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The true aspect of the affair is this: A chain of circumstances, unforeseen, and uncaused by any premeditated effort on our part, has presented to his mind the most powerful motives to take a natural part in the conflict. It has gradually become evident that the secret of his restraint is a mystery that affects his whole being.
In harmony with this proposition, Atheists cannot admit the supernatural caused the natural; for, between the natural and the supernatural it is impossible to imagine any thing in common. The universe is an uncaused existence, or it was caused by something before it. By universe we mean matter, the sum total of things, whence all proceeds, and whither all returns.
And because it comes unmotived, uncaused, self-originated, springing up from the depths of His own heart; because it is all effected by His own mighty work who has trodden the winepress alone, and, single-handed, has wrought the salvation of the race; and because its essence and heart is the communication of God Himself, and the bestowing upon us the participation in a divine nature, therefore the depth of the thought, God Himself is the well-fountain of salvation.
My plan of culture was very simple: it was to seek out the innermost unity connecting the most diverse and widely-separated phenomena, whether subjective or objective, and whether theoretical or practical, to learn to see the spiritual side of their activity, to apprehend their mutual relations as facts and forms of Nature, or to express them mathematically; and, on the other hand, to contemplate the natural and mathematical laws as founded in the innermost depths of my own life as well as in the highest unity of the great whole, that is indeed to regard them in their unconditioned, uncaused necessity, as "absolute things-in-themselves."
And I for one would rather believe in a miracle than believe in an uncaused change, in which the Apostles take exactly the opposite course from that which they necessarily must have taken, if there had not been the facts that the New Testament asserts that there were, Christ's rising again from the dead, and Ascension.
Nothing daunted, the religionist then insists that nothing can exist without a cause, except cause, and that this uncaused cause is God. To this we again replied: Every cause must produce an effect, because until it does produce an effect, it is not a cause. Every effect must in its turn become a cause.
That experience is the substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable objects.
Undoubtedly, the matter-God-system has its difficulties, but they are trifles in comparison with those by which the spirit-God system is encompassed; for, one obvious consequence of faith in bodiless Divinity is an utter confusion of ideas in those who preach it, as regards possibilities and impossibilities. The universe is an uncaused existence, or it was caused by something before it.
One is that the fountain of all our deliverance from sin, and of our healing of our sicknesses, lies in the deep heart of God, from which it wells up undrawn, unmotived, uncaused by anything except His own infinite lovingkindness.
The principle laid down by the writer of this book is of universal application, and the true 'philosophy of history' must recognise as underlying all other so-called causes and forces the one uncaused Cause, of whose purposes kings and politicians are the executants, even while they freely act according to their own judgments, and, it may be, in utter unconsciousness of Him.
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