ELEMENTS
OF
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY,
PRELIMINARY TO THE
APHORISMS ON SPIRITUAL RELIGION.
Philip saith unto him: Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father? Believest thou not, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? And I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth: whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him. But ye know him, for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you. And in that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. John xiv. 8 9 10 16 17 20.
PRELIMINARY.
IF there be aught Spiritual in Man, the Will must be such.
If there be a Will, there must be a Spirituality in Man.
I suppose both positions granted. The Reader admits the reality of the power, agency, or mode of Being expressed in the term, Spirit; and the actual existence of a Will. He sees clearly, that the idea of the former is necessary to the conceivability of the latter; and that, vice versá, in asserting the fact of the latter he presumes and instances the truth of the former—just as in our common and received Systems of Natural Philosophy, the Being of imponderable Matter is assumed to render the lode-stone intelligible, and the Fact of the lode-stone adduced to prove the reality of imponderable Matter.
In short, I suppose the reader, whom I now invite to the third and last division of the work, already disposed to reject for himself and his human brethren the insidious title of "Nature's noblest animal," or to retort it as the unconscious irony of the Epicurean poet on the animalizing tendency of his own philosophy. I suppose him convinced, that there is more in man than can be rationally referred to the life of Nature and the mechanism of Organization; that he has a will not included in this mechanism; and that the Will is in an especial and pre-eminent sense the spiritual part of our Humanity.
Unless, then, we have some distinct notion of the Will, and some acquaintance with the prevalent errors respecting the same, an insight into the nature of Spiritual Religion is scarcely possible; and our reflections on the particular truths and evidences of a Spiritual State will remain obscure, perplexed, and unsafe. To place my reader on this requisite vantage-ground, is the purpose of the following exposition.
We have begun, as in geometry, with defining our Terms; and we proceed, like the Geometricians, with stating our postulates; the difference being, that the postulates of Geometry no man can deny, those of Moral Science are such as no good man will deny. For it is not in our power to disclaim our nature, as sentient beings; but it is in our power to disclaim our nature as moral beings.[65] It is possible (barely possible, I admit) that a man may have remained ignorant or unconscious of the Moral Law within him: and a man need only persist in disobeying the Law of Conscience to make it possible for himself to deny its existence, or to reject or repel it as a phantom of Superstition. Were it otherwise, the Creed would stand in the same relation to Morality as the multiplication table.