If the Incarnation of the Eternal Son, as it is set forth in the Scriptures, be a truth of God — if the Divine Person Who had glory with the Father, having taken upon Him the nature of His creature, really condescended to go through the humiliation and pain and distress which is written of Him, it stands to reason that the loving humility and abnegation of self displayed in such endurance, must be the chief feature in the character of the God-man, which we must in our degree possess, if, in the words of the Holy Ghost, Christ is to be " formed in us."
Jesus Christ is the Master who can comfort and Strengthen a man, a laborer and working man whose life is hard — because he is the Great Man of Sorrows who knows our ills, who was called a carpenter’s son, though he was the Son of God, who worked for thirty years, in a carpenter’s shop to fulfill God’s will. And God wills that in imitation of Christ man should live humble and go through life not reaching for the sky, but adapting himself to the earth below, learning from the Gospel to be meek and simple of heart.
We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. ¶ We may believe the statement of another person, when there is a reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. ¶ It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.
I often told them that I had had a presentiment of it years ago and that all that joy and glory had been perceived by me while I was still on our earth as a nostalgic yearning, bordering at times on unendurably poignant sorrow; that I had had a presentiment of them all and of their glory in the dreams of my heart and in the reveries of my soul; that often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without tears…. That there always was a sharp pang of anguish in my hatred of the men of our earth; why could I not hate them without loving them too? why could I not forgive them? And in my love for them, too, there was a sharp pang of anguish: Why could I not love them without hating them?
"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", in The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky, trans. David Magarshack (New York: The Modern Library, 1992 [first published 1877]), 335-6.
Oh, everything was just as it is with us, except that everything seemed to be bathed in the radiance of some public festival and of some great and holy triumph attained at last. The green emerald see lapped the shore and kissed it with manifest, visible, almost conscious love. Tall, beautiful trees stood in all the glory of their green luxuriant foliage, and their innumerable leaves (I am sure of that) welcomed me with their soft, tender rustle and seemed to utter sweet words of love. The lush green grass blazed with bright and fragrant flowers. Birds were flying in flocks through the air and, without being afraid of me, alighted on my shoulders and hands and joyfully beat against me with their sweet fluttering wings. And at last I saw and came to know the people of this blessed earth. They came to me themselves. They surrounded me. They kissed me. Children of the sun, children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! Never on our earth had I beheld such beauty in man. Only perhaps in our children during the very first years of their life could one have found a remote, though faint, reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a bright luster. It was an earth unstained by the Fall, inhabited by people who had not sinned and who lived in the same paradise as that in which, according to the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned. These people, laughing happily, thronged round me and overwhelmed me with their caresses; they took me home with them, and each of them was anxious to set my mind at peace.
"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," in The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky, trans. David Magarshack (New York: The Modern Library, 1992; first published 1877), 335-6.
But are such repetitions possible in the universe? Can that be nature’s law? And if that is an earth there, is it the same earth as ours? Just the same poor, unhappy, but dear, dear earth, and beloved forever and ever? Arousing like our earth the same poignant love for herself even in the most ungrateful of her children? I kept crying, deeply moved by an uncontrollable, rapturous love for the dear old earth I had left behind… Suddenly a strange feeling of some great and sacred jealousy blazed up in my heart. “How is such a repetition possible and why? I love, I can only love the earth I’ve left behind, stained with my blood when, ungrateful wretch that I am, I extinguished my life by shooting myself through the heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that earth, and even on the night I parted from it I loved it perhaps more poignantly than ever. Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss, with tears streaming down my cheeks, the one and only earth I have left behind. I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!
Did I ever tell you about a picture by Boughton, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”? It is toward evening. A sandy path leads over the hills to a mountain, on the top of which is the Holy City, lit by the red sun setting behind the gray evening clouds. On the road is a pilgrim who wants to go to the city; he is already tired and asks a woman in black, who is standing by the road and whose name is “Sorrowful yet always Rejoicing”: “Does the road go uphill all the way?” “Yes, to the very end.” “And will the journey take all day long?” “Yes, from morn till night my friend.” Truly, it is not a picture, but an inspiration.
I purpose to present an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of science — a struggle which has lasted for so many centuries, and which yet continues. A hard contest it has been a war waged longer with battles fiercer with sieges more persistent with strategy more shrewd than in any of the comparatively transient warfare of Caesar or Napoleon or Moltke. ¶ I shall ask you to go with me through some of the most protracted sieges and over some of the hardest fought battle fields of this war We will look well at the combatants we will listen to the battle cries we will note the strategy of leaders the cut and thrust of champions the weight of missiles the temper of weapons we will look also at the truces and treaties and note the delusive impotency of all compromises in which the warriors for scientific truth have consented to receive direction or bias from the best of men uninspired by the scientific spirit, or unfamiliar with scientific methods.
To express my feelings for her [Kee], I said, “She, and no other.” And her “no, never, never” (niet, nooit, nimmer) was not strong enough to make me give her up. I still had hope, and my love remained alive, notwithstanding this refusal, which I thought was like a piece of ice that would melt. But I could find no rest. The strain became unbearable because she was alwys silent and I never received a word in answer. Then I went to Amsterdam. There [her parents] told me, “When you are in the house, Kee leaves it. She answers, ‘Certainly not him’ to your, ‘she, and no other'”. Your persistence is disgusting. I put my hand in the flame of the lamp and said, “Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame”… no wonder that Teersteg perhaps noticed my hand afterward. But I think they blew out the lamp and said, “You will not see her.” Well, it was too much for me, especially when they spoke of my wanting to coerce her, and I felt that the crushing things they said to me were unanswerable, and that my “she, and no other” had been killed.