- end_line
- 9503
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9455
- text
- Chinese notions of things may answer well enough here, they are by no
means universally applicable, and that the central Greenwich in which He
dwells goes by a somewhat different method from this world. And yet it
follows not from this, that God's truth is one thing and man's truth
another; but--as above hinted, and as will be further elucidated in
subsequent lectures--by their very contradictions they are made to
correspond.
"By inference it follows, also, that he who finding in himself a
chronometrical soul, seeks practically to force that heavenly time upon
the earth; in such an attempt he can never succeed, with an absolute and
essential success. And as for himself, if he seek to regulate his own
daily conduct by it, he will but array all men's earthly time-keepers
against him, and thereby work himself woe and death. Both these things
are plainly evinced in the character and fate of Christ, and the past
and present condition of the religion he taught. But here one thing is
to be especially observed. Though Christ encountered woe in both the
precept and the practice of his chronometricals, yet did he remain
throughout entirely without folly or sin. Whereas, almost invariably,
with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world
according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt
to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, _unique_ follies
and sins, unimagined before. It is the story of the Ephesian matron,
allegorized.
"To any earnest man of insight, a faithful contemplation of these ideas
concerning Chronometricals and Horologicals, will serve to render
provisionally far less dark some few of the otherwise obscurest things
which have hitherto tormented the honest-thinking men of all ages. What
man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive,
that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of
this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that
same heavenly soul? And yet by an infallible instinct he knows, that
that monitor can not be wrong in itself.
"And where is the earnest and righteous philosopher, gentlemen, who
looking right and left, and up and down, through all the ages of the
world, the present included; where is there such an one who has not a
thousand times been struck with a sort of infidel idea, that whatever
other worlds God may be Lord of, he is not the Lord of this; for else
this world would seem to give the lie to Him; so utterly repugnant seem
its ways to the instinctively known ways of Heaven. But it is not, and
can not be so; nor will he who regards this chronometrical conceit
aright, ever more be conscious of that horrible idea. For he will then
see, or seem to see, that this world's seeming incompatibility with God,
absolutely results from its meridianal correspondence with him.
* * * * *
- title
- Chunk 8