Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX THE HOLY SPIRIT IN RELATION TO HUMAN PERSONALITY THERE is now another side on which it is important for us to consider the meaning, to ourselves, of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost; in its relation, namely, to our own personal being. What is human personality? And what is the relation of the new Presence or Power, revealed within man at Pentecost, to the realization of man's own personality, the true consummation of himself? It has been a natural and deep-rooted instinct, on the part of thinking man, not only to start all speculation, or apprehension, from himself, --which is his inevitable and only mode of access to wider truth: but in such wise to start from himself, as if he himself were, by himself, a complete and separate whole, a realization in full of what he meant, or needed to mean, by the word personality: and therefore also a measure by which to gauge the meaning of the word personality, wherever it was to be predicated of any other than himself. Whether he had, in fact, or how far he had, or had not, achieved the completeness of what personality meant, was a question which he hardly paused, or thought it necessary, to raise. That he at least was, anyhow, himself, was a natural assumption to make; and it was naturally made, without adequate scrutiny, as a basis of all further thought The assumption that I am, anyhow, myself, passes almost MO indistinguishably, into the assumption that whatever this "I " may do or suffer, on the right hand or the left, the " I" itself remains a fixed and permanent quantity, of one continuous and essential content and significance. This assumption that human personality was already fully realized, and therefore remained as an unchanging entity in the midst of all that was done by it, ...