The Formation of Christian Character: A Contribution to Christian Ethics
by William Straton Bruce (9781143703836)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: their mad careers. But if man is not only a "combination of inherited aptitudes and faculties," but is also conscience and will; if within him there be an absolute imperative able to prohibit any breach of its commands, and to vindicate them when they are violated, and also a will to choose a consciously conceived ideal of life,?then is he responsible for every one of his acts. Then is it possible for him to choose the " universe of desire" in which he is to live, and to organise his natural impulses into character. Against all such objections to our subject we maintain that the one characteristic of man, of which he may well be proud, is responsibility. And while many of the interests of the science of to-day seem to be bound up with the denial of it, and with the assertion of Determinism (a " fairer name " for Necessity), the famous saying of Kant is as full of significance as ever, that freedom is the postulate of morality. Incessantly we spin and weave and knit our inward garment, which, unlike our outer garment, can never be cast aside, because it is interwoven with our Ego, and in it our soul, our will shall be arrayed, when, after laying down the material body, it shall enter eternity.?Bishop Martensen. We weave character as the spider does its web, out of its own entrails, if I might so say. We weave it, and we dye it, and we cut it, and we stitch it, and then we put it on and wear it. It is the self; and yet it is a kind of projection and making visible of the self, the vesture which is cast round the hidden man of the heart.?Dr. A. Maclaren. God cannot make man's best Without best men to help Him. Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.?St. JOHN (R.V.). ...

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