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awake within us after the powers of consciousness and will have been evolved , without our being able to regard them as the offspring of our minds . Rather , they are immediately imparted to our minds . They awake as of themselves in the heart , and we can regard them only as a gift from above . " This view of an immediate divine agency upon our soul has been opposed , especially of late , by many divines as a mystical delusion *
Tzcherner , in particular , says , * Mysticism is the mistaken opinion that the spirit of man is immediately moved by the spirit of God , and is able to apprehend it . It appears to me to be an error , because in the thought of God I cannot penetrate to himself , the unapproachable light , and because I observe in myself no change in the heart which must be referred to an immediate influence of the Supreme . ' We reply , It is true the human soul is not able to penetrate to God and his inaccessible light , but God can descend to us ; he
can communicate a ray of his light to our soul , and by his almighty power and universal presence act immediately upon our hearts , and such an effect we do in fact observe in our hearts . This is indeed acknowledged by Tzcherner , when he says , * The Gospel were a dead letter , a dark and unintelligible word , were it not made quick and luminous by the light which God has kindled in our souls . Could we understand what Christianity communicates to us of the being and government of God without the glimpses of the supernatural , eternal , and infinite , in our soul ? What were the promises of
Heaven in the Gospel without the aspiration after a higher and greater good ? Accordingly , Christianity leads us on to the plain and clear consciousness of that which we bear within ourselves . The revelation of God through the Gospel is a word of the Spirit , which , through the inward religious intimation and moral feeling , is apprehended by us in a definite form . ' These expressions say plainly enough that the divining of the supernatural , the desire after what is higher , and the moral feeling , are originally prior in us : but these are the light which is kindled by God in our soul , and which is fanned by the word of Christ into a clear and ardent flame . We ascribe this to the
immediate agency of God , because it exists in us in a quite different manner from the feelings of sense , which yet , like the whole of nature , are mediately the work of God . The latter are excited in us by external objects which we can shew , and they are not excited when these objects are remote from us : but with the religious feeling it is not so . Certainly we have not produced
it ; we have merely received it ; and it ofien forces itself upon us in an unwelcome manner , when it brings with it painful reflections . We do not perceive whence it comes , for without being excited by any thing external , it enters secretly into the soul , and it exercises over it , not a compulsory , but a very powerful influence . There remains then nothing else , but that we consider the Creator himself as its author , and as we observe no means
through which it is produced in us , we must ascribe it to the immediate act of God . It will be said , perhaps , that God , at the creation of man , imparted an index of the supernatural to his mind , and that now it belongs to the constitution of the soul , and with its development becomes plainer within it of itself . But it seems a contradiction to account it a part of our proper being , of ourselves , our personal unity , because it is often resisted , and more
or less over-ruled and silenced within us . Besides , this view of the subject rests upon a merely human representation of the creation of God . We should consider creation not as an event which passes by , and after the accomplishment of which the Creator rested : no , it is . a never-ending work , by which the universe is sustained and governed . The course of nature is progressive creation . The breath of God moves unceasingly in his world .
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294 Letters from Germany .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1831, page 294, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2597/page/6/
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