Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge
page 47 of 389 (12%)

[Footnote 49: J.P. Richter, _Selina_. Compare, too, Lotze,
_Microcosmus_: "Within us lurks a world whose form we imperfectly
apprehend, and whose working, when in particular phases it comes under
our notice, surprises us with foreshadowings of unknown depths in our
being."]

[Footnote 50: As Lotze says, "The finite being does not contain in
itself the conditions of its own existence." It must struggle to
attain to complete personality; or rather, since personality belongs
unconditionally only to God, to such a measure of personality as is
allotted to us. Eternal life is nothing than the attainment of full
personality, a conscious existence in God.]

[Footnote 51: J.A. Picton (_The Mystery of Matter_, p. 356) puts the
matter well: "Mysticism consists in the spiritual realisation of a
grander and a boundless unity, that humbles all self-assertion by
dissolving it in a wider glory. It does not follow that the sense of
individuality is necessarily weakened. But habitual contemplation of
the Divine unity impresses men with the feeling that individuality is
phenomenal only. Hence the paradox of Mysticism. For apart from this
phenomenal individuality, we should not know our own nothingness, and
personal life is good only through the bliss of being lost in God.
[Rather, I should say, through the bliss of finding our true life,
which is hid with Christ in God.] True religious worship doth not
consist in the acknowledgment of a greatness which is estimated by
comparison, but rather in the sense of a Being who surpasses all
comparison, because He gives to phenomenal existences the only reality
they can know. Hence the deepest religious feeling necessarily shrinks
from thinking of God as a kind of gigantic Self amidst a host of minor
DigitalOcean Referral Badge