Recurrence to first principles
Life is made up of circles. We are ever coming back to whence we started. As history repeats itself, so must morality and religion. The shining points of wisdom appear and reappear with the regularity of the heavenly bodies. The vault of heaven has its analogue in the star-besprinkled vault of the moral relations. Iteration and repetition of first principles are constantly necessary, ever wholesome, peculiarly characteristic of Semitic thought. Wherever life is bounded to a small circle of interests, the same truths must be insisted on "over and over again."
I. RELIGION A FIRST PRINCIPLE.
1. Religion characterized. The fear of Jehovah. In other words, reverence for the Eternal One. We may unfold the definition, but can we substitute a better for it? It is a relation to the eternal and unseen, to a supersensual order, as opposed to that which is visible and transient. It is deep-seated in feeling. Reverence is the ground tone in the scale of religious feeling; we descend from it to awe and terror, or rise to joy and ecstasy. It is a relation, not to ourselves, or a projection of ourselves in fancy, but to a personal and holy Being.
2. Its connection with intelligence firmly insisted on. It is the beginning, or root principle, of wisdom, and "acquaintance with the Holy is true insight" (Proverbs 9:10). The question, often discussed, whether religion is a matter of feeling, knowledge, or will, arises from a fallacy. We may distinguish these functions in thought; but in act they are one, because the consciousness is a unity, not a bundle of things, a collocation of organs. In feeling we know, in knowledge we feel, and from this interaction arise will, acts, conduct. Hence so far as a man is soundly religious, he is likewise soundly intelligent. In the truest conception religion and wisdom are identical.
II. WISDOM A FIRST PRINCIPLE. (Proverbs 9:11.) Here we come down from the region of speculation to that of practical truth.
1. The "will to live" is the very spring of our activity.
2. Only second to it in original power is the wish to be well, i.e. to have fulness, energy of life, consciousness. The extensive form of this wish is naturally the earlier, the more childlike—to enjoy many years, to live to a green old age, etc. The intensive form is later, and belongs to the more reflective stage of the mind. "Non vivere, sed valere, est vita" (Martial). 'Tis "more life and fuller that we want" (Tennyson). "One hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." This view comes more home to the modern mind than to that of the monotonous East, where the like fulness of interest was not possible. We say, "Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
III. PERSONALITY A FIRST PRINCIPLE. (Proverbs 9:12.)
1. We have a distinct individual consciousness. "I am I, and other than the things I touch." I know what my acts are as distinguished from my involuntary movements, my thoughts as distinct from the passive reflection of perceptions and phantasies unbegotten of my will.
2. Our wisdom or folly is our own affair, both in origin and consequences. We begot the habit, and must reap as we sow, bear the brunt of the conflict we may have provoked.
3. Neither our wisdom can enrich nor our folly impoverish God (Job 22:2, Job 22:3; Job 35:6-9; Romans 11:35; Revelation 22:11, Revelation 22:12).