Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... with fairly? If our position be disputed, viz., that there is growth and advancement in the Intermediate-life, then an early death will place them at a disadvantage for all eternity. Is it fair that to one man should be granted a long life to prepare for that eternity, while another's career should be closed almost as soon as the work has commenced? If the Earth-life be the only "School," how unjust to give one son a fifty years' training, and another son one. And yet we are shut up to this conclusion, unless our Fourth Deduction be admitted. The bearing of this Deduction upon our Christian thought and experience. It imparts a reasonableness to our faith, and invests the Intermediate-life with increased interest. Take the first, that it imparts a reasonableness to our faith. What is faith? Not an unthinking prostration of the mind before a code of theology, however venerable with age, or stamped with ecclesiastical authority. Not an unquestioning acquiescence in certain doctrines which may have passed muster as Divine truth, two centuries ago; nor the mere association of one's self with orthodox Christianity. All this may exist, and yet produce in a person nothing more than credulity. Faith is man's grasp of God and truth with his whole moral nature. A certain divinely-implanted instinct in man, called by Plato "the something divine" {fie'wv n), finds its correspondence in God and truth. In other words, the inner consciousness of man perceives, and does homage to, certain moral qualities, e.g., love, mercy and fair dealing. When God is viewed as possessing those qualities in a preeminent degree, there is established between man and his Maker a relationship which rises above the domain of the intellectual and emotional, into that of the...
