Publisher's Synopsis
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. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... LECTURE VIII. INTERIOR FAITH. We said at the very beginning of 'our conferences, that man's human perfection lay in a self-induced subjection of the flesh to the spirit--of the senses, the imagination, the passions, the feelings, to reason, intelligence, and will; in guiding his life not by transitory appearances, but by eternal realities; not by that which seems to be, but by that which is. All admit this, at least implicitly. A man who lacks prudence or foresight, or whose judgments are all prima facie or superficial, is so far regarded as a child or a savage, that is, as an undeveloped man, because he has not yet learnt to guide his actions by what is future and therefore invisible, or by what underlies the outward semblance of things present. So far as the word faith might be used to signify a practical hold on unapparent truths, on unseen realities, a power of resisting the illusions of the senses and the imagination, faith might be said to be a condition of all human, as opposed to merely animal, life; a condition of success even in business and in the subordinate affairs of our daily existence wholly unconnected with religion. But when we come to the supreme and eternal interests to which all these temporal concerns are or ought to be subordinate, where, as in the case of what is called natural religion, the realities by which our conduct is to be guided, lie at the extreme horizon of our intelligence; or, as in the case of supernatural religion, altogether beyond it; then faith, in the above sense of realizing the unseen, is at once far more difficult and far more imperatively necessary. Without faith it is impossible to please God, i.e., impossible to lead a moral and religious life. For the things of religion are after all the...