Orthodox Christianity

“ One bad consequence of the Orthodox idea is discouragement on the one side, and spiritual pride on the other. Those who are not converted are discouraged, and deprived of the comforts of Christian faith. Those who think they have been converted are satisfied with this past experience, and believe themselves Christians on the strength of it. Because some spiritual commotion took place in their souls at a certain time and place, they consider themselves children [pg 185] of God and heirs of his favor, though in their daily lives they may show little proof of practical Christianity. ”

“ But there is one dogma of Orthodox Christianity which stands alone in its atrocity, which is thoroughly and essentially bad, which is without one redeeming feature, which is as blasphemous towards God as it is injurious to man ”

“ They also tell us that it is infinitely wicked to attack the Christian religion, and when I speak of the Christian religion I do not refer especially to the Christianity of the new testament; I refer to the Christianity of the orthodox church, and when I refer to the clergy I refer to the clergy of the orthodox church. There was a time when men of genius were in the pulpits of the orthodox church; that time is past. When you find a man with brains now occupying an orthodox pulpit you will find him touched with heresy—every one of them. ”

“ Orthodox churches have fallen away, more or less, from the doctrine of justification by faith. They have fallen back from the central point of Christianity, faith in Jesus, in different directions, and seek to be justified by a law,—some upon a law of belief, and others on a law of emotion. ”

“ I believe that thousands of men would be orthodox enough in certain points, if divines had not been too curious, or too narrow, in reducing orthodoxy within the compass of subtleties, niceties, and distinctions, with little warrant from Scripture, and less from reason or good policy.
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution. ”

“ In Protestant Orthodox churches, if any of those born and brought up in it are Christians, it is, so far as they are concerned, a happy accident.
All this shows something wrong in the common theory of conversion. Every one in a Christian community who desires to be a Christian ought to be able to become one. Christianity is a gospel, because it opens the kingdom of heaven to all. The call of the Church at the beginning was to follow Christ. Any one who was willing to follow Christ was baptized at once, and became a Christian. ”

“ I answer,—It would be strange if any two man should be found to agree exactly in all the minute matters of religious opinion. With respect, however, to what is properly considered the Orthodox or Calvinistic system of doctrines, as including the great facts of Christianity, and as opposed to, and distinguished from, the Unitarian, Pelagian, and Arminian systems, I suppose there is between the Orthodox ministry and myself an entire agreement. ”

“ A strong and, I think, an unanswerable case might be made out to show that the religion of the Orthodox Church beneficially influenced the conduct of men and women in their individual capacity and in their relations one with another. ”

“ It is on such occasions as these—and they are many—that the attitude of the people towards their church may be studied with advantage, and the beholder will realise how strong is the affection of the orthodox for all that pertains to their religion. ”

“ Hardly had the Orthodox doctrine triumphed over that of subordination, against those who denied the equal Deity, than it was obliged to turn round and contend against those on the other side, who denied the humanity of Christ altogether. ”

“ The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life, recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness, and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of Deity. ”

“ Nothing can be at present expected from the unorthodox bodies who until lately have been persecuted to such a degree that they have scarcely been able to exist. In external matters the Orthodox Church commands the obedience of the nation to a wonderful degree, but in controlling the deep convictions of the heart she lacks power. ”

“ Much has been already accomplished by the enlightened men who have taken up the cause of the apostles, and who are labouring hard to dispel the dark cloud of ignorance which hangs over the minds of my countrymen like a heavy cloud. With the knowledge and the elements of the true faith which they are zealously disseminating, I do not despair not merely of a thorough reform of the Orthodox Eastern Church, but of an entire change in the mutual relations of the several religious bodies. ”

“ Orthodox believers 'never read the other side.' The mastery of standard Unitarian books is no part of clerical preparation in the Church of England, and orthodox Nonconformist ministers are 'not genuinely and honestly acquainted with the adversary at all.' The moral results of Protestant orthodoxy are, in this writer's opinion, deplorable. ”

“ Every day the whole thing becomes more and more absurd. Of course there are hundreds and thousands of most excellent people who believe in orthodox religion; people for whose good qualities I have the greatest respect; people who have good ideas on most other subjects; good citizens, good fathers, husbands, wives and children—good in spite of their religion. I do not attack people. I attack the mistakes of people. Orthodoxy is getting weaker every day. ”

“ They don't become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything; but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view, to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity. Now for good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect ”

“ All the sects of Christendom do, indeed, place faith at the root of the Christian life; but some make it essentially an intellectual act, others essentially affectionate, and others an act of will. Orthodoxy makes it, in substance, a sight of faith, or an act of looking at spiritual realities. Sometimes it is called a realizing sense of spiritual things. But, at all events, the sight of truth is considered the beginning and root of religion by the Orthodox party in the Church. We are saved by the word of truth ”

“ And yet experience has taught me that there is no chance of unravelling the confused ideas which prevent many a well-meaning Christian from perceiving that the charge of the pride of reason falls upon the Orthodox. Their own sense of the Scripture (such is the dizzy whirl which their excited feelings produce) must be the word of God, because THEY cannot find another. ”

“ Who cares nowadays for what is dully orthodox? Who ever heard of a hero in orthodoxy nowadays? The thing is impossible. There may be, of course, thousands of orthodox heroes, but one never hears anything of them. ”

“ Should a fact be found inconsistent with the creed, he binds himself to deny the fact and curse the finder. With scraps of dogmas and crumbs of doctrine, he agrees that his soul shall be satisfied forever. What an intellectual feast the Confession of Faith must be! It reminds one of the dinner described by Sydney Smith, where everything was cold except the water, and everything sour except the vinegar.
Every member of a church promises to remain orthodox, that is to say—stationary. Growth is heresy. Orthodox ideas are the feathers that have been moulted by the eagle of progress. ”

“ For neither does religion consist Orthodoxy, or right opinions; which, although they are not properly outward things, are not in the heart, but the understanding. A man may be orthodox in every point; he may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them against all opposers ”

“ Orthodox religion brings to my mind only a lot of long-haired men, who are very arrogant, without instruction, clothed in silk and velvet, decorated with ornaments and jewels, whom one calls archbishops and metropolitans, and thousands of other men, with hair uncombed, who find themselves under the most servile domination of a few individuals who, under color of dispensing the sacraments, cheat and rob the people. ”

“ I realised, and, once again, not abstractly, but with body and soul, that in Russia, orthodoxy and the existing order of things are inseparably united, and that before both—autocracy and orthodoxy—are rejected together, a new conception of Christianity must first be arrived at. ”

“ It is when we pass from the influence of the Church on the conduct of the individual, to ask what was the value of its ethical teaching in regard to national life, whether it ever set before the nation a lofty national ideal, or whether it ever caused a wave of religious enthusiasm which influenced the nation as a whole, that we find the Orthodox Church during the later centuries of its history greatly lacking. Religion was to guide the conduct of the individual and to save him from eternal punishment. There was little or no conception of it as an aid to national righteousness. ”

“ Every orthodox creed is savage, ignorant and idiotic.
In the orthodox heaven there is no mercy, no pity. In the orthodox hell there is no hope, no reform. God is an eternal jailer, an everlasting turnkey. ”

“ Orthodoxy here becomes intelligible, so soon as we perceive that its purpose is not speculative, but practical. As religion consists so greatly in the sentiment of dependence, it is a leading purpose in the Orthodox system to produce this sense of dependence. ”

“ The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature ”

“ If the doctrine of saving faith be true, the thief or murderer, if the law lays hold of him, and the fear of the gallows induces him to rely on Jesus, goes directly to heaven; whereas, if he had been honest and virtuous, but had not faith in Christ, he might have died in his sins and gone to hell! Oh! how consistent is Orthodox salvation with justice and truth! In one case, the Orthodox Christian is in truth consistent. It is this: that in this life, even in New York, a man will not be admitted as a church member, however virtuous. He must be a sinner, or he cannot be admitted. ”

“ Parsi theosophists as champions of the cause of orthodoxy. The advocacy on the part of the theosophists of the revival of the past, and their seeing in such a revival the sole panacea of communal ills, whether real or imaginary, their readiness to allege religious sanction for the time-hallowed customs, matched with their zeal for ritual, and their eagerness to vindicate the sacred ceremonies by giving strained allegorical interpretations to explain them, won for them the applause of the orthodox party, who cast in their lot with them. ”

“ One of the most interesting questions concerning a religious body is that of its size. Statistics in this case are specially difficult, because the Turk has no idea of such things, and the Russian persecution of dissenters makes it impossible to know how the figures would show if the people were free to profess what faith they like. I find the total number of Orthodox Christians reckoned at from ninety-five to one hundred millions, [16] of which between four-fifths and nine-tenths belong to the Russian Church. ”

“ We believe a thing when we do not know whether it is so or not; consequently the belief may be true or false. How egregious, then, the blunder of the orthodox world in condemning for disbelief! Belief, then, is a state of guessing. We will illustrate the position of orthodox Christendom: A boy throws up a copper coin, and cries, "Heads, or tails?" A by-stander, believing from its construction that "heads" will come up, cries out, "Heads!" Now, according to the logic of the orthodox, if he guesses wrong, he should be damned eternally for it. ”

“ From your knowledge of the religious tendency in the United States, how long will orthodox religion be popular?
Answer. I do not think that orthodox religion is popular to-day. The ministers dare not preach the creed in all its naked deformity and horror. They are endeavoring with the vines of sentiment to cover up the caves and dens in which crawl the serpents of their creed. Very few ministers care now to speak of eternal pain. ”

“ All the orthodox churches are obstructions on the highway of progress. Every orthodox creed is a chain, a dungeon. Every believer in the "inspired book" is a slave who drives reason from her throne, and in her stead crowns fear.
Reason is the light, the sun, of the brain. ”

“ Since we are accustomed to do everything and to consider everything which concerns our Christian polity, and especially whatever touches the purity of our faith, through which we look for all our prosperity, we recognise how greatly our orthodox people has been disturbed. Some of them maintain One Will in the dispensation of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and His One Operation in divine and human things. Others maintain Two Wills and Two Operations in the same dispensation of the Incarnate Word. ”

“ Orthodox as they were in their day, they yet attempt to gaze on the Divine Nature in its absoluteness and abstraction, apart from the manifestation of it to our intellect, our heart, and our imagination, which is made in the incarnate Christ Jesus. God has supplied them with this help to their apprehension of Him, but they hope by His help to dispense with it. ”