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Day 92 Fruits of our Ignorance

6/4/2025

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Paul Cezanne, "Fruit"

(see also Bible, Bible Text, Christianity)

 “Indecision. ––In another way still, we are eating the fruit of our ignorance. A paralysing hesitancy and uncertainty are upon us. We are tolerant of all beliefs because we have none. 'We do not know,' we say; 'we are not sure.' 'What right have we to think that the creed of another man, or another people, is not as true as ours?' The very newspapers ask us, Is Christianity effete? ––and we presume to discuss the question; or, at any rate, we are able to listen in calmness while men toss to and fro the one question which is vital to us. Let us believe it––What think ye of Christ? is the only question that matters. We cannot escape with the evasion, ‘We think not of Christ, but of the Father’––for the word is true, ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me.’

                                                    *

“So soon as men's eyes turn from minute literary criticism to the gradual revelation of our God in His beauty (the progressive revelation which we get in the Bible alone), the truth of the Book is confirmed to us; and we know, without proof.

          "Thou canst not prove the Nameless,
          Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
          For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
          Nor yet disproven."


Plato has said the last word on this matter for our day as well as his own. The danger I refer to is that, while occupying our minds about questions of criticism, we neglect the knowledge which cannot come without labour; that we forsake the earnest and devout study of the Bible, the one way of approach to the knowledge of God.

Already we begin to gather the fruits of our ignorance. Little books with Bible sayings, working into specious arguments to prove a philosophy of life which the Bible does not sanction, come to us as a new and wonderful gospel. We talk of new developments of Christianity when the Christianity of the Bible offers infinite scope for development in the beauty of holiness and in the knowledge of our illimitable God. We are offered on all hands, religions about Christ and without Christ. We are taught to believe that, ‘God manifest in the flesh,’ means no more than the divine in ourselves, and that every power that was used by Christ is available to us.

A smug religiosity is upon us, a religion of which we ourselves are the measure; whether we call it 'Christianity on a Higher Plane,' or Buddhism, or Theosophy; or whether, like the Dukhobors, we decline to obey human law, because we choose to believe ourselves under the immediate direction of God,––saying, with that poor little community in Lancashire, 'There is no law but God's law,' and drawing the absurd inference that all human law is transgression:––all these things have the one interpretation; we are declining from the knowledge of God.”
 
 
 
Examen:  Have I forsaken earnest study of my faith?  Why? What do I prefer instead? 


~~~~~~~

Indecision.--In another: Charlotte M. Mason, Ourselves, 4:83 Bk.II.
So soon as: Mason, 4:82 Bk.II.

​

Day 92 Fruits of our Ignorance meditation/100 days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025

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