Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

IOS THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMof the universal enchainment of causes and effects,only the completion of the universal law, what remainsfor us in relation to this absolute necessity but unconditionalsubmission ?" l All here depends on the natureof the God to whom submission is required. Submissionto the unfree, impersonal, unbroken, everlastingsequence of cause and effect, is as terrible adoom as submission to a free, loving, remuneratingCreator is " to reign." But the pantheistic conceptionof God rules every part of Stoic doctrine,and interpenetrates the whole mass with a rigorousnaturalism. " The real ground of Stoic fatalism isexpressed in the statement that nothing can happenwithout sufficient cause, or under given circumstancescan fall out otherwise than it actually falls out. Forthis, as the Stoics believe, is as impossible as thatanything should come out of nothing, and if it werepossible it would destroy the unity of the universe,which consists exactly in this fast-closed chain ofall causes, in the unbroken necessity of all thingsand all their changes. This is the immediate consequenceof its Pantheism. The divine force whichrules the world could not be the one absolute causeof all things if there were anything which in anyrelation were independent of it; if an unchangeableconnection of causes did not embrace everything." 2The fiction has been imagined of a prisoner confinedin an iron room, the walls of which he at lengthperceived to be daily contracting upon him, until atno great length of time they would join and crushhim. Such is the treatment which man, as a personalbeing, having affections and conscience, as well asreason, experiences at the hands of the Stoical god.1 /filer, iv. 339; iv. 282. 2 Ib'ut. iv. 149.