Cretinism

“ It brings before us, at once, that vast mass of baptized profession which calls itself the church of God, but is not; which calls itself Christianity, but is not. Christendom is dark and a dreadful anomaly. It is neither one thing nor the other. It is not "the Jew or the Gentile, or the church of God." It is a corrupt mysterious mixture, a spiritual malformation, the masterpiece of Satan, the corrupter of the truth of God, and the destroyer of the souls of men, a trap, a snare, a stumbling-block, the darkest moral blot in the universe of God. ”

“ Her own sense of sin was so profound and vivid that she shuddered at the thought of claiming perfection for herself; and it seemed to her a very sad delusion for anybody else to claim it. True holiness is never self-conscious; it does not look at itself in the glass; and if it did, it would see only Christ, not itself, reflected there. This was her way of looking at the subject; and she came to regard all theories, still more all professions, of entire sanctification as fallacious and full of peril—not a help, but a serious hindrance to real Christian holiness. ”

“ Of course I never talk theology with her, but I am surprised sometimes to find that under the shell of her orthodoxy is a good deal of liberalism. I suppose any kindly mortal who accepted the old creeds made allowances for those nearest and dearest, and human nature will always make allowances for itself. I should think that an imaginative belief in a creed, a belief that realized the cruelty of theology, must either drive one mad or make one disbelieve from simple horror. ”

“ A woman resemble a religious creed! When I promise to believe a creed, I promise only that I will believe it, until its falsehood is pointed out. The veriest fanatic has this conditional reservation. It is the nature of such promises; and they cannot be otherwise made, or construed. It may be difficult, or impossible, to convince a fanatic; but he does not tell you he would maintain his creed, if it were proved false. He holds it, because he is satisfied it cannot be proved false. He does not admit "the creed he professes may be a mass of errors and absurdities;" ”

“ Chretien says of him that he "consigns us for the guidance of our life to seeming truths, but tells us that, if we could only lay aside the veil of our human nature, we should perceive these seeming truths to be falsehoods." ”

“ Creeds are, further, at enmity with truth, because they resist its development, and embarrass its progression. The world could never have advanced beyond a fixed point, had it been governed by Churchmen, in the true Church spirit. For what is it that Creed-makers so insanely attempt? They attempt what is alike inconsistent with the glory of truth and the nature of man. Truth is infinite, like its author, and they would confine it within the limits of the Nicene and Athanasian formularies. Truth is eternal and progressive, but Creeds would swear us to the worst barbarisms of the worst ages. ”

“ States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true—as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no Christians. ”

“ Is it not by the reception of the Spirit and the word, that the mind becomes enlightened; and filled with the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus? The light and truth of the Gospel, must chase away darkness and error from the mind of fallen man. The carnal mind is enmity itself, against spiritual light and truth; and it is only by the influence and power of the Holy Spirit, that the enmity is done away, and inclination for the light and truth of revelation is produced. ”

“ Deism had been much abused; but what was Deism? It was a belief in one God; and it might as well be opposed to polytheism or idolatry, or any of the ancient systems of superstition, as to the doctrine of the Trinity. But the creed of the Trinity was not in any wise essential to morality of life and rectitude of conduct. Greece and Rome boasted of citizens equal, if not superior, in all the virtues which can adorn men, to any ever trained under the Christian code. It was in vain for him to take up any other volume at present. His whole defence rested on one point. ”

“ Amine made no answer.
"Thou art still an unbeliever, and a heretic. Beware, young woman! beware!"
"Beware of what, good Father? why should I beware? Are there not millions in these climes more unbelieving, and more heretic, perhaps, than I? How many have you converted to your faith? What trouble, what toil, what dangers have you not undergone to propagate that creed—and why do you succeed so ill? Shall I tell you, Father? It is because the people have already had a creed of their own: a creed taught to them from their infancy, and acknowledged by all who live about them. ”

“ The men who esteemed themselves to be philosophers must needs corrupt the simple truth of the "Apostles' Creed" respecting the three persons of the Godhead, by the false philosophies of the orient, and the idle speculations of the Greeks; until this simple expression of Christian faith in God was changed from what we find it in the "Apostle's Creed" to the "Athanasian Creed," and those vain philosophizings and definitions which have grown out of it, and which reduce the dignity of the Godhead to a mere vacuum—to a "being" impersonal, incorporeal, without body, without parts, without passions ”

“ It was indeed the chief Modernist contention, as the orator showed, that formal creeds were mere "landmarks in the Church's life," crystallizations of thought, that were no sooner formed than they became subject to the play, both dissolvent and regenerating, of the Christian consciousness.
"And so you come to that inconceivable entity, a Church without a creed—a mere chaos of private opinion, where each man is a law unto himself." ”

“ Therefore, if you doubt our doctrine, it is the same as doubting God, and you should fall on your knees and pray to read Scripture as we do.
As to the Christian life being a conflict, why, you "ordinary" Christians are all wrong. Satan never tempts us, though he tempted our Lord; it comes natural to us to go into Canaan with one bound; the old-fashioned saints were ridiculous in "fighting the good fight of faith." Look at the characters in the Bible, "resisting unto blood, striving against sin"; what blunderers they were to do that!... In our enlightened day nobody is "chastened" ”

“ There is no time so trying, so full of agony to the soul, as is that hour when it first begins to doubt the absolute, unquestionable truth of the creeds it has hitherto blindly accepted, and in which it has fully believed. Creeds are the swaddling clothes of the soul, and must inevitably be outgrown and laid aside as the mind of man grows more and more capable of comprehending the truth which is to set it free from the trammels of mere blind belief. ”

“ When we look at the subject in this light, there is no mystery about it. Only look at it in the light that it is revealed to man in these last days, and there is none of that darkness and sectarian foolishness which characterize apostate Christendom; and we cannot understand nor explain one single principle correctly, and are in the dark and cannot see the way before us; but when we talk and act under the immediate influence of the spirit of revelation, then we can see that which the world are ignorant of. ”

“ You might, for example, react from a bigoted creed to one whose sole proclaimed article was universal toleration, and become a fierce bigot in that,—for the creed, not the idea; because creeds always obscure ideas: when a creed is formulated, it means that ideas are shelved. So now Chrisitianity inherited the Chosen People dogma, but transferred it from a racial-ecclesiastical to a wholly ecclesiastical basis; and, since every Teacher comes upon a cyclic impusle outward, took on a missionary spirit. The Chosen People now were the members of the church, who might belong to any race. ”

“ What never passes beyond the sphere of thought in us becomes action in Krespel. The bitter scorn and rage which the soul, imprisoned as it is in earthly conditions of being and action, often vividly feels, Krespel carries out, or expresses, into external life, by extraordinarily frantic gesticulations and hare jumps. ”

“ On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. ”

“ Wonderful power of religion! that has brought a blind beneficence to the aid of an equally blind misery. Wherever cretins exist, there is a popular belief that the presence of one of these creatures brings luck to a family—a superstition that serves to sweeten lives which, in the midst of a town population, would be condemned by a mistaken philanthropy to submit to the harsh discipline of an asylum. In the higher end of the valley of Isere, where cretins are very numerous, they lead an out-of-door life with the cattle which they are taught to herd. ”

“ This is my first assertion, and I shall establish its correctness in several particulars. Creeds generate mental apathy and mental dependence, and this is fatal in the very outset. To a spirit of inquiry there is needed an impulsive intellectual activity, and to this activity there is needed a desire for the thing to be attained, and a sense of its importance. There is no labour without motive, and if in religious belief, the creed has defined before-hand all that is necessary for my salvation, I have no necessity to take any more trouble in the matter. ”

“ One who holds a creed to be absolutely true, and who by implication holds the multitudinous other creeds to be absolutely false in so far as they differ from his own, cannot entertain the supposition that the value of a creed is relative. That each religious system is, in its general characters, a natural part of the society in which it is found, is an entirely alien conception, and indeed a repugnant one. ”

“ We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:—the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together. ”

“ The human mind cannot be chained. But it was a great thing to establish a creed which the Christian world could accept in the rude and ignorant ages which succeeded the destruction of the old civilization. That creed was the anchor of religious faith in the Middle Ages. It is still retained in the liturgies of Christendom.
It is not my province to criticise the Nicene Creed, which is virtually the old Apostles' Creed, with the addition of the Trinity, as defined by Athanasius. ”

“ They are like thin-skinned insects, which, as we watch the restless play of their muscles, seem to be misshapen, while nevertheless everything soon comes back into its proper form again. All that with us remains thought, passes over with Krespel into action. That bitter scorn which the spirit that is wrapped up in the doings and dealings of the earth often has at hand, Krespel gives vent to in outrageous gestures and agile caprioles. ”

“ If all creeds are equally true, then since they are contradictory to one another, they are all equally false, or at least equally uncertain. We are indulging therefore in a mere juggling with words. To say that all creeds are equally true, and that they are based upon experience, is merely to fall back upon that agnosticism which fifty years ago was regarded as the deadliest enemy of the Church. The enemy has not really been changed into a friend merely because he has been received within the camp. Very different is the Christian conception of a creed. ”

“ Perhaps the most singular attempt to graft Infidelity on any thing called a Science, is by those who associate their denial of the Christian Revelation with the doctrines of Phrenology, as if there were any earthly connection between the form of the human skull, or its effects upon the human character upon the one hand, and the truth or falsehood of our Religion on the other ”

“ The Restoration of the New Testament Creed.
In the evolution of the movement for Christian union, it was soon discovered that human creeds, as standards of church or ministerial fellowship, are divisive in their nature and prevent the reunion of God's people. All claim to get their creed from the Bible; but since creeds contradict each other in doctrine, they cannot all be right, although they may all be wrong. Human creeds are responsible for most of the heresy trials and have armed most of the infidelic attacks upon the church. ”

“ Truth is discovered and carried onward by the independent working of free and various minds, but Creeds would reduce all to an apathetic uniformity; and had not truth been greater than Creeds, all that has been done for religion and science, would now be in eternal silence. Creeds not only thus retard the progress of Truth, by the sanction of authority, by the influence of prejudice, by the tenacity of habit; but give errors all but immortality. Creeds are foes to whatever is most heavenly in our nature; to conscience, in its rectitude, and to charity in its gentleness ”