The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 273 pages of information about The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day.

The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 273 pages of information about The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day.

But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not merely conservative.  The Lord and Giver of Life presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty to birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we must not make an unconditional surrender to psychic indolence, or to the pull-back of the religious past.  We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in the place of heroic and difficult actualizations:  make external religion an excuse for dodging reality, immerse ourselves in an exquisite dream, or tolerate any real conflict between old cultus and actual living faith.  A most delicate discrimination is therefore demanded from us; the striking of a balance between the rightful conservatism of the cultus and the rightful independence of the soul.  Yet, this is not to justify even in the most advanced a wholesale iconoclasm.  Time after time, experience has proved that the attempt to approach God “without means,” though it may seem to describe the rare and sacred moments of the personal life of the Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and even those who do achieve it are, as it were, most often supported from behind by religious history and the religious culture of their day.  I do not think it can be doubted that the right use of cultus does-increase religious sensitiveness.  Therefore here the difficult task of the future must be to preserve and carry forward its essential elements, all the symbolic significance, all the incorporated emotion, which make it one of man’s greatest works of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, in the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer to experience or communicate life.

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.  But these varying types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in the relative though none in the absolute sense.  Did we more openly acknowledge the character of that life, the historic Churches would no longer invite the sophisticated to play down to their own primitive fantasies; to sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, or lull themselves by the recitation of litany or rosary which, admirable as the instruments of suggestion, are inadequate expressions of the awakened spiritual life.  On the one hand, they would not require the simple to express their corporate religious feeling in Elizabethan English or Patristic Latin; on the other, expect the educated to accept at face-value symbols of which the unreal character is patent to them.  Nor would they represent these activities as possessing absolute value in themselves.

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The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.