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COMPARATIVE RELIGION SEPARATION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER Note on the Examination of the Biblical doctrine with
reference to Sannyasa. No easy hope or lies Shall bring us to our goal, But iron sacrifice Of body, will, and soul.
-- Kipling.
M EN today look upon philosophy as a subject to be accomplished II in an arm-chair ; but this has not always been so. The ancients, who took a more serious view of life than ourselves, looked upon it not only as a science but also as an art, the art of life, and regarded it as necessitating a systematic and habitual training. In his interesting work “The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church " Edwin Hatch, D.D., points out that the aim of the training was to bring the passions under control. It was a sort of moral gymnastics intended for the development of the moral side of the human nature.
“Just as the training of the muscle which is necessary for perfect bodily development is effected by giving them exaggerated exercise so the training of the moral power was effected, not by reading the rules and committing them to memory, but by giving them a similarly artificial and exaggerated exercise ... The aim of it was to bring the passions under the control of reason, and to bring the will into harmony with the will of God'-(Loc. cit. 147).
Dr. Hatch's conception of the harmony between the individual and the divine wills is necessarily tinged with the current misconceptions of mystic origin, but the student of the Science of Religion will have no difficulty in grasping the sense of the expression to consist in the aspiration of man to acquire the nature of God. The principle of exercising the moral restraint needs no comment from me beyond this: that as in physical culture over-exertion will be productive of strain
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