B. F. Cocker

“ 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? ”

“ Inflexible necessity, inexorable law, absolute uniformity, unbroken continuity tell the story of the universe. In such a world there is no place for prayer, or at most it is but the cry of anguish wrung from the lips of those who are being mangled and crushed by the ponderous mechanism, which floats away into the infinite spaces, and never finds a living ear or touches a compassionate heart. ”

“ Has the universe always existed, or had the Cosmos, with its changes and constants, its forces and laws, its forms and relations, a Beginning? Is its present condition but one link in an endless chain, one phasis in a series of changes, which had no beginning and shall have no end? Is the universe limited both in space and duration, or is it unlimited, unbeginning, and endless? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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." ”

“ Belief in the uniformity of nature is an induction from experience, and not a primary intuition. And by the word experience, in this connection, we must understand not the experience of one man only, or of one generation, but the accumulated experience of mankind in all ages as registered in books or transmitted by tradition. But how limited, at best, is human experience—how circumscribed both in time and space! Compared with the vastness and duration of the universe, it is narrowed down to a mere point. ”

“ To the native common-sense of our race, the world is a reality, not a dream; to the universal reason of mankind the universe is a harmony, not a chaos. Men have instinctively apprehended some ideal relations, some causal connection, some adaptation and purpose in nature, and they have always had some intuition, however dim and shadowy, of an all-pervading unity, and an ultimate causative principle. ”

“ 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." ”

“ A thing has no responsibility for its movements, which it has not willed, and of the nature and consequences of which it is ignorant. A person alone is responsible, because he is intelligent and free; that is, he can foresee the consequences of his action, and freely determines himself to its performance. A thing has no dignity; dignity attaches only to personality. Personality is inalienable, sacred, and inviolable; it can not be abrogated, surrendered, or transferred, and it demands to be respected. In a word, it has both duties and rights, while things have neither. ”

“ The thoughtful mind recognizes that there is a purpose to be fulfilled in life which is nobler than mere enjoyment. Who has dared to say that our highest duty is to be happy? But every one must feel that it is our highest duty to form a nobler character and let the happiness take care of itself.
And now is it not a fact of experience that the more a man strives after a pure and noble life, the more does he become conscious of the need of superhuman strength and grace? ”

“ In the beginning was FORCE—force homogeneous but unstable, and necessarily tending to differentiation and heterogeneity; splitting into opposites, standing off into polarities, ramifying into attractions and repulsions, light, heat, magnetism, and electricity; and mounting up through the stages of physical, vital, and neural to the mental life itself, with all its varied and endless phenomena, as revealed in the languages, laws, institutions, arts, sciences, and religions of the world. Force is "the ultimate of all ultimates," the "Absolute Reality," the "Unconditioned Cause." ”

“ There is a permanent force, or power, which is the cause of all change. There are constant numerical proportions, determinate geometrical forms, specific ideal archetypes, and special ends, which give the law of all change. The universe is not a mere aggregation of phenomena, a mere concourse of things in time and space with accidental resemblances: it is a unity, a cosmos, a harmonious whole, both in its contemporaneous and successive history. ”

“ 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." ”

“ And now the question arises, By what method is order to be maintained in the sphere of freedom? How are beings that have the power to determine for themselves what they will choose and do, to be brought to act in harmony with the eternal laws of righteousness and love?
There are inconsiderate souls who dream that this may be achieved by force. God, say they, is omnipotent; if He will the non-extension of evil, He is able to destroy it; if He desire the maintenance of moral order, He can compel it. ”

“ If, then, we admit, as we must admit, the existence of an immediate consciousness, not merely of the phenomena of mind, but of the personal self as actively and passively related to them, we must also admit the direct testimony of conscience to the fact of liberty. "I am conscious not merely of the phenomenon of volition, but of myself as producing it, and as producing it by choice, with a power to choose the opposite alternative." ”

“ Strauss has no solicitude about mere names. "If this be considered pure, unmitigated materialism, I will not dispute it. In fact, I have always tacitly regarded the contrast so loudly proclaimed between materialism and idealism (or by whatever term one may designate the view opposed to the former) as a mere quarrel about words. They have a common foe in the dualism which pervaded the conception of the world throughout the Christian era, dividing man into body and soul, his existence into time and eternity, and opposing an eternal Creator to a created and perishable universe." ”

“ And now, in conclusion, may we not say that this dictum of faith that the universe exists only in virtue of the continued Will of its Creator, is coming more and more to be recognized as a scientific fact. The will of God is the one primal force which streams forth in ever-recurring impulses with an immeasurable rapidity at every point in space—an incessant pulse-beat of the Infinite Life. ”

“ Unreasoning and instinctive life never leaves its sphere. The beaver builds its dam, lives, and dies, just as it did six thousand years ago. The bee builds the same hexagonal cell she built before the flood. There is an all-pervading order in the physical world, But with man it is quite otherwise. Man, created in the image of God, is a free moral being. He is not solely under the dominion of mere nature-conditions, and he is therefore a progressive being. The physical man is not the true man; the body is not an end, but a means. ”

“ Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism alike commence with unity at the fountain-head of being—a unity which is incomposite, absolutely continuous, every where present and eternal. Every system of philosophy is essentially an effort to show how the universe that now is has been originated by, or evolved out of, or has emanated from, a First Principle, an absolute Unity. To determine whether this absolute First Principle can be known, and, if known, how conceived and expressed aright, is the ultimate problem of all philosophy and all religion. ”

“ A single tree is a garden, wherein a hundred different plants intertwine their branches, and display their brilliant flowers on a ground of verdure, where their varied hues and forms of leaves are richly blended." And here the perfection of vegetable life is attained in the graceful palms which stand at the head and crown the vegetable kingdom. This is the region of a perpetual summer, where nature makes ample provision for the support of animal life, and the date, the cocoa-nut, the banana, the plantain, the sugar-cane, the pine-apple, supply all the wants of uncivilized man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, then, creation be the act of an Absolute Personality, the act of a Being who freely and unconditionally determines his own nature and conditionates all existence, then the Will of God is the sole causality of the world, and in his Will alone we have the unlimited, infinite ground-principle of all reality. Absolute Personality tolerates no other transition from the idea of God to the idea of the world than that of a Will which freely conditions itself by Love. This Free Love is the highest determining principle for the Divine efficiency. ”

“ By what philosophy can you eradicate the sense of wrong or cease to impute blame to the man whose perfidy has despoiled your life? You may forgive him, and follow him with your prayers to the last hour of your life, but you will still pray for him as a guilty man whose crime has been the burden of your life." Now what is this radical and fundamental difference between the events of the material universe and the actions of men? and what is the rational basis for the different feelings we experience and the diverse judgments we pass in regard to them? ”