Absolute religion

“ Moreover, in all the relations of life, he professes to be governed by the highest possible principle—Christian principle; and claims to be, indeed really is, at least theoretically, a believer in the truths of our holy religion. ”

“ That which alone, if anything, stamps Christianity as the supreme religion, is that its essence, its object, is in none of these things, valuable as some of them may be as signs and symptoms of the change which every mission is intended to effect. ”

“ What, in truth, are the conditions necessary to constitute a religion? There must be a creed, or conviction, claiming authority over the whole of human life; a belief, or set of beliefs, deliberately adopted, respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought to be subordinate. Moreover, there must be a sentiment connected with this creed, or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays claim in theory. ”

“ And his religion—the holy doctrine of an indivisible Unity of God, of man's creation in the image of God, of our destination, to become by virtue, justice, and charity contented in this, and happy in after life—is daily gaining more ground as the only religion complying with the demands of reason and our destination on earth. ”

“ This is the consciousness of obligation of the practical reason or of the conscience, which raises man to a faith in the moral government of the world, in immortality and God. With the reduction of religion from all external forms, doctrines, and ceremonies and the finding of the real essence of religion in the human mind and spirit, the way was opened to a knowledge of religion free from all external authority. ”

“ We have discovered the unity of ethics, of righteousness, of right and wrong, one right, one wrong. A million applications, but one goal towards which all those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are striving.
One religion: for underneath all the diversity of creeds and religions, barbaric, semi-civilized, civilized, enlightened, we find man, the one child of God, hunting for the clearest light he can command, after the one Father, that is, the one eternal, universal search of the religious life of the race. ”

“ Christianity, by being a more spiritual and moral constitution than any other form of religion that ever appeared in the world, requires men to think and act for themselves more accurately than any other. ”

“ Religion prostrates men before a being, who, without extension, is infinite, and fills all with his immensity; a being, all-powerful, who never executes his will; a being, sovereignly good, who creates only disquietudes; a being, the friend of order, and in whose government all is in confusion and disorder. What then, can we imagine, can be the God of theology? ”

“ But instantly there will be raised the objection that this is morality, not religion; morality, ethics, conduct, being by many people, and above all by theologians, carefully contradistinguished from religion, which is supposed in some special way to be connected with propositions about the Godhead of the Eternal Son, or propositions about the personality of God, or about election or justification. Religion, however, means simply either a binding to righteousness, or else a serious attending to righteousness and dwelling upon it. ”

“ For indeed, what probability, what possibility rather, (speaking after the manner of men) is there that Christianity, Scriptural Christianity, should be again the religion of this place? That all orders of men among us should speak and live as men filled with the Holy Ghost? ”

“ The very foundation of Christianity is, that a man can merit nothing of God: that we are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ: not for any of our works, or of our deservings; but by faith in the blood of the covenant.
But the Papists hold, that a man may by his works merit or deserve eternal life; and that we are justified, not by faith in Christ alone, but by faith and works together.
This doctrine strikes at the root of Christian faith, the only foundation of true religion.
6. Secondly, the doctrine of praying to saints and worshipping of images. ”

“ Is this not a convincing proof that religion is not restricted to one age or to one country—not the privilege of one chosen people or the monopoly of one favoured realm? It is eternal as the Truth of God, universal as the Love of God. ”

“ Finally, and most important of all, let us not worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opinions of men; but look rather to their spiritual condition. The church ought to think less of creed and more of character. The essence of faith lies not in correct conclusions upon doctrinal points; but in righteousness, and love, and trustful submission to God’s will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches the heart of religion. ”

“ What is alledged against our Argument from the Universality of Religious veneration, viz. The manifold ridiculous Religions in the world; from whence it is inferred that the Mind of man has no Innate principle of Religion at all in it, it being mouldable into any shape or form of Worship that it pleases the Supreme Power in every Countrey to propose ”

“ Great is the truth, and it shall then have prevailed! The authority and excellence, and triumphs of Christianity shall then appear, in their utmost evidence, in opposition to deism in all its shapes. The necessity of a public and spirited stand for the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, in opposition to slothful, covetous, and cowardly temporizers, shall, doubtless meet with the divine approbation. The stedfastness of the church in her principles, in opposition to the wavering and unstable in religion, will be fully vindicated. ”

“ Those who listen to New Church instructions will find, at any rate, that so far from involving a mere farrago of mystical and visionary crudities, they do actually inculcate the necessity of a practical and life-pervading religion, and that our doctrines are not, as the impression often is, a peculiar mode of dispensing with all religion—a sort of quitclaim to all genuine devotion and piety. ”

“ For my own part, if my thoughts were worth any one's notice, I do declare I have thought of this great concern with all the liberty that a reasonable soul can pretend to, or desire; and the result is that the more I think, and the more freely I think, the more fully I am satisfied that the Christian religion is the true religion, and that which, if I submit my soul sincerely to it, I may venture my soul confidently upon. ”

“ The ethical element of Christianity becomes elevated above the dogmatic. The sermon on the mount is regarded as the very soul of Christ's teaching. And in looking forward to the future of Christianity, the Christian religion is considered likely to become the religion of the world, merely because it will have ceased to be the religion of form and dogma, and become the highest type of ethics. ”

“ Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions, as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and operation of the Infinite and of God in all men. ”

“ In rejecting such a theory of religion, we reject not the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; we only vindicate them from objections, which, if unanswerable, are fatal; and we hold to the Gospel with a firmer conviction and a livelier faith, when we behold its accordance with the righteousness of the Divine administration and with the moral constitution of man. ”

“ Let us accept the truths of the Christian religion and we have then have the consolation that our suffering is not without cause, that we are expiating the original and primitive sin of mankind. This will at least make us understand our condition. Thus we shall, in a way, be proving Christianity and even God himself, beginning with man. ”

“ They were men of sterling character, of deep religious convictions, of willingness to make painful sacrifices for the sake of principle, of great reverence for the Bible and the institutions of religion, of purity of life in the home and in their social relations. They believed that religion was the supreme thing and that the commandments of God were of binding obligation upon all intelligent moral beings. ”

“ But not only is Christianity thus so immeasurably in advance of all other religions. It is no less so of every other system of thought that has ever been promulgated in regard to all that is moral and spiritual. ”

“ We will now consider the reciprocal obligations of ethics to theology; and, in the first place, to Natural Religion. Pure theism attaches the Divine sanction to the verdicts of conscience, makes them the will, the voice of God, enforces them by his authority, and elevates the conception of virtue by establishing a close kindred between the virtuous man and the Ruler of the universe. ”

“ In the first section the rise, development, and disintegration of Christianity as authority-religion is historico-critically traced. In the second section, Christianity as religion of the moral consciousness is defined in antithesis to the extremes of naturalism and clericalism.
“Taken altogether, his style has so little in common with the ordinary usage of British and American theologians that it is not transparent enough to make the reading of the book a pleasure, unless it be to the narrowest specialist. ”

“ To be consistent with himself, he must reject not only the term Christian, but also the term religion, and put the alternative, Either Catholicity or no religion. The word religion—from religare—means either intensively to bind more firmly, or iteratively, to bind again, to bind man morally to God as his last end, in addition to his being physically bound to God as his first cause. ”

“ What, then, are these Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan and Buddhist religions? They are not religions at all: they are merely philosophies, or systematised accounts of God, the world, and of man, which have obtained large support in earlier stages of the world's history. ”

“ VI. It is a wrong use of the Bible to manufacture cut of it any one uniform, system, of theology, as the fixed and final form of thought in which religion is to live.
Let me define these contrasting terms, so commonly confounded. Religion is man's perception of the Power in whom we live and move and have our being, and his emotion towards this power. Theology is man's conception of this Power, and his thought defined and formulated.
Religion is man's feeling after God; theology is man's grasp of God. ”

“ Stock. It is easy enough to be what the world calls a Christian, but not to be what the Bible calls so.
Will. Why, master, we working men are not expected to be saints, and martyrs, and apostles, and ministers.
Stock. We are not. And yet, Will, there are not two sorts of Christianity; we are called to practice the same religion which they practiced, and something of the same spirit is expected in us which we reverence in them. It was not saints and martyrs only to whom our Saviour said that they must crucify the world, with its affections and lusts. ”

“ It is true that he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion is absent from his writings. ”

“ And to prove it, we will here institute a critical comparison between Christianity and some of the older systems with respect to the essential spirit of their teachings, and observe how utterly untenable and groundless is the dogmatic assumption which claims for the Christian religion either any originality or any superiority. Of course if their is nothing new or original, there is nothing superior. ”

“ The study of early Church History suggests the conclusion that the Christian religion was recognised as a rule, or fashion of life, before it was discovered to be a philosophy and a creed. To be complete, therefore, any account of Christianity must include the presentation of it as a Divine 'way of life'—a coherent system of practical ethics, marked by characteristic conceptions of freedom, duty, the moral standard, the highest end of life, and the conditions of human perfection. ”

“ Or, as I should urge, the gain to humanity by unbelief is that “the teaching of Christ” has been modified, enlarged, widened, and humanised, and that “the conscience of the Christian” is in quantity and quality made fitter for human progress by the ever increasing additions of knowledge of these later and more heretical days.
SUPERNATURAL AND RATIONAL MORALITY THE essential of all religion is supernaturalism, and every religious system therefore involves at least dualism; as creator and created, ruler and ruled. ”

“ Now it is the true religion of Jesus Christ, the true doctrine of His gospel, which is justice and light; all false doctrines are injustice and darkness: it is by our holy faith that we belong to Christ, and are temples of the living God; all false religions flow from the father of lies, and make those who embrace them unbelievers; therefore all participation, all fellowship, all communication with false religions, is here expressly forbidden by the Word of God. ”

“ And there is here no necessary conflict with the claim of Tradition. It is true that all real, actual Religion is ever an act of submission to some fact or truth conceived as not only true but as obligatory, as coming from God, and hence as beyond and above our purely subjective fancies, opinings, and wishes. ”

“ Such being the facts, which cannot be successfully refuted, we must believe that the Christian religion, instead of being of Divine authenticity, as popularly claimed, is purely and entirely of human origin, and that all its teachings relative to a future state are but priestly inventions, concocted for the purpose of enslaving the ignorant masses. ”