Disembodied Spirits and Principles.
By Editor
In a recent temperance article, Miss Frances E. Willard said: "Disembodied spirits and disembodied principles stand in an equally helpless relation to every-day affairs." Very good. Concerning disembodied spirits we have Scripture authority for saying that they can do nothing. The Bible says: "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." Ps. 146:3, 4. Disembodied spirits, then, can have no part to act in human affairs. The same thing may also be said of disembodied principles; and we commend Miss Willard's utterance to those people who teach that men are to be governed by principles instead of by precepts. No one ever obeyed an abstract principle. Love is an abstract principle. But it is only when embodied in the precepts, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," that it becomes practical, and tends to shape character. And even these two commandments are too broad to be comprehended by finite minds, until they are expanded into the ten commandments, which tell us just how to manifest the proper measure of love to both God and man.