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The Fundamentals
T H E CLEW TO ALL PH ILO SO PH IES
Christian experience takes all the abstractions of philoso phy and recombines them and gives us the conception of the Fatherhood of God. The one substance of Monism comes back as the one person behind the world. The one idea of Hegel comes back as the thought and plan of eternal love. The one energy of those who glorify force and change comes back as the beneficent will of the Holy and loving Father. The plan and progress of nature and the moral ongoing of the world come back as the infinite and eternal design of the Holy and Loving. Thus when in our hearts we can say and know what we mean when we say it, the word “Abba” Father, we hold in our hands the clew to all the philosophies which re main in a state of unstable equilibrium until we find this key. All philosophy is thus summed up as in the words of Dr. Fairbairn: “God is the Father, everlasting in His love. Love was the end for which He made the world, for which He made every human soul. His glory is to diffuse happiness, to fill up the silent places of the universe with voices that speak out of glad hearts. Because He made man for love He can not bear man to be lost. Rather than see the loss, He will suffer sacrifice. In the place we call hell, love as really is as in the place we call heaven, though in the one place it is the complacency of pleasure in the holy and the happy which seems like the brightness of everlasting sunshine or the glad music of waves that break in perennial laughter, but in the other it is the compassion of pity for the bad and the mis erable which seems like a face shaded with everlasting regret or the muffled weeping of a sorrow too deep to be heard. That grand thought of a God who is*eternal Father, all the more regal and sovereign that He is absolutely Father, can never fail to touch the heart of the man who understands it, be he savage or sage.” And we may add, cannot fail to be come the one generalization large enough and broad enough
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