מי יורש קנייני אלוה ס׳Who is the Heir of Divine Things 60
א׳
1[300] How that “until” is fixed he will himself shew us, when he says “for the iniquities of the Amorites are not yet fulfilled” (Gen. 15:16). Such words as these give weaker minds a handle for supposing that Moses represents fate and necessity as the cause of all events.
ב׳
2[301] But we should recognize that while as a philosopher and interpreter of God he understood that causes have their sequence, connexion and interplay, he did not ascribe the causation of events to these subsidiary factors. He envisaged something else higher than and antecedent to these, a Someone who is borne on the universe like a charioteer or pilot. He steers the common bark of the world, in which all things sail; He guides that winged chariot, the whole heaven, exerting an absolute sovereignty which knows no authority but its own.
ג׳
3[302] What then must be our explanation of these particular words? This.—The name Amorites is by interpretation “talkers.” Now speech is the greatest boon given by nature to mankind, but the gift has been marred by thousands of the recipients who have dealt ungratefully and faithlessly with the power which gave it. Such are impostors, flatterers, inventors of cunning plausibilities, who know well how to cheat and mislead, but that only, and have no thought for honest truth. And further, they practise a lack of clearness, which in speech is profound darkness, and darkness is the fellow-worker of thieves.
ד׳
4[303] It is for this reason that Moses adorned the high priest with Manifestation and Truth (Ex. 28:26), judging that the speech of the man of worth should be transparent and true. But the speech which most aim at is obscure and false, and this is accepted by all the deluded multitude of common and unmeritable men.
ה׳
5[304] So long then as “the sins of the Amorites,” that is of sophistical arguments, “are not fulfilled,” because they have not been refuted, but still in virtue of their powers of attraction seduce us with their plausibilities, while their enticements make us powerless to turn from and leave them, we remain where we are.
ו׳
6[305] But if ever all the plausible fallacies are refuted by true beliefs, and thus the cup is filled to the brim and their sins appear in their true light, we shall run for our lives without a backward glance, or (shall we say?)slip our cable and sail clean away from the land of falsehood and sophistry, eager to find an anchorage in the most secure of all roadsteads, the haven of truth.
ז׳
7[306] Such is the lesson expressed in the problem here presented. For it is impossible to turn back from, to hate, to leave the plausible falsehood, unless the sin involved in it be revealed complete and consummated. And this revelation will be made when, confronted by the firm evidence of truth, it receives the much-needed refutation.
