06-07-2007, 08:35 PM
“It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).
“The first revelation of God is a revelation to the moral sense. For what is it in God that is nearest to man, and which man is most concerned to know? Not his creative power, not the fact of creatorship, but the moral archetype, the moral ideal, which, received by the conscience, becomes the moral law. If God were merely omnipotent force or transcendent skill; if all that could be said of him were that ‘he can create and he destroy,’ or that the universe is his handiwork, it would matter little whether we knew him or knew him not; it would matter little whether the universe were conceived as the product of a single will or of many wills, or whether as a self-existent power. What it really concerns us to know of God is, not that he made the worlds, but that he is justice and truth and holiness and love. And of this the evidence is not external, but internal” (Frederic Henry Hedge, Reason in Religion [1865], p. 56).
“The first revelation of God is a revelation to the moral sense. For what is it in God that is nearest to man, and which man is most concerned to know? Not his creative power, not the fact of creatorship, but the moral archetype, the moral ideal, which, received by the conscience, becomes the moral law. If God were merely omnipotent force or transcendent skill; if all that could be said of him were that ‘he can create and he destroy,’ or that the universe is his handiwork, it would matter little whether we knew him or knew him not; it would matter little whether the universe were conceived as the product of a single will or of many wills, or whether as a self-existent power. What it really concerns us to know of God is, not that he made the worlds, but that he is justice and truth and holiness and love. And of this the evidence is not external, but internal” (Frederic Henry Hedge, Reason in Religion [1865], p. 56).