Religious history

“ It was my purpose, in projecting the essays at what seemed to me to be the dawn of a great religious era, to help the onward movement by a few earnest words. History itself has swept the world far beyond one's dreams, and in completing them, I only ask that they may stand a further witness to the overwhelming majesty and influence of the Christian faith. ”

“ It simply wishes to apply the tests of reason, of experience, of judgment, and of such knowledge as history affords from the manifestations of the religious principle in man, to some of the phases of the thought and inquiry of our time.
"Christianity is a fact and it is to be accounted for. ”

“ Aspirations and ideals, connected especially with man's religious life, spring from the long line of experiences with which men have always been struggling. The central fact of the higher religious experience is communion and union with the deity, and the roots of this conception are found in all the religious ideas and usages that have been formulated and practiced in human history. ”

“ Christian belief, Christian morality, the Christian view of the world, of which the church as a religious society and institution is the focus, as fluid spiritual elements permeate humanity as it becomes Christian, far beyond the sphere of the church proper ”

“ As it is one of the main characteristics of Christianity itself, that alone of all religions it claims to be founded on historical fact—that its doctrines and precepts, in great measure, have been conveyed to us in the form of history, and that this form has given them a substance, a vitality, a variety, which could, humanly speaking, have been attained in no other way ”

“ I deny not, that there are some matters of fact, as the more remarkable turns of ecclesiastical history, and the greater revolutions of the civil world, which are of moment to be known; because, by discovering to us the conduct of divine providence, they supply us with occasions of acknowledging and adoring the wisdom and goodness of God. Neither do I deny, that there are many other historical passages, which may be of moment to be known; tho’ not as perfective of our understanding, but as touching our interest. ”

“ But to reverence it for what it really is, a record of the religious evolution of the most intensely religious nation of antiquity, a great race that has contributed more to the religious life of the world than any other, is a credit to the intelligence of any one. ”

“ Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions, as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and operation of the Infinite and of God in all men. ”

“ This is the explanation which a great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European history. ”

“ The name ‘religion’ should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element. ”

“ To this intellectual, moral, and religious activity, heightened and intensified by supernatural faith, we owe the spread of Christianity throughout the Gentile world, more than to the zeal and labors of all the apostles. ”

“ They steadfastly sought to eliminate the miraculous from theological belief, and to expel from the system of religious truth all debatable, difficult or mysterious articles. They aimed at a rational and intelligible faith, professedly in order to make religion, in all its width and depth, the heritage of every man. ”

“ They were men of sterling character, of deep religious convictions, of willingness to make painful sacrifices for the sake of principle, of great reverence for the Bible and the institutions of religion, of purity of life in the home and in their social relations. They believed that religion was the supreme thing and that the commandments of God were of binding obligation upon all intelligent moral beings. ”

“ Ecclesiastical influence thus familiarises us with the distinctions of secular and sacred, and we hear frequent mention made of our duties to God and our duties to man, of our religious duties and our worldly duties, and we frequently hear religion spoken of as something readily distinguishable from business. ”

“ So-called Christianity has become a social and cultural movement as well as a religious belief and practice. The stream of modern Christianity drains many an ancient pagan swamp and many a barbarian morass ”

“ Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. ”

“ Even with a view to the ascendancy which a more simple and purified religion may ultimately obtain under an improved and free constitution, it is better that a religious feeling of some sort should exist. ”

“ But a thorough acquaintance with the history and moral systems of some of the oriental nations, and the practical lives of piety and self-denial exemplified in their leading men long anterior to the birth of Christ, and long before the name of Christianity was anywhere known, must convince any unprejudiced mind that such a claim is without foundation. ”

“ And in that place, religion, religious system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself in a way of which even the least serious by nature could not be unaware. Their great church, its customs and traditions, formed an element in that esprit de corps into which the boyish mind throws itself so readily. ”

“ If we begin our study of the book expecting to find clear evidence of an established Theocracy, a spiritual idea of the kingdom of God ever present to the mind, ever guiding the hope and effort of the tribes, we shall experience that bewilderment which has not seldom fallen upon students of Old Testament history. Divide the life of man into two parts, the sacred and the secular ”

“ And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. ”

“ Two causes are obviously assignable for Christianity in all its essential features and phases, being so strikingly similar to the ancient pagan systems which preceded it, as also the close analogies of all the principal systems, whose doctrines and practical teachings have found a place on the pages of history. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the early history of the Christian Church, the theological interest centred in discussions on the nature of God, the meaning of the Incarnation, and apocalyptic forecastes of the ultimate fate of the world. ”

“ In the diversity of the Church will be found a more powerful argument for the divine origin of Christianity itself, than in the most perfect unity. It is not, humanly speaking, surprising that a religion should sustain itself from age to age in the same race and country. ”

“ And so it has varied from age to age, and can and must change in our time also, assimilating its culture, if Christianity still wishes to answer to the spiritual demands of our time. The religious and moral value of fundamental truths remains ”

“ It is therefore a lesson all the more worth learning from history that one religion at least, and one of the most ancient and powerful and most widely spread82 religions, has recognized this fact without the slightest hesitation. ”

“ The position we profess to occupy as a religious body, is a subject for profound reflection. We testify to having received a knowledge, through the revelations of heaven, concerning the restoration of the ancient Gospel and holy Priesthood, whereby we have been authorized to preach by inspiration, and administer to the world the principles of life and salvation. ”

“ The religion of civilization. The advancing religious concepts and practices of the civilizing races—the religion of the mind—the intellectual theology of the authority of established religious tradition. True religion—the religion of revelation. The revelation of supernatural values, a partial insight into eternal realities, a glimpse of the goodness and beauty of the infinite character of the Father in heaven—the religion of the spirit as demonstrated in human experience. ”

“ Nowhere, perhaps, are broad views of historical development more needed than in the study of religion. Notwithstanding all that has been written to make the world acquainted with the lower theologies, the popular ideas of their place in history and their relation to the faiths of higher nations are still of the mediæval type. ”

“ A very able critical defence of the genuineness of the New Testament history, of the truth of the miracles and resurrection of our Lord, his superhuman character and 843divine mission, completes a solid and unanswerable argument for the historical basis of Christianity as a divine and supernatural religion. ”

“ When Christianity began its career of world conquest in the preaching of the Apostle Paul, the representatives of the intellectual culture of the ancient world assumed toward it an attitude, either of utter indifference, or of keen hostility, or of readiness to accept Christian elements, while retaining along with these many of their old notions. ”

“ In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as remarked already, studiously inclined people made no particular selection of one study rather than another. But men discriminated sharply between religious devotion and all profane pursuits. Energies which were regarded as religious might have a political-ecclesiastical character, and be devoted to the purification and upbuilding of the Church ”

“ Our people not only created the noblest religion of the ancient world, a religion which is destined to become the common property of the entire civilized world, but continued to develop it, keeping pace with the progress of the human spirit. ”

“ The history of Christianity furnishes sublime proofs of the supporting influence and protecting power bestowed Christian history on man by his heavenly Father, omnipotent Mind, who gives man faith and understanding whereby to defend himself, not only from temptation, but from bodily suffering. ”

“ It is really a request that I should judge Christianity, as a great, ancient, historic system, not by what it has in the main taught and done, but by what a select body of its professors say and do in the present generation. ”

“ They enable one to draw important conclusions as to the dates of propagation and disappearance of the various religions, their extent, the quality and social rank of their votaries, the sacred hierarchy and sacerdotal personnel, the constitution of the religious communities, the offerings made to the gods, and the ceremonies performed in their honor ”

“ Oh that a preacher might arise and expound from the Book of books a religion with a God, a religion with a heart in it--a Christian religion, which would abolish the cold legend whose centre is respectability, and which rears great buildings in which the rich recline on silken hassocks while the poor perish in the shadow thereof. ”

“ Christianity, by planting itself emphatically at the very first start, as one may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety of externalism, and placing the essence of all true religion in regeneration, or, as St. ”

“ I merely wish to lay stress upon the fact that, for one reason and another, Christianity, at least among Protestants, has cast aside, or dropped out, a great part of the ancient practise that, during many centuries, helped it adapt itself to human needs, enabled it to produce heroic and radiant personalities, and shed over it a poetry which it now lacks. ”

“ In the world, and in society, religion is a tabooed subject—it is only kept for Sundays and for churches. I believe your clergy know no more of the real doctrines of Christianity, those deep and mystical truths underlying the teachings of Christ, than the child at his mother’s knee. ”

“ Of a separation of religion and politics, of the spiritual power from the temporal, heathen antiquity knew nothing, because it regarded religion itself only from a natural point of view, and subjected it to the purposes of the all-ruling state, the highest known form of human society. ”

“ Thus we grew up from our earliest youth, being taught to look upon Christianity as an historical fact, on Christ and His disciples as historical characters, on the Old and New Testaments as real historical books. ”

“ I still admire the Liturgy, and I still believe the Articles of the church; I still retain that religion which you say is venerable for its antiquity; but, then, I believe it is not to remain a religion of mere forms and ceremonies, but that it is to operate on my heart, and produce within me the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The new religion, as you and others are pleased to term it, is not a corruption of the old; but it is the old religion of our venerable Reformers, and the good old bishops and pastors of our church, revived in its primitive simplicity, and life, and power. ”