Religious mania

“ The history of Christianity, with which alone we have here to deal, affords recurring examples of agitation directed against a perverted religious symbolism—a dangerous degeneration which, by crushing the spirit beneath the letter of observance, leads to hypocritical and idolatrous practices. ”

“ Is reason so largely developed in the great mass of men that the priests should interdict its use as dangerous? Are mankind sufficiently advanced in knowledge to be able to overcome the prejudices and chimeras which render them unhappy during the greatest part of their lives? In fine, have the beasts some species of religious impressions, which inspire continual terrors in their breast, making them look upon some awful event, which imbitters their softest pleasures, which enjoins them to torment themselves, and which threatens them with eternal damnation? ”

“ Now religion in the hands of corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind, than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame, than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, hatred, and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions, which nature, left to itself, would start at. ”

“ In a word, it is passion, affliction, and despair to which most conversions must be attributed; and they are persons of such character who deliver themselves to the priests, and these mental aberrations and physical afflictions are the marvellous strokes of grace of which God makes use to lead men to himself.
It is not, then, surprising if we see persons subject to this devotion most commonly ruled by sorrow and passion. These mental moods are perpetually aggravated by religion, which is exactly calculated to imbitter more and more the souls thus filled with vexations. ”

“ Not all the pleasures of the most prosperous sinners, could counterbalance the hundredth part of those sensations described in his penitential psalms—and which must be the portion of every man, who has fallen from a religious state into such crimes, when once he recovers a sense of religion and virtue, and is brought to a real hatred of sin. ”

“ We impute fanaticism {198} when the tension of religious feeling destroys the moral equilibrium or stunts development of other parts of our nature, or prompts to acts which, but for this morbid influence, would excite moral indignation. ”

“ Yet still, habits of religious restraint, even more, perhaps, than religion itself, checked the dangerous impulse; and that ardent sentiment which resisted the force of his reason and the influence of his faith, submitted to the dictates of what might be deemed rather his prejudice than his principle. ”

“ If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one's being and appointer of one's spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and 'conviction of sin' that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. ”

“ The spiritual dissipations indulged in by the religious world, wherever asceticism prevails, are more injurious to sound morals than any public amusements, as conducted in modern times, have ever been proved to be. It is questionable whether even gross licentiousness is not at least equally encouraged by the excitement of passionate religious emotions, separate from action: and it is certain that rank spiritual vices, pride, selfishness, tyranny, and superstition, spring up luxuriantly in the hotbeds of religious meetings. ”

“ Violent excitements, as a rule, are found only among northern nations, among the ignorant masses, or those who have more feeling than judgment.
But why may not a wide-spread excitement about religious truths, though in some persons a mere physical condition of the nervous system, be the very means, under God, of arresting their mind or the minds of others, and disposing them to consider and receive the truth itself? What is it which we have most to complain of as an obstacle to the gospel? ”

“ It was no sudden happening, like the conversion some people seem to experience; but came about quite logically. Some people take religion like a disease, and it runs a similar course. They get sick, sicker, sickest; and then die or recover. With religion they get religious, more religious, most religious or fanatic, and then they go mad or suddenly become free-thinkers. People whose emotions are well-balanced and thoroughly under the control of intellect never go mad over a religious idea. ”

“ It is also to be remembered, that of all those cases which are charged to religion by an indiscriminating public, and by the enemies of Christianity, in very few of them is the insanity produced by the proper presentation of religious truth, while in the great majority of them it owes its origin to the wild vagaries and the rash measures of the errorist, the ultraist, and the fanatic. ”

“ First, you see how the entire consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious systems.
Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. ”

“ All this apparatus of defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies and chapel oppositions,—things which have given a form so strangely artificial to our conceptions of Christianity—are here either secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being concentrated into strong Sunday doses, is here a pervasive, unobtrusive presence, that cometh not with observation, the luminous background of human conduct, the hiding-place of the light which irradiates the whole picture of man's life. ”

“ A more stable and active form of religious exaltation is theomania—i.e., “a mental state in which the subject believes himself to be God, or at least inspired by Him to reveal His will to men.” To draw a hard and fast line between the founders of religions, the reformers, the promoters of religious orders, and pure theomaniacs, is as difficult as to indicate the precise point at which a violent love becomes madness. ”

“ But if hostile to light irony, religion is equally hostile to heavy grumbling and complaint. The world appears tragic enough in some religions, but the tragedy is realized as purging, and a way of deliverance is held to exist. ”

“ Notwithstanding the rage of persecution, a calm, devout, earnest, patient protest against the prevailing corruption of religious faith continued for centuries to be uttered. The Christians of that early time had only a partial knowledge of the truth, but they had learned to love and obey God's word, and they patiently suffered for its sake. ”

“ And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the 'prayerful communion' of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work—even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations—can possibly be done. ”

“ Have I not often seen you uncertain yourself whether you ought to sigh or smile at the self-depreciation of devotees ridiculously inflamed by that religious vanity which grows out of sectarian conventionalities? You also see them participating in theological quarrels, in which, without comprehending their nature or purport, they believe themselves conscientiously obliged to mingle. ”

“ We are so apt to consider these superstitions as bound up with old religious feelings, that we almost instinctively expect to find this kind of abuse supported by the pious and orthodox in those generations, and opposed chiefly by some coldly superior persons who are untouched by the popular feeling of the time. ”

“ What he pleads for, is, that self-examination should always have reference to tho Christian standard of temper and conduct; and that spiritual conflicts should consist of a resistance against evil dispositions or immoral practices. What he fears on the part of religious folks is, a forgetfulness of meekness, temperance, integrity, amid the illusions—now gloomy, now gaudy—of a diseased brain. ”

“ In the second were all that numerous body who, neurasthenically unbalanced or near the overbalance, shut instinctively the eyes of their reason and glowed with a devastating and fanatical religious zeal. Among these, so extraordinarily are we constituted, almost immediately grew up various sects, uniting only in the belief that the wrath of God was upon an iniquitous people. ”

“ While, among some of our equally well-meaning, but far less wise, religious teachers, there is, in consequence, a panic spreading in anticipation of the moral dangers which must follow on the loss of the help of the Devil. One of the last appearances in public of the author of the 'Christian Year' was at a conclave of clergymen assembled in defense of faith in damnation. ”

“ Panic terror of the supernatural, whenever it has occurred, has been a parody of the prevailing form of religion. When the religious ideas are at once narrow and introspective, when the social life is poor and unsatisfying, and when there is also a profound ignorance of bodily and mental physiology, we have the combined conditions for the ready and serious development of religious panic. Such were the circumstances of the witchcraft delusion that followed the religious revival due to the preaching of the Franciscan friars ”

“ What if the old gentleman considered her hostility to religion as a mere fashionable mania unsupported by inner conviction, a girlish whim changeable like the wind, which with little effort might be made to veer round to the point or the most unimpeachable orthodoxy? ”

“ We see these pernicious characteristics of the Divinity penetrating the entire economy of the Christian religion; we find them in the books which are pretended to be inspired, and we discover them in the dogmas of predestination and grace. In a word, every thing in religion announces a despotic God, whom his disciples vainly attempt to represent to us as just, while all that they declare of him only proves his injustice, his tyrannical caprices, his extravagances, so frequently cruel, and his partiality, so pernicious to the greater portion of the human race. ”

“ Displays of religious emotion in everyday life they regarded as symptoms of insanity; and if they heard people discuss religion with enthusiasm, and profess to love the Lord, they were genuinely shocked. ”

“ There are religious exaltations beyond the regular pulse and beatings of ordinary nature, that quite as surely gravitate downward into the mire of irritability. The ascent to the third heaven lets even the Apostle down to a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him.
It is the temptation of natures in which the moral faculties predominate to overdo in the outward expression and activities of religion till they are used up and irritable, and have no strength left to set a good example in domestic life. ”

“ This letter contains sentiments, on the subject of religious toleration, which would be highly ornamental, if placed in golden characters, upon the walls of all our churches—“Our fault is, we are apt to be mighty hot upon speculative errors, and break all bounds in our resentments; but we let practical ones pass without remark, if not without repentance! as if a mistake about an obscure proposition of faith were a greater evil, than the breach of an undoubted precept. ”

“ We perceive with pain and fearful apprehension a general dereliction of religious principles and practice among our fellow-citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity, which in many instances tends to atheism itself. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. ”

“ Does not experience constantly show us that religion effects changes of this kind? What are called conversions, what devotees regard as special acts of divine grace, are very often only lamentable revolutions by which real vices and odious qualities are substituted for amiable and useful characteristics. By a deplorable consequence of these pretended miracles of grace we frequently see sorrow succeed to enjoyment, a gloomy and unhappy state to one of innocent gayety, lassitude and chagrin to activity and hilarity, and slander, intolerance, and zeal to indulgence and gentleness ”

“ When this is the case, the religious taste becomes fastidious—a roving habit is often indulged—the customs of the world are yielded to, and the principle of sin, which once lay dormant in the heart, rises up with renewed strength, and breaks forth in open manifestations of evil. ”

“ The God-wise, as the religious monomaniacs called themselves, had grown licentious and even obscene; they had developed the most disgusting and beastly habits from the idea that they knew the will of God and could dispense with the common rules of morality and decency, those ‘badges of mere earth-born natures.’ The worshippers of beauty had grown callous in their cruelty. ”