Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society by Naomi Hetherington Clare Stainthorp

Author:Naomi Hetherington, Clare Stainthorp [Naomi Hetherington, Clare Stainthorp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138572836
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Note

1Generation, degeneration, regeneration,—in these three terms is comprised the whole process of the soul’s history.

25

ALICE OLIPHANT AND LAURENCE OLIPHANT, SYMPNEUMATA, OR EVOLUTIONARY FORCES NOW ACTIVE IN MAN

(Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885), pp. 4–8, 20–30

Extract from Chapter 1, ‘The Earthly Malady’

The original human creature was a pure and creative form of the divine humanity of God. Its absorption into itself, by acts of its free will, of elements from the subordinate animal creation, caused the initial disturbance of pure order on the planet. Before that, the infant human race received the free and full play of the divine vitality, which worked, according to its law, from the inmost folds of the organism outwards to all the surfaces, without check in its activity; and the gradual constructive power of this God-force would have carried the original human society out of its infancy, through an education which would have resulted in an adolescence untainted by impurity, into a power of race-reproduction in divine conditions.

The real nature of the catastrophe, of which the tradition survives in so many forms under the name of “the Fall,” was to precipitate the period of reproduction. The manner by which it was precipitated, was by the wilful and conscious opening of the human nervous organism to influences originating in the lower animal degree of creation.

Now, whereas heretofore the whole vitality of man had been propelled in currents acting from within outwards, from God hidden in the central will, towards the emotional and mental and physical systems which that will had built around itself, assuming thus the outer aspect of the human form; and whereas heretofore no current of conscious or unconscious creating force had thrilled; except in accordance with this radiative law; now the complicated machinery of procreative power in the human system began to allow itself to be impelled by gross currents set in motion by the brute world. Hence that union which the fluid organisms of the pure man-woman would in due time have accomplished in absolute divineness, without shock of passion or of self-consciousness, without sense of departure from the calm flow of the normal, vital current—the true marriage which should have evolved—was arrested. A premature desire for such relationship in the outer coverings of the human frame having taken possession of the imagination; the organism having sought to produce, by individual will-act, that experience which should have been awaited till the divine maturing power produced it in due course of order, man “fell,”—in other words, drew into himself, as an irritant to the unready senses, the forces of brute sexuality.

That current which is not like is opposite. An impulse from the outside could not be evoked and its action sensibly experienced, except as its impulsion had gross material force enough to establish a current acting inwards upon the human organism. That fact, which has been so often named as the beginning of disorder, was so in this sense,—that it established a direction of active forces in man opposite to the direction of the divine forces which were his inheritance.

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