United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bathsheba had taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.
Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics.
Here Jesus deals another powerful blow to the self-righteousness of the Pharisaical "good" people of the sects, creeds and cults of all lands, time and religions. He warns against that "Thank God! I am holier than thou" attitude that so many vain formalists affect in their dealings with other men.
Formalists know that then weak brethren have been of a long time scandalised by the ceremonies, and they hear them professing that they are yet scandalised, and how then can they but know that scandal will still follow upon that which they do?
He chuckled over the indignation of the haute volee, when on the visit to England of President Grant's daughter in 1872, Americans in London sent out cards of invitation headed "To meet Miss Grant," as at a profane imitation of a practice hitherto confined to royalties; laughing not at the legitimate American mimicry of European consequence, but at the silly formalists in Society who fumed over the imagined presumption.
Harlots and thieves, publicans and sinners, leprous outcasts, and souls tormented by unclean spirits, the wrecks of humanity whom decent society and respectable Christianity passes by with averted head and uplifted hands, criminals on the gibbet with the rope round their necks and those who are as hopeless as any of these, self-complacent formalists and 'Gospel-hardened professors' all have a place in that heart.
The Mohammedan world is roughly divided into Sunnis and Shia. The Shia are the idealists, the mystics of Islam; the Sunnis are the formalists, the schoolmen.
But that nonconformity is neither scandal nor contempt, Parker hath made it most evident. For, as touching contempt, he showeth out of fathers, councils, canon law, schoolmen, and modern divines, that non obedire is not contempt, but nolle obedire, or superbiendo repugnare. Yea, out of Formalists themselves, he showeth the difference betwixt subjection and obedience.
No man so young had within living memory occupied so high a post in the government. He had but just completed his twenty-eighth year. Nobody, however, except the solemn formalists at the Spanish embassy, thought his youth an objection to his promotion. He had already secured for himself a place in history by the conspicuous part which he had taken in the deliverance of his country.
To those who regard Jesus but as a human teacher, the acclamations of those to whom He is King and Lord always sound exaggerated. People with no depth of religious life hate religious emotion, and are always seeking to repress it. A very tepid worship is warm enough for them. Formalists detest genuine feeling. Propriety is their ideal.
Word Of The Day