The spiritual life Author:Thomas Griffith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CHRISTIAN PIETY. Piety, we have seen, is the sense of God : the feeling of the absolute dependence of ourselves and of the universe on unseen P... more »ower and Authority ; " A sense o'er all the soul imprest That we are weak, but not unblest, Since in us, round us, everywhere, Eternal strength and wisdom are." But in calling this experience a " sense," and a "feeling," it must be remembered that we mean thereby a state of mind essentially different from the impulses of sensation and the passing humours of sensibility; a state analogous to that which we experience in contemplating the true the noble the beautiful and the good, wherein the soul is elevated above itself, absorbed in the objects which attract its gaze, and roused from the cool collected- ness of mere observation into the earnestness of personal interest. Coleridge. Yet this very feeling of personal interest in the idea of God, this very sense of a relation of that God to us and our well-being, which constitutes the life of Piety, must bring with it an awe, a shrinking of the mind before superior might, in proportion as we feel the greatness of the Being with whom we have to do. The same works and ways which excite in us veneration of a supreme Creator and Ordainer, humble us at the same time with the painful sense of our own exceeding littleness. As our conception of God expands, our conception of man contracts. The higher we lift our eyes towards heaven the lower we sink in our own esteem. And Veneration therefore, by itself alone, takes the form of dread. Piety manifests itself as superstition. The sense of God lies like a heavy weight upon the soul, and crushes it down into abjectness. If we regard ourselves as only parts— and most insignificant parts—of the vast creation which he grasps wit...« less