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Most High, because, deluded by Satan, he thinks in his heartwe take refuge
in God from such blasphemythat the absolutely Wise God is not superior to him
in wisdom and knowledge, and that God is unable to reveal in His holy word such
matters as pass man's comprehension.
But if a man refuses to accept and believe anything that he cannot fully and
completely understand, what is there in the whole universe that he will be able
on these terms to believe? He will be like the ancient philosopher who thought
he had attained perfect wisdom when he said, 'I know nothing, not even that I
know nothing.' Whoever believes nothing that he cannot understand must
necessarily deny the existence of God, because evidently God's nature and His
mode of existence are beyond the limits of man's thought, understanding and
imagination. Such a man must deny his own existence, too, for he has not yet
understood and will never fully understand how God created him in his mother's
womb, or what his spirit really is, and how it is associated with his body. On
his own principles such a man must every day deny thousands of things, even
though every moment they occur to his view, and though their existence is
clearer than the sun, for he cannot fully comprehend their nature, their inward
potencies and their outward effects. He is like the rationalistic chicken, which
a painter represented as standing with a piece of the shell still clinging to
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gazing scornfully at the eggshell from which it had just issued forth, and
saying, 'You will never get me to believe that I ever came out of that thing.'
Has any wise man ever yet discovered by investigation. how it is possible that
from a small seed a great tree should grow, that thousands of seeds should be
formed on it, and that in each one of them there should reside the same power as
in the first seed, so that thousands of other trees should spring from it, all
resembling the original tree? Who has the ability to explain how it is that,
through the energy and under the influence of the same soil, air, sun and rain,
various plants and different kinds of flowers, trees and fruits spring up and
grow, differing from one another very much in form, colour, peculiarities and
virtues? Again, who has fully explained the mystery of how it is that man's
small eye can see the world at large as far as the limits of the horizon? We
know how the image of exterior objects falls upon the retina and there produces
a photograph, as it were, but we do not know how that picture is conveyed to the
brain, unless the optic nerve acts somewhat like a telegraph wire. When the
brain receives the impression of the exterior object, how does the material
brain convey the picture to the immaterial ego, so that the man can truthfully
say, 'I see it'? This nobody has as yet been able to explain; yet the man who,
because he could not understand the process of sight, declared that he did not
believe
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