Is Life Worth Living? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Is Life Worth Living?.

Is Life Worth Living? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 307 pages of information about Is Life Worth Living?.
we feel convinced should be the truth, and even what they do not, will, we feel convinced, be some indirect profit to them.  And the case of spiritual science is entirely analogous to the case of natural science.  A man to whom the truth is open is not excused from finding it because he knows it is not so open to all.  A heretic who denies the dogmas of the Church has his counterpart in the quack who denies the verified conclusions of science.  The moral condemnation that is given to the one is illustrated by the intellectual condemnation that is given to the other.

If we will think this over carefully, we shall get a clearer view of the moral value claimed for itself by orthodoxy.  Some of its doctrines, the great and picturable parts of them, that appeal to all, and that in some degree can be taken in by all, it declares doubtless to be saving, in their own nature.  But for the mass of men the case is quite different with the facts underlying these.  That we eat Christ’s body in the Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief would be to most men the merest gibberish.  Yet it is no more unimportant that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should understand the action of alcohol, because anyone independent of such knowledge can tell that so many glasses of wine will have such and such an effect on him.  Theology is to the spiritual body what anatomy and medicine are to the natural body.  The parts they each play in our lives are analogous, and in their respective worlds their raison d’etre is the same.  What then can be shallower than the rhetoric of such thinkers as Mr. Carlyle, in which natural religion and orthodoxy are held up to us as contrasts and as opposites, the former being praised as simple and going straight to the heart, and the latter described and declaimed against as the very reverse of this? ‘On the one hand,’ it is said, ’see the soul going straight to its God, feeling His love, and content that others should feel it.  On the other hand, see this pure and free communion, distracted and interrupted by a thousand tortuous reasonings as to the exact nature of it.  What can obscure intellectual propositions,’ it is asked, ’have to do with a religion of the heart?  And do not they check the latter by being thus bound up with it?’ But what really can be more misleading than this?  Natural religion is doubtless simpler in one sense than revealed religion; but it is only simple because it has no authoritative science of itself.  It is simple for the same reason that a boy’s account of having given himself a headache is simpler than a physician’s would be.  The boy says merely, ‘I ate ten tarts, and drank three bottles of ginger-beer.’ The physician, were he to explain the catastrophe, would describe a number of far more complex processes.  The boy’s account would be of course the simplest, and would certainly go more home to the general heart of boyhood; but it would not for that reason be the correctest or the most important.  And just like this will be the case of the divine communion, which the simple saint may feel, and the subtle theologian analyse.

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Is Life Worth Living? from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.