How we master our fate / by Ursula N. Gestefeld.

  • Gestefeld, Ursula N. (Ursula Newell), 1845-1921.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: How we master our fate / by Ursula N. Gestefeld. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/120 (page 11)
    LAW OR CHANCE. Every observing and reflective mind is sometimes obliged to choose one horn of the dilemma—either all is law and order or all is chance. If chance rules all, if things happen, we might as well take life as easily as possible, for we are sure of nothing but the present moment, and even have our doubts about that. We must be submissive to fate, for it is supreme. But if all is governed by law, by that which changes not, there is no fate save that which we make for ourselves through our ignorance of law, and submission is unnecessary, obedience is the necessity. Let us apply to ourselves the illustration in the previous article, using it as a working hypothesis, and see if its appli- cation may not throw some light upon the problem of being— upon the factors of that problem. We find the inventor, the inventive power, and his idea which is the invention, to be a trinity in unity—an indivisible unity, for no one of the three can be separated from the other two. Yet they remain distinct from each other by virtue of the nature of each. Distinctness without separation is a point not to be lost sight of, for much depends upon it further on. Let us view God as the inventor, God’s power as the in- ventive power, and man as the invention, and see what kind of a nature he would have in consequence. Clearly, his nature would depend upon the nature of God, as the invention, not only in fact, but in nature, depends upon the inventor. But man as the invention or idea of Mind would not have the nature the inventor might choose to bestow upon him, for Mind, expressing itself in idea, would have no power of choice, no power to bestow this or that by preference. A human in- ventor could half-frame an idea, drop it incomplete, take up and complete another. Here a human and materialistic illus- tration fails to reveal the complete meaning sought to be con- veyed. But if we view God as “ the beginning ” of man—and of all things—as the inventor is the beginning of the invention, we shall see the definite relation of man to his cause. If we then see that God, as impersonal Principle, as Mind, has no power of choice but must express itself, and that man, as the idea of Mind, is its expression, we shall see that the expression must have the nature necessitated by what God is, rather than by what a humanized God might choose to do.