Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMthe Christians: between a necessary force proceedingthrough all nature to its utmost limit, and the Lordof Hosts, surrounded by hierarchies of spirits, who arecalled into existence, and maintained in it, by Hisomnipotent Fiat: between a universe in which manis the product of a nature eternally unfolding itselfwithout will, and man the creature of God.This brings us to the third point of contrast whichwe had to consider, the being, position, duties, andhopes of man in Neoplatonism and in Christianity.The God of Plotinus does not create, but evolvesitself in an eternal becoming; and the human spiritis a portion of the divine Universal Mind. This latterpantheistic doctrine seems to date from Pythagoras,and coming down through Plato and the Stoics, to)rm the basis of the conception of human nature inall the course of Greek philosophy, and in its lasteffort shows itself as part of a complete pantheisticsystem. If such be the nature of the human spirit,its conjunction with matter would seem of itself to bethe cause of evil, and so, as we have seen, it is reckonedby Plotinus to be. Yet that the will is free,1 thatue is without a master, that every one bears thault of his own actions, all this, he says, is a factwhich is grounded so immediately in the being oman, that without free-will we should be no men, butmere portions of the universe, moved from without.Yet he totally fails, or rather does not endeavour, toreconcile these statements with that necessary chainf cause and effect according to which the universees forth without any will or choice of a contrive]d in which man's actions are bound as part of thmachine. Human nature in fact has no unity und1 Zeller, v. 525.