Henry More Quotes on God
Henry More (1614–1687) — the Cambridge Platonist whose long career at Christ’s College made him one of the principal seventeenth-century English philosophical theologians — gave the Cambridge Platonist tradition its most extensive defense of the existence of God and the spiritual realm against the rising mechanistic materialism of Hobbes. The central commitments — that genuine extension is a property of spiritual as well as material substances, that the absolute space through which physical bodies move is itself a divine attribute, and that the Spirit of Nature mediates between the divine intellect and the mechanical operations of physical bodies — articulate a distinctive Platonist alternative to the Cartesian sharp dualism between extended matter and unextended mind. The framework, developed across The Immortality of the Soul (1659), An Antidote against Atheism (1653), and the Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), shaped Newton’s early conception of absolute space and supplied principal philosophical resources for the contemporary recovery of Cambridge Platonism.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Henry More:
“There is a spiritual extension that pervades all space.”
-
Attributed to Henry More:
“God is the omnipresent spirit, infinite in extension and intelligence.”
-
Attributed to Henry More:
“Reason is the ally, not the enemy, of true religion.”
-
Attributed to Henry More:
“The light of reason and the light of grace shine from the same source.”
-
“True religion, sprung from God above, Is, like her fountain, full of charity, Embracing all things with a tender love, Full of good will and meek expectancy, Full of true justice and sure verity, In heart and voice; free, large, even infinite, Not wedged in straight peculiarity, But grasping all in her vast active spright: Bright lamp of God! that men would joy in thy pure light!”
The Immortality of the Soul (1662), Book 2, Canto 3 -
“The Immortality of the Soul (1662), Book 2, Canto 3”
True religion, sprung from God above, Is, like her fountain, full of charity, Embracing all things with a tender love, Full of good will and meek expectancy, Full of true justice and sure verity, In heart and voice; free, large, even infinite, Not wedged in straight peculiarity, But grasping all in her vast active spright: Bright lamp of God! that men would joy in thy pure light! -
“Tell mankind Jehovah reigns; He shall bind the world in chains, So as it shall never slide, And with sacred justice guide. Let the smiling heavens rejoice, Joyful earth exalt her voice; Let the dancing billows roar, Echoes answer from the shore, Fields their flowery mantles shake; All shall in their joy partake; While the wood-musicians sing To the ever-youthful spring. Fill His courts with sacred mirth; Lo! He comes to judge the earth: Justly He the world shall sway, And His truth to men display.”
A Hymn of Praise" (1668) -
“...indeed, if there were any modesty left in mankind, the histories of the Bible might abundantly assure men of the existence of angels and spirits... I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that . . . fresh examples of apparitions may awaken our benumbed and lethargic minds into an assurance that there are other intelligent beings besides those that are clothed in heavy earth or clay . . . for this evidence, showing that there are bad spirits, will necessarily open a door to the belief that there are good ones, and lastly, that there is a God.”
Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky , in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, (1877)