Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 136

112

SCIENCE AND SIN

§ 43.

But

there

is

The

more.

[Div. II

disorganization which

is

the

result of sin consists not merely in the break in the natural

life-harmony between us and the cosmos, but also in a More than one break in the life-harmony in our own selves. string has been strung upon the instrument of oar heart,

and each string has more than one

And

tone.

its

condition

is normal only when the different motives and tones of But such is no our heart harmoniously affect one another. Disharmony rules in our innermost parts. longer the case.

The

different senses, in the utterances of our inner selves,

affect each other

block the

way

no longer

in pure accord, but continually

Thus

before each other.

discord arises in our

Everything has become disconnected. innermost selves. And since the one no longer supports the other, but antagonizes it, both the whole and its parts have lost their

Our sense

purity.

what

is

right, of

their effect

*

is

holy, has ceased to operate with ac-

In themselves these senses are weakened, and in

curacy.

since

of the good, the true, the beautiful, of

what

it is

upon each other they have become mixed.

And

impossible, in the spiritual sciences, to take one

forward step unless these senses serve us as guides, how greatly science is obstructed by sin.

it

readily

'appears

And

harm is the ruin, worked by sin, which were at our command, for obtaining \the knowledge of God, and thus for forming the conception Without the sense of God in the heart no 'of the whole. attain unto a knowledge of God, and withshall ever one or, if you please, a holy sympathy for God, that out love, knowledge shall never be rich in content. Every effort to prove the existence of God by so-called evidences must By this we do not mean that the fail and has failed. knowledge of God must be mystic for as soon as this knowledge of God is to be scientifically unfolded, it must be reproduced from our thinking consciousness. But as our science in no single instance can take one forward step, except a bridge is built between the subject and the object, it cannot do so

\

finally, the chiefest

in those data,

;

here.

If

thus in our sense of self there

existence of God, and

if

is

no sense of the

in our spiritual existence there is

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