Western Christianity

“ Western civilization, then, is a thing by itself, not more clearly distinguished from ancient life than from the civilizations that have arisen in other parts of the world. What is it that has made the difference? What subtle spirit is it that appears in every aspect of the civilization, that assumes so many forms, and generates such transcending energies?
There can be but one answer: it is Christianity. In every community religion is the life principle, the central fire, which fills the whole with living force, and communicates its own spirit to every cell of the organism. ”

“ If the East is to return upon the West in substituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to the West. ”

“ We are beginning to recognize the right of religion and philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencies have combined to produce a considerable group of people who, having found, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in their inherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of the problems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hope of discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them. ”

“ The paganisms which still exist in the East are rapidly yielding to the march of western intelligence. Christianity alone, amidst all these ring and fallen fabrics, retains its original vitality, for, like its author, it is imperishable. ”

“ In the past there have been very great changes in human thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few centuries the whole of Western Europe was changed from the wild confusion of warring tribes that succeeded the breakdown of the Roman Empire, into the unity of Christendom, into a community with such an idea of unity that it could be roused from end to end by the common idea of the Crusades. ”

“ And now at last I am caught up in the illusion of a new Western ideal—not Christianity, for that has passed away, strange as such a statement may sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the individual soul to its own divinity; 55 we have made a fetish of our neighbour’s earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians, followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. ”

“ Thousands in Europe, actuated by honest motives such as the hope of securing spiritual benefits, the wish to expiate sins, the desire to extend Christianity, the yearning to convert the Mohammedans, and the determination to overthrow a grave enemy to western civilisation and progress, gave their means and their lives to this sacred undertaking. The cries for help which came from the Christians in Jerusalem and from the Eastern Emperor fell on sympathetic ears. ”

“ It appears there in a reactionary form among men of culture and leads many of them to turn away in hearty disapproval from our faith. They are wonderfully drawn towards Christ, our Lord. His praises are in their mouths, and they eagerly study his example and life. They claim him as one of the East and, therefore, as one of themselves. But these same men will have none of Christianity, because it is, as they say, of the West, Western. ”

“ Love of change made their conversion to Christianity easy; love of adventure made all enterprises of discovery seem trifling hazards, and gave them the world to roam in. To their achievements in the Western hemisphere the influence of the Christian religion was, no doubt, very powerful. ”

“ But whatever cleavage may appear hereafter in the religion of the West, the search for the essence of Christianity, even when it works through controversy, will contribute to lop off idle dissensions and reveal fellowship in fundamentals where men had previously supposed themselves to be hopelessly divided. ”

“ The conversion of the northern peoples, and their incidental introduction to profane knowledge, wrought upon them deeply; while their own qualities and the conditions of their lives affected their understanding of what they received and their attitude toward the new religion. Obviously the dissemination of Christianity among rude peoples would be unlike that first spreading of the Gospel through the Empire, in the course of which it had been transformed to Greek and Latin Christianity. Italy, Spain, and Gaul made the western region of this primary diffusion of the Faith. ”

“ This theistic movement, as a growing search after a personal God, is to be traced definitely to the growth of western thought, and especially to the direct influence of Christianity. This is no less true of those theistic movements which are by no means amiably disposed toward our religion. ”

“ The little pamphlet, the Catholic paper will keep the watch around the lonely settler's faith until the living contact with the Church's authority and sacraments be renewed. And in the great battle against religious indifference and profound materialism which are rapidly spreading over our West, the Catholic Truth Society will make us realize the saving power of Christianity. ”

“ In uniting the East and the West, in uniting Asiatic and European faith and character, the Church of the New Dispensation works faithfully upon the lines laid down by Christ, and only seeks to amalgamate the Western Christ and the Eastern Christ. ”

“ The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not be made perfect." ”

“ Already the world has been opened up, the nations of the earth are awakening to the greatness of life's possibilities. The danger is that the Oriental peoples should become satisfied with the mere externals of civilisation, and miss that which will assure their complete emancipation. Christianity was born in the East, though it has become the inheritance of the West. It is adapted by its genius to all men. And undoubtedly the West has no better boon to confer on the East than that on which its own life and hope are founded—the religion of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Yet just because of a too one-sided emphasis on this truth, the Catholic Church in the West has, as a rule, not tried to be a home for nations at all. "Christianity separated religion from patriotism for every nation which became, and which remained, Christian." ”

“ The missionary fire still burns in consecrated breasts.
And that is a lucky thing for the Christian world. We Westerners—we of America and Europe—would go all to pieces otherwise. You see we Occidentals have not eons of fatalistic paganism to fall back on as have the sons of the East. They endure without our religion. But we—what would happen to us if Christianity did not unite, purify, and exalt us. ”

“ True it is that Christianity was a product of the East, but it was an accidental and inferior offshoot from the original religion of the race, not adapted to their needs, and fitted only for exportation. ”

“ But whatever the sources and phases of its growth, the existence and strength of this faith in humanity are undeniable. It is this faith which compels us to refuse to think of Western civilization as merely Western. For we believe that the West holds in trust for mankind, not only a right knowledge of nature, not only a correct scientific method, but also an essential conception of the worth and unity of human life. Whatever we are to gain from the East, this is one of the gifts we bring to the other half of the world. ”

“ And has not this estimate of the Eastern religion so forced itself upon us that, whereas before the knowledge of the sacred books of the East missionaries were apt to speak only of the perishing heathen, and of their superstition and immorality, which were sinking them to perdition, now they speak rather of the hopeful side of their life, and apply the gospel as the means of evoking this into perfection? We evidently must not assert for Christianity an exclusive place in the upraising of the world to God. ”

“ Continental Europe was being deluged with blood and devastated by relentless religious wars to crush out the evangelic faith, whose confessors held up the Bible over all popes and secular powers, and would not consent to part with their inalienable charter from the throne of Heaven to worship God according to his Word. And amid these woeful struggles the good providence of the Almighty opened up to the attention of the nations the vast new territories of this Western World. ”

“ But let us look the facts solemnly in the face that the Christian religion has now been in effect for nearly two thousand years; that the nations now warring are Christian nations, in the very foremost rank of Christendom; that never in history has there been so much bloodshed in such wide-spread areas and so much hate, and that we see no signs that Christianity is employing any influence that she has not been employing for nearly two thousand years. ”

“ From the Roman world the idea has spread, through the Greek Catholic Church, to Greece, parts of the Balkans, and Russia; through the Roman Catholic Church to all western Europe and the two Americas; and through the Protestant churches which sprang from the Roman Catholic by secession, and the Mohammedan faith, to include almost all the world. Only among uncivilized tribes and in Asia do we find any great number of fundamentally different religious conceptions. ”

“ Here, again, his life will be very different from that life which has characterized, thus far, the Western Christian. The masculine virtues of assertion, boldness, aggressiveness have characterized the West. We have been strong and continue strong in that aspect of our faith which we associate with the words assertion and attack. ”

“ Underneath all, the thing they are really asking for, all unconsciously most of them, is that which lies at the root of all our Western progress. They ask unknowingly for the Gospel of Christ, the heart of this precious old Bible. When they get that they will find that it brings the new awakening of mental life and the new aggressive energy that has made us Christian nations what we are. ”

“ Remove this supreme vision of this Republic of God, and western civilisation — nay, the whole of human history, which but culminates in it, is without intelligibility, having neither explanatory source nor goal. The central and real meaning of the Christian Religion, in which the self-consciousness of the West finds its true expression, and which thus far has found no home except in the West, lies exactly in the faith that the Creator and the creature are reciprocally and equally real, not identical; that there is Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men ”

“ Thou must perceive, also, with equal clearness, that the splendid ecclesiasticism which I have established throughout the Western Empire in place of the primitive religion is vastly better for mankind than any system ever before attempted, and that it should be speedily extended over all the East. ”

“ In fact, the masses of the Oriental countries are in ignorance of the real spiritual thought of their own religion, as much as the masses of the Western World are of theirs, and the teachers who are sent out by the West would help forward the work of the Reform Forces by showing the natives [Pg 244] that the ideas of the reform forces are in the line of thought of their own great saints and sages. ”

“ That the Church conferred incalculable benefits upon western Europe, few will question. To say nothing of its chief mission,—the moral uplifting of mankind through the Christian religion,—we have seen how, under its auspices, the barbarians were civilized and brought into the family of nations, how violence was checked by the "Truce of God," and how an educated class was maintained during the centuries when few laymen could either read or write. These are only the more obvious of its achievements ”

“ The history of Europe suggests that, though the Church exerted a considerable influence on the growth of a common type of civilization in the West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than a unifying factor. ”

“ Hence, those nations, though differing in origin and political independence, made but one grand spiritual community, bound together by a common faith and a common church. But if we would now express the spirit of this epoch in a philosophical formula, we should say that it was the period in which the Roman and Germanic races were converted to Christianity after the decease of the old world and of pagan civilization ”

“ In that country the missionary must also stand before the people as their exemplar. He must represent, not only Christianity at its best, but also the civilization of the West in its purest and most attractive garb. ”

“ No eastern religion, Buddhism not excepted, appears to contain conceptions that satisfy the western mind. The religion of the Christ, however can be shown to hold whatever ideas and ideals make vital the great race-religions of the East. ”

“ Study, thought, discussion, and contact with Western Catholicism, as well as Western Protestantism and rationalism, will compel them to place themselves face to face with their own hereditary and traditional dogmas; and either to be consistent with themselves, and submit to the supremacy of the Roman See, or to give up their orthodoxy and open the doors to a religious revolution. ”