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Book:
Soul & Spirit
Appendix 7
SOME SOULISH COUNTERFEITS
OF SPIRITUAL REALITIES
| Contents Soul & Spirit Every genuine spiritual phenomenon has its soulical counterpart. For example, the love of truth, or love viewed as a spiritual phenomenon, differs essentially from the soulical counterfeit. Soulical love, as consisting in sentiment and the strong stirrings of affection, is a mere fleshly principle. It shuns suffering, it courts worldly enjoyment and consideration, it exhibits itself in the strength of the domestic and social attachments, and in its most refined form takes a deep interest in alleviating the miseries and promoting the comforts of the family of man. All this may exist with deep-rooted hatred to the truth. Love as a divine principle and spiritual phenomenon is distinguished by properties exactly the opposite of all this. It is love to God and is the result of our knowing that God has first loved us (1 John 4:19). While soulical love pretends to cherish attachment to the Creator through the medium of the creature, spiritual love goes out to the creature through the medium of the Creator. Soulical love would, for the promotion of the apparent good of the creature, sacrifice at any time the truth of the Creator, whereas spiritual love rejoices to know that through the truth of the Creator the real good of the creature is secured and promoted. Spiritual love is emphatically attachment to the truth and attachment to others for the truth's sake. Soulical love, though appearing to be spiritual, may be detected to be what it is by this test, that the truth of God is always in its estimation secondary, whereas the essential feature of spiritual love is its supreme and exclusive attachment to the truth of God. The soulical nature of love professed often betrays itself in a great anxiety to reconcile the Word of God with well-established human facts and cogent human seasonings founded thereon, this even at the expense of God's veracity being compromised and encroached on. However, the language of love which is divine and spiritual is, "Let God be true, though every man should prove to be a liar." |