Читать книгу The Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer онлайн

3 страница из 7

“Though inland far we be

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

That brought us hither.”

We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path, but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes.

We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will—a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief.