United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it is irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not.
Does he want to be called an "Irrationalist"? Hardly yet if he is not a Rationalist what else can he be? No: the difference between us is one of detail, not of principle. This is a great step gained. The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view which the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to hold in common.
The value of the Bible, the greatness of the Bible, are in this Life that it discloses to us. "It is upon Jesus," says a modern rationalist, "that the whole Bible turns. In this lies the value, not only of the New Testament, a great part of which refers to him directly, but of the Old Testament as well." Rationalist though he is, no man could have stated the truth more clearly.
The Lieutenant-General had even written a pamphlet against a ribald iconoclastic book published by the Rationalist Press Association, in which pamphlet he had made a sorry mess of Herbert Spencer. All the Lieutenant-General's relatives and near admirers went to church, and they all went to precisely the same kind of church, for no other kind would have served.
It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none. Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic.
So that what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a well-known rationalist about him: 'The Tories were always carrying off his honey to their hive. Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey had to give, drank in all the ideal fervour, the spiritual enthusiasm of the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty years earlier, carried his religious passion so stimulated into the service of the great positive tradition around him.
I had been for months at my wit's end, forming plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the first days in January 1872:
My purpose is served in pointing out the plain historical fact; that if you had talked to a Utilitarian and Rationalist of Bentham's time, who told men to follow "enlightened self-interest," he would have been considerably bewildered if you had replied brightly and briskly, "And to which self do you refer; the sub-conscious, the conscious, the latently criminal or suppressed, or others that we fortunately have in stock?"
I have honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to 'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent, is one that I can make neither head nor tail of.
The rationalist acts rationally that is to say, he does not speak out of his part so long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the odium anti-theologicum, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people who knoweth not the law are cursed."
Word Of The Day