Editorial note — LESSON VI.
Reading edition
[Footnote A: The impressive thought is Sir Robert Ball's, see Defense of the Faith and the Saints, Vol. II. p. 500.]
[Footnote B: See Seventy's Year Book IV, Lesson I. The central and real meaning of the Christian religion, in which the self-consciousness of the Wests finds its true expression, and which thus far has found no home except in the West, lies exactly in the faith that the Creator and the creature are reciprocally and equally real, not identical; that there is Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men; that God recognizes rights in the creature and acknowledges duties toward him; and that men are accordingly both unreservedly and also indestructibly real, both free and immortal. In that religion alone, I venture to assert, is the union of this triad of faiths to be found—in God, in freedom, in immortality—faiths that, while three, are inseparably one, since neither can be stated except in terms of the other two. ("Conceptions of God"—Howison, p. 94.)]
[Footnote A: Such Descartes formula, and the strength of it as a truth, and its value as an initial point in philosophy, has not been shaken in the two and three quarters of a century since it was first published. See Descartes' Meditations. In the Universal Classics Library edition of Descartes, there is in the Introduction by Frank Sewell, A. M., a very fine and exhaustive discussion of the above principle, "The Cogito Ergo Sum—Its Nature and Meaning." Subdivision III and IV of the Introduction. The Meditations were first published in Paris 1641, A.D.]