Shared belief

“ I do not see, if I may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives, are the same ”

“ The belief influences his attitude towards the higher powers, the conduct of his daily life, and his behaviour towards his fellows; more than that, it regulates to a great extent the relations of independent communities to each other. ”

“ As some have liked to describe the change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. ”

“ The knowledge of absolute unity is apprehended as faith in a [500] moral disposition of the world, an absolute hypothesis in accordance with which we have the belief that every moral action that we perform will have a good result. ”

“ Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. ”

“ Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its mono-ideistic bent, both 'pass to the limit' and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world. ”

“ This structure, which adapts a society for combined action against other societies, is associated with the belief that its members exist for the benefit of the whole, and not the whole for the benefit of its members. ”

“ But a thinking man has only to come into contact—as constantly happens in these days—with people, equally good and bad, of different denominations, who condemn each other's beliefs, to doubt of the truth of the belief he professes himself. ”

“ Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social [27] purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. ”

“ What shall we say of that authority, more venerable and august than any individual witness, the time-honoured tradition of the human race? An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life. It is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?
We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; ”

“ In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. ”

“ It is the new-born consciousness in the many of each other’s existence and of the relationship of each to all as members one of another. This consciousness is born of God and these times, when “no man liveth unto himself,” whether he would or not. It is the movement of the common mind to understand the complex relations of man to man in modern society, and to forge out the science and arts of living and working together. It is the movement of the common heart to realize the undying hope of social justice and human brotherhood. ”

“ Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; ”

“ Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the beginning. ”

“ In its honorable sense, knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation ”

“ Thou shalt have no intelligence, no life, no substance, no truth, no love, but that which is spiritual. The second is like unto it, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” It should be well understood that all men have one Mind, one God and Father, one Life, Truth, and Love. Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this becomes apparent, and the true brotherhood of man will thus be established. ”

“ Had religion been true to its nature and function, as wide as morality and humanity, it should have been the bond of unity to hold mankind together in one brotherhood, linking them in good feeling, good will, and good work toward one another ”

“ If the foregoing lectures had indeed exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight, we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will to conform itself to the laws of the master of life with whom we need to be united. ”

“ Here, as in the world of my station, we have the objective side, the many affirmations of the one will, the one body, the real ideal humanity, which in all its members is the same, although in every one it is different; and which is completely realized not in any one this or that, nor in any mere ‘collective unity’ of such particulars, but only in the whole as a whole. And we have the subjective personal side, where the one will of the whole is, in its unity with the conscious members, self-conscious, and wills itself as the personal identity of the universal and particular will. ”

“ The social consciousness, therefore, so far as it is an expression of the possibility and inevitableness of our mutual influence, is a reflection of the immanence of the one God in the unity and consistency of his life. ”

“ A second element in the social consciousness, and, perhaps, that which has most of all characterized it through the larger period of its growth, is the strong sense of the mutual influence of men—that we are all "members one of another." ”

“ Human solidarity, humanity regarded as a spiritual whole, may be called, as Hegel calls it, self-conscious spirit; or you may call it, as Comte calls it, the Mind of Humanity—it is but the collective wisdom "of a common humanity with a common aim"; and, that being so, morality is rooted, not in the will and the love of a beneficent and omnipotent Providence, but in the self-realising spirit in man setting up its "common aim" at morality. ”

“ Perfect good is therefore the realization, at once normal and free, of the right relations to one another of all beings; each being occupying, by virtue of this relation, that place in the great whole, and playing that part in it, which befits it.
‘Now, just as in a human family there is one central relation on which all the rest depend,—that of the father to all the members of this little whole,—so is there in the universe one supreme position, which is the support of all the rest, and which, in the interest of all beings, must be above all others preserved intact—that of God. ”

“ If he goes not, he remains in the common life, with the common conscience, with the common virtue, with the common faith, or with the common doubt; and it is well. For the inward peace it is evidently the best. If he ascends to that peak, he is caught. ”

“ That the common sense latent in man is the inspiration of God is an assumption with which he started in his Inquiry. ‘The inspiration of the Almighty giveth man understanding.’ ‘The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.’ So the common sense moral trust in God, or universal moral venture, is at the root of all human life and human knowledge, giving unity and vitality to the whole. ”

“ If we now suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion, directed, as it once was in the case of religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and the practice of it, I think that no one, who can realize this conception, will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the ultimate sanction for the Happiness morality. ”

“ There must be clearer ideas of the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man; there must be reconstruction of ideas concerning the independence of the individual as related to the solidarity of society; there must be revision of our ideas of the sacred and the secular; there must be reconstruction of our ideas of property ”

“ Does it hurt your understanding to outgrow your own profoundest ideas and see some validity in the doctrines and formulæ of others? Does it hurt your Christianity to make concessions to another's Christianity or to the worship of any land or any time? The reading of the last great book, or the visit to the pagan temple, is an answer. Simply the doubter the world over, social being that he is by nature, imbued as he is with a living sympathy, must recognize, and must labour to maintain or achieve, the unity of humanity. ”

“ It is the object of these ordinances, the institutions of heaven, to bring us from our ignorance, our want of knowledge, our lack of understanding, to a comprehension of the truth; and when we are brought to that point and place, no matter if we are counted by thousands and tens of thousands, the blessings of the Gospel are ours, if we are united; for we all occupy the same ground, we understand the same truth, and we are all in the same relationship with truth and with God, which make us one. It causes us to feel alike, to think alike, and to act alike. ”

“ We believe in association—which is but the reduction to action of our faith in one sole God, and one sole law, and one sole aim—as the only means we possess of realising the truth; as the method of progress; the path leading towards perfection. The highest possible degree of human progress will correspond to the discovery and application of the vastest formula of association. ”

“ But while the love of goodness and the love of truth, give rise to these more general and obvious distinctions in the heavenly state, there is still an immense number and variety of societies in each of these kingdoms, growing out of the peculiar manner in which goodness and truth are received by each spirit or association of spirits. For it is very plain that in the spiritual world, all societies, or combinations of individual spirits, must result from the free and voluntary union of those who love the same or similar things. ”

“ Think of the things that have kept people apart in physical and mental and spiritual realms, the rivers, the mountain chains, the oceans; differences of religion, differences of language, differences of civilization; different ethical ideas, until people of the world have sat looking at each other with faces of fear and antagonism instead of with the dawning in their eyes of love and brotherhood. ”

“ Faith and hope alike find their assurance in the increasing sense of the solidarity of human kind, and the spirit of brotherhood more and more discernible, which, as it grows, must end all oppression, conscious and unconscious. ”

“ In absolute harmony, then, with the genesis of the social consciousness, religion, in this conception, is bound up with the whole of life; and we catch a glimpse of the real and final unity {68} of life in true love, the relation to God and the relation to man each helping everywhere the other. If religion is truly a personal relation, and its laws are those of a deepening friendship, then every human relation, heartily and truly fulfilled, becomes a new outlook on God, a revelation of new possibilities in the religious life. ”

“ Today the most remarkable favour of God centereth around union and harmony among the friends; so that this unity and concord may be the cause of the promulgation of the oneness of the world of humanity, may emancipate the world from this intense darkness of enmity and rancour, and that the Sun of Truth may shine in full and perfect effulgence.
Today, all the peoples of the world are indulging in self-interest and exert the utmost effort and endeavour to promote their own material interests. They are worshipping themselves and not the divine reality, nor the world of mankind. ”

“ We all recognize relations that go beyond individual existence, lasting and "more than biological" relations, and it is the realization of these conceptions intellectually and emotionally true to our individual and group nature that constitutes our various religions and faiths. ”