![The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/0/5/6/the-world-s-greatest-books-volumes-1-15-17-20-download.jpg)
The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1910
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Культурология
Электронная книга - «The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]». Краткое содержание книги:
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 01 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 02 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 03 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 04 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 05 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 06 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 07 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 08 — Fiction от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 09 — Lives and Letters от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 10 — Lives and Letters от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 11 — Ancient and Mediæval History от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 12 — Modern History от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 14 — Philosophy and Economics от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 15 — Science от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 17 — Poetry and Drama от Неизвестный
The world's greatest books от Mee, Arthur, 1875-1943, joint editor & Hammerton, John Alexander, Sir, 1871-1949, joint editor & McClure, S. S. (Samuel Sidney), 1857-1949, joint editor
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 19 — Travel and Adventure от Неизвестный
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 20 — Miscellaneous Literature and Index от Неизвестный
IV.--Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion
If there be aught spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be spirituality in man.
There is more in man than can be rationally referred to the life of Nature and the mechanism of organisation. He has a will not included in his mechanism; the will is, in an especial sense, the spiritual part of our humanity.
I assume a something, the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any man say that he cannot find it, I am bound to disbelieve him. I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundations of my own moral nature. If he will not find it, he excommunicates himself, forfeits his personal rights, and becomes a thing--i.e., one who may be usedagainst his will and without regard to his interest. If the materialist use the words "right" and "obligation," he does it deceptively, and means only compulsion and power. To overthrow faith in aught higher than nature and physical necessity is the very purpose of his argument. But he cannot be ignorant that the best and greatest of men have devoted their lives to enforce the contrary; and there is not a language in which he could argue for ten minutes in support of his scheme without sliding into phrases that imply the contrary.
The Christian grounds his philosophy on assertions which have nothing in them of theory or hypothesis; they are in immediate reference to three ultimate facts--namely, the reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of the law; and lastly, the existence of evil--of evil essentially such, not by accident of circumstances, not derived from physical consequences, nor from any cause out of itself. The first is a fact of consciousness, the second a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first, and the third a fact of history interpreted by both.
I maintain that a will conceived separately from intelligence is a non-entity, and that a will the state of which does in no sense originate in its own act is a contradiction. It might be an instinct, an impulse, and, if accompanied with consciousness, a desire; but a will it could not be. And this every human being knows with equal clearness, though different minds may reflect on it with different degrees of distinctness; for who would not smile at the notion of a rose willing to put forth its buds and expand them into flowers?
I deem it impious and absurd to hold that the Creator would have given us the faculty of reason, or that the Redeemer would in so many varied forms of argument and persuasion have appealed to it, if it had been useless or impotent. I believe that the imperfect human understanding can be effectually exerted only in subordinationto, and in a dependent alliance with, the means and aidances supplied by the supreme reason.
Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life. Not a philosophy of life, but life, and a living process. It has been eighteen hundred years in existence.
The practical inquirer has his foot on the rock when he knows that whoever needs not a Redeemer is more than human. Remove from him the difficulties that perplex his belief in a crucified Saviour, convince him of the reality of sin, and then satisfy him as to the fact historically, and as to the truth spiritually, of a redemption therefrom by Christ. Do this for him, and there is little fear that he will let either logical quirks or metaphysical puzzles contravene the plain dictate of his commonsense, that the Sinless One that redeemed mankind from sin must have been more than man, and that He who brought light and immortality into the world could not in His own nature have been an inheritor of death and darkness.
A moral evil is an evil that has its origin in a will. An evil common to all must have a ground common to all. Now, this evil ground cannot originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a mystery--that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate.
The article on original sin is binding on the Christian only as showing the antecedent ground and occasion of Christianity, which is the edifice raised on this ground. The two great moments of the Christian religion are, original sin and redemption; that the ground, this the superstructure of our faith. Christianity and redemption are equivalent terms.
The agent and personal cause of the redemption of mankind is--the co-eternal word and only begotten Sonof the living God. The causation act is--a spiritual and transcendent mystery, "that passeth all understanding." The effect caused is--the being born anew, as before in the flesh to the world, so now born in the spirit to Christ.
Now, albeit the causative act is a transcendent mystery, the fact, or actual truth, of it having been assured to us by revelation, it is not impossible, by steadfast meditation on the idea and supernatural character of a personal will, for a mind spiritually disciplined to satisfy itself that the redemptive act supposes an agent who can at once act on the will as an exciting cause, and in the will, as the condition of its potential, and the ground of its actual, being.
The frequent, not to say ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or traditional. By forcing the soul in upon herself, this enigma of saint and sage, from Job, David, and Solomon to Claudian and Boëtius, this perplexing disparity of success and desert, has been the occasion of a steadier and more distinct consciousness of a something in man, different in kind, which distinguishes and contra-distinguishes him from animals--at the same time that it has brought into closer view an enigma of yet harder solution--the fact, I mean, of a contradiction in the human being, of which no traces are observable elsewhere, in animated or inanimate nature.
A struggle of jarring impulses; a mysterious division between the injunctions of the mind and the elections of the will; and the utter incommensurateness and the unsatisfying qualities of the things around us, that yet are the only objects which our senses discover or our appetites require us to pursue; these facts suggest that the riddle of fortune and circumstance is but a form of the riddle of man, and that the solution of both problemslies in the acknowledgement that the soul of man, as the subject of mind and will, possesses a principle of permanence and is destined to endure.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own evidence--remembering only the express declaration of Christ himself, "No man cometh to Me, unless the Father leadeth him."
Christ's awful recalling of the drowsed soul from the dreams and phantom world of sensuality to actual reality--how has it been evaded! His word, that was spirit! His mysteries, which even the apostles must wait for the parable in order to comprehend! These spiritual things, which can only be spiritually discerned, were--say some--mere metaphors! Figures of speech! Oriental hyperboles! "All this means only morality!" Ah! how far nearer the truth to say that morality means all this!
CONFUCIANISM
The Lun Yu, or Sayings of Confucius
The so-called "Four Books" of Chinese literature are held in less esteem than the "Five Kings," or "Primary Classics," but they are still studied first by every Chinaman as a preparation for what is regarded as the higher and more important literature. It should be borne in mind that the four "Shus," as these books are called, tell us much more about the actual teaching and history of Confucius. The four books are: (i) The "Lun Yu," or the "Analects of Confucius," which contain chiefly the sayings and conversations of Confucius, and give, ostensibly in his own words, his teaching, and, in a subordinate degree, that of his principal disciples; (2) the "Ta-Hsio," or "Teaching for Adults," rendered also the "Great Learning," a treatise dealing with ethical and especially with political matters, forming Book 39 of the "Li-Ki," or "Book of Rites," the "Fourth Classic," (3) the "Chung Yung," or "Doctrine of the Mean," more correctly the State of Equilibrium or harmony, forming Book 28 of the "Li-Ki"; and (4) "Meng-tse," Latinised "Mencius," that is, the conversations and opinions of Mencius. The first, the "Lun Yu," or "Analects," is the most important of these, the next in importance being the teaching of Mencius. The book to which we are most indebted in the preparation of the following epitomes is "The Chinese Classics," edited by Dr. J. Legge. Other books are "The Sayings of Confucius," translated by S.A. Lyall; "Chinese Literature," by H.A. Giles; and "The Wisdom of Confucius," by G. Dimsdale Stacker.