the consciousness of God within, — the intuitive perception of the life of God in the soul of man. The system of Jesus and of Buddha here find a point of contact and flow together. The Buddhist Nirvana, or ideal conception of the summum honum, the supreme good, was not originally a state of annihilation, — which is no state at all, much less one of happiness, — but was rather the rest of the soul in its complete union with God, and its harmony with the Divine Life. I cannot avoid this view, although Max Muller, in his Science of Religion, has seemed to prove to the contrary. It is that condition of union with the Godhead which Jesus so often affirmed of himself, — not a mathematical, but a spiritual oneness, which does not destroy the feeling of our individuality. It is that for which the mystics of all ages have longed. It was sought as a realization of their highest ideal of a state of blessedness by Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbrock, Behmen, Guyon, and others. This is the essence of all religion ; for a system that does not unite Divinity and Humanity does not answer to the fundamental idea of the word. In the evolution of the religious life of mankind we see what is the coming stage of its advancement. Il will be the revelation of God in the individual said. This is a stage of the religious consciousness to which the world is being borne by influences which it did not originate, and which cannot be suppressed. All genuine science and philosophy are drifting in that direction, and all church organizations will follow in their wake.
A spiritual science of religion, the philosophy of the relations of the finite mind to the Infinite Being, of matter to spirit, and of the body to the soul in man, will be the last to be worked out in the progress of human knowledge, but when it is elaborated according to the law of evolution, it will change the life of the world, and usher in a new and higher dispensation of Christianity. The great mistake of men is, they seek without for what they can only find within. Within the depths of the soul are infinite spiritual capabilities and possibilities. In every human mind is the hidden germ of an endless development. God dwells in man, and the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Divine element in our nature is not there as an idle guest or spectator, but as an ever-operative force. God's activity is co-extensive with his presence. We cannot separate from the idea of his presence that of causation. The Divine Being is the causa causarum, the prime cause that lies back of all secondary causes. This doctrine was introduced into philosophy by an Arabian and a Mohammedan. Says Sir Wm. Hamilton : " As far as I have been able to trace it, this doctrine was first promulgated toward the commencement of the twelfth century by Algazel, of Bagdad, a pious Mohammedan philosopher, who not undeservedly obtained the title of the Imam of the World. Algazel did not deny the reality of causation, but he maintained that God was the only efficient cause in nature; and that second causes are not properly causes, but only occasions of the effect." (The Metaphysics of Sir Wm. Hamilton, by Prof Bowen, p. 540.) The subject was much discussed by the philosophers of subsequent ages, but the mo.st distinguished advocate of the doctrine of Algazel was Malebranche. He believed and taught that God was the only active force in the universe, and even in the body. What we call second causes were only the occasions on which the Divine power acted. There is an important substratum of intuitional and logical truth in this view. A cause is that without which something we call an effect could not exist or take place. But can anything exist without God ? If not, then all secondary causes are but effects, and must be referred back to the great First Cause.
Some minds have so vivid a consciousness of God as to lose sight of everything else, at least everything else is thrown into the back-ground. Such was the mind of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. And this was emphatically true of Spinoza, who has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Novalis characterizes him as "the God-intoxicated man." The essence, or fundamental idea of his philosophy is contained in a single sentence of his writings, which is certainly in harmony with the Christian system. Its infidelity consists in giving a more intense reality to God than most people have done, but not more than Jesus himself did. Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non transiens, God is the immanent not transient cause of all things; or, in other words, God is permanently resident in nature, and not a power outside of it that has occasionally acted upon it.
We have seen in what has been said above that religion is a conscious union with God. All religions, however imperfect, are an instinctive seeking after this, and, in a measure, accomplish it. But it is a self-evident truth that what is the source of life must be the primal cause and fountain of health. The efficiency of any remedial agency must, in its last analysis, be referred to a Divine power and causation. But a soul, made in the image of God, may come into vital communication and fellowship with God, the only Life. This is, at the same time, both religion and health in their highest idea. As religion, in its inmost essence, consists in an intuitive consciousness of a Divine life in the soul, so health is the Divine life within us coming to a free activity and expression in all our voluntary powers.
Chapter Ii. - Religion Is A Development From Within, And Not A Foreign Element Imported Into Our Nature From Without.
The Divine element in human nature is not something of which we are born destitute, and that is afterwards to be superadded to our being by instruction and the religious propagandism of the church, but is the seed, and the only vital germ, from which our existence springs. This Divine germ is enclosed as in a pericarp in every one of the human race, — the savage and the saint. It is not the true function of preaching, and of religious instruction, to import the Divine life as a foreign element into human nature, for it is already there, but to bring men to a conscious realization of this truth. The religious element in man is not something communicated to him from without, but is an original constituent of his nature, and one which may be drawn forth and modified in its action by instruction and influences received from others. It is not something entirely adventitious, but is inherent in the essence of the soul. The universal prevalence of religion in the world among all races and in all ages of human history would militate against the theory that it is something extraneous, and goes to prove that it is natural to man, and a necessary outcome of his mental constitution, as much as language, or poetry, or music, or civil government. This does not make it any less Divine, for God is in all natural powers, susceptibilities, and laws. Certain it is, I have never found a man in whom the religious sentiments were utterly suppressed or annihilated. In many men the religious nature is latent, and overlaid by a deep covering of externality, but there is still the vital germ in the depths of the soul that awaits the vivifying touch of the Divine Spirit to cause it to sprout, and to be unfolded into the flower and fruit of a religious consciousness and life. It is only a question of the best means of developing this Divine instinct of the soul. A seed may remain dormant for a long series of years without losing its vitality, and when exposed to the proper influences of moisture, heat, and genial sunshine, it starts into a manifested life spontaneously. As we could never be taught morality without a moral nature and a moral sense to distinguish between right and wrong, and as we could not be taught music or mathematics without an inborn genius for those sciences, so the same is true of religion. All education (from ex and duco, to draw out) implies something in the hidden depths of the soul to be educed or developed into conscious activity. On this principle is based the system of Frobel. All moral and religious education consists in awakening and properly directing what is already potentially within us. On this subject Mr. Morell justly observes : " We could never be taught religion by any external appliances unless there was some inward susceptibility which may indeed be aroused or regulated by discipline, but which has a prior existence as a primary element of our spiritual nature." (Philosophy of Religion, p. 65.)
This view, when fully recognized, must essentially modify our idea of the nature of regeneration. It is no longer a new creation, but a development. Religion will never be propagated with any great success unless this self-evident and fundamental truth is acknowledged, and the means of propagandism be adapted to it. The true religious life is an evolution, the unfolding of a latent and dormant power within us.
We must not confound religion with theology. Theology is what we think about religion, and this is an ever-changing thing, but true religion remains the same. The stars do not constitute astronomy, nor the rocky strata of the earth geology, but astronomy is what we know about the stars, and geology what we know or think about the rooks. Religion is the union of man with God, or as Schelling defines it, " the union of the finite with the infinite." But this may be predicated of all men. If it be true, as Paul affirms, that, " in Him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts xvii: 27), or in other words, that God is the inmost Life of all that is, and the ground of our own existence, then no human mind is or can be entirely sundered from the Divine Mind, or can have any life that is not a manifestation of the One Life. We may loose the consciousness of this, but there is a region of the Soul where God perpetually dwells, and in which our life is linked to the Deity. The incarnation is not a solitary miracle in the course of human history, and something outside of that fixed order of things which we call the laws of nature, and confined to one individual of the race, but a universal fact, without which the existence of the soul here, and its immortality hereafter, would be an impossibility. The human soul 'is distinct from the Deity, but not separate. It retains its self-consciousness and individuality and never loses its personal identity in an all-prevading impersonal Pneuma, or becomes a part of the abstract Reason. Though the soul retains a connection with the totality of spirit, it is never merged in it, like a drop falling into the ocean. The more fully and consciously it is united to the All, the more it becomes itself. The true theory is this, — that owing to the incarnation of God in every individual soul, and in the whole of humanity, every man has within himself a region of the soul where he may have direct and immediate communication and converse with the Divine Mind. Man is an individual endowed with free will, but in being an individual possessing self-consciousness, he does not become an exile from God. He is not banished from the Divine Presence, but is still enclosed within the infinite circle of the Divine Life. Through this medium he may learn all that is essential to his highest interests in this world and the next, and may gain the highest truths of wisdom in relation to health of mind and body. All our knowledge of spiritual things comes from this source, and is, in a proper sense, a revelation from God, and a ray of that uncreated and Divine Word that " lighteth every man that cometh into the world." All men, in favored moments, have experiences of this spiritual illumination, this awakening and quickening of the intuitive perception, and might have much more if they understood the laws and conditions of its transmission and re6eptivity. The reality of a present inspiration from God, both of life and light, in all human souls, can be established as a fact in mental philosophy, resting on a foundation of evidence far more substantial than that of most metaphysical theories.
One of the first results of this nearness of man to God is the revelation of God to man. The existence of God is a truth to be seen, not to be proved. There is no demonstration of the being of God that does not involve some logical absurdity, or, at least, a petitio principii, or begging of the question. The central sun of our system shines with his own light, and makes himself known to all the planets that revolve around this central orb. Their light is borrowed or imparted light, and not self-originated. God may be so very near to us that we cannot see him, but only feel him, and this is the highest possible evidence. Thus, Paul says that we should seek the Lord, if haply we might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from every one of us. (Acts xvii : 27.) Conscious contact of the soul with God, an all-satisfying communion and fellowship with Him, is the highest demonstration of His existence, for to feel anything to be true is to attain to a state of certainty and freedom from all doubt. It has been truly said by Immanuel Hermann Fichte that " God is not merely an object of faith, as is usually said; He operates faith in us, and gives in this very fact the most lively proof of His existence and care." He makes known Himself to the religious consciousness with more certainty and force of evidence than the external world is made known to our senses. He reveals Himself to the intuitive reason, — or, as Kant calls it, the pure reason, — which is the highest evidence the mind is capable of receiving. In the attainment of certainly as to the Divine Existence, so that the being of God is no longer a doubtful hypothesis, but He becomes to us the only Reality, our pathway is opened to the fountain of all health and blessedness. As in the age of Augustus all the magnificent highways of the empire centred in Rome, and conducted the traveller from the provinces by an unerring route to the place whence emanated all subordinate authority and power, so to the man who has attained to the consciousness of God, and of our vital relations to Him, all remedies will conduct us to the central Life, and will bring the sick and bewildered wanderer to Him, from whom proceeds every sanative potency for soul or body. For it is the Divine alone that heals. There is one truth, of which we must never lose sight — that there is but one Life in the universe. As Fichte has said, " Being is simple and uncompounded. There is not a multiplicity of beings, but only one Being." Being and life are the same. This one Being, one Life, is what Jesus calls the Father, because from Him everything springs. By existence we mean manifested being. This is endlessly varied and multiplied. But all existences, from the atom to the world, from the insect to the angel, have their ground in the One Being and Life of which they are but manifestations to consciousness, that is, to sense and thought. All the millions of the race are but the rising into individuality of the ocean of being, but never lose their connection with it. They are a personal cropping out of the Primal Life, as mountains are an upheaval of the primitive rock, but are not sundered from it. The Father is in us, and we are in the Father. In the innermost root of our existence we are inseparably and perpetually connected with Him, otherwise we could not exist at all, and because of it we shall live forever.
" An insight into the absolute unity of the human existence with the Divine is certainly the profoundest knowledge that man can attain. Before Jesus this knowledge had nowhere existed; and since his time, we may say down even to the present day, it has been again as good as rooted out, at least in profane literature " ( Way Towards the Blessed Life, Lecture VI.)
The grand error of the religious world has ever been in separating God too far from man. It has believed in a Divine Being who is somewhere, but not here, and indeed who is anywhere and everywhere except in man.
It is a fundamental doctrine of Swedenborg's spiritual philosophy, and one that comes continually to view in all his voluminous writings, that there is only one Life in the universe, and angels, spirits, and men are but recipients of it. (Arcana Celestia, 3742.) Our life is perpetually imparted from Him. His Being flows forth into our existence which is but a manifestation of it, and is continuous with it. Our individual life is identical with His, and is included as an item, or an atom, in the sum total of the Divine Existence. The thread of our life, without a break, is ever unwound from His.
Swedenborg also affirms (Arcana Celestia, 4525) that man is so made that he can apply to himself life from the Lord. In other words, as an individual existence, he -can appropriate more of the Divine Life and make it his own, as you can enlarge the stream that flows from the lake in the mountains, and increase its volume by deepening the channel. In certain elevated states we become more highly charged with a Divine vitality, and become, in a more exalted degree, incarnations of the Deity. This fits us for the higher uses of life, — as the spiritual instruction of others, and the cure of their mental and bodily maladies. This is what is called, in the expressive language of the New Testament, being endued with power from on high. (Luke xxiv : 49.)
Descartes, the father of modern speculative philosophy, affirmed that God has accorded to created things no principle of subsistence in themselves, and that the existence of everything, from moment to moment, is due to the renewal each moment of the creative act of the Deity. (Med. iii. p 23, ed. 1663.) Since his day, the tendency of philosophy has been towards a fuller recognition of a Divine Life and Force in Nature. To a truly religious and spiritual man the world is not a mere dead mass of material forces, but is everywhere seen to throb and pulsate with the life of God. It is everywhere inter-penetrated with a living Intelligence and Thought, of which it is the existence or outward form and phenomenon. By Fichte, one of the most profoundly religious men of any age or country, Nature is elevated into a living and sacred manifestation of the One Eternal, Divine Life According to him. "Religion consists in regarding and recognizing all earthly life as the necessary development of the One Original, Perfectly Good and Perfectly Blessed Divine Life.'' ( Characteristics of the Present Age, p. 256.)
Especially is man, in a preeminent degree, a manifestation of God. " According to the meaning of true religion, and in particular of Christianity, humanity is the one, visible, efficient, living, and independent existence of God; or, if the expression be not misunderstood, the one manifestation and effluence of that Existence, — a beam from the eternal Light, which divides itself, not in reality, but only to mere earthly vision, into many individual rays." (Characteristics of the Present Age, p. 198.)
However strange it may seem, it is nevertheless true that this higher view of God and of our relation to Him, which arises naturally out of the profoundest religious consciousness and feeling, has almost always been viewed by more superficial minds as equivalent to atheism. Spinoza was ignorantly misapprehended, and has been maliciously defamed. The memory of the " God-intoxicated man " has been ignominiously buried beneath the stones that the ferocious zeal of shallow souls have cast upon it. Every candid, religious mind will unhesitatingly adopt the language of Prof. Ferrier when he says : " This I will avouch, that all the outcry which has been raised against Spinoza has its origin in nothing but ignorance, hypocrisy, and cant. If Spinoza errs, it is in attributing not certainly too much to the great Creator, for that is impossible, but too little to the creature of his hands." (Institutes of Metaphysics, p. 554.)
Schleiermacher speaks of Spinoza as "that holy and yet outcast man, who was full of the sentiment of religion, because he was filled with the Holy Spirit." Says Cousin: "Instead of accusing Spinoza of atheism, he should be subjected to the opposite reproach." Prof. Saisset says of him : " He has been loudly accused of atheism and impiety. The truth is that never did a man believe in God with a faith more profound, with a soul more sincere, than Spinoza. Take God from him, and you take from him his system, his thought, his life."
Spinoza denied, as many great and pious divines have done, the free agency of man. Hegel escapes this charge by making the very essence of spirit to consist in freedom, and that of matter in passivity. (Hegel’s Philosophy of History, John's edition, p. 18.)
When Spinoza affirms that God is the only substance, he uses the word not in a physical but in a metaphysical sense. According to him, substance is that which does not depend upon anything else for its existence. (Ethics, Part I., p. 3.) It is that which exists absolutely and of itself, and in this sense it is only another name for Pure Being. It is equivalent to the Hebrew Jehovah, which is derived from a substantive verb, and signifies permanent being. With that definition of it, he logically infers that God is the only Substance. He is the underlying, or, more properly, the under-standing, reality and support of all things. They do not exist separately from God, but in and from Him. Spinoza asserts "that whatever is is in God; and nothing can be, nor be conceived to be, without God." (Ethics, Part I., Prop. XV.) The world and all it contains are the ex-istence or out-standing of the Divine Being. This gives to the Universe its appropriate name (from unum, one, and versus, a turning), the mundus of the Latin, the welt of the German, and the world of the English, which is radically the same as whirl.
Jesus affirms that God is Spirit, — not a spirit, which is contrary to the Greek ; and spirit is essentially active and living. God is not merely an extraneous, isolated, individual Being, — though his personality, in any proper sense of the word, is not denied, — but the internal, collective, and intrinsic energy and Life of all things from the sparrow to the archangel. He is the ever-present, ever-acting, and indivisible Life of the world. Under the idea of the Primal Life ho was apprehended by the Greeks as well as by the Hebrews. Zeus and theos, and even the Latin deus, are all derived from a verb meaning to live. Kuss, a distinguished physiologist of Strasbourg, has defined life to be " all that which cannot be explained by chemistry or physics." But all the laws of chemistry and of every physical science are only modes of action of the One Life. Physiology and even Psychology are in their inmost essence only individual manifestations of the Divine Existence in man. As one has said, who will not be suspected of any heretical taint : " There is something grand in the idea of the unity of all being, and the connection of our life with the whole life of the universe." (Christlieb's Modem Doubt and Christian Belief, p. 188.)
Chapter Iii. - The Power Of The Religious Emotions Over The Life Of Man.
The region of the religious sentiments and feelings is the seat of the kingdom of heaven in man. The religious emotions are the most powerful of all the principles to which our nature can appeal. They can hold the animal nature in chains, and control and restrain our hereditary bent from any wrong direction. Even when distorted by superstition, and directed into a wrong channel, they give a force of character which breaks down all minor opposition, and an almost supernatural energy to human nature, but when of a pure and elevated description, and united with a high moral sensibility, and under the guidance of an exalted intellectual state, they lend to our nature a power, a dignity, and a glory which shows its alliance with the Divinity here, and gives the clearest intimations of its exalted destiny hereafter. (Morells Philosophy of Religion, p. 23.)
The history of the world is full of illustrations of the power of religion to move and control great masses of men. The conquests of the Jews under Joshua were effected by the animating influence of a religion by no means perfect, but better than that of the tribes they overran and displaced. The brilliant career of the Persian empire under Cyrus found its inspiring principle in the Zend-Avesta. The petty tribes of Arabia were galvanized into an irresistible life and conquering force by the Koran of Mohammed, which still maintains its hold upon millions of the human family.
An hundred and fifty millions of Hindoos have been moulded and directed by their sacred writings, the Vedas and Puranas, for more than twenty-five centuries. The writings of the mild and gentle Buddha, who approaches in spirit the nearest to Jesus, hold sway over one-third of mankind, and have for many ages. The religion of Confucius, as contained in the " Kings " and the " Four Books,'' has given shape to the civilization and the every-day life of the millions of China. The power of religion to inspire to action great masses of men is seen in the Crusades, during which Europe was poured out upon Asia, under the preaching of Peter the Hermit, like a stream of lava from a volcano. What men can suffer for religion is illustrated in the lives and deaths of the martyrs and reformers of all ages and countries. All these things show the power of the religious nature, when developed into activity, over the life of man. It gives energy to all below it, the intellect and even the body. It is a power when properly educated and directed that, by its native Divine right, comes forth from the inmost depths and sublimest heights of our being, and assumes command of every department of our nature. From its throne, in the inmost palace of the soul, it reigns dei gratia over the whole external domain of mind and body.
In the system of the Christ, and in the apostolic Church, religion was a spiritual medicine and a means of cure. In the spiritual philosophy of Jesus, religion and health were viewed as one. Health of body was external holiness, or wholeness, and holiness was internal health. But the power of the spirit over disease was gradually lost sight of both in the doctrine and practice of the Church. As the religion of the Christ spread, it seems, except in scattered individual cases, to have lost in depth what it gained in surface extension, and at length the priests of religion, who were but a poorly-defined shadow of Jesus, stood in dumb and powerless amazement before diseases that yielded at once to the primitive spiritual power and Divine force.
Religion is influential over the life and health of soul and body in proportion to its depth, and powerless in an exact ratio to its shallowness. Genuine religion, and a true spiritual philosophy, raise the soul above all mere appearances, the surface of things, and all empty show, and penetrate to the very nature of things, and thus exhibit the most felicitous use of the spiritual powers, the greatest depth and acuteness of thought, and the highest strength of character. All these are favorable to a vigorous health of the mind, and therefore of the body. The religion of the day is too superficial, and has thus lost its sanative value. It is a sort of pious coloring stamped upon the external memory, the mere surface of our being. It does not strike through the tissue, and easily wears off. Its outward expression is a mechanical round of ceremonies, and posturing of the body, or a repetition of cant phrases that have lost their spiritual meaning, — a sort of parrot talking where the words are too large for the ideas in the mind of the one who utters them, and which are consequently empty sounds. The religious zeal of such persons, full of sound without sense, seems to a thoughtful mind like acting in the pulpit, and in the conference room, instead of upon the stage, the drama of Shakespeare under another form of " Much Ado About Nothing." The faith of such a person, instead of being the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, dwindles down, when closely examined, to an opinion borrowed from others. Its moral code, its Decalogue, is to do what most people do, and especially to ape the life of the ecclesiastical organization to which it belongs without much vital attachment to it. In their speaking in the "assembly of the saints," they use symbolic language which they have acquired in the same way as they learned to talk originally, that is, by imitation of others. The creed is a tradition, and not a present Divine conviction. They speak in riddles, with no power to interpret them, or to translate them into the definite language of a spiritual science. They dream dreams with no Daniel at hand to explain them. In this state of things, the trumpet of the Gospel gives an uncertain sound, and the creed to which the man has given an unintelligible assent is written in a spiritual tongue that has become a dead language, or, at least, a foreign one, which is no longer the soul's vernacular. All this is but the foam on the great current of the religious life of the world. Underneath it is a region of Divine life that has not been stirred.
A certain degree of mental activity is necessary to health, both of soul and body. It maintains the body in a state of perpetual youthfulness, — a constant juvenility, — for intellectual and spiritual growth is the mental state we call adolescence (from adolesco, to grow). In the other world we return to a state of perpetual youthfulness, because we enter upon a state of constant progress. The cause of old age and death is not a physical one ; it is metaphysical. It is a cessation of growth, — a stasis, or standing still, in our intellectual life. Any creed, or form of religion, that demands for its acceptance a torpidity of the reflective and reasoning faculty, and that can exist only by suppressing all active thinking, is not mentally healthful. A religion, to be spiritually healthy, and to furnish any nutriment to the souls of men, must be co-existent in the soul with a profound thoughtfulness, in opposition to that light-hearted and shallow thoughtlessness which professes to believe so much, — and even the most absurd and incredible dogmas, — but docs not in reality possess the power of realizing a profound conviction of anything. The bigotry and narrowness of such persons is always in an exact ratio with their shallowness and spiritual ignorance.
Religion being, as we have defined it, the conscious union of the soul with God, or at least an instinctive conatus to realise this, must bring us into closer and more vital and influential relations with the Central Life than anything else. To know God aright is eternal life. (Jno. xvii: 3.) It is only in union with Him that we live at all, and health is only a mode or condition of life. Religion, as thus defined, is that alone which can give to the soul the quality of immortality. Life, whatever it is, is only in the soul, and is a derivation and perpetual gift of God. The body neither lives nor dies. It lives from the spirit, and this from the Deity. From the cessation of the organic movements of the body, or what we call death, we are no more to infer that the spiritual force, which actuated that life, and those physiological movements, is annihilated, than we are to conclude that the spinning-girl is dead because the wheel stands still, or that the woman who runs the sewing-machine has passed out of existence because the machinery is found at night to be silent and motionless. There is but One Life in the universe. All else is derived, and not original. It is the true function of a religious and spiritual philosophy to teach men how to make this great truth available for the cure of all mental unhappiness and physical maladies.
God is the only Reality. On this subject Kant has said all that we can think or know in few words. It is absolutely impossible that nothing should exist. This is a truth of the intuitive reason. An absolutely necessary Being, therefore, exists, who is single, simple, and must be a spirit, for no idea that we can form of matter answers to this conception. This necessary Being comprises all reality, and is the Supreme Ground of all possible Reality. This Being is what we call God. This is a rational pantheism; it makes God the underlying Reality of all other things. Kant brought his transcendental view of God and of man's relation to Him up to the imperfectly drawn and separating line between an infinite truth and an essential falsity. Spinoza crossed the Rubicon, and, by losing sight of our individuality, carried his philosophy over on the wrong side of the line. Paul expresses in guarded language the highest truth, — that in God we live, and move, and have our being. (Acts xvii: 28.) No remedial device, or redeeming agency, can have any saving power that is not borrowed from Him who is the only Life and Supreme Reality. A union with God, which brings our consciousness of individuality down to the lowest point, and makes God the All in all, as exhibited in the life of Jesus, who could say " I and my Father are one," is the highest condition of health and blessedness.
Can we attain to a consciousness of God ? Raymond Lull (born anno 1236, in the island of Majorca) speaks for all great minds when he says " The spirit longs after nothing as it docs after God." But a Deity that I can never find is to me little better than none. The various churches claim to have a revelation from God, but they will never satisfy our spiritual cravings until they instruct us how to obtain a revelation of God. There is a power in the soul by which we may attain to an inward sense of the Deity. Bernard, of Clairvaux (A. D. 1091), affirms that in the third stage of the development of the spiritual life we reach a position where the soul has an experience of the Divine. (Neander's History of Christianity and the Church, Vol. IV., p. 372.)
To know God is eternal life, and He has not hidden Himself from us in an impenetrable darkness. There is a power in all human souls, call it what you will, — psychometry with Buchanan, intuition with Jacobi, or faith with Wesley, — by which God may become an object of perception or intuition. He is then no longer the Great Unrevealed of Basilides, nor the Abyss of the Gnostic Valentine. Wesley defined faith to be " a divine evidence and conviction of God and of the things of God." David Hartley, notwithstanding his materialism, recognized the power of the soul to attain to an inward sense of God, and calls it theopathy, and avers that it is a right and beneficial condition. Jesus declares that the pure in heart see God. And why not ? Shall the material world alone be visible to us, and the only Reality be hidden from our perception ? The pulpit is telling us what somebody has thought about God, and gives its hungry hearers for spiritual nutriment traditionary beliefs of the past, but we long to hear what it knows of God. It will ever be shorn of its power as long as its preaching is only a dogmatic history, and not like that of Jesus, an original knowledge of God and of a spiritual world.
In the system of the Christ it is made our highest duty not only to love God but also to know Him, for can we, in the highest sense, love a being or a thing about whom we know nothing ? In Christianity the Spirit is promised to teach us all things, and to guide into all truth ; it searches all things, yea, the deep things of God. (Hegel's Philosophy of History, p. 15.) The objects of nature are a Divine Theophany, or an appearance of God to the sensuous range of the mind's perception, as the body in man is a manifestation of the soul. That God is the All is no new truth, but is as old as religion. It was the grand arcanum of the Orphic theology. According to Dr. Cudworth, Orpheus taught that "this universe and all things belonging to it were made within God; that He is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things." (Intellectual System of the Universe, Vol. I, pp. 108—112.)
There can be no profound religious life of the soul as long as we look upon the existence of God as a thing probable rather than certainly known. We know God as we know the existence of the spirit of man from its manifestation in the body. Every individual organism is an embodiment of the activity of the all-comprehending Life. The Whole, the All, is in each of the parts, or, as Goethe has it, " If you wish to appreciate the whole, you must see the Whole in the smallest." God does not impinge externally upon the universe. He moves the world from within. As he is out of time and space, there is an indivisible unity of God in every object of nature. This is true of the soul in the body. Every spot on the face of the earth is a Peniel or vision of God, where we meet Him face to face ; and we need not go beyond the place where we are to find a Bethel or house of God. To sunder any part of the earth's surface from God, when we axe there, is to be for the time being an atheist, or without God.
Bishop Berkeley, whose theological soundness has never been questioned, whatever may have been said of his idealistic philosophy, very truly says : " God is known as certainly and immediately as any other mind or spirit whatsoever distinct from ourselves. We may even assert that the existence of God is far more evidently perceived than the existence of men, because the effects of nature are infinitely more numerous and considerable than those ascribed to human agents. We need only open our eyes to see the Sovereign Lord of all things." (Principles of Human Knowledge, Krauth's edition, pp. 275, 276.)
Chapter Iv. - All. Religions Useful And Spiritually Medicinal.
The clergy, by a figure of speech, which represents what ought to be rather than what always is, have been called physicians of the soul, and religion has been viewed as a spiritual medicine. This idea is given us in the Scriptures. " Is there no balm in Gilead ? Is there no physician there ? Why, then, is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? " (Jer. viii : 22.) If, then, souls in great numbers are diseased, and lost, and bewildered in the darkness, is it not because the physician is unskillful, and his medicine inefficient, even if it is not positively injurious. Let us search for the true remedy, the spiritual specific. The minister is a spiritual physician, and has medicine for the mind in proportion as he reproduces in himself the life of Jesus the Christ, and teaches the truths which he proclaimed.
All the various religions of the world are useful, and none of them could have been dropped out of human history and the general life of humanity without the race having suffered loss. They have all been factors in the progress and development of the human mind. They have all, in different degrees, accomplished the use of a spiritual medicine, in healing the hurts of the soul, and as preventives of something worse. The best medicine is that which prevents disease ; the next best that which cures it. Religion serves both these uses to the soul. Every style of religious thought and life that has gained any considerable degree of currency in the world has met some deeply-felt want of the human spirit. It has often but imperfectly satisfied the instinctive cravings of the soul for spiritual nutriment, but its dry, and perhaps mouldy, crusts have preserved the divinest realm of the soul's life from starvation, and kept an absolute famine from its door. The great religions of the world have been the system of Confucius, Brahmanism, Buddhism, the system of Zoroaster, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedism. Of more insignificant systems that have sprung out of these we need not speak. The most imperfect of all these religions have been a spiritual nutriment and a mental medicine to many millions of souls. To those who cannot live directly and immediately from the Divine Being, to which state Christianity elevates the soul, all other religions have served at least as a nursing-bottle to prevent complete spiritual death, and to furnish the means of spiritual growth. They have been as a gentle breath of wind from the heavens to keep alive the Divine Promethean spark in human nature, and to prevent the smoking wick from going entirely out. "All these religions," says S. Baring-Gould, " set themselves to respond to some craving of the head or heart of man, to satisfy some instinct, dimly felt and read ; and however various, however contradictory they were in their expression, they did fulfill their office in some sort, else they would never have lasted a day. They differ unquestionably, according to the stage of thought-development of the several peoples and nations which embraced them ; but their differences ought, if man is progressive, to be capable of arrangement in a series of progressively advancing truths. In every religion of the world is to be found distorted or exaggerated some great truth, otherwise it would never have obtained foothold ; every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven. ( Origin and Development of Religious Thought, Vol. 2, p. 9.)
The Christian religion, as a medicine and a nutriment to the spiritual life of man, has the advantage, in one respect, over all others, — that it is in its nature eclectic. It is not in its spirit exclusive but is inclusive of that which is good and true in them all. Jesus defines the Word of God to he truth. It is the totality of all truth. So far as the sacred books of the different nations contain and record any spiritual truth, they are the Word of God, or a manifestation of the Logos, — " the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The Logos, or Word, is the living principle of them all, and without it they could have had no permanent hold upon the souls of men, for " in it is life, and the life is the light of men." Christianity has in its spirit and teachings the elements of universality, and thus may properly be called the natural religion, or the religion of humanity, while other systems are adapted only to particular peoples or races. As one has said, " That which excludes or shuts out is not so great as that which takes in and receives. So Christianity has received into itself all the good of many systems, — the philosophy and arts of Greece, the laws of Rome, the mysticism of India, the monotheism of the Jews, the triad of Egypt, the war between good and evil taught by Zoroaster, the reverence for ancestors, and the conservatism of China, and the Scandinavian faith in liberty and progress. All the prophets, since the world began, and all the civilizations of the past, have, like the wise men of the east, brought their gifts to the infant Messiah. There is in this wonderful religion the power of assimilating to itself all that is true and good everywhere. It is like the sea, into which all rivers run, and yet is never full." (Lecture by James Freeman Clarice on Essentials and Non-Essentials in Religion.
Jesus left no written creed, no unalterable system of ecclesiastical polity, and no fixed forms of external worship. Everything was left to be unfolded by the Spirit that was promised, the Paraclete that was to lead into all truth and duty. The Christian system is constructed on the principle of progress, and thus bears the mark of Divinity, and it cannot but administer to the healthy growth of all who receive it in its true spirit. Once in the soul, it is like the mustard grain that develops into a tree, or like a Divine leaven that transforms the whole nature. A truly catholic system that receives into itself all that is of permanent value in the world's science, philosophy, and religion, and that stimulates the growth of all that is good and true in the souls of men, must have a spiritually sanative efficiency. It is God's "saving health," which the prophet prayed might be known among all nations. (Ps. lxvii : 2.) It is like the Apocalyptic tree of life, whose roots drew fresh nutriment from the river of life, on the banks of which it stood ; its fruit is ever fresh and new, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Rev. xxii : 1, 2.) This religion is everywhere in the Scriptures represented as a spiritual medicine ; and Jesus the Christ, as the founder and present life of the best system of religion the world ever saw, rightfully claims to be the Great Physician, a title the Church in all the centuries has given him.
In the infancy of the race, and in the earliest ages of human history, the sanative value of religion was fully recognized. Mankind were then more in a state of nature, and governed by instinct and intuition. The priests were the only physicians, and the temples were the place of cure, — a sort of spiritual pharmacy where the body was affected and healed through the mind. Civilization is in some sense an unnatural and artificial condition, as was taught by Rousseau, and in it man is influenced more by reason, which is a far more imperfect guide than instinct. But we must be converted and become as little children before we can enter the kingdom of the heavens, or come into the closest sympathetic relations with the general sphere of life and light in the world above. When the religion of the Christ is divorced from all the shams and counterfeits that pass current for it, and is pruned of all that a priestly ecclesiasticism has grafted into it, and it becomes what it was in its founder, a sympathetic union with the living God and the ever-present angel-world, it will be the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation to body and soul.
