Divine Library is a free online public library that includes free eBook downloads and free audio books.
We work with New Thought Seekers and Sharers around the world
insuring that all New Thought Texts in the Public Domain
are available for you to read on the web for free, forever!
Navigate through this book by clicking Next Page or Previous
Page below the text of the page & jump directly to chapters using the chapter numbers above the text.
fitly called the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life, have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, " The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature.
It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects is, --- " Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some the°, sophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, " It is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has called into time."
