Article May 4, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Frederick K. Howard, J. Harvey Murphy, Joseph H. Bradley

[Universalist Leader.]

In one of his fine moments Amiel wrote that the center of life is not in thought, nor in feeling, nor in will, nor even in consciousness. For he says that moral truth may have penetrated all these and yet it may escape us. "Deeper than consciousness," he tells us, "there is our being itself, our very substance, our nature. Only those truths which have entered into this last region, which have become ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive and unconscious, are really life; that is to say, something more than prosperity. So long as we are able to distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us, we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the desire, the consciousness of life are not yet quite life." We have here a series of advances in truth, through which we gradually pass from a purely mental process of appreciating an idea or truth, to a state of experience where that idea or truth has perfectly blended in our constitution. We do not think of ourselves any longer as holding the opinion or believing the truth. It has lost its identity, to find expression in life and character.

All truth which takes great hold on us and masters us must travel this road from the mind to the very center of being where things are not believed but are lived. In the last analysis truth is inseparable from life. It is because so much of truth never gets beyond the first or second step in this advance that it is so impotent and ineffective. Here is the exposure of all of that form of religious experience which is expressed in the idea of belief, or in the realm of emotion.

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