Religious reform

“ For these reasons reform in this particular must move from the people to the government, not from the government to the people.
And here we come to the root of the whole matter, to the field where reform is most needed, that is, in the moral condition of our society. While there are few nations in which there is such a diversity of religious views and multiplicity of religious sects, there are few peoples which are so proverbially irreligious as our own. ”

“ There is a loud clamour for extensive change in that department. The clamour would be entitled to more respect if they who are the most eager to swell it with their voices were not generally the most ignorant of the real state of the Church, and the service it renders to the community. Reform is the word employed. Let us pause and consider what sense it is apt to carry, and how things are confounded by a lax use of it. The great religious Reformation, in the sixteenth century, did not profess to be a new construction, but a restoration of something fallen into decay, or put out of sight. ”

“ This should be the model of all Christian reformers. He that believeth shall not make haste is the true motto of Christian reform.
And these great multitudes, to whose hands no special, [57] individual power is given—they are only minute workers in a narrower sphere. Daily toils, small economies, the ordering of the material cares of life, are all their lot. Before them in their way they can see the footsteps of Jesus. ”

“ And if the acts and opinions of religious reformers of a past generation, are to be considered, why are we to shut out those of the reformers of this present reforming generation? Why “build the sepulchres of the Prophets” and despise or persecute their successors? ”

“ Religious reforms, he freely admits, are necessary, but they ought to be spontaneous developments, emanations from the heart of the believers themselves, in response to changes in the times and social relations. ”

“ The instrument of reformation is simple; viz. the Word of God as it stands written in the Sacred Scriptures, pure as our forefathers received it, powerful in itself to change the face of the whole universe. The truths of that inspired volume constitute the whole of Christianity; out of it there exists no truth for the Church. Be it yours, then, with the Holy Bible in your hand, to reform the doctrine corrupted by your predecessors! No one can do this work so well as you; no one so much as you is bound to do it by conscience and by special obligation. ”

“ The Eternal One who loved righteousness could be served in no other way than in furthering justice. Religion became social reform, aflame with the enthusiasm of holy ideals; of ideals seen to be eternal realities, as the shadows cast by The Living God, moving on to accomplish the good pleasure of His will.
To conserve the new spirit of brotherhood which they awakened, they embodied in the book of the Law, that constituted the Magna Charta of the Reformation, a development of a gracious usage of the people. ”

“ Here we can see the reason that no church in any age of the world has inaugurated any great system of reform for the improvement of society, but has made war on nearly every reform set on foot by that class of people which it has chosen to stigmatize as "infidels." Such a religion will decline and die in the exact ratio of the enlightenment and progress of society. ”

“ Do not talk to me and tell me that you are so backslidden and dark, but reform and get the light of God within you. Some get up here and say, "I will live my religion, I will brethren; O pray for me, I will live my religion, if it costs me my life." ”

“ Those politicians who are moved only by agitation may say, ‘The condition of the Church is not one of practical politics,’ and pass on. The greater number realising that the ultimate conflict is between those who would govern with God and those who would govern without God, and anxious that the Church should be effective for its purpose, are quietly making up their minds to one of two solutions—Disestablishment or Reform. ”

“ They may be the best Church reformers, for they will make more and more manifest how it is not institutions but righteousness which exalts a nation; how, one after108 another, all reforms fail because men tell lies and love themselves; and how, therefore, the first of all reforms is the reform of the Church, whose mission for the nation is that it create righteousness. ”

“ When Christianity itself was in such need of reform, when Christians could scarcely be distinguished from pagans in love of display, and in egotistical ends, how could it reform the world? When it was a pageant, a ritualism, an arm of the state, a vain philosophy, a superstition, a formula, how could it save, if ever so dominant? The corruptions of the church in the fourth century are as well authenticated as the purity and moral elevation of Christians in the second century. ”

“ Among the theologians, Bernard de Clairvaux, Gerson d’Ailly, Nicholas de Clémangis; among the poets, Dante and Petrarch; even councils held at Pisa, Constance, and Basle; men the most renowned for their piety and their character, for their genius and their learning, had raised the same cry: “A reform, a reform in the Church! A reform in the head and the members, in the faith and the manners!” But this Catholic movement always failed; because it never attacked the root of the evil. The secret of obtaining all—is it not that of desiring and daring all? ”

“ We wish them to be brought about without rebellion, to be the work of the legitimate authorities. We desire reforms in religious instruction, in the ceremonies, in the discipline of the clergy, reforms even in the highest sphere of ecclesiastical government. ”

“ But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. ”

“ Of such a species of reform, there are two varieties. In one, the reform accords with the principles of the religion and merely invites people, who have departed from it, to revert to them and to follow them. ”

“ Instead of favoring and fostering the existing evils of society, He sought to reform them, and set into motion the great wheels of Christianity [Pg vi] that are rolling over the whole earth. Let those who call themselves His followers, strive to make His commands practicable. Let them have more of justice, charity and humanity. ”

“ As to those who maintain that the inauguration of reforms and the setting up of powerful institutions would in reality be at variance with the good pleasure of God and would contravene the laws of the Divine Law-Giver and run counter to basic religious principles and to the ways of the Prophet—let them consider how this could be the case. ”

“ Can the Lord expect, or require, anything less from a people in such unhampered circumstances--from a people so liberally furnished with all means and mercies, than a thorough reformation in all things, civil and religious, according to his word? Why should we suppose it? And would not such an improvement of our precious privileges be equally conducive to the glory of God, and our own present and everlasting good? The auspicious phenomena of the times furnish collateral arguments of a very encouraging nature, that our dutiful and pious endeavors shall not be in vain in the Lord. ”

“ First, to shew, That it is not unusual with God, when he raiseth up men faithful in their generation to reform his Church, to give way to the enemy of mankind, for the trial of his people, to raise up some men even amongst the Reformers themselves, that by spreading of errours and Heresies, and State-disturbing opinions, should endeavour to obstruct the Reformation so happily begun. ”

“ Our consistency increases, instead of diminishing, the evils we would cure. The reformers started wrong. They would reform the Church by placing her under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even a God. ”

“ Promotion of Social Reform.—As an institution hoary with age, the church is naturally conservative, and it has been slow to champion the various social reforms that have been proposed as panaceas. It has been quite as much concerned with a future existence as with the present, and has been prompt to point to heavenly bliss as a balance for earthly woe. ”

“ The Church has pusillanimously left, not only the working oar, but the very reins of salutary reform in the hands of men she denounces as inimical to Christianity, and who are practically doing, with all their might, for humanity's sake, what the Church ought to be doing for Christ's sake ”

“ When we remember the century and a half of wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going reconstruction ”

“ So soon as the world shall be converted to the true faith, and religious theory and practice made to accord, the necessity of civil laws and judicial tribunals will cease —the world will be one great brotherhood, and the laws of God as expounded by the priesthood will be the only needed rules of life and morals. ”

“ We must also acknowledge that in the Church the rust of abuses and of a mechanical superstition is always forming afresh; that the spiritual in religion is sometimes materialised, and therefore degraded, deformed, and applied to their own loss, by the servants of the Church, through their indolence and want of intelligence, and by the people, through their ignorance. The true spirit of reform most, therefore, never depart from the Church, but must periodically break out with renovating strength, and penetrate the mind and the will of the clergy. ”

“ Can we wonder that men who felt their happiness here and their hopes of hereafter, their worldly welfare and the kingdom of heaven at stake, should sometimes attach an importance beyond their intrinsic weight to collateral points of controversy, connected with the all-involving object of the Reformation? The changes in the forms and principles of religious worship were introduced and regulated in England by the hand of public authority. ”

“ Which cause of the covenanted reformation in doctrine, worship, discipline and government, and all interests, or rights, religious or civil, contended for during the foresaid space of years, conducing to promote the same, we faithfully promise to prosecute, propagate, preserve and maintain, to the utmost of our power, with our lives and all that we have ”

“ God's plan was for man's regeneration, a change of heart and life—a working from the centre to the circumference. But the churches—all denominations—of the years we are speaking about, began endless schemes of deliverance that the man, as they hoped, might be changed from the outside—that is to say, man's idea of benefitting man was by an outward reform. ”

“ The progress in the arts, science, agriculture, political economy, the mechanic arts, the fine arts, &c., has far outstripped the improvement of our religious institutions, and their relinquishment of the errors and superstitions of the past, and nothing but the most absolute compulsion by the moral force of the progressive spirit of the age has induced the churches to make any improvement in their creeds and doctrines. The spirit of improvement is manifested in every department of business, and in all our numerous institutions but that of our religion. ”

“ The Reformation, in all its later phases, that is to say, after it ceased to be a protest against moral defects and administrative abuses and became a revolutionary invention of new dogmas and practices, was the result of clever, stupid or perverse minds working overtime on religious problems which could not be solved or even apprehended by the intellect, whether it was that of an acute and highly trained master such as Calvin, or that of any one of the hundred founders of less savage but more curious and uncouth types of "reformed religion." ”

“ They must have recourse, therefore, to cautious stratagem; they must pretend that their object is not to demolish, but reform: and it was with a view of giving colour to this pretence, that the impudent lie—for such I have proved it to be—has been propagated in this country of their reverence for pure Christianity, and for the Reformation. ”

“ The spirit of human government in church affairs has shown itself in, or has followed in the wake of, every reform movement of the past. The Spirit of God worked in the movement to accomplish good, but was always checked by this baleful element. ”

“ For men desired reform from very different motives. The ascetic temperament saw nothing but the moral abuses and the corruption of the clergy; the humanist desired a greater freedom of thought, and a certain toleration of divergences of opinion which was abhorrent to the doctrinal reformer. The latter shared with the humanist the wish for a reconstruction of the traditional dogma, but wished to see the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy drawn with no uncertain hand. ”

“ To talk about Church Reform, without doing something that shall tend to a full amount of practical and permanent good, is to insult the Nation; because the existing state of the Church is really a burthen and a grievance, and of no general utility. ”