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Updated: May 8, 2025
The theological attributes with which metaphysicians decorated these divinities, were in fact nothing but pure negations of the qualities found in man, or in those beings of which he has a knowledge; by these attributes their gods were supposed exempted from every thing which they considered weakness or imperfection in him, or in the beings by whom he is surrounded: they called every quality infinite, which has been shewn is only to affirm, that unlike man, or the beings with whom he is acquainted, it is not circumscribed by the limits of space; this, however, is what he can never in any manner comprehend, because he is himself finite.
Hence the affirmations and the negations of God always involve necessity or truth; so that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it would have involved a contradiction that Adam should have been able to eat of it, and would therefore have been impossible that he should have so eaten, for the Divine command would have involved an eternal necessity and truth.
To begin with, it is largely negative: there are three negatives in this twentieth verse for one affirmative, and negations cannot redeem us. The law is also external. As a proof that it is ineffectual, I ask, Have you ever REJOICED in it? Have you ever been kindled by it? Have all its precepts ever moved you like one single item in the story of the love of Jesus?
"I shall have strength given me," said Maggie, tremulously. "No, you will not, Maggie; no one has strength given to do what is unnatural. It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature that you deny now will assault you like a savage appetite."
Why turn to the front its incidental negations? This is topsy-turvy nomenclature. Better blot the word self-sacrifice from our dictionaries. Devotion, service, love, dedication to a cause, these words mark its real nature and are the only descriptions of it which its practicers will recognize.
Representative of the latter is the Evangelische Lutherische Kirchenzeitung, of Leipzig, which says: "The psychological and spiritual solution of Rittelmeyer's problem is not so hard to find. The soul of man can not live on negations. To stir the soul there must be positive principles and epoch-making historical facts, such as are offered by the Scriptural teachings of Christ and his words.
Before attacking the stars that light us, and the higher certainties, ought he not to understand the certainties which are actually about him? "But no! to the negations of doubt I ought rather to reply by negations. Therefore I ask you whether there is anything here below so evident that I can put faith in it?
It is simply a bundle of doubts and negations. Men are bound together in social and fraternal ties by what they affirm and believe in common. But they care nothing for what they deny.
Their platform consisted mainly of a denial of all power in the Federal Government to do anything or prevent anything, the extravagant negations borrowed from the republican philosophers of England and the French Revolutionists.
Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century, newly arisen from the ashes of pseudo-Christianity, of mere scepticism, and of the soulless affirmations and blind negations of the Mechanists and Neo-Darwinians. But it cannot become a popular religion until it has its legends, its parables, its miracles.
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