In things Natural and Spiritual––Are the ideas suggested by the Holy Spirit confined to the sphere of the religious life?
No; Coleridge, speaking of Columbus and the discovery of America, ascribes the origin of great inventions and discoveries to the fact that ‘certain ideas of the natural world are presented to minds already prepared to receive them by a higher Power than Nature herself.’
Is there any teaching in the Bible to support this view?
Yes; very much. Isaiah, for example, says that the ploughman knows how to carry on the successive operations of husbandry, ‘for his God doth instruct him and doth teach him.’
Are all ideas which have a purely spiritual origin ideas of good?
Unhappily, no; it is the sad experience of mankind that ideas of evil also are spiritually conveyed.
What is the part of the man?
To choose the good and refuse the evil.