United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It has led man to shame and crime and death; yet it is dearer to him than any paradise where the self lies, securely slumbering in perfect innocence in the womb of mother nature. It is a constant striving and suffering for us to maintain the separateness of this self of ours. And in fact it is this suffering which measures its value.
Nothing is more natural than this interaction between a living faith and the writings which are felt to be its guarantee. Religion is notoriously conservative and retrospective. Especially is this true of religions which impute to themselves a complete and final source of revelation in the past. Faith and book are associated in the mind so intimately that they lose their separateness.
They think of the separateness from the world involved in a life of Holiness; they think of the cold shoulder which some, even Christian friends, would give them; they think of the toil after souls which the sanctified must maintain; of the money that they may have to give; of the partnership in Christ's sufferings, and other self-denying expressions of devotion to God and the Kingdom.
She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women but how is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of passion. "This is the thing that lasts that really lasts for a lifetime," he said in his thoughts.
They may develop a social hierarchy of their own, almost unnoticed, as have the Negroes and the "foreign element," but among that assimilated mass which always considers itself the "nation," there is in spite of the great separateness of sets, a variety of personal contacts through which a circulation of standards takes place. But imitation does not stop at frontiers.
Dartmouth felt a sudden impulse to tell her of his strange experience. He was not given to making confidences, but he felt en rapport with this girl as he had never felt with man or woman before. He had a singular feeling, when talking with or listening to her, of losing his sense of separateness. It was not that he felt de-individualized, but that he had an accession of personality.
Since, as was said, the affections of heaven and the lusts of hell are diametrically opposite to each other, plainly a heavenly joy is so unenjoyable to hell that it is unbearable, and in turn an infernal joy is so unenjoyable to heaven that it is unbearable, too. Hence the antipathy, aversion and separateness.
In fact again, a man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham and a delusion. Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal.
Not only in our self but also in nature is there this separateness from God, which has been described as maya by our philosophers, because the separateness does not exist by itself, it does not limit God's infinity from outside. It is his own will that has imposed limits to itself, just as the chess-player restricts his will with regard to the moving of the chessmen.
Its people were awake to their peculiar conditions and problems; it had plenty of talented citizens to formulate policies; and it had excellent machinery for uniting public opinion. In colonial times, plying its trade mainly with England and the West Indies, it was in little touch with its continental neighbors, and it developed a sense of separateness.
Word Of The Day