Religion of nature

“ There is not, and never was, any necessary connection between any theory of Nature's history and the kernel of religion—the sense of a supreme mystery behind Nature, the sense of, moral obligation transcending utility, and the hope of everlasting life. ”

“ How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. ”

“ But I fear the opinion of Immaterial substances in Nature will at last bring in again the Heathen Religion, and make us believe a god Pan, Bacchus, Ceres, Venus, and the like, so as we may become worshippers of Groves and shadows, Beans and Onions, as our Forefathers. I say not this, as if I would ascribe any worship to Nature, or make her a Deity, for she is onely a servant to God, and so are all her parts or creatures, which parts or creatures, although they are transformed, yet cannot be annihilated, except Nature her self be annihilated, which may be, whensoever the Great God pleases ”

“ Thus the religion of the Rig-Veda ascends from nature up to nature's God. The worshipper appreciates the glorious phenomena of nature, and rises from these phenomena to grasp the mysteries of creation and its great Creator. ”

“ Nature was the sphere of the activities of the gods in the same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature, man and the gods acted together in a sort of social whole. ”

“ For our second conception Natural Religion is viewed simply as the voice of human nature itself, whose faith is to be expressed, whose ideals are to be recorded, whose will and whose needs are to be, above all, consulted and portrayed, since, for this view, the consciousness of those who believe in religious truth is, when once made articulate, its own apology. But, for our third conception, the office of the student of Natural Religion is to deal with the most fundamental metaphysical problems. ”

“ To those who believe in the Uniformity of Nature, religion is impossible.
Can we affect the nature and qualities of substance by prayer? Can we hasten or delay the tides by worship? Can we change winds by sacrifice? Will kneelings give us wealth? Can we cure disease by supplication? Can we add to our knowledge by ceremony? Can we receive virtue or honor as alms? ”

“ But the idea that religion may calmly neglect the study of nature as long as naturalism leaves breathing-room for the freedom and independence of mind is quite erroneous. If religion is true, nature must be of God, and it must bear tokens which allow us to interpret it as of God. ”

“ You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. ”

“ But Nature comes into the category of religion, for to him religion means: To know and feel at one with ourselves, with God, and with man; to be loyal to ourselves, to God, and to Nature: and to remain in continual active, living relations with God. ”

“ Nature worship is the religion which unobserved makes the most proselytes nowadays. Even the druggist of my little town, who is a clever botanist, has gradually renounced his slack Protestantism for an ardent and devout nature worship. When he accompanies me to my nursery occasionally, on his search for plants, he can be stirred to truly southern enthusiasm at the sight of insects, birds, plants, trees, meadows, - all the wonders of his adored "Nature." ”

“ Nothing is more certain than that man everywhere started with a simple worship of natural objects. And the bearing of this on the future of religion is decisive. The religion of man in the vast cycles of primitive ages was reverence for Nature as influencing Man. The religion of man in the vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence for Humanity as supported by Nature. The religion of man in the twenty or thirty centuries of Theology was reverence for the assumed authors or controllers of Nature. ”

“ A religion, therefore, claiming divine origin, ought, by the nature of its doctrines and principles, to produce conviction in the mind, that it is really supernatural and divine. It ought to exhibit the proof of this celestial birth in so clear and striking a manner, as to be capable of being embraced by every capacity interested in a knowledge of its nature and consequences. ”

“ This thoroughly 'pragmatic' view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. ”

“ The interest of religion as against the claims of naturalism includes all this. And it would be doing the cause of religion sorry service to extract from this whole some isolated question to which the mood of the time or traditional custom has given prominence. Our task must be to show that religion maintains its validity and freedom because of the truth and independence of spirit and its superiority to nature. ”

“ One of the main factors in the origin of religion is the feeling of dependence upon nature so strongly manifested in all primitive forms of faith. The outcome of this feeling of dependence was to exalt the forces of nature into divinities, and man's conception of these divinities, shaped as it was by the attitude of nature around him, had an incalculable influence on his life and actions. ”

“ But that which is beyond the range of the senses, that realm of phenomena through which the conscious pathway to the Kingdom of God leads, the world of spiritual susceptibilities and divine religion,—of these the animal is completely unaware, for in its highest station it is a captive of nature. ”

“ The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him. ”

“ For there is this outstanding difference between religion and all “moods”—all poetic or fanciful views of nature—that it lives by the certainty of its ideas, suffers if they be uncertain, and dies if they be shown to be untenable, however charming or consoling, sublime or simple they may be. ”

“ And the very first attempt to answer these spontaneous questions produces the first theory of natural theology, inaugurating the reign of the earliest natural religion.
But the curiosity of the intellect never slumbers, and the problem repeats itself from age to age: What is the magnificent and mysterious power above man and before nature, the primordial Cause of all phenomena? ”

“ The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not “divine”! The formula “natura sive deus” is a monstrous misuse of the word “deus,” if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask “Why?” ”

“ B. Allowing that the natural knowledge we have of God, ourselves, and our fellow creatures, is the foundation of all religions, may not external revelation, building on this foundation, erect a larger and nobler edifice, by extending it to such things as the Light of Nature could not reach, without contradicting anything it teaches? ”

“ Then there sprang up and too widely spread itself abroad through the world that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism which, totally opposed as it is to the Christian religion as a supernatural institution, striveth with all its might to thrust out Christ from the thoughts and the life of men, and to set up the reign of mere reason or nature. ”

“ All the new discoveries in astronomy, which prove the immense grandeur and magnificence of the works of Nature, are so many additional arguments for a Deity, according to the true system of Theism; but, according to your hypothesis of experimental Theism, they become so many objections, by removing the effect still further from all resemblance to the effects of human art and contrivance. ”

“ This opens up a vista into the background of things, and thereby yields to the religious conception all that a study of nature can yield—namely, an acknowledgment of the possibility and legitimacy of interpreting the world in a religious sense, and assistance in so doing. ”

“ For our first conception the student of Natural Religion, having accepted the natural knowledge of his time as valid, and not having attempted to delve beneath the foundations of that knowledge, seeks to interpret external nature in the light of religious interests. ”

“ The heart of traditional religion seems to be the belief in a personal, superhuman agency at work in nature or, rather, upon nature. Even the religious mind, however, admits that investigation has shown that there is a routine aspect to nature which covers the ordinary course of events. ”

“ This struggle takes place in the religious consciousness of mankind, which ascends through the various mythologies to Christianity, and finally through the development of Christianity to the religion of pure spirit.—In addition to brilliant ideas and points of view, we find here also, just as in the Philosophy of Nature, a large measure of fantasy and arbitrariness. ”

“ The holy scripture, therefore, designing by revealed religion to maintain and improve natural religion, to repair the decays of it, and supply the defects of it, since the fall, for the reviving of the precepts of the law of nature; lays down, at first, this principle of the unclouded light of nature, That this world was, in the beginning of time, created by a Being of infinite wisdom and power, who was himself before all time, and all worlds. ”

“ The freedom of spirit over nature makes its appearance, but to the spirit explicitly in the transcendent form of abstract theistic religion, in which God appears as the ruler over Nature as merely dependent; and His chosen people plant the root of their nationality no longer in the earth, but in this belief. The unity of the abstractly natural and abstractly spiritual determinateness is the concrete unity of the spirit with nature, in which it recognizes nature as its necessary organ, and itself as in its nature divine. ”

“ Next, science of religion became natural theology, which proved the existence of God by the nature of thought and by the constitution of reality, and also the immortality of the soul by the concept of the soul and by moral demands, thus constructing natural or rational dogmas and putting these dogmas into more or less friendly relations with traditional Christianity. ”

“ Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy — by one or more or all of these — and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details. ”

“ The form and path of faith are determined, in much, by the kind of natural objects with which the spiritual faculty is most closely or impressively brought in contact. Where the spirit of man is frequently confronted with Nature in its power, beauty, or wrath—where sky, sun, mountain, or river, is an important factor in the daily experience and fortune—there arise naturally the corresponding forms of religion—Nature-worship, fetichism, and pantheism. ”

“ The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. ”

“ In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. “Science” in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the “Laws of Nature” as objective facts to be revered. ”

“ The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. ”