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| Although the Soul Hopes for Blessedness, Yet It Does Not Remember Lost Blessedness, But Remembers God and the Rules of Righteousness. The Unchangeable Rules of Right Living are Known Even to the Ungodly.
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Chapter
15.—Although the Soul Hopes for Blessedness, Yet It Does Not
Remember Lost Blessedness, But Remembers God and the Rules of
Righteousness. The Unchangeable Rules of Right Living are Known
Even to the Ungodly.
21. And of this certainly it feels
no doubt, that it is wretched, and longs to be blessed nor can it
hope for the possibility of this on any other ground than its own
changeableness for if it were not changeable, then, as it could not
become wretched after being blessed, so neither could it become
blessed after being wretched. And what could have made it wretched
under an omnipotent and good God, except its own sin and the
righteousness of its Lord? And what will make it blessed, unless
its own merit, and its Lord’s reward? But its merit, too, is His
grace, whose reward will be its blessedness; for it cannot give
itself the righteousness it has lost, and so has not. For this it
received when man was created, and assuredly lost it by sinning.
Therefore it receives righteousness, that on account of this it may
deserve to receive blessedness; and hence the apostle truly says to
it, when beginning to be proud as it were of its own good, “For
what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst
receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received
it?”903
But when it
rightly remembers its own Lord, having received His Spirit, then,
because it is so taught by an inward teaching, it feels wholly that
it cannot rise save by His affection freely given, nor has been
able to fall save by its own defection freely chosen. Certainly it
does not remember its own blessedness; since that has been, but is
not, and it has utterly forgotten it, and therefore cannot even be
reminded of it.904
| 904 [In the case of knowledge that is
remembered, there is something latent and potential—as when past
acquisitions are recalled by a voluntary act of recollection. The
same is true of innate ideas—these also are latent, and brought
into consciousness by reflection. But no man can either remember,
or elicit, his original holiness and blessedness, because this is
not latent and potential, but wholly lost by the
fall.—W.G.T.S.] | But it
believes what the trustworthy Scriptures of its God tell of that
blessedness, which were written by His prophet, and tell of the
blessedness of Paradise, and hand down to us historical information
of that first both good and ill of man. And it remembers the Lord
its God; for He always is, nor has been and is not, nor is but has
not been; but as He never will not be, so He never was not. And He
is whole everywhere. And hence it both lives, and is moved, and is
in Him;905
and so it
can remember Him. Not because it recollects the having known Him in
Adam or anywhere else before the life of this present body, or when
it was first made in order to be implanted in this body; for it
remembers nothing at all of all this. Whatever there is of this, it
has been blotted out by forgetfulness. But it is reminded, that it
may be turned to God, as though to that light by which it was in
some way touched, even when turned away from Him. For hence it is
that even the ungodly think of eternity, and rightly blame and
rightly praise many things in the morals of men. And by what rules
do they thus judge, except by those wherein they see how men ought
to live, even though they themselves do not so live? And where do
they see these rules? For they do not see them in their own [moral]
nature; since no doubt these things are to be seen by the mind, and
their minds are confessedly changeable, but these rules are seen as
unchangeable by him who can see them at all; nor yet in the
character of their own mind, since these rules are rules of
righteousness, and their minds are confessedly unrighteous. Where
indeed are these rules written, wherein even the unrighteous
recognizes what is righteous, wherein he discerns that he ought to
have what he himself has not? Where, then, are they written, unless
in the book of that Light which is called Truth? whence every
righteous law is copied and transferred (not by
migrating to it, but by being as it were impressed upon it) to the
heart of the man that worketh righteousness; as the impression from
a ring passes into the wax, yet does not leave the ring. But he who
worketh not, and yet sees how he ought to work, he is the man that
is turned away from that light, which yet touches him. But he who
does not even see how he ought to live, sins indeed with more
excuse, because he is not a transgressor of a law that he knows;
but even he too is just touched sometimes by the splendor of the
everywhere present truth, when upon admonition he
confesses.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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