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The Quiet Thoughts of a Quiet Thinker, Being Extracts From the Diaries of R. Smith
The Quiet Thoughts of a Quiet Thinker Being Extracts From the Diaries of R Smith Author:Robert Smith General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: March 24,1868. Love is creative; love is inventive. A nature not under the dominion of love is ready to fall under the power of indifference. Justice, on the other hand, is a restraining power. The one limits; the other overflows. The one contracts; the other expands. When God created the world, love gave the impulse. baptism 0f Christ July 25,18B8. The human consciousness has two aspects, a public and a private, and in both it is a personal consciousness. The first belongs to man's individuality, the second to his social character. In respect to His private consciousness Jesus could feel no pressure of guilt, being absolutely holy. In so far, however, as He identified Himself with the Church, He bore the burden of her sin, and that not in a mechanical way, but inwardly and truly. As therefore on the Cross He groaned under the burden of human guilt, not merely suffering its effects, but homologating its proper substance, there can be no difficulty in admitting that in the baptism of John, which preceded it and symbolically pointed to it, He entered the water in an inward frame of mind quite suited to the outward act of the baptism which He underwent. His baptism was therefore no empty and unmean- Liturgies 29 ing ceremony. We demand reality in all the actions of Jesus as a necessary condition of their perfection. But if Christ entered His passion itself, His inward state in all respects responding to the objective inflictions of His Father's anger, He sustaining and the Father imposing the burden as a deserved penalty, why should He not, by anticipation, pass through His baptism, in which His deat...« less