The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884 by Various
page 18 of 100 (18%)
page 18 of 100 (18%)
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he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of
information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind. Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul. I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense--or, as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God, has that conviction from inspiration. Many people have it, or think they have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those, perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the |
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