Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/253

Rh, on the groundwork which consciousness lays in its antagonism against evil; and this is what philosophy herself teaches unto man. She shows him, that so long as our consciousness and our passions merely are in the field, although it is true that our regeneration must commence in their strife, yet that these elements meet together only in a bitter and interminable struggle, and do not embody of themselves any positive issues of good. Thus is he led by the very strife which philosophy reveals to him, tearing his being asunder, to feel the necessity under which he lies of obtaining strength, support, and repose, from a higher source: thus is he led by philosophy to discover, in the bitter strife between consciousness and his passions, his own importunate seeking of the kingdom of heaven, as the only means through whose intervention his struggling and toilsome acts may be embodied and perpetuated in glorious and triumphant substances his resistance of hatred changed by Divine grace into Christian love, and all his other resistances of evil (mere negative qualities) transmuted by the power of a celestial alchemy into positive and substantial virtues.

Thus philosophy brings man up to the points which Christianity postulates, as the conditions on which her blessings are to be bestowed. In revealing to man the strife, which, in the very act of consciousness, exists between himself and his whole natural man, philosophy, of course, brings him to entertain the desire that this strife should be