The Ethical Record Volume 3, No. 1

Download or read book The Ethical Record Volume 3, No. 1 written by New York Society For Culture and published by Rarebooksclub.com. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ...get for himself some of that power for moral excellence which he believed Jesus to have possessed, how to get over that dead-point of moral inertia which he felt unable to pass, so that he no longer need to say, --"The thing that I would, that I do not: but the evil which I hate, that I do." And the answer which he gave to the question---How to borrow that power from Jesus, who possessed it.'--is contained in his doctrine of faith. Faith; that word is much misunder-' stood. As used by Paul what was its meaning? It was the crowning expression of his mysticism. It meant getting Christ within one's self, or entering one's self into him, or putting on Christ, envel oping one's self with him as one would with a garment. All such expressions he uses. He has the strangest vay of speaking of persons as if they were processes, --dissolving the person, so to say. Thus he speaks of Christ as if he were a process, an exercise of ethical force going on in the human soul. Thus, also, at other times, he speaks of processes like sin. or of abstractions like law, as if they were real beings. On the other hand, however, the distinct outline of Jesus, as a real person, ' is not blurred or obliterated in his mind. The terms in which he expresses himself are elusive, mystical, but the sense is plain enough. Faith in Jesus, as Paul understood it, means so to identify ourself in thought with this marvelously excellent being as to become actually one with him, and to act so that the impulses which go out from him shall also determine us. If you have any earthly friend and can imagine that you should so grow together with him, so be in inner harmony with him that anything which he feels you may also feel, that any...