Pantheism's destruction of boundaries - pagina 26

Pantheism'' 8 Destruction of

Bonn

he had confined hundreds (tf evil spii'its. The self-deiri:>dation and cruel iinniorahty of the Vulentinians and Ophites among the Gnostics needs no new demonstration. The moral destruction which this self-same m^ystical pantheism wrought among the Beghards and their consorts, and in our country among the Antinomlans, is well known from liistorj. It all ended in the "rehabilitation" of the flesh, as Iluudeshagen calls it. The connnon system is, quod Deus formaliter ent^ omne id quod Tlius the boundary between good aiid evil falls away. estP "The will of God determines our disposition, and should a man commit even a thousand deadly sins by tlie force of such predispositioTi he need not even wish that lie liad not committed them." The lesson of history is sufficient!}' alarming. Feuerbach once wrote: "The eternal, supersensual death is God;" and, indeed, everything seems here to pass away in national and moral death. Of course this needs delineation, in l)road outline, at least, wliich we will do in the order of our personal, ecclesiastical, and political life. A thoughtful student who had suffered himself to drift with the tempting current of this stream prefaces his translation of one of llcrhart's works with these significant words " I allowed myself to drift with it because it promised my soul peace and rest. And what has it brought me ? A feeling of powerlessness and of heaviness. Then I turned to Herbartand regained that buoyancy of spirit which was fast failing me." We understand this well for wlien the boundary between God and the world falls away, and in the Holy Trinity we can no longer worship, the fullness of the richest personal life, the mainspring of our own ^''

:

;

personal existence,

is

broken.

holy Friend deepens the expresses

it

beautifully:

He who

traits of his

"Ko

deals with

own

God

as his

nature; and llerbart

longer to feel the need of this

Friend were devotion to such loneliness as only egoism creates in the midst of society, making the dwelling of man a wilder-

No strong character can

be formed when the etcher, who graver taken from him by the dreamer, who dissolves every line. Character demands strength of conviction coupled with firmness of will, a deep sense of a calling in life, bound up with faith

ness."

should deeply

tnai'k the lines in the metal, lias his

of success in this calling; and these factors of our pci'sonality refuse to do service

when

the stability of lines in our con-

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