The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

LOVE.

“There are indeed men whose souls are like the sea. Those billows that ebb and flood, that inexorable going and coming, that noise of all the winds, that blackness and that translucency, that vegetation peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, those wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterious agitation by millions of luminous wavetops, confused heads of the multitudinous sea—the errant lightnings, which seem to watch; those prodigious sobbings, those half-seen monsters, those nights of darkness broken by howlings, those furies, those frenzies, those torments, those rocks, those shipwrecks, those fleets crushing each other; then that charm, that mildness, those festivals, those gay white sails, those fishing boats, those songs amid the uproar, those shining ports, those mists rising from the shore; those wraths and those appeasements, that all in one, the unforeseen amid the changeless, the vast marvel of inexhaustibly varied monotony—all this may exist in a mind, and that mind is called genius, and you have Æschylus, you have Isaiah, you have Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have Shakspere.”

CHAPTER VI.
THE PROVISION FOR THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF MAN.

In speaking of the spiritual nature of man, reference is not had to a side or faculty or power of himself, but to his real, essential life. Man is a spirit. All faculties and powers exist for him as such. The hunger, and the food provided for it, are to serve man as spirit. The social element, and the power provided for it, are to serve him as spirit. The intellect and truth, the will and right, the æsthetic sense and beauty, are all to serve him as spirit. The correlate of man as spirit, on one side of himself, we have seen to be the life of humanity—the correlate of man as spirit, on the other side of himself, is the life of God. Man’s spiritual nature is mediated to him on one side by the family, by the school, by the institutions of the state, by the establishments of trade, by the newspaper, by literature, by art, by history. Man’s spiritual nature is mediated to him on the other side by love, embodied in the one Mediator between God and man.

The mud-philosophy of Locke, and Hume, and Mill, and Spencer dissolves spirit, because it dissolves the idea of a mind, an ego, or an external world. If the mind can know nothing but a succession of things in time, if nothing but a constant flow and flux of sensations; of course it cannot know itself, only as a sensation in the perpetual procession of sensations always passing by. But how is it possible for the mind to know a succession of things in time, and a procession of things in space, unless it is itself out of and apart from the succession and the procession. One sensation, say of the self, in a flow of sensations, could not know itself as a part of such a flow, without knowing itself as related to a before and an after in the process. To know even a procession of sensations, we must have a spirit that stands still and does not pass on with the procession. The spirit, then, must be out of time to know succession, and out of space to know procession, and self-conscious, so as to distinguish itself from the succession and the procession. The human spirit is something in the midst of time, yet passes not with the tides of time. It is to the succession of things ever passing through it, and to the procession of sensations ever passing before it, like some mighty Teneriffe with its peak of Teyde in the midst of the sea, pushing its proud head up 12,000 feet above the sea, and contrasting with its ever changing waves, the immutability of eternity. Man, as a spirit, is after God, the most universal of all facts. He is illimitable in more ways than space, remaining when all the events of time have passed, and with a nature dipping into the eternal spirit of God. The respect in which man is made in the image of God, is, that he is endowed with self-consciousness, and self-determination. Self-consciousness and self-determination are the universal forms of spiritual activity. Man, as a self-conscious and self-determining spirit, is not independent. He must find his true self beyond himself. He is dependent upon the absolute self-consciousness and self-determination of God. He is the child of God, and as there cannot be an absolute without a relative, he is the relativity of the absolute. God’s nature is the ground of man’s nature, and in God he is mirrored to himself.

In God man lives and moves and has his being. In finding God, man finds himself. In the revelation of God is the revelation of man. God is a spirit and man is a spirit; but man, as a relative spirit, comes to himself in God, the absolute spirit; as the life-germ of the acorn comes to itself in the natural conditions of soil and sky which environ it.

I.

As man is essentially spirit, he can never come to unity, only as he comes to it in himself as a spirit. As long as he abandons himself to mere bread, or power, or knowledge, or law, or beauty, there is contradiction. Not in any one of these can he find full-orbed life. These all bring nutriment to him, as a spirit, from the several spheres to which they are variously correlated. But provision is made not only for the sides and faculties of himself, but for the essential nature of himself. We have seen how hunger was met by bread, the needs of the social nature by power, intellect by truth, will by law, and the æsthetic sense by beauty; but here we come to life, and find that love, timeless and illimitable love, alone corresponds to it. But love can only find its embodiment and its expression in life. Therefore, love has taken the form of life to meet the needs of man as a spirit.