It has been
vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have
had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances
of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to
merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian
religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages
determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general
exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in
the individual's past experience directly serves as a model.
But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious
objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have
an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his
justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his
omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the
redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have
proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian
believers.[21] We shall see later that the absence of definite
sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical
authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful
orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths.
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