... : ... ... ... ... ... ... ... XXVII. THE SOUL AND THE CARDINAL VIRTUES XXVIII. THE SOUL IN PRESENCE OF FAILURE THE LIFE OF THE SOUL IN THE WORLD. CHAPTER I. THE SOUL THE CREATURE OF GOD. "Behold, all souls are Mine, saith the Lord God."-EZEKIEL xviii. 4. "The universe is simple; God and I, BAILEY. "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own."-SHAKESPEARE. "There are souls which fall from heaven like flowers, but ere they bloom are crushed under the first tread of some brutal hoof."-RICHTER. WE read in Ezekiel, "Behold, all souls are Mine, saith the Lord God." In these words is contained one of those deep and majestic truths which are found here and there in the prophecy of Ezekiel. It is a restatement of an ancient truth, part of the original revelation; it is an uncovering of what had B been buried and hidden from sight by human fancies and inventions. All truth is old; all error is recent, for it is but a perversion of some portion of the original deposit of truth.* Dig deep enough into error, and you will find a substratum of truth. Error is but distorted truth, or truth disproportionately displayed; for every portion of a truth must have its due place and relative position, or we have monstrous disproportion, and the commonest form of falsehood, which is an undue prominence of one truth to the obscuring of another. Ezekiel in these words is asserting a fundamental truth which we understand well enough, but which the old world had strangely lost. "All souls are Mine, saith the Lord God;" that is, each soul is individual, independent, responsible only to Me, its Creator. In the old world the general opinion was that every man belonged to some one else; the son to the father, the wife to the husband, the subject to the monarch, the slave to his master. So Ezekiel tells us it was the common opinion that the son ought to suffer for the father's sin; and if the father ate sour grapes, that the son's teeth should be set on edge. So elsewhere we find the people involved in the king's guilt and punishment; the slave's life counted of no value, his personality lost as a mere * In the ancient Vedas of India there are not only high and pure principles of morality, but wonderful indications of a knowledge of the great fundamental truths of revelation. Thus, Purusha, "begotten before the world, the author of the universe," gives himself up as a sacrifice for men, and for that purpose unites himself to a mortal body. |