Why hast thou said, 'I have sinned so much,
And God in His mercy has not punished my sins'?
How many times do I smite thee, and thou knowest not!
Thou art bound in my chains from head to foot.
On thy heart is rust on rust collected
So that thou art blind to divine mysteries.
When a man is stubborn and follows evil practices,
He casts dust in the eyes of his discernment.
Old shame for sin and calling on God quit him;
Dust five layers deep settles on his mirror,
Rust spots begin to gnaw his iron,
The colour of his jewel grows less and less.
IF there is freedom (and even Determinists consistently act as if they were certain of it) and
- A latent Providence,
- a confused life,
- an odd material world,
- an existence broken short in the midst and on a sudden,
Pert nella giusthia sempitérna la vista che riceve vostro mondo,com'occ/zio per lo mar, dentro s'interna,ckê, benc/lê dalla proda veggia ilfondo,in pelago nol vede, e non di menoIi, ma cela liii l'esser profondo.
('Wherefore, in the eternal justice,
But, you urge, if men sin from the necessity of their nature, they are excusable;
you do not explain, however, what you would infer from this fact.
Is it perhaps that God will be prevented from growing angry with them?
Or is it rather that they have deserved that blessedness which consists in the knowledge and love of God?
If you mean the former, I altogether agree that God does not grow angry and that all things happen by his decree.
But I deny that, for this reason, all men ought to be happy.
Surely men may be excusable and nevertheless miss happiness, and be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for being a horse and not a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse and not a man.
One who goes mad from the bite of a dog is excusable; yet it is right that he should die of suffocation.
So, too, he who cannot rule his passions, nor hold them in check out of respect for the law, while he may be excusable on the ground of weakness, is incapable of enjoying conformity of spirit and knowledge and love of God; and he is lost inevitably.
Horizontally and vertically, in physical and temperamental kind as well as in degree of inborn ability and native goodness, human beings differ profoundly one from another. Why? To what end and for what past causes?
- Jesus answered, 'Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.'
- The man of science, on the contrary, would say that the responsibility rested with the parents who had caused the blindness of their child either by having the wrong kind of genes, or by contracting some avoidable disease.
- Hindu or Buddhist believers in reincarnation according to the laws of karma (the destiny which, by their actions, individuals and groups of individuals impose upon themselves, one another and their descendants) would give another answer and say that, owing to what he had done in previous existences, the blind man had predestined himself to choose the sort of parents from whom he would have to inherit blindness.276
These three answers are not mutually incompatible. The parents are responsible for making the child what, by heredity and upbringing, he turns out to be. The soul or character incarnated in the child is of such a nature, owing to past behaviour, that it is forced to select those particular parents.
'Karma,' according to the Hindus, 'never dispels ignorance, being under the same category with it. Knowledge alone dispels ignorance, just as light alone dispels darkness.'
In other words, the causal process takes place within time and cannot possibly result in deliverance from time. Such a deliverance can only be achieved as a consequence of the intervention of eternity in the temporal domain; and eternity cannot intervene unless the individual will makes a creative act of self-denial, thus producing, as it were, a vacuum into which eternity can flow. To suppose that the causal process in time can of itself result in deliverance from time is like supposing that water will rise into a space from which the air has not been previously exhausted.277
The right relation between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.
The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God.
Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society.
In the past the nations of Christendom persecuted in the name of their faith, fought religious wars and undertook crusades against infidels and heretics;
Meanwhile, on the credit side of the balance sheet, we find such items as the following: an immense increase in technical and governmental efficiency and an immense increase in scientific knowledge—each of them a result of the general shift of Western man's attention from the eternal to the temporal order,