"
Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul
caught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethical
dualism within. This perception of the One behind the many in nature,
of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions of
that thing, is the chief theme for preaching. This is what brings men
to themselves. Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears
the unique marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself as
individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering
itself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving
at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of
its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life.
On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere of
being of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and having
its center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breaking
no thread of nature's weaving, subject to its own law, and manifesting
a dynamic of its own."[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Meaning of the Personal Life_, p. 173.]
The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and human dignity,
the urge that lies behind all metaphysics and much of literature and
art, the thing that makes men eager to live, yet nobly curious to die,
is this conviction that One like unto ourselves but from whom we have
made ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, walketh
with us in the fiery furnace of our life.
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