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Now tell us, you who make so much of confirmation and so little of catechization, seeing that you are content with six months of the latter, in adopting a rite which Spener and the Pietists introduced into the church, have you also adopted the principles which governed Spener and the Pietists in the practice of confirmation? Their object in catechization and confirmation was conversion.
Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement controversies, their interminable discussions, are outmoded and abandoned. Their takyihs, the haunts of the lazy, the passive, and contemplative pietists, are either being sold or closed down.
But we defy pietists to ferret out of his religious writings, any argument in defence of religion, not absolutely beneath contempt; the best of them are execrably bad mere ravings of a disordered and o'erwrought intellect.
Rationalism had starved the soul, it had minimised and derided feeling. It had suppressed emotion. It had been fatal to art. It was barren of poetry. It had had no sympathy with history and no understanding of history. It had reduced everything to the process by which two and two make four. The pietists said that the frenzy for reason had made man oblivious of the element of the divine.
Saint and sinner, ascetic and worldling, united in its practice. Even the extreme Dutch saints of Bohemia Manor community, the pietists of John de Labadie, sitting at meat with hats on, and pausing ever and anon with suspended mouthfuls to bear a brother's or sister's exhortation, and sandwiching prayers between the courses, were waited upon by negro slaves.
Everybody has read Mr. Darwin's book, or, at least, has given an opinion upon its merits or demerits; pietists, whether lay or ecclesiastic, decry it with the mild railing which sounds so charitable; bigots denounce it with ignorant invective; old ladies of both sexes consider it a decidedly dangerous book, and even savants, who have no better mud to throw, quote antiquated writers to show that its author is no better than an ape himself; while every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism; and all competent naturalists and physiologists, whatever their opinions as to the ultimate fate of the doctrines put forth, acknowledge that the work in which they are embodied is a solid contribution to knowledge and inaugurates a new epoch in natural history.
I was appointed bodyservant to the paymaster of the ship, a bucolic old Bourbon of the most pronounced aristocracy. This excused me from military and naval duty, and I was privileged to wear plain clothes. I attached myself to a small group of pietists called Plymouth Brethren, orthodox theologians, literalists in interpretation of the Scriptures and exceedingly straight-laced in their morality.
Darwin's book, or, at least, has given an opinion upon its merits or demerits; pietists, whether lay or ecclesiastic, decry it with the mild railing which sounds so charitable; bigots denounce it with ignorant invective; old ladies of both sexes consider it a decidedly dangerous book, and even savants, who have no better mud to throw, quote antiquated writers to show that its author is no better than an ape himself; while every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism; and all competent naturalists and physiologists, whatever their opinions as to the ultimate fate of the doctrines put forth, acknowledge that the work in which they are embodied is a solid contribution to knowledge and inaugurates a new epoch in natural history.
The second assault, more brutal and cowardly than the first, followed as the logical sequence of that powwow of pietists, peddlers and politicians.
He was condemned by the Pietists because he had never experienced their sudden and spasmodic method of conversion.
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