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Updated: October 6, 2025
The good shall be persecuted and the theists tortured, and those that say there is balm in Gilead, shall be thrust beyond the pale of decent society. Then, oh, what a spiritual revival there will be!
When we are dealing with such matters as these, we recognize that truth is truth, and that, if we mistake it or refuse to recognize it, so much the worse for us. Is it otherwise in philosophy? Is it a perfectly proper thing that, in one age, men should be idealists, and in another, materialists; in one, theists, and in another, agnostics?
These three supreme Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, have not contributed a single argument for the existence of a supreme being which is now not discredited. Socrates relied on the now outmoded argument from design; and only in a greatly modified form are the arguments of Plato and Aristotle accepted by modern theists.
I confess that the way is open for improvement among Protestants in this respect, but is it not just as open for a similar improvement among unbelievers in the scientific field of thought? There we find Atheists, Pantheists, Deists, Polytheists and Theists. In their history will be found an immense mass of contradictory opinions. Man is imperfect in many of his attainments.
Indeed, the notion of universal creation involves first, that of universal annihilation, and secondly, that of something prior to everything. What creates everything must be before everything, in the same way that he who manufactures a watch must exist before the watch. As already remarked, Universalists agree with Theists, that something ever has been, but the point of difference lies here.
The doctrine of the necessity of creation, though held in a few instances by theists who seem not to have discerned its logical consequences, is virtually pantheistic. Had God been pleased to dwell forever in the self-sufficiency of His Trinity, and never called the Finite into existence from nothing, He might have done so, and He would still have been omnipotent and "blessed forever."
There is a higher synthesis in which partial truths are being constantly taken up and reconciled in some fuller and more luminous expression, and I have no doubt that that scientific reconciliation of materialism and spiritualism which is now progressing so rapidly will eventually be effected between those who now call themselves theists and agnostics.
We do not suppose the existence of any being, of which there is no evidence, when such supposition, it admitted, so far from diminishing would only increase a difficulty, which, at best, is sufficiently great. These are 'strong reasons' for Universalism. They prove that Theists set at nought the rule of philosophising which forbids us to choose the greater of two difficulties.
We do not suppose the existence of any being, of which there is no evidence, when such supposition, if admitted, so far from diminishing would only increase a difficulty, which at best is sufficiently great. These are 'strong reasons' for Atheism they prove that Theists set at nought the rule of philosophising which forbids us to choose the greater of two difficulties.
Today this is scarcely discussed: the theists are no longer troubled by the logical impossibilities of their system. They want a God, especially a Providence: there is competition for this article between the radicals and the Jesuits. The socialists preach happiness and virtue in the name of God; in the schools those who talk the loudest against the Church are the first of mystics.
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