New religion

“ We no longer light our rooms by the dim light of a small oil lamp, we walk no longer at night through dark narrow lanes, but through brightly illuminated avenues, does it follow from this that it can no longer be true that Christ is the Son of God, nor that He has worked miracles, or founded a Church, and a new religion is therefore necessary? ”

“ And now for the next objection, that "this is a new religion." How can men give the name of a new religion to that which proclaims as the one means of salvation the Eternal Word of God believed in of old by Jews as well as by Christians? Or is it a mark of novelty to accept Jesus of Nazareth as that Word incarnate? The one thing new about the opinions put forward in my letters is this—that it is not a necessary condition for believing in Christ, that men should accept a number of historical statements which are, and have been, doubted by many honest seekers after truth. ”

“ Every religious change in a people is, in fact, only an intermixture of religions; because the new religion, whether received by means of convincing arguments, or enforced by the eloquence of fire and sword, cannot at once tear up all the wide-spreading roots by which its forerunner has grown in the heart of the people ”

“ The New Theology is the gospel of the kingdom of God. Neither socialism nor any other economic system will permanently save and lift mankind without definitely recognised spiritual sanctions, that is, it must be a religion. The New Theology is but the religious articulation of the social movement. ”

“ There have been cases in which the efforts of individuals or societies have been directed towards the spread of a new religion, but the result has been the creation of a new state or the making of a powerful military community. Sometimes the ruling classes or the subjects have endeavoured to raise the status of their country by developing its secular and political interests, but a new religious system with its peculiar dogmas and doctrines has displaced the old mythology and renovated the spiritual life of the people. ”

“ When we have acquired a true meaning for these disputed terms, we shall stand harmoniously on a common ground. We shall then be ready to accept the higher teachings of the new religion. A religion of spiritual evolution and unfoldment, which responds to the progress of the twentieth century. ”

“ The conversion of a people to a new religion, notwithstanding the glory of apostolic legends, must have always been largely a nominal change. The victorious faith takes up into itself the customs and cardinal ideas, the habits of feeling and doing, the mental and moral leaf-mould, as it were, of the old, and it is often the old that survives in the growth under a new name and in a new social organization. ”

“ The new religion, as it has ever since been called, embodied all the precepts of the ancient faith, recognized the ancient mode of worship giving it a new sanction of the Great Spirit, and also comprehend such new doctrines as came in aptly, to lengthen out and enlarge the original system without impairing it. ”

“ We cannot expect anything other or better than what we have, i.e. what the people, or the young Christian community, related about the life of the founder of the new religion, unless it were a record from the hand of the founder of our religion himself; for even the apostles are only depicted as men, and their comprehension is represented as purely human and often very fallible. ”

“ Maur insisted.
"It would mean a great new religion," Lord Henry answered. "And we are all too much [143] exhausted for such a stupendous undertaking. New religions depend in the first place upon the belief in great men, and where are the great men of to-day? Only those whose coarse impudence has made them forget their limitations start new religions nowadays. ”

“ Again, the history of the past, and a study of the present, enabled us to see that the foundation of a new religion, or the modification of an old one, did not destroy ancient practices, though it transferred priestly power to a new set of men, who, while they introduced new gods and new dogmas, endeavoured to incorporate the older ideas with new, so as to seduce or cheat the vulgar, whom it was not judicious to slaughter, into adopting the new faith. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a country that has stood still for twenty-five centuries, worshipping the past and bowing down to nineteen thousand filthy gods, you can hear 'My Faith Looks Up to Thee' and 'All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name' sung by congregations so big that they have to meet out doors. And yet I understand from reading one or two high-browed religious magazines printed in this country that the old gospel has lost its power and that the world must have a new brand of religion of the hermetically canned variety suited to the elevated culture and new thought of the times. ”

“ We have made great progress in the material province of civilization, in science and art; “can an old religion suffice under these new and improved conditions, a religion which originated at an age when these conditions did not exist? This contradiction is shocking.... Progress in culture demands progress in religion.... We want a more perfect religion, a higher religion” (Masaryk, Im Kampf um die Religion, 1904, 29) . ”

“ What a joy it would be if there could come to pass a real revival of religion, of piety and morality, in the church of America—I mean among the thirty thousand Protestant ministers and the thirty hundred thousand Protestant church members;—a revival of religion which should be qualitatively nice and quantitatively large,—a great, new growth of the soul ”

“ When we project this great revolution upon the whole history of the Christian Church, we cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human life. For good or for evil, it was a great transformation of religion ”

“ Therefore, when we point out in heathendom the preparation for a new promulgation of the universal religion, we are not tracing Christianity back to its natural causes and to its origin, but are tracing the movement of humanity along its re-entering curve, from the ultimate term of its departure, to its point of contact with a new motive power, the true and divine cause of the re-conversion and restoration of mankind through Christ, qui restauret omnia. ”

“ So long as the new organisation claims to be Christian at all, it must go back for its foundation to Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and he himself can appear only as a reformer, a restorer of what professes, and must profess, to be the religion which they delivered to mankind. ”

“ And thus, in the expression of the [48] biographer of Charles V., the barbarous nations when converted to Christianity changed the object, not the spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas of the old religion were consciously tolerated by the first propagators of Christianity, who justly deemed that the new dogmas would be more readily insinuated into the rude and simple minds of their neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. ”

“ In keeping with this fact it is found that in those countries where the greatest changes and modifications of government and occupation have occurred, there have the religions undergone the greatest modification to fit the new order of things. If it were the religion that determined the matter, civilization and morals would be immovable, and legislation would revolve around, the guidance of the Church. ”

“ The early representatives of Christianity, with a keen-sighted appreciation of the means by which a change of religion is most successfully effected, treated the older conceptions with tolerance, and by doing so made possible the establishment of new ideas in the old heathen setting. ”

“ The religion of our new era, we may be sure, if it be in any real sense a religion of the world, will not be something apart from and above other experiences. It will be a secular religion and a democratic religion, a quality and spirit of life as a whole. ”

“ In the long and varied course in which religion has adapted itself to new intellectual and moral conditions, one of the most marked processes has affected time-honoured religious customs, whose form has been faithfully and even servilely kept up, while their nature has often undergone transformation. ”

“ mankind waits for the new founder of religion, and, as in the year one, the age presses for a decision The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworthiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and the God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. ”

“ I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. ”

“ But I hear (added he) you preach to a great number of people every night and morning. Pray, what would you do with them? Whither would you lead them? What religion do you preach? What is it good for?” I replied, “I do preach to as many as desire to hear, every night and morning.” You ask, “What I would do with them?” I would make them virtuous and happy, easy in themselves, and useful to others. “Whither would I lead them?” To heaven; to God the Judge, the lover of all, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant. “What religion do I preach?” The religion of love; ”

“ People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind, and the heart, and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it's being challenged in many different ways. ”

“ one religion is as true as another, new fangled devices, all for human respects;” ”

“ But I trust it will be seen that what is contained in this book is at least a self-consistent whole: every arc of the circle implies every other. It only remains to reiterate my conviction that the movement represented by the New Theology is only incidentally theological at all; it is primarily a moral and spiritual movement. It is one symptom of a great religious awakening which in the end will re-inspire civilisation with a living faith in God and the spiritual meaning of life. ”

“ In place of the rule of Law and Order, rising into the rule of Equity and Love, they substitute the arbitrary rule of a monarch, full of partiality, favoritism and vindictiveness. The time has come for something more humane, consistent and rational, more progressive, comprehensive and complete. This the New Theology supplies to the advanced mind. Mankind are sloughing off the Old Theologies, and coming up higher. We are at the turn of the tide, and the New Theology is a safe craft on which to ride the spiritual waves, in the light of a new and better era, to a higher condition. ”

“ Sometime in his religious development—it is impossible to settle precisely when or where—he read the writings of the spiritual Reformers, and received from them formative influences which turned him powerfully to the cultivation of inward religion for his own soul and to the expression and interpretation of a universal Christianity—a Christianity of the inward Word and of an invisible Church. ”

“ The end for which God created man, according to the belief and teaching of the New Church, was, that there might be a heaven of angels from the human race—a countless host of rational, wise and loving creatures, images and likenesses of Himself, capable of receiving his own life, and of being made unspeakably and eternally happy in the mutual and reciprocal impartation of that life. ”

“ If thus we learn to respect the old, still more do we learn that what is new has also its all-important part to play. The blade and the ear in turn are innovations. We must not condemn those new forms of Christian activity, Christian association, and Christian councils, which new times evoke, until we have considered well whether they are truly expansions, in the light and heat of our century, of the sacred life-germ of the ancient faith and the ancient love. ”

“ In the degree that the old and false dogmas which ecclesiastical councils have super-induced upon the early Christian Church, together with the selfish, bigoted, and infernal spirit that is so often the sure accompaniment of such dogmas, are cast out, and the new light and life through the New Heaven is received, the New Church is established and built up. And that this church-renewing process is steadily going on all around us, must be plain to every careful observer of the religious thought and life of our times. ”

“ The war against science, criticism, literature, and art-all that is characteristic of our age—is gradually being limited to a smaller number of theologians and denominations, and there is ever an increasing number of theologians and churches which fully recognize all the achievements of modern times, and who are at work in harmonizing them with the verified Christian dogmas in a larger, grander system—in a new theology representing all that is noblest and best in Christianity as applied to the modern world. ”

“ Could Catholicism be renewed, could it return to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world, overturned and in danger of perishing, awaits in order to be pacified and to live? ”

“ We are now near the close of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, but the faith we profess is by no means a worn-out cult, a spent force, a religious movement which has run its evolutionary course and is now about to take its place among the things that have been. Such a fate may overtake a religion as well as other things. ”