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Updated: May 13, 2025
This God, then, who is not, willed no! not "willed"; he could not will; but whether he willed or did not will, in some way or other there was an emanation; not God, but very much of God; very divine, but not all God; from this another and another in a descending series, down to the daemons, and down to men. All that is, is God; evil is not-being.
Quite inevitably it abandons the personality and Fatherhood of God, the selfhood and freedom of man, the reality of sin and evil, which it describes as "not-being," and the value and rationality of prayer for how or to whom can we pray if we are already "on the eternal throne"? Quite inevitably, therefore, we may add, the votaries of this philosophy, in attempting to accommodate it to the facts of life, the intuitions of the moral self and the aspirations of the soul, are faced everywhere by irreconcilable antinomies and "find no end, in wandering mazes lost."
Our first and simplest duty in dealing with the specious doctrine which asserts that evil is "not-being" a mere illusion which, like the idols spoken of by the Apostle, is "nothing in the world" is to point out promptly and uncompromisingly that whatever such a reading of the facts may be, and from whatever quarter it may be offered, it is not Christian, but at the furthest remove from Christianity.
The value of analysis is to lead us to the original starting-point of that which we analyse, and so to teach us the laws by which its final form springs from this centre. Knowing the law of its construction, we turn our analysis into a synthesis, and we thus gain a power of building up which must always be beyond the reach of those who regard "the unknowable" as one with "not-being."
A man’s true ideas are the most he can hope, and all that he should wish, to carry with him to a life hereafter. Falsehood, sin, is the efficient agent of death. As Bishop Hall says: “There is a kind of not-being in sin; for sin is not an existence of somewhat that is, but a deficiency of that rectitude which should be; it is a privation, as blindness is a privation of sight.”
It is giving to the negative an affirmative force which does not belong to it. Consider what is meant by the negative. It is the absence of something. It is not-being, and is the absence of all that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own nothingness, and it only assumes form and activity when we give these to it by our thought.
Accursed be every human trace that is welcome to your misery! Go down into the deepest dungeon of my house! Moan! Howl! Drag out the time with your woe. Let your life be the slimy writhing of the dying worm, the obstinate, crushing struggle between being and not-being. And this curse shall rest upon you until Gianettino has gasped out his last breath.
Most true. Since then what is partakes of not-being, and what is not of being, must not the one also partake of being in order not to be? Certainly. Then the one, if it is not, clearly has being? Clearly. And has not-being also, if it is not? Of course. But can anything which is in a certain state not be in that state without changing? Impossible.
And the transition is a process of generation and destruction, into and from being and not-being, the one and the others. For the generation of the one is the destruction of the others, and the generation of the others is the destruction of the one.
Moreover, this and that, some and other, may be all attributed or related to the one which is not, and which though non-existent may and must have plurality, if the one only is non-existent and nothing else; but if all is not-being there is nothing which can be spoken of.
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