Culture and Religion in Some of the Their Relations by J.C. Shairp  (English, Paperback, Shairp John Campbell)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1876 Excerpt: ... LECTURE V. RELIGION COMBINING CULTURE WITH ITSELF. The truth which I tried to bring before you in my last lecture, though a very obvious one, is yet sometimes forgotten. It was this: To discern and judge rightly of spiritual truth is not mainly the work of the logical understanding, nor of rough and round common sense. To do this requires that another capacity be awake in a man, --a spiritual apprehension, or, call it by what name you may, a deeper, more internal light, which shall be behind the understanding, as it were, informing and illuminating it. For otherwise the understanding, however powerful or acute, attains not to spiritual truth. This power of spiritual apprehension we saw is, though not identical with the moral nature, more akin to it, --belongs more to this side of our being than to the intellectual. It contains the moral nature, and something more than what ordinarily comes under that name. Like every other power in man, it is capable of growth and cultivation. We can, if we choose, starve and kill it, or we can, by submitting it to its proper discipline and bringing it into contact with its proper objects, deepen and expand it. Care, watchfulness, earnest cultivation it requires; but that cultivation is of a different kind, as its objects are different, from that which trains the intellect and the imagination, and it cannot be directly taught in colleges and schools. The belief that the spiritual faculty is different from the logical and scientific faculty, led me to notice some of the hindrances which our habits as students often put in the way of spiritual vision and religious growth. The mental tendencies which I noted were among the most obvious, those that meet us at the very threshold. There are several others more recondite, which I sh.