Religious literature

“ The enlightened soul can see the invisible, and live its true life in the suprasensible sphere. The primary evidence for the truth of religion is religious experience, which in persons of religious genius—those whom the Church calls saints and prophets—includes a clear perception of an eternal world of truth, beauty, and goodness, surrounding us and penetrating us at every point. ”

“ The most important lesson deducible from all the religious systems, commemorated in history, and noticed in this work, is, that all religious conceptions, whether in the shape of doctrine, precept, prophecy, prayer, religious devotion, or a belief in miracles, are a spontaneous outgrowth of the moral and religious elements of the human mind. And to assign them a higher origin is to ignore the developments of modern science, and insult the highest intelligence of the age. ”

“ But churches whose genius it is to develop religious thought, as distinguished from religious emotion, will gradually change, and the devotional element will take the place largely of the theologic, and the ethical the place of the philosophical. ”

“ What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. ”

“ But whether Mother Church or Poetry or Philosophy or Music be the magic-medium, the result is much the same if the motive be not religiously sincere, sincerely religious, piously pure, lofty, and humane. ”

“ Stress must be laid upon those last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is the perfection and consecration of man's whole nature, intellectual and physical, as well as moral and spiritual. All that is lovely, splendid, moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life—all health and vigour and beauty and cleverness and charm—all nature and all art, all science and all literature—are among the good and perfect gifts which come down from the Father of Lights. ”

“ Consider now these various states of mind—that of the people, ready to add almost any deity to the large and vague number already recognised; that of the poet, who finds the deities such useful literary material; that of the magistrate or public man, who, without enthusiasm or necessary belief, regards religion as a thing useful to society; and that of the philosopher, who thinks all the current religious conceptions unsound, if not absurd, and morally almost useless. ”

“ He will see and hear many things which powerfully tend to increase and perpetuate his serious impressions. He moves in a circle where God, the soul, and salvation are regarded as of supreme importance—where religion is presented to him—not as a cold abstraction, but living in the persons of its disciples. 3. No one will continue to walk with religious persons after his serious impressions are effaced, and it is presumed that no one who continued to be the subject of religious impressions for any length of time ever failed to become religious. ”

“ Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. ”

“ It seems to me clear, then, that if we are to emphasize the transcendent elements in religion; if they represent, as we have been contending, the central elements of the religious experience, its creative factors, then the revival of worship will be a prime step in creating a more truly spiritual society. ”

“ The religious spirit, the consciousness of the Absolute, and the reverence for it, should permeate all. Not unfrequently, however, we find that what is meant by religion is theology, or the church ceremonial, and these are only one-sided phases of the total religious process. ”

“ Very likely, because they are more familiar with the phraseology of the Scriptures than you are; and they feel the power of religious truth on their heart more forcibly than you profess to do. Your religion, if I judge from your conversation, is the religion of opinion, theirs of belief—yours of speculation, theirs of principle—yours of forms and ceremonies, theirs of knowledge and of feeling—yours [419] of times and seasons, theirs of habitual devotion; and while you derive no consolation from the routine of duties which you perform, they have peace with God through Jesus Christ. ”

“ The first point I will speak of is the part which the æsthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You believe the direct influence of the Spirit of God upon every individual mind is necessary, to make him a religious being. I cannot but think that the indirect influence, the beautiful and ever-renewed miracle of nature, the observation of God's providence in the care of his creatures, and the study of the adaptation of Christianity to our particular dispositions—not merely by a process of reasoning, but aided by the religious sentiment which seems to me innate and natural to every human being—is more powerful. ”

“ There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.”
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. ”

“ That the essence of religion consisted in the feelings of divine love; and that it was a matter of indifference what opinions Christians entertained concerning points of faith, provided their hearts burned with the sacred flame of piety and love. (2.) That the union of the soul with Christ transforms it into the essence of the Deity. ”

“ But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title. ”

“ This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. ”

“ The fervour shown in sacred worship and work must have an origin that is purely religious. He who pleads earnestly with God on behalf of men, or rises to impassioned appeal in beseeching men to repent, appearing as an ambassador of Christ urged by the love of souls, has to do not with symbols, but with truths, ideas, Divine mysteries infinitely more sacred than the incense and fire of Old Testament worship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now we venture to believe that we have peculiar and pre-eminent advantages for answering questions of this nature—that we are prepared to point out the way to the acquisition of a religious character, and consequently the way to eternal life with more clearness and certainty than is attainable under any other system of theological belief. ”

“ In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed: out of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of hopelessly conflicting statements in religion and morals has come, in obedience to this new conception of development, the idea of a sacred literature which mirrors the most striking evolution of morals and religion in the history of our race. Of all the sacred writings of the world, it shows us our own as the most beautiful and the most precious ”

“ We call attention to the term “doctrines”—therefore religious beliefs: reasonable, plausible, satisfying beliefs. What are they? First: Ritualism is Religion; when we have gone through a certain proscribed programme—whether it be a chant, reading prayers, or burning a dim light—there you are. How do we know we are religious? ”

“ We may be able to account historically or mythologically for many excrescences of religion, but we cannot dispute them away, nor can we wonder that a pure mind, sickened by them, should turn with a delightful relief to the pure and fresh atmosphere of Christianity. ”

“ For, more often than not, religion is the whetstone on which men sharpen the spiritual sense. Religion, like art, is concerned with the world of emotional reality, and with material things only in so far as they are emotionally significant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, religion ought to be dispensed in accommodation to this spirit and character of our age. Men desire excitement, and religion must be communicated in a more exciting form.... Men will not now be trifled with.... They want a religion which will take a strong hold upon them.
And they desire the same quality in their literature, he says elsewhere, “a poetry which pierces beneath the exterior of life to the depths of the soul.” ”

“ They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitrary and fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notion of equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the source of all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness ”

“ And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until The Passionate Friends of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. ”

“ Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now, I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another. ”

“ Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness. We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life. ”

“ Religion descends from heaven to break our chains. She alone raises me from degradation, and bids me lift my drooping head, and look up to heaven. Yes; it is that very gospel which by some is supposed to present such dark, degrading, gloomy views of man and his destiny, which lifts me from the dust to set me among princes—on a level with angels—in a sense above them. To say nothing of the divine nobility grace imparts to a soul which is stamped anew with the likeness and image of God, how sacred and venerable does even this body appear in the eye of piety! ”

“ According to the above theory, revealed religion should be especially poetical—and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world—a world of overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and purest feelings. ”

“ How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in all its mystery and splendour—the life of more than this-world perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. ”