The scientific bases of faith / by Joseph John Murphy.

  • Murphy, Joseph John, 1827-1894.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The scientific bases of faith / by Joseph John Murphy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    all:—first universal justice and afterwards universal mercy. Sucli a belief as this—a belief in both justice and mercy, and in the universality of both—is more favourable than any other to the only legitimate end and aim of all reli- gion, namely the attainment of holiness. NOTE. MEANING OF THE WORD HEAVEN IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. Heaven in the Epistles means the spiritual world as opposed to the visible. Epistle to the Hebrews xii. 26, 27. Same, ix. 23. The word heaven in the New Testament sometimes means the immediate dwelling-place of God, as in the invocation Our Father who art in heaven. But also, especially in the Epistles, it means the spiritual world as opposed to the visible : and when used in this sense it does not connote the idea of perfect purity and bliss. See especially the following passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which, though almost certainly not by St. Paul, is certainly by a contemporary and probably by a friend of his, and may safely be quoted on the Apostolic use of words :— Whose voice then [at Sinai] shook the earth : but now He hath promised saying, Yet once more only will I shake not the earth alone but also heaven. And this ' yet once more only' signifieth the removal of those things that are shaken, as being perishable, that the things unshaken may remain unmoveable.1 See also the following passage from the same Epistle, where the Apostolic author is speaking of the animal sacrifices of Judaism :— It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. In both of these passages, heavenly is obviously a synonym for spiritual: and it is also obvious that the heavens cannot here mean any place or state of perfect purity and bliss, because in such a world there would be no need of purification.2 1 The translation is Conybeare's. 2 See page 447.