Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton.

  • Thomas Hodgkin
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    459/494 (page 417)
    In the multitude of counsellors there may be wisdom, but there is also perplexity. Like property, membership in a Christian Church has its duties as well as its rights. The sense of need is the beginning of worship. If you do not see your way clearly upon it just at first, have patience. Keep the matter well in view, and light will arise upon your path. On the absurdity of making St. Peter the first of a long line of infallible pontiffs : He was one of the most delightfully fallible of the whole band, as all his history shows. When preaching about the Ark of the Covenant: The Ark was meant to be secret within the veil, we do ! not well when we draw out our soul’s secret experiences and parade them before the world or try to do battle by their means with the Philistine. Of one who spoke about the future life in detail: He has too much of the upholstery of Heaven for me. Between the extremely sharp and clear notions about Heaven which some of our popular religious teachers present and this gran rifiuto of immortality there is surely room for something better, * a reasonable faith and quiet exercise of the patience of hope/ It seems to be quite as true in reference to our material as to our spiritual existence, that we can only live by accepting, without trying to think out, the unthinkable. We are meant to take our faith into the world and use it, not to shut it up in a hothouse. There are shadows across our paths, but let us not lengthen the shadows by our own forebodings which have so often proved vain and needless, but go forth to meet the unknown without fear and with a manly heart. And so with a good hope and with courage drawn from our Captain's words, we look towards the wonderful—not terrible—Beyond. 2 E