Enthusiasm (religion)

“ Use every means which either reason or scripture recommends, as conducive (thro’ the free love of God in Christ) either to the obtaining, or increasing any of the gifts of God. Thus expect a daily growth in that pure and holy religion, which the world always did, and always will call Enthusiasm: but which, to all who are saved from real Enthusiasm, from merely nominal Christianity, is the wisdom of God and the power of God, the glorious image of the Most High: righteousness and peace: a fountain of living water, springing up into everlasting life! ”

“ It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his own personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to sacrifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to the acts we hold as ideals. ”

“ For this is like the gentile Romans branding the Jewish religion with the hated name of superstition; and if this work is truly enthusiasm, then we have been wholly mistaken in the meaning of the word: and what they call enthusiasm, is a glorious and blessed work of God, most powerfully and suddenly changing the very hearts and lives of men; making them in a great degree like to Christ in love, and righteousness, and holiness, and meekness, and humility; filling their hearts with holy joy, and their mouths with praises. ”

“ We are the most religious people in the world; but we are not so enthusiastic as some are. We have seen plenty of enthusiasm, but we do not care about it. Said I, "This shouting and singing one's self away to everlasting bliss, may be all very well in its place, but this alone is folly to me; my religion is to know the will of God and do it." ”

“ Or, while {44} the rising and falling temperature of the spirit is watched and recorded, the common principles of honor and integrity are so completely lost sight of, that, without explicit ill-intention, grievous delinquencies are fallen into, which fail not to bring a deluge of reproach upon religion. These melancholy perversions of Christian piety might seem not to belong, with strict propriety, to our subject; but, in fact, religious despondency is the child of religious enthusiasm. Exhaustion and dejection succeed to excitement, just as debility follows fever. ”

“ In proportion as the influence of scriptural religion faded, the elder and the younger vice—Superstition and Enthusiasm, joined their forces to deform every principle and practice of Christianity, and in the course of four or five centuries, under their united operations, a faint semblance only of its primeval beauty survived; another period of five hundred years saw Superstition prevail, almost to the extinction, not only of true religion, but of Enthusiasm also; and mankind fell back into a gloom as thick as that of the ancient polytheism. ”

“ But the infinite may always bow to the finite. Those, therefore, who, inflated by enthusiasm, contemn or neglect the modes and style of worship proper to humanity, must find that, though indulgence should be given to their affectation on earth, no room can be allowed it in heaven.
The dispensations of the divine providence towards the pious have all the same tendency to confine the devout affections within the circle of terrestrial ideas, and to make religion an occupant of the homestead of common feelings. ”

“ But even if it should appear that—excepting individual instances of constitutional extravagance, which it would be absurd, because useless, to make the subject of serious animadversion—enthusiasm is not now justly chargeable upon any body of Christians, there would still be a very sufficient reason for attempting to fix the true import of the term, so long as it is vaguely and contumeliously applied by many to every degree of fervor in religion which seems to condemn their own indifference. ”

“ That sort of plain and practical religion which adapts itself to the circumstances of common life—the religion taught by the apostles, a religion of love, sobriety, temperance, justice, fit for the use of master and servant, of husband and wife, of parent and child, by no means satisfied the wishes of those who sought in Christianity a delicious dream of unearthly excitements. ”

“ Let all this signal felicity have belonged to the lot of a Christian—a Christian well taught in the principles of his religion; nevertheless, in the midst of his honest joy, he will find place rather for humiliation than for that vain excitement and exultation wherewith a man of merely natural benevolence would not fail, in like circumstances, to be intoxicated. ”

“ In this manner it may happen, not in rare instances, but in many, that if, in the history of an individual, a season of religious excitement has once taken place, though it had in it little or nothing of the elements of a change from evil to good, it may have been assumed as constituting a valid and inamissible initiation in the Christian life; and if subsequently the decencies of religion and of morality have been preserved, a strong supposition of sincerity is entertained to the last, even though all was illusory. ”

“ In the social circle, the essay, or review, how often is spiritual religion branded with the title of enthusiasm, and the wings of devotion clipped, lest she should soar with too lofty an elevation, and pass beyond the limits which a cold and calculating policy would prescribe. ”

“ The aspect of religion, when thus amalgamated with the enthusiasm or the superstitions of a country, is always in accordance with the direction which that enthusiasm has taken, or with the peculiar cast of these superstitions, or with the nature of the circumstances and events by which they were modified or produced. ”

“ How much the usual meaning of the word has altered since the middle of the last century, is well illustrated by the length at which he argues that 'enthusiasm' ought not to be applied only to religion, and that it should be used in a good as well as in a bad sense. ”

“ Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm. When anything concerning it becomes an object of much meditation, it cannot be indifferent to the mind. They who do not love religion, hate it. ”

“ This process of perversion and of induration may as readily have place among the religious emotions as among those of any other class; for the laws of human nature are uniform, whatever may be the immediate cause which puts them in action; and a fictitious piety corrupts or petrifies the heart not less certainly than does a romantic sentimentality. The {16} danger attending enthusiasm in religion is not, then, of a trivial sort ”

“ The religious idealist sincerely believes himself, perhaps, to be eminently devout; and those who witness his abstraction, his elevation, his enjoyments, may reverence his piety; meanwhile, this fictitious happiness creeps as a lethargy through the moral system, and is rendering him, continually, less and less susceptible of those emotions in which true religion consists. ”

“ We want enthusiasm and fervor to transform the inner life of man and convert him." These words, which we can see and hear everywhere by opening our eyes and ears, constitute a formal avowal of the suggestive factor in religion. ”

“ It is only in exaltation, in quiet enthusiasm, that religious feelings can come to life and become pervasive, and religious truth can only become a possession available for everyday use in proportion as it is possible to make this non-secular and exalted state of mind permanent, and to maintain enthusiasm as the enduring mood of life and conduct. ”

“ Unless a perpetual miracle were to intercept the natural operation of common causes, religion, not less than philosophy or poetry, will draw enthusiasts within its precincts. Nor, if we recollect on the one hand the fitness of the vast objects revealed in the Scriptures to affect the imagination, and on the other, the wide diffusion of religious ideas, can it seem strange if it be found, in fact, that religious enthusiasts outnumber any other class. ”

“ Some disparage such expressions as enthusiasm, but there is nothing that should call forth enthusiasm like the Gospel. Religion calls for not only feeling and sentiment, but for the highest degree of feeling and sentiment. [3] 2. Religion, rational as well as animated. ”

“ Meanwhile the hesitations, and the musings, and the upbraidings of an introverted sensibility absorb the thoughts. Is it then reasonable to presume that similar practices in religion can have a tendency to promote the healthful vigor of piety?
By the constitution of the human mind, its emotions are strengthened in no other way than by exercise and utterance; nor does it appear that the {41} religious emotions are exempted from this general law. The Divine Being is revealed to us in the Scriptures as the proper and supreme object of reverence, of love, and of affectionate obedience ”

“ The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise ”

“ No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most intense element in his religious convictions. ”

“ At last the jumble of all these passions, with many more, will make an accomplished reformer of mankind.
Religious enthusiasm, therefore, is a flaming conceit that we have great personal interest with the deity, and that the deity is eminently employed about us, or in us; that he warms and solaces our hearts, guides our understandings and our steps, determines our will, and sets us far above those who have less pride and more sense than our selves. The enthusiast heats his own head by extravagant imaginations, then makes the all-wise spirit of God to be the author of his hot head ”

“ In fact, whoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs. The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; ”

“ But, as matter of fact, nothing is more common than to meet with religionists whose opinions and language are manifestly deformed by enthusiasm, while their devotional feelings are barely tepid: languor, relaxation, apathy, not less than extravagance, characterize their style of piety ”

“ The amenities that have been diffused through society in modern times forbid the overt acts and excesses of fanatical feeling; but the venom still lurks in the vicinity of enthusiasm, and may be quickened in a moment meantime, while smothered and repressed, it gives edge and spirit to those hundred religious differences which are still the opprobrium of Christianity. Whoever, then, admits into his bosom the artificial fire of an imaginative piety, ought first to assure himself that his heart harbors no particle of the poison of ill-will. ”

“ In the present state of the world and of the Church, when communications are so instantaneous, and when attention is so much alive to whatever concerns the welfare of mankind, if it might be imagined that a great and sudden extension of Christianity should take place in the regions of superstition and polytheism; and that yet no corresponding improvement of piety, no purifying, no refreshment, no enhancement of motives, should occur in the home of Christianity, there is reason to believe that the influx of excitement might generate a blaze of destructive enthusiasm. ”

“ No species of enthusiasm, perhaps, is more extensively prevalent, and certainly none clings more tenaciously to the mind that has once entertained it, and none produces more practical mischief, than that which is founded on an abuse of the doctrine of a particular Providence. It is by the fortuities of life that the religious enthusiast is deluded. Chance, under a guise stolen from piety, is his divinity. ”

“ Christians, amid many contrarieties of opinion, are, with a tacit or an explicit expectation, looking for movement and progression, to be effected either by a quickened energy of existing means, or by the sudden operation of new causes. This probable opinion, if held in the spirit of Christian modesty, affords, under the sanction of the coolest reason, a new and strong excitement to religious hope. ”

“ That the error of the enthusiast does not consist in an excess merely of the religious emotions, might be argued conclusively on the ground that the Scriptures, our only safe guide on such points, while they are replete with the language of impassioned devotion, and while they contain a multitude of urgent and explicit exhortations, tending to stimulate the fervency of prayer, offer no cautions against any such supposed excesses of piety. ”

“ We have said that when an important object is zealously pursued in the use of means proper for its attainment, a mere intensity or fervor of feeling does not constitute enthusiasm. If, therefore, prayer has a lawful object, whether it be temporal or spiritual, and is used in humble confidence of its efficiency, as a means of obtaining the desired boon or some equivalent blessing, there is nothing unreal in the employment ”