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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-405}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-405}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|these two words. The first he adopted as it stood. The second he changed in order that he might give utterance to the mightier conceptions of Christianity, and adopted instead of it an old Greek word that had been used sometimes for the life of the ''Psyche'', sometimes for that of the ''Nous'', sometimes for a larger thought than either, that was gradually growing up in the Greek mind.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-407}} | The vivifying, sustaining, nursing, pitying, guiding presence of the Father of Jesus, and of all men; going to and for in the earth; brooding over the dark waters; dwelling in the humble and obedient heart as in a shrine; the breath that goeth where it listeth, unheard and unseen, the dove of the opening heavens; the fire of pentecostal prophecy—that was the ''Paraclete'' of early Christianity, ''that'' was the ''Pneuma'' of S. Paul. | ||
When the time came for the translation of our English Bible “out of the original tongues,” the English faith in the “supernatural” was already waning; the days of ''Bluff King Hal'' had been unfavourable to its growth, and since those days religious people had not done much more than fly at each other’s throats. Still the translators were able to find words which to the people might serve to express the difference between the ''Psyche'' and the ''Pneuma'' of the Greek Testament. The Saxon ''soul'' from Chaucer’s time had been used in the sense of outer as well as inner life, while the Anglo-Norman spirit was associated generally with the latter, partly, no doubt, on account of the ''Sanctus Spiritus'' of the Latin vulgate and mass-book. | |||
Fate thus consecrating and preserving to us language in which the sublimest “seeing of the invisible” of an Isaiah and a S. John might be brought home to our England’s heart, in which the panting, thirsting cry of her children after righteousness, after the inward and the real, might become articulate. Language, which should stand forth for ever as her protest in her noble days against that resting in the external, that seeking for signs, that trust in “chariots” and “horses,” in rappings, and creakings, and tappings; that peeping, muttering, shameless, restlessness of her decline. | |||
The knowledge of the ''spirit'', “''Spiritualism'',” it is a ''divine science'', the best and holiest thing that we can ever know, but it “comes not with observation,” the psychical man does not receive it, till silently, imperceptibly there grows up within him a faculty of apprehension, and he begins for the first time to live. | |||
11. What is called Spiritualism is but ''psychicism'', the knowledge of the ''life conditions in non-material structure''. There are too many ''isms'' in the world already, isms are apt to mean schisms, and we want this science of ours to be a uniting and not a dividing science, do we not? We will try another suffix! ''Psychology'', which we may translate, I think, “the science of psychic manifestation;” that was the title adopted as you know by the late lamented Serjeant Cox. The objection to it lies in the fact that ''Psychology'' has already a place in the circle of recognised sciences, and means very reasonably the study of mental phenomena. Yet one more attempt—''Psychonomy''! I introduce the word to you, I confess, a little shyly; of course, I like it myself; not altogether, I hope, because it is of my own coining, but because it marks the character of our study as law revering, and law abiding, and also because it links us pleasantly to the heavenly science of those | |||
{{Style P-Poem|poem= “Who see the stars’ untroubled ways | |||
And the divine of endless days.”}} | |||
12. Think over what I have said at least carefully. Take my new word or leave it as it seems good to you, who are better, wiser, more experienced than I. But if the old word remain with you, strive at least that it be no longer the darkener of counsel, the support of delusion. Lift up your voice at least in the midst of this festering materialism, and assert with all the force that is in you the forgotten truth. That the unphenomenal is the real, that structure exists only in order to embody the Divine idea of perfect righteousness and perfect love. That manifestations in themselves are of no value and become valuable only in so far as they make clearer to us this idea. | |||
13. Incidentally throughout my paper I have dealt with the relations between Psychonomy, religion and morals, or between Psychonomy and ''Spiritualism''. Suffer me for a few moments to deal with them in a more direct manner. | |||
My definition of religion—the binding-link with that which is above us, has roused much indignant criticism; yet that is, after all, what it does mean. Religion may be good or bad, pure or impure, false or true; it may be the binding to an idol that our imagination has made and put in the place of God or to God himself, dimly or plainly discerned. It may be the binding to a human being or to a material or immaterial thing—to a wife, a friend, to our money, our ambition, our duty or our sin; it is the captivity in which our spirit is held to things in heaven, or things in earth, {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-407}} | |||