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If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines of concursus, of influxus ordinarius and extraordinarius usually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces.
Yet what is the fact? So far from any mysterious repulsion externally between idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief could no more coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a hive, as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable concursus, do but open a child's epitome of history, and you find it to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's hammer and crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of idolatrous worship; and not before five, nay, locally six, or even seven centuries had elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have sung gratulations announcing that the great strife was over that man was inoculated with the truth; or have adopted the impressive language of a Latin father, that "the owls were to be heard in every village hooting from the dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturbing the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the cold, dilapidated altars."
But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if God arranged these causæ secundariæ, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingenious concursus, influxus, determinationes, gubernationes, and the like.
Alias vero omnes, non nisi ope concursûs Dei existere posse perspicimus.
All these theories of influx, concursus, and so on, whether transcendental or immanent factors be employed, immediately become wooden, and never admit of verification in detail. But precisely the same is true of the dominance of the “idea,” or of the “law of evolution,” or of the “potential of development” in every developing organism.
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