_Reflections Introductory to Aphorism X._
The most _momentous_ question a man can ask is, Have I a Saviour? And yet as far as the individual querist is concerned, it is premature and to no purpose, unless another question has been previously put and answered, (alas! too generally put after the wounded conscience has already given the answer!) namely, Have I any need of a Saviour? For him who _needs_ none, (O bitter irony of the evil Spirit, whose whispers the proud Soul takes for its own thoughts, and knows not how the Tempter is scoffing the while!) there _is_ none, as long as he feels no need. On the other hand, it is scarcely possible to have answered this question in the affirmative, and not ask--first, _in what_ the necessity consists? secondly, _whence_ it proceeded? and, thirdly, how far the answer to this second question is or is not contained in the answer to the first? I intreat the intelligent reader, who has taken me as his temporary guide on the straight, but yet, from the number of cross roads, difficult way of religious Inquiry, to halt a moment, and consider the main points, that, in this last division of my work, have been already offered for his reflection. I have attempted then to fix the proper meaning of the words, Nature and Spirit, the one being the _antithesis_ to the other: so that the most general and _negative_ definition of Nature is, Whatever is not Spirit; and _vice versâ_ of Spirit, That which is not comprehended in Nature: or in the language of our elder divines, that which transcends Nature. But nature is the term in which we comprehend all things that are representable in the forms of time and space, and subjected to the relations of cause and effect: and the cause of the existence of which, therefore, is to be sought for perpetually in something antecedent. The word itself expresses this in the strongest manner possible: _Natura_, that which is _about to be_ born, that which is always _becoming_. It follows, therefore, that whatever originates its own acts, or in any sense contains in itself the cause of its own state, must be _spiritual_, and consequently _super-natural_: yet not on that account necessarily _miraculous_. And such must the responsible WILL in us be, if it be at all.