B. F. Cocker

“ It is quite pertinent to ask, Why may not the universal heart of humanity be touched and moved by the spirit of God? If the ideas of reason be a revelation from God, may not the instinctive feelings of the heart be an inspiration of God? May not God come near to the heart of man and awaken a mysterious presentiment of an invisible Presence, and an instinctive longing to come nearer to Him? May he not draw men towards himself by sweet, persuasive influences, and raise man to a conscious fellowship? Is not God indeed the great want of the human heart? ”

“ The bee, the ant, the swine, the ape—these can not sin; but they are mere things, not free powers; they have no sense of dignity and moral worth, no approving conscience, no joy of sacrifice, and no immortal hopes. Lived there ever a sane man who would change his lot with one of these, even though in being a man he has the fearful power to sin, and in sinning, the fearful susceptibility to suffer—yea, to suffer eternally? Is there any thing on earth whose value does not fade away when compared with the priceless value of being capable of duty, of virtue, of devotion, and of sacrifice? ”

“ The original light of the divine self-consciousness is eternally and absolutely first and before all. "Thus, in the depths of our own self-consciousness, as its concealed background, the God-consciousness reveals itself to us. This descent into our inmost being is at the same time an ascent to God. Every deep reflection on ourselves breaks through the mere crust of world-consciousness, which separates us from the inmost truth of our existence, and leads us up to Him in whom we live and move and are." ”

“ For if Space, Time, and Number are eternal, why may not Matter be eternal? But why stop with the assertion of the eternity of Space, Time, Number, and Matter? "If we admit that there may be something uncaused, there is no reason to assume a cause of anything." If we admit the eternity of Matter, how can we deny the eternity of Force? We can not conceive of the existence of substance without some properties or qualities, and of all the properties of matter, gravitation or weight seems to approach nearest to an essential, necessary quality. ”

“ The idea of a Supreme Power, a living Personality, energizing in nature, and presiding over the affairs of men, is not the product of philosophy. It is the immanent, spontaneous thought of humanity. It has, therefore, existed in all ages, and revealed itself in all minds, even when it has not been presented to the understanding as a definite conception, and expressed by human language in a logical form. It is the thought which instinctively arises in the opening reason of childhood, as the dim and shadowy consciousness of a living mind behind all the movement and change of the universe. ”

“ Has any finite thing or being an independent existence? Have the forces of nature any reality apart from the Divine efficiency? Did the Creator, in the beginning, give self-being to the substance of the universe, and endow it with properties and forces, so that it can exist and act apart from, and independently of, the First Cause? or is God still in nature upholding all substance, the power of all force, the life of all life, shaping all forms, and organizing all systems? Is God not only the Creator but the Conservator of all things? ”

“ He felt that if any thing gave meaning and value to life, it must be the contemplation of absolute truth, absolute beauty, and absolute Good. This absolute Good is God, who is the first principle of all ideas, the fountain of all the order and proportion and beauty of the universe, the source of all the good which exists in nature and in man. To practise goodness--to conform the character to the eternal models of order, proportion, and excellence, is to resemble God. To aspire after perfection of moral being, to secure assimilation to God (όμοίωσις θεῷ) is the noble aspiration of Plato's soul. ”

“ He must be conscious of his own ignorance. He must not exalt himself. He must not put his own conceits in the way of the thing he would know. He must have an open eye, a single purpose, an honest mind, to prepare him to receive light when it comes. And that there is light, that there is a source whence light comes, he avowed in every word and act.
Socrates unquestionably believed in one Supreme God, the immaterial, infinite Governor of all. He cherished that instinctive, spontaneous faith in God and his Providence which is the universal faith of the human heart. ”

“ All the rich treasures of the past are appropriated by Christianity—the moral culture of the Hebrew, the poetry and philosophy of Greece, the jurisprudence of Ancient Rome. All these—in so far as they are pure and good—are absorbed by Christianity, and ennobled and baptized by the Christian spirit. In Christian Europe poetry, philosophy, science flourished as they had never flourished in any preceding age, and they lay their richest tribute at the feet of Christ, the Divine King of the world. Nature, also, herself becomes more and more subject to man, and to the religion of the God-man. ”

“ The creation itself is an example of God's coming forth out of the mysterious depths of his own eternal and invisible being, and making himself apparent to man. There, on the pages of the volume of nature, we may read, in the marvellous language of symbol, the grand conceptions, the glorious thoughts, the ideals of beauty which dwell in the uncreated Mind, These two sources of knowledge--the subjective teachings of God in the human soul, and the objective manifestations of God in the visible universe--harmonize, and, together, fill up the complement of our natural idea of God. ”

“ In every nation under heaven, veracity, justice, and beneficence are separated by a clear, unmistakable line from falsehood, injustice, and cruelty; nor can all the casuistry and sophistry in the universe transpose or confound them. Custom, prescription, conventions of human opinion, factitious circumstances, can never blur over and obliterate these lines which separate right and wrong. Beneath all these apparent differences, the conscience will make her voice heard in the depth of the soul, in the common sentiments of mankind, and in the statutes of universal jurisprudence. ”

“ The Propylæa, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum, those peerless gems of Grecian architecture, are now in ruins. The magnificent sculpture of Phidias, which adorned the pediment, and outer cornice, and inner frieze of these temples, and the unrivalled statuary of gods and heroes which crowded the platform of the Acropolis, making it an earthly Olympus, are now no more, save a few broken fragments which have been carried to other lands, and, in their exile, tell the mournful story of the departed grandeur of their ancient home. ”

“ What good, one might ask, is the light when there is no eye to see? What good the expanse of heaven, the land and seas, with none to inhabit them? What good the plants with none to use them? But the Intelligence that foresaw the end toward which the creative process was tending could recognize the fitness and the beauty of each new element of creation as contributing to that completed whole, which, when realized, is pronounced "very good." Thus each stage of the advancing work of creation is pronounced "good" in view of its subordination to the ultimate purpose, which is the highest "good." ”

“ The grand object of philosophy, according to Epicurus, is the attainment of a happy life. "Philosophy," says he, "is the power by which reason conducts men to happiness." Truth is a merely relative thing, a variable quantity; and therefore the pursuit of truth for its own sake is superfluous and useless. There is no such thing as absolute, unchangeable right: no action is intrinsically right or wrong. "We choose the virtues, not on their own account, but for the sake of pleasure, just as we seek the skill of the physician for the sake of health." ”

“ After the first concession that matter is uncreated and eternal, how can any one refute the doctrine of Hume that the universe never had a beginning, and that under some one or another possible phase—amid the infinite possibility of phases—it is both eternal and infinite? How, after this admission, can we deny that the universe is "a series of events existing eternally in a state of order without a cause other than the eternally inherent laws of matter?" ”

“ When the human mind has contemplated any object of beauty, any fact of order, proportion, harmony, and excellency, it may rise to the notion of a quality common to all objects of beauty--from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others; from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until, from thought to thought, we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the perfect, absolute, Divine Beauty. ”

“ These affections presuppose a force or energy outside of my consciousness, and distinct from myself. Thus I am constrained to believe that the earth on which I tread, the heavens that shine upon me, the forms and movements which surround me, are not vain shadows, unreal phantoms of my own creation, but real entities. The totality of existence called the universe is for me a reality.
The phenomena of the universe are in ceaseless flow and change. Bodies are aggregated and dissolved. Plants are evolved from germs, they live and grow, then decay and perish. ”

“ The mere verbal affirmation "there is a God" made to one who has no idea of a God, would be meaningless and unintelligible. What notion can a man form of "the First Cause" if the principle of causality is not inherent in his mind? What conception can he form of "the Infinite Mind" if the infinite be not a primitive intuition? How can he conceive of "a Righteous Governor" if he have no idea of right, no sense of obligation, no apprehension of a retribution? Words are empty sounds without ideas, and God is a mere name if the mind has no apperception of a God. ”

“ Furthermore, when we conceive the Divine Essence as power or efficiency, our conception is in some measure determined by our consciousness of power. We know ourselves as a power, a cause of our own volitions, and a power which can control and modify external nature, but yet a limited and finite cause. To the eye of reason the Divine efficiency transcends all limitation and mensuration. It is a power which is not conditioned by quantity. It is limitless power, spaceless, all-mighty presence, self-directive power, carrying its own light and seeing its own way—infinite efficiency. ”

“ Christianity, as a comprehensive scheme of reconciliation, embracing "all things," can not, therefore, be properly studied apart from the ages of earnest thought, of profound inquiry, and of intense religious feeling which preceded it. To despise the religions of the ancient world, to sneer at the efforts and achievements of the old philosophers, or even to cut them off in thought from all relation to the plans and movements of that Providence which has cared for, and watched over, and pitied, and guided all the nations of the earth, is to refuse to comprehend Christianity itself. ”

“ The universe as presented to sense is a perpetual genesis, a ceaseless change; therefore it can not be permanent. It is a time-march of phenomena; therefore it can not be eternal. It is limited by quantity and quantitative relations; therefore it can not be infinite. Thus reason has always conceived the universe as having a beginning, and has confidently predicted that it will come to an end. All systems of philosophy, and, indeed, many systems of religion, have been attempts to explain "the beginning or origin of things"—that is, they have been "à priori theories of the universe." ”

“ Has the universal Father left his "own offspring" without a single native power of recognizing the existence of the Divine Parent, and abandoned them to solitary and dreary orphanage? Could not he who gave to matter its properties and laws,--the properties and laws through whose operation he is working out his own purposes in the realm of nature,--could not he have also given to mind ideas and principles which, logically developed, would lead to recognition of a God, and of our duty to God, and, by these ideas and principles, have wrought out his sublime purposes in the realm of mind? ”

“ Nature, or the sum-total of phenomena, is an effect—an effect which demands a cause. There can be no phenomena without change, no change without motion, no motion without force, no force without Spirit, for Spirit-force is the only force of which we have any knowledge or consciousness. A rational Will, and not a blind necessity, must stand at the fountain-head of being, and uniformity in nature must be the result of reason and choice. ”

“ Socrates had identified virtue and knowledge, he had taught that "virtue is a Science." Aristotle contended that virtue is an art, like music and architecture, which must be attained by exercise. It is not purely intellectual, it is the bloom of the physical, which has become ethical. As the flower of the field, obeying the laws of its organization, springs up, blooms, and attains its own peculiar perfection, so there is an instinctive desire (ὄρεξις) in the soul which at first unconsciously yearns after the good, and subsequently the good is sought with full moral intent and insight. ”

“ No man can escape from God. We may retire to the remotest parts of the earth, and take up our abode in the most solitary isle; we may press our way into the deepest recesses of the primeval forest, to spots where the foot of man has never trod, and on which the light of heaven has never shone, and where solitude has held its undisturbed reign ever since the morning of creation, and the conviction that "God is in this place" will relieve the loneliness, and hold us fast within the grasp of his government and laws. ”

“ The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed to the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his mythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and infinite diversity of nature, the colossal magnitude of all the forms of animal and vegetable life, the broad and massive features of the landscape, the aspects of beauty and of terror which surround him, and daily pour their silent influences upon his soul, give vividness, grotesqueness, even, to his imagination, and repress his active powers. ”

“ Absolute vacuity is a negation, and unity and infinity are negations of a negation—that is, they are predicates of nothing. "Negative notions" must be predicates of something, otherwise they are a mere negation or absence of thought, and convey absolutely no knowledge. We may, if we please, assert with Hegel, that "Nothing is the same as Being," and then amuse ourselves with making affirmations concerning vacuity, nihility, and unreality to the disgrace of philosophy; but the common-sense of mankind will repudiate our absurdities. We can not think about nothing; all thought must be positive. ”

“ When a change takes place, when a new phenomenon presents itself to our senses, we can not avoid the conviction that it must have a cause. We can not even express in language the relations of phenomena in time and space, without speaking of causes. And there is not a rational being on the face of the globe--a child, a savage, or a philosopher--who does not instinctively and spontaneously affirm that every movement, every change, every new existence, must have a cause. Now what account can philosophy render of this universal belief? ”

“ The scientists of this age, who are so enamored of inert matter and insensate force, may have no eye to see, no heart to sympathize with, and no competent faculty by which to estimate the value of this blessed vintage; but there are souls to whom honor is dearer than life, and wisdom more precious than rubies, and purity more desirable than fine gold, who will continue to pray—"Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily magnify thy holy name." ”