The Religious Feeling; A Study for Faith (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1877 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III. THE FEELING OF MORAL DEPENDENCE. These is another phase of the religious feeling by which it is to be distinguished from all other feelings. It involves not merely the sense of absolute dependence upon some power above ourselves and all finite things, but also the sense of dependence upon a supreme authority or absolute right. It is the feeling not only of finite being, but also of moral dependence, or the moral sense. There is a something other than ourselves and the world, which puts us both into dependence and under obligation. There is a feeling of responsibility from which we cannot free ourselves even in thought. We cannot conceive ourselves to be, no man ever for a moment was conscious of himself as being both absolutely independent, and without law. The feeling of our finiteness, and the feeling of obligation, or the sense of dependence for our being and for our well-being, are but different phases of the consciousness of absolute dependence, which is the religious feeling in ita most general form. But an issue has been raised, at this point, which our argument ought not to avoid by any roundabout appeal to prejudice, or stolen march in the dark: courses, however common they may be in polemical tactics, not to be followed by any who would prefer to be beaten by Truth, rather than to succeed for the time with error. The vital issue is joined upon this question, whether the moral sense, or our human consciousness of moral dependence, like the feeling of dependent existence, is simple, and underived from other feelings; not compounded of different experiences, but a primary element, an original force of human life. The question just stated leads us into the very thick of the latest scientific and philosophical controversies. As the field o...