Religious tract

“ Transcribed from the 1st March 1843 edition by David Price, email [email protected]
No Publications can be supplied except those of the Religious Tract Society.
March 1st, 1843.
TRACTS AND HANDBILLS
OF THE
RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY,
SOLD BY
WILLIAM JONES, AT THE DEPOSITORY,
56, PATERNOSTER ROW, AND 65, ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD;
Also by J. Nisbet and Co. 21, Berners Street, Oxford Street, London; and by
other Booksellers.
A Catalogue of Bound Volumes and Works for the Young is printed
separately; also a Catalogue of Welsh and Foreign Tracts. ”

“ 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 end “religions,” systems of creed and ritual, or, more generally, of feeling and practice, have their ways of being instrumental. And what is religious in them, I take it, is all that which contributes to keep true religion alive in the heart. ”

“ Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions o 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Religious rites are, first, rites of approach, whereby the community draws nigh to its god; and, afterwards, rites of sacramental meals whereby the community celebrates its reconciliation and enjoys communion with its god. ”

“ These notions and the corresponding practice tend to make religion external, consisting in obedience to form, in compliance with custom; while religion is and can be only piety and goodness, love to God and love to man. To keep the Sunday idle, to attend church, is not being religious. ”

“ But to be religious in the world—to be pious and holy and earnest-minded in the counting-room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—to cany our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life,—this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling. ”

“ Infuse the gospel spirit into everything. Strictly enforce the rules which Christian prudence lays down for the use of means and attractions not distinctively religious. Let the word Christian be in the largest letters on your sign. Remember your great object, the duty thrown upon you by the nature of the case, thrown upon you by similarity of age, by congeniality of taste and pursuits, thrown upon you by the church, thrown upon you by Christ; the church's head, is the salvation, not the entertainment of the young men. ”

“ This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulæ, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence,—it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It must, however, be added that myths have influenced mainly the dogmas and ceremonies of religion—their part in more intimate or spiritual worship, the converse of the worshiper with the deity, has been comparatively slight. Religious ceremonies are ordinary social customs and forms transferred to dealings with supernatural Powers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies. ”

“ We may define, then, the religious object as the sacred, and the corresponding religious attitude as consisting in such manifestation of feeling, thought and action in regard to the sacred as is held to conduce to the welfare of the community or to that of individuals considered as members of the community. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We have laid aside our religious dogmas, theories, follies, and nonsense; and we have one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one hope of our calling, one idea in relation to what we were, what we are, and what we are going to be, and that idea is in accordance with what God has revealed through the Priesthood. ”

“ Such religious mummery as this is painful to witness, and to see the saint borne round in procession, with men carrying candles, and white-clad girls with large birds' wings fastened to their shoulders, dispels the idea of its being Christianity at all. ”

“ You have long resided in a country distinguished by its abundant religious privileges, and as you are about to leave it for ever, it becomes you to inquire, what benefit you have derived from the means of grace, with which you have been so long favoured. How many sabbaths have rolled over you, how many sermons you have heard, how many opportunities you have had of knowing God, and of enjoying his salvation! And yet perhaps you are going forth to a distant land, with the guilt of all the sins you have committed in Britain on your conscience ”

“ 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. ”

“ To bring together a body composed of such material, affected more or less by the religious sentiments and forms of the several denominations, with all their national peculiarities, has called for much patient, and persevering toil. And it is by the grace of God that we are what we are. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But, whilst ritual at least represents routine, it tends, historically speaking, to have a far deeper significance for the religious consciousness. A recurrent feature of religion, which many students of its phenomena would even consider constant and typical, is the attribution of a more or less self-contained and automatic efficacy to the ritual procedure as such. ”

“ But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers. ”

“ They put no faith in rites or ceremonies, nor do they believe in penances as instrumental in obtaining the grace of God. They declare that moral righteousness, the gaining of wisdom, divine contemplation, charity and the cultivation of devotional feelings are their rites and ceremonies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, others who were brought into the churches full of zeal, full of resolution, they will be cursed by the theology they accept, and will be stunted in their mental, moral, affectional, and religious growth—most of all in their religious. ”

“ Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life. ”

“ Differences of Church, albeit in each the same word, God, is spoken, have built a dividing wall between two throbbing hearts. I often ask myself uneasily: is religion indeed a blessing to mankind? Religion, which is meant to save us from our sins, how many sins are committed in thy name? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The course which the divine dispensations suggest is the course to which divine revelation has afiixed its most solemn and sacred sanction. We are too much accustomed to consider the men of other countries as if they came not within the scope of the sympathies and dispositions of the religion of Christ. ”

“ Address on distributing Religious Tracts
4
8
1
2
Vivian’s Three Dialogues
5
10
11⁄4
3
Subjects for Consideration
2
4
1⁄2
4
End of Time, (from Dr. Watts)
3
6
3⁄4
5
Watts’s Songs for Children [1]
7
0
11⁄2
6
Death of Lord Rochester
3
6
3⁄4
7
To Disturbers of Public Worship
2
4
1⁄2
8
To a Youth, on Purity
2
4
1⁄2
9
To the Unfortunate Female
2
4
1⁄2
10
To a Prisoner
2
4
1⁄2
11
The Way to Heaven
l
2
1⁄4
12
Friendly Hints to Servants
2
4
1⁄2
13
Golden Rule, (by Dr. Watts)
2
4
1⁄2
14 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tidy had lived to be ten years old in this Christian land, and had never heard of the God who made her. Miss Lee, with all her kindness, was not a Christian, and never read the Bible, offered prayer, or went to church; so that the poor child had grown up thus far as ignorant of religious truth as a heathen. ”

“ Yet it is from mythology, or from the still more reflective and deliberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, that the science of religion has sought to infer the nature of the gods man worships. The whole apparatus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been investigated; the one thing overlooked has been the one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, the prayer in which man's soul rises, or seeks to rise, to God. ”

“ He must be accustomed to regard the inner religion of the heart and that of the external church as perfectly one, as the great universal sacrament, which again divides itself into so many others, and communicates to these parts its holiness, indestructibleness, and eternity. ”

“ Such ancient doctrines as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the personality of the Holy Spirit, the atonement, the obligation of the Sabbath, the necessity and efficacy of prayer, the existence of the devil and the reality of future punishment, are quietly put on the shelf as useless old almanacs, or contemptuously thrown overboard as lumber! ”