Moral regeneration

“ The more we are aware of our own frequent and serious shortcomings, the more, when we perceive the moral delinquencies of others, shall we recognize in their nature the same recuperative agency which we believe to be in ourselves, namely, the power of divine regeneration that can make all things new. ”

“ There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself. ”

“ On the one hand, it is evident that a change of moral dispositions, so entire as to be properly symbolized by calling it a new birth, or a resurrection to life, must be much more than a self-effected reformation ”

“ Is their conduct in stricter conformity with useful or exalted virtue? Do they sympathize more with the unfortunate, or exhibit greater specimens of genuine benevolence? Is the heart tranquillized, the mind improved, and their actions more consistent with the invariable principles of rectitude? Have they diminished human misery, or improved the condition of human nature? No! Where then is the utility of this thing called regeneration? If the heart be not improved, the mind cultivated, or morality extended in the sphere of its influence, no advantage has resulted from this pretended change. ”

“ In fact, our whole people will hail it as the missing link in the great Scheme for the regeneration of mankind, enabling them to act out those impulses of their hearts which are ever prompting them to do good to the bodies as well as to the souls of men. ”

“ If we resume the moral progress of the nineteenth century, allowing for its inconsistencies, carefully weighing its negative and positive results, and taking as a balance what is original in its contribution to the ethical development of the human race, we will find that this contribution mainly lies in the direction of tolerance and of altruism. ”

“ Suppose that without divine aid you should try to save a soul—you might as well attempt to make a world. Why, you cannot create a fly, how can you create a new heart and a right spirit? Regeneration is a great mystery, it is out of your reach. ”

“ Are the feelings of the heart nothing? Are the consciousness of independence, and the power of pursuing the occupation and habits of life which we prefer, nothing? Is the prospect of happier days, and of an improved situation for ourselves or our children, nothing? Where also are family endearments, and social intercourse, and willing services, and grateful returns? Where, above all, are moral improvement, and the light of religious truth, and the hope full of immortality? ”

“ The restoration of the full life and entire operation of the divided faculties of the human soul must be considered now only as a splendid exception—the high gift of creative genius, and of a more than ordinary strength of character; and such a re-union of faculties must be looked upon as the high problem which constitutes the ultimate object and ideal term of all the intellectual and moral exertions of man. ”

“ He comes to this higher test fortified by self-conquest, and with an increased sense of the dignity and worth of life—prepared, moreover, to believe that the path of true happiness is an ascending one. Let these truths—for they are truths—be believed and taught; let men see the path along which their moral development has lain in the past, and along which it must lie in the future, and we shall have little reason to regret the lures and terrors of the old theology. ”

“ But there is one certain way, in which we can do something and perhaps much for the amelioration of mankind and the regeneration of the world: and that is, by regenerating that part of the world which lies absolutely in our own power—namely, ourselves. We are each a part of the world and of mankind, and, by regenerating our own minds, we regenerate a portion of the world. ”

“ The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstract conceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in the stimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement. How shall we make men good? No longer by the mere appeal to reason; no longer mainly by promise of heaven and threat of hell. Still appealing to reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put about men all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances. ”

“ You have been kind enough to say that I find a subject for caricature in the doctrine of regeneration. If, by regeneration, you mean reformation,—if you mean that there comes a time in the life of a young man when he feels the touch of responsibility, and that he leaves his foolish or vicious ways, and concludes to act like an honest man,—if this is what you mean by regeneration, I am a believer. But that is not the definition of regeneration in your creed—that is not Christian regeneration. ”

“ Such principles impart new light and vigor to the mind, and secure to its possessor a safe passage through all the temptations of the world to the abodes of eternal purity and blessedness. A character without fixed moral principles has impressed on it the deformity of a great and palpable defect. Whatever virtues it does not possess are like flowers planted in the snow or withered by the drought—wanting the life vigor and beauty which principles alone can impart. ”

“ Just so the exertions of single talents can create extraordinary men indeed; but happy and perfect men only by their uniform temperature. And in what relation should we stand, then, to the past and coming ages, if the cultivation of human nature made necessary such a sacrifice? We should have been the slaves of humanity, and drudged for her century after century, and stamped upon our mutilated natures the humiliating traces of our bondage—that the coming race might nurse its moral healthfulness in blissful leisure, and unfold the free growth of its humanity! ”

“ I have sought to show them that the end of their work is the redemption of humanity, an essential part of that process by which it is being gradually elevated to moral freedom, and to suggest to them the direction in which they ought to turn their chief efforts. ”

“ Moral perfection for himself, and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of all. ”

“ Only a resurrection and transfiguration of the earth and the universe, as well as of a glorified mankind, show us such a goal. For this aim, for such a real continuation of life of the single personality, and of all mankind, after the long work of moral and intellectual development, all noble and worthy instincts of mankind are prepared—from the instinct of self-preservation up to the instinct of self-sacrifice for ideal purposes and the instinct of moral perfection and community with God. ”

“ What is the principle of this new life? We answer: intellectual and moral progress. Mind has grown; the soul has been expanded. God has permitted man to be free, and furnished him with the means to be so. ”

“ For the origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever contains the supernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is alive. That alone can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power.
The new voices in the wilderness crying “Repent,” have revived a hope, which had wellnigh perished out of the world, that the thoughts of the mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy hour, be executed by the hands. That is the hope, of which all other hopes are parts. ”

“ There is no hope, therefore, for the thorough reformation of the world, except by the slow and gradual process of individual regeneration. [15] The world is made up of individuals; and it is very plain that as is the character of the individuals that compose the world, such will be the character of the world as a whole. ”

“ Both gave back truth to man, and man to nature, at the expense of temporary moral uncertainty and ruthless destruction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual in his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and acting being; the Eighteenth Century reconstructed society as a homogeneous free existence ”

“ Man must now become imbued with new virtues and powers, new moral standards, new capacities. New bounties, perfect bestowals, are awaiting and already descending upon him. The gifts and blessings of the period of youth, although timely and sufficient during the adolescence of mankind, are now incapable of meeting the requirements of its maturity. ”

“ But as in this struggle the survival of the fittest does not necessarily mean the destruction of those who represented the defeated ideal, but the supplanting of their ideal by another, the movement is one of comprehension, and we should expect to find, and do find, the history of morality exhibit the gradual development of a universal moral order, good not for one group of men but for all. ”

“ And when, aside from all the distorting and hardening influences exerted on our own moral natures by a grudging refusal to meet the calls of benevolence, we consider the civil and social melioration which has attended the pathway of this heavenly light, together with its refining and sanctifying influences of the individual soul ”

“ Must we translate that expectation into the hope of moral and social development? By doing so, can we still have a religious sense of a great and divine future overhanging humanity which will give to our life the same value and solemnity which the first generation felt? ”

“ But if we mean to make of each fresh development in the way of material betterment a step toward a fresh development in moral and spiritual betterment, then we are to be congratulated.
To me the future seems full of hope because, although there are many conflicting tendencies, and although some of these tendencies of our present life are for evil, yet, on the whole the tendencies for good are in the ascendency. ”

“ Every advance in humanitarianism, in our treatment of men and animals, is evidence to us of the illimitable capacities of moral expansion in our nature, and therefore of the growth of conscience, or the moral sentiment. ”

“ Yet we can in no wise draw out what is best in others without constantly renewing ourselves, making ourselves better fitted to exercise regenerative influence, and thus attaining the highest mental and moral growth of which we are capable. ”

“ What we call the awakening of the social conscience marks an important step in progress, But, like all progress, it involves hardship to individuals. For the higher moral classes, the saints and the reformers, it is the occasion of wholehearted rejoicing. ”

“ They recognize that society can continuously progress only as these benefits become the possession not merely of a few but of all. In the disregard of this immutable law of human progress they discern the main cause of the retrogression, decay, and failure of every great civilization of the past; in its solicitous fulfillment they find the only ground of hope for the constant improvement of human society as a whole and the uninterrupted moral progress of the world. ”

“ And strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die—that hereby is signified; that the things which pertain to the moral life should be vivified, appears from the signification of strengthening, as denoting to vivify the moral life by truths; for truths from the Word vivify that life, which, when it is vivified, is also strengthened, for it then acts as one with the spiritual life. ”

“ They insist that any improvement in the conditions of human life must be accomplished, not through individual moral effort, nor through the propagation of truth, but through progressive modifications in the general material conditions of life. ”

“ These miseries do depend upon us. In spite of its disdainful nobility, the stoic resignation has here too much the look of egoism.
This moral civilization, when its hour comes, will revive Christianity and propagate it; it will not leave the human race in the abandonment of the desperate misery of today.
III
The naturalists and the sociologists have contributed to spread this idea that moral progress is, for individuals, a function of the anatomical complex, and for societies of the complex of habits, institutions and industries. ”

“ The next question, then is,—how is regeneration to be accomplished? That is, indeed, the next question, and the great question, and one which should interest every thinking man, more, infinitely more, than how to get rich, or how to win honor, even though it were to gain the whole world: for "what shall it profit a man, though he gain the whole world, and lose his soul." [19] Honor and riches can last, at most, but for a few years—and then comes death, "and after that the judgment." ”

“ But how shall we reform the man who has more animal than moral courage, who has lost the true idea of Soul? Through silent argument, convince the mortal of his mistake in seeking such means for procuring happiness. Perhaps reason is the most active human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments, and awaken the man's dormant sense of moral obligation; and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense, and the grandeur and bliss of a diviner sense, superior to matter. ”

“ WE, desiring to improve public morals, must begin by reforming the heart of man; and in order to reform the heart of man, it is necessary first of all to place education upon a sound basis.
When man comes into being between Heaven and Earth, there are certain moral obligations in his daily life, which are for the learned and simple alike; to seek after the mysterious and to practice strange arts is not to follow the example of the wise and the worthy. ”

“ This life is not a sojourn in a vale of tears, but the scene of the attempts of socially-minded, conscious organisms to achieve a temperate and fairly happy existence. But the centuries intervening have not been without their effect; man's moral horizon has been both deepened and enlarged. ”