Within; Thoughts During Convalescence (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE INHERENT IMPULSE Whatever that Something is which we feel must be at the back of things, it cannot be an external Omnipotent Being who created us and who guides and controls us. That is the conclusion at which we have arrived, and other lines of thought than that just pursued have led other men to the same conclusion. We are realising nowadays that the old guardian God of our childhood never existed. He was our own creation. He did not make us. We made him. What, then, is to take his place ? What is to be our fundamental belief in future ? We must have a faith and guiding idea of some kind. And we do feel that if what is at the back of us is not the venerable Being of our infancy, or the awful Judge sitting on a throne, there yet is something spiritual at the source of things. If that Something is not a Person outside ourselves, what, then, is its nature ? What shall we have in future to support us in all the difficulties and complications of life ? What shall carry us over the sea of troubles in which we find ourselves ? What will there be to guide us; what to support and comfort us ? If we make one false step in our daily conflict with the forces of Nature, we are lost. If we cannot rely on the old guardian God to help us, on whom, then, can we trust ? The reply I suggest is, that it is on our own selves that we should put our trust ? on our individual se/ves and on one another. And I urge that we can thus trust ourselves and one another, because we all alike are animated by one great purpose and impelled by the same inherent spirit welling up within us and binding us altogether in one indissoluble bondship; and because that spirit is found to be in its essential nature good. We are abandoning the idea of God the Father; and we are realising the idea of God th...