IV.—­APHORISMS ON SPIRITUAL RELIGION

If there be aught spiritual in man, the will must be such.  If there be a will, there must be spirituality in man.

There is more in man than can be rationally referred to the life of Nature and the mechanism of organisation.  He has a will not included in his mechanism; the will is, in an especial sense, the spiritual part of our humanity.

I assume a something, the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself.  If any man say that he cannot find it, I am bound to disbelieve him.  I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundations of my own moral nature.  If he will not find it, he excommunicates himself, forfeits his personal rights, and becomes a thing—­i.e., one who may be used against his will and without regard to his interest.  If the materialist use the words “right” and “obligation,” he does it deceptively, and means only compulsion and power.  To overthrow faith in aught higher than nature and physical necessity is the very purpose of his argument.  But he cannot be ignorant that the best and greatest of men have devoted their lives to enforce the contrary; and there is not a language in which he could argue for ten minutes in support of his scheme without sliding into phrases that imply the contrary.

The Christian grounds his philosophy on assertions which have nothing in them of theory or hypothesis; they are in immediate reference to three ultimate facts—­namely, the reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of the law; and lastly, the existence of evil—­of evil essentially such, not by accident of circumstances, not derived from physical consequences, nor from any cause out of itself.  The first is a fact of consciousness, the second a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first, and the third a fact of history interpreted by both.

I maintain that a will conceived separately from intelligence is a non-entity, and that a will the state of which does in no sense originate in its own act is a contradiction.  It might be an instinct, an impulse, and, if accompanied with consciousness, a desire; but a will it could not be.  And this every human being knows with equal clearness, though different minds may reflect on it with different degrees of distinctness; for who would not smile at the notion of a rose willing to put forth its buds and expand them into flowers?

I deem it impious and absurd to hold that the Creator would have given us the faculty of reason, or that the Redeemer would in so many varied forms of argument and persuasion have appealed to it, if it had been useless or impotent.  I believe that the imperfect human understanding can be effectually exerted only in subordination to, and in a dependent alliance with, the means and aidances supplied by the supreme reason.

Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life.  Not a philosophy of life, but life, and a living process.  It has been eighteen hundred years in existence.