: Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by herself with additions by the author and introduction by Blanche Atkinson by Cobbe Frances Power Atkinson Blanche Author Of Introduction Etc - Authors English 19th century Biography; Journalists Great Britain Biograp

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After a considerable discussion on the various doctrines of the nature and limitations of Inspiration, I ask, p. 110, 111:--

"Admit the Inspiration of Prophets and Apostles to have been substantially the same with that always granted to faithful souls;--admit, therefore, the existence of a human element in Revelation, can we still look to that Revelation as the safe foundation for our Religion?"

"To this question the leaders of the Second Broad Church answer unhesitatingly: 'Yes. It has been an egregious error of modern times to confound the Record of the Revelation with the Revelation itself, and to assume that God's lessons lose their value because they have been transmitted to us through the natural channels of human reason and conscience. Returning to the true view, we shall only get rid of uncounted difficulties and objections which prevent the reception of Christianity by the most honest minds here in England and in heathen countries.'"

But in conclusion I ask--

"The language of the new world, coming to us through the thousand tongues of our multiform civilization, is one long cry of longing aspiration: 'Would that I could create the ineffable Beauty! Would that I could discover the eternal and absolute Truth! Would! O, would it were possible to live out the good, the noble, and the holy!'"...

"Here we have really ground to go upon. There is no need to establish the authenticity or veracity of special books or harmonize discordant narratives to obtain an answer to our question. The whole voice of human history unconsciously and without premeditation bears its unmistakeable testimony. The turning point between the old world and the new was the beginning of the Christian movement. The action upon human nature which started it on its new course was the teaching and example of Christ. Christ was he who opened the age of endless progress."

"The sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue."

This book also was fairly successful, and went into a second edition.

"'Is necessarily altogether imperfect and fragmentary, but in the great solitude where most of us pass our lives as regards our deeper emotions, it may be more helpful to know that other human hearts are feeling as we feel, and thinking as we think, rather than to read far nobler words which come to us only as echoes of the Past.' The book is 'designed for the use of those who desire to cultivate the feelings which culminate in Prayer, but who find the rich and beautiful collections of the Churches of Christendom no longer available, either because of the doctrines whose acceptance they imply or of the nature of the requests to which they give utterance. Adequately to replace in a generation, or in several generations, such books, through which the piety of ages has been poured, is wholly beyond hope; and the ambition to do so would betray ignorance of the way in which these precious drops are distilled slowly year after year, from the great Incense-tree of humanity.'"

"Nay, it would seem that, far from the immediate aurora of such a morning, the world is destined first to endure a great 'horror of darkness,' and to pass through the dreary and disaster-laden experience of a night of materialism and agnosticism. Perhaps it will only be when men have seen with their eyes how the universe appears without a thought of God to illumine its dark places, and gauged for themselves where human life will sink without hope of immortality to elevate it, that they will recognise aright the unutterable preciousness of religion. Faith, when restored after such an eclipse, will be prized as it has never been prized heretofore....

I never expected that more than a very few friends would have cared for this book, and in fact printed it with the intention of almost private circulation; but it has been continuously, though slowly, called for during the 23 years which have elapsed since it was compiled.

"But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career."

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