Religious uniformity

“ It has shown us that all through the present societies of savage men there prevails an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its environment. ”

“ Hence we have among us every shade and every variety of religious opinion, and, in many cases, contention and strife, resulting from hopeless efforts to produce uniformity.
A stranger who should come among us would suppose, from the tone of our religious journals, and from the general aspect of society on the subject of religion, that the whole community was divided into a thousand contending sects, who hold nothing in common, and whose sole objects are the annoyance and destruction of each other. ”

“ At the same time we exhort most earnestly in the Lord the said religious who are to be, or even have been, sent to the said places, to observe uniformity in their instructions to the people, especially those who have been recently converted to the Christian faith, in order that such neophytes be not scandalized through conflicting teachings, especially in matters relating to morals. ”

“ Were we truly reasonable human beings, we should perhaps provide openly and as a matter of course within the Christian frame widely different types of ceremonial religion, suited to different levels of mind and different developments of the religious consciousness. To some extent this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism, revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. ”

“ The potency inherent in things is the object of observation, its laws are studied, and it is used for purposes of life. The diversities in the form of ceremonies, in the conception of the characters of the Powers, and in the general tone and coloring of worship arise from economic and cultural differences, and are as numerous as the tribes of men; the unity of cults is a result of the psychological unity of the human race—the religious needs of men in all stages of culture are the same; there is nothing in the highest religious systems that is not found in germ in the lowest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is meet that he have all the praise. Presbyterians, independents, all have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere! All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious; because inward and spiritual, in the body, and to the head. For being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When you compare the systems, creeds, and governing principles among the sects and religious denominations in the world, where will you find one that is perfect, or that is calculated to lead men back to a unity of the faith and to God? Where will you find a system or a denomination of religious people in the world who have such principles embodied in their faith? ”

“ Could Religion excite the angry passions that she does, if her aims were spiritual and not doctrinal? Could Religion be divorced as she is from practical life, and confined to a class kept under powerful stimulants, and called the “religious public,” if her aims were spiritual and not doctrinal? ”

“ The preceding survey of early religious customs and institutions discloses a recognizable unity in diversity. Everywhere we find the same classes of sacred objects and the same methods of approaching them. ”

“ Why is it that there has been so singular a religious movement as that which has taken place within the last thirty years, introducing views that are contrary to the commonly established views of the whole religious world? ”

“ How is it possible to find, underneath the disputes of theology, the variations of ritual, the multiplicity of groups and the diversity of individuals, the fundamental states characteristic of religious mentality in general?
Things are quite different in the lower societies. The slighter development of individuality, the small extension of the group, the homogeneity of external circumstances, all contribute to reducing the differences and variations to a minimum. ”

“ Thus, throughout the evolution of religious communities, down to the Jesuits and Oratorians, to the great nursing brother-and sisterhoods of the seventeenth century, we can watch the substitution of care for lay souls in the place of more saintly ones—a gradual secularisation in unsuspected harmony with the heretical and philosophical movements which tend more and more to make religion an essential function of life, instead of an activity with which life is for ever at variance. ”

“ With the emancipation of Man's higher activities from ecclesiastical control, the distinction between the religious and the secular life has gradually established itself. That this should happen was inevitable. ”

“ There are events in the common course of history—revolutions, wars, divisions of races and nations—which in themselves can hardly be called religious, but which have at least one aspect distinctly religious. There are also institutions, customs, ceremonies, even vestures and forms of ritual, in which, though originally pagan or secular. ”

“ Customary observance, buttressed by the sanctions of religion, has supplied the element of stability specially necessary to primitive society. These primitive religious instincts have persisted, and continue to play their part in all developed religions, though they have been moulded by the mellowing influences of such emotions as gratitude and love. Yet these two instincts form the basis of the Church. ”

“ The kind of spiritual order which would grow up under such conditions would be deathlike and not lifelike; and the visible uniformity could be maintained only by the strong repression of all that makes the life and progress of a Church. ”

“ It is true that such communal character belongs, in some degree, to all religious life—no person's religion is wholly independent of the thought of his community; but in the lower strata the acceptance of the common customs is unreflective and complete. When definite individualism sets in, ceremonies begin to lose their old significance, though they may be retained as mere forms or with a new interpretation. ”

“ It is an attempt after spiritual unity and the reduction of religion to very simple and inclusive forms and a challenge to the followers of religions widely separated on the surface to be more true to what is deepest in their faith. ”

“ The mores grow out of the life as a whole. They change with the life conditions, density of population, and life experience. Then they become strange or hostile to traditional religion. In our own experience our mores have reached views about ritual practices, polygamy, slavery, celibacy, etc., which are strange or hostile to those in the Bible. Since the sixteenth century we have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and mores. Every religious reform in history has come about in this way. ”

“ Even in our days, any one who considers our modes of society, the organism, customs, ceremonies, and manifold and complex institutions of modern life, will readily see that religious influences and their rites initiate, sanction, and accompany every individual and social fact, although civil and religious societies are becoming ever more distinct. ”

“ The sovereigns of Europe and rulers of America are on its side. But what a haggard picture of union does the theatre of modern Christianity present! A garment of as many colours as the various religious creeds of modern christianity, would constitute a phenomenon fit to be carried about as a curiosity. ”

“ Deducting from these, again, those who attend church simply as a matter of fashion, or from other than religious motives, and there remains a minimum almost too small to be considered, abundantly sustaining our charge. The disintegration of the prevalent forms of religious belief, the rapid multiplication of sects, the increase in the ranks of intellectual sceptics, the fashionable detractions from, and perversions of, the Holy Scriptures, acting with the influences already mentioned, may well cause alarm. ”

“ Max Muller, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 48.
The question as to whether the identity of conception and the similarity in detail observed in religious rites, ceremonies, and symbols in the various countries of the globe are due to the universal law of unity which governs human development, or whether, through the dispersion of one original people, the early conceptions of a Deity were spread broadcast over the entire earth, is perhaps not settled ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be unnecessary to go through the whole catalogue of beliefs finding expression in the dogma of practically all religious organizations, and in times past dividing the followers of Christianity into denominational groups. ”

“ The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion? ”

“ And one would think, that property assigned for the purpose of providing for a people's religious worship when that worship was one, the State should, when that worship is split into several forms, apportion between those several forms, with due regard to circumstances, taking account only of great differences, which are likely to be lasting, and of considerable communions, which are likely to represent profound and widespread religious characteristics ”

“ In our own country, it is seen how the forms of worship, and even the doctrines believed, and certainly the modes of religious thought and feeling, depend on the natural character, and the natural character on the local situation of the respective sections of the community. ”

“ As civilization progressed, we are told that a separate order of men, with a liberal provision for their subsistence, was set apart for religious service, and a minute and magnificent ceremonial contrived, which challenged comparison with that of the most polished nations of Christendom. ”

“ It should overlook petty differences, which have no serious reason for lasting, and inconsiderable communions, which can hardly be taken to express any broad and necessary religious lineaments of our common nature. ”

“ The religious unity established by the Puritans, and maintained for a time by the simple method of rigorously excluding those holding peculiar doctrines, gave way to considerable diversity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ”

“ Shall we give a liberty to a man's library which we refuse to his belief? Must he—and his church—have only his grandfather's ideas, standards, and decrees?
The tenets of a sect are the theological arrangement of belief which for the present seems best; it is the systematic arrangement of facts so far examined, determined, and classified. But no system of theology can be final. Thought is moving on. Experience is progressive. Providence is continually revealing. The race is a creed-builder, as well as a builder of pyramids, cathedrals, and triumphal arches. ”

“ You can see the same variety in this world. You see the Latter-day Saints, who have come into these valleys,—they are by themselves as a community, yet they are in the same world with other communities. But I do not feel as though I am dwelling where there are six or eight kinds of religion or more, and, after all, no religion at all; I am not dwelling where there is cursing, and swearing, and horse-racing, and gambling, and everything else that is calculated to disturb a peaceable community. ”

“ Nevertheless, it embodies a significant fact: in the course of the history of the world the three religions above-named have come to divide the civilized world among them, that is, they have been selected as best responding to the religious needs of men. ”

“ The history of theistic movements in civilized peoples shows that the effectiveness of a polytheistic system as a framework of religious life is in proportion to the extent of its anthropomorphization of deities, that is, it is in proportion to their humanization that gods enter into intimate association with human experiences. ”

“ But if disciples differ about days, or meats, or water, ought such differences to prevent their communion and fellowship more than differences in personal stature, or beauty, or in mental powers. Uniformity in anything but love to God and to each other is a fool's paradise, contrary to the experience of the apostolic and all ages, and opposed to every law of nature.—Ed. ”

“ And he knew, also, that for the sanctification of such men the aids of religion, though not changed in themselves, must be applied in a different spirit. Discipline and uniformity, though never to be dispensed with, must yield the first places to more interior virtues. The dominant influence must be docility to the guidance of the Holy Spirit dwelling within every regenerate soul. ”