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National Gallery Illustration by Blake to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
Christian with the Shield of Faith Taking Leave of His Companions From The Double Vision, by Northrop Frye: "What 'the' truth is, is not available to human beings
in spiritual matters: the goal of our spiritual life is God, who
is spiritual Other, not a spiritual object, much less a
conceptual object. That is why the Gospels keep reminding us how
many listen and how few hear: the truth of the gospel kind
cannot be demonstrated except through personal example. As the
seventeenth-century Quaker Isaac Penington said every truth is
substantial in its own place, but all truths are shadows except
the last. The language which lifts us clear of the merely
plausible and the merely credible is the language of the spirit;
the language of the spirit is, Paul tells us, the language of
love, and the language of love is the only language that we can
be sure is spoken and understood by God." (Page 20) |
"
All truth is a shadow except the last—yet every Truth is true in its
kind. It is substance in its own place, though it be but a shadow in
another place, (for it is but a shadow from an intenser substance;) and
the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance."
Thomas Ellwood on Isaac Penington
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