Tract (religious)

“ 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 ”

“ As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in every religious experience without exception. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are not, as a general thing, taught by their masters about God, the salvation of Jesus Christ or the way to heaven. The SOUL is starved. To be sure, they pick up, here and there, a few crumbs of religious truth, and make the most of their scanty supply. Many of them truly love the Lord ”

“ To thousands of earnest and sincere Christians connected with churches using an elaborate ritual, this ritual is no mere form; it is a means of blessing and grace through which God reveals himself to their souls. Moreover, God selects certain persons, especially well qualified to hear his voice; these he commissions as ambassadors to declare him and his will to the people. The belief in this method of revelation is the philosophical basis for the offices of the Christian preacher and the Christian religious teacher. ”

“ 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 are the circumcision, who worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Here are three characters:— 1. They worshipped in the spirit, in opposition to the carnal ordinances of the Old-Testament, which consist in meats, and drinks, and divers washings, etc. Christianity takes us off from these things, and teaches us to be inward with God in all the duties of religious worship. We must worship God in spirit, John 4:24. The work of religion is to no purpose any further than the heart is employed in it. ”

“ The love of adventure, a thirst for the acquisition of territory, and a desire after wealth have acted as motives, and stimulated many persons to such undertakings; while others have left their homes from a love of freedom, an attachment to religious truth, or in obedience to the command of God. ”

“ The too common mistake has been of thinking of this view of celestial nature as the origin of man’s religious rites, instead of as an outgrowth of the primal religious rite, which antedated man’s study of, or wonder over, the workings of the elements and the course of the heavenly bodies. ”

“ In the brain of man, between the wings of the kneeling cherubim, is the mercy seat, and there man speaks with his God as the priest of the tabernacle spoke to the spirit of the Lord hovering between the wings of the Angels. Man is again the Ark, and within him are the three principles, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—the tablets of the law, the pot of manna, and the rod that budded. ”

“ You feel painfully at parting from friends, relatives, and home, and your heart is softened by a review of the past, and by an anticipation of the future. May the emotion you now feel lead you to the throne of grace, and cause you to cast your care on Jesus, who careth for you! May the presence of God go with you, and give you rest! You part with many whom you will soon meet again. ”

“ But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We “hunger and thirst” after righteousness; we “find the Lord a sweet savor;” ”

“ So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my opening lecture [23] about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our introductory position as to the three great forces of the soul, with the corresponding three great elements of religion, appears, then, to have stood the test of our detailed investigation. For each of these forces and corresponding elements has turned out to be necessary to religion, and yet to become destructive of itself and of religion in general where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements, and their vigorous and normal action and influence. ”

“ In this, as in all other things, we believe ourselves the true followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life as He made it His. We have several forms of ritual, but no form of creed, and our religious differences may be said to be aesthetic and temperamental rather than theological and essential. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Now the Church, being spiritual was manifested in the flesh of Christ, thereby showing us that if any of us guard her in the flesh and defile her not, he shall receive her again in the Holy Spirit: for this flesh is the counterpart and copy of the spirit. No man therefore, when he hath defiled the copy, shall receive the original for his portion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most valuable part belonged to the gods, and this consisted of the organs that were pre-eminently the vehicles of the soul. Though man first aimed to appropriate the soul of the sacrifice for himself, the developed religious cult of a later period made this the privilege of the deity. ”

“ Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. ”

“ Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his 'glory' incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. ”

“ The voyage on which you are entering is a long one, and many of its hours may become tedious to you on the great waters. Let me urge you by all means to secure a Bible, if you have not one, and to make that the companion of your days and nights. Search the Scriptures, for they testify of Christ, and are able to make you wise unto salvation. Do not be ashamed to acknowledge God, or to commend your spirit to him in morning and evening prayer, though you may be surrounded by persons prepared to treat devotional exercises with indifference or contempt. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Guard ye the flesh, that ye may partake of the spirit. But if we say that the flesh is the Church and the spirit is Christ, then he that hath dealt wantonly with the flesh hath dealt wantonly with the Church. Such an one therefore shall not partake of the spirit, which is Christ. So excellent is the life and immortality which this flesh can receive as its portion, if the Holy Spirit be joined to it. No man can declare or tell those things which the Lord hath prepared for His elect. ”

“ So it is not surprising that even in the religions where there are avowed divinities, there are rites having an efficient virtue in themselves, independently of all divine intervention. It is because this force may be attached to words that are pronounced or movements that are made just as well as to corporal substances; the voice or the movements may serve as its vehicle, and it may produce its effects through their intermediacy, without the aid of any god or spirit. ”

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

“ And if you will but confess that there is in you no wisdom or power for holiness, none at all, and allow Christ, ‘the Wisdom of God and the Power of God,’ by the Holy Spirit within you, to lead you on, and prove how completely, how faithfully, how mightily, He can be your sanctification, He will do it most gloriously. ”

“ You are not an exile for conscience' sake, or for liberty; you are not compelled to leave your homes, as many good men have been compelled to do, in quest of a spot where you can worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the dictates of your conscience. The lines, in this respect, have fallen to you in pleasant places, and you have had a goodly heritage. Your blessings have been greater than the blessings of your forefathers. ”

“ THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES.
As the side which a religious system presents to the intellect is shown in the Myth, so the side that it presents to sense is exhibited in the Cult. This includes the representation and forms of worship of the unknown power which presides over the fruition of the Prayer or religious wish. The representation is effected by the Symbol, the worship by the Rite. The development of these two, and their relation to religious thought, will be the subject of the present chapter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions: the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. ”

“ There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.”
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. ”