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Two Biblical passages, the one from Deuteronomy, the other from Deutero-Isaiah, afford a signal illustration of the contrast between the religious nationalism of the Mosaic law and the universalism of the Prophets.
Selfism is mixed with their universalism. None has spoken truth so pure and universal as Boehmen. He is the most inspired man of modern times. He had more love and truth than all the other mystics put together, and fewer faults than either one of them taken singly." IT was the middle of August, 1843, when Isaac Hecker once more took up his residence with his family in New York.
Absolute Universalism is thought by them the inseparable ally of most shocking wickedness, involving 'blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which we are assured shall not be forgiven unto men 'neither in this world nor in that which is to come. Educated to consider it 'an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every restraint and to every virtuous affection, the majority of all countries detest and shun its apostles.
I would not have it inferred from the foregoing remarks that horror of Universalism, and detestation of its apostles, is confined to the low, the vulgar, the base, or the illiterate.
And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and that "a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows that the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity; while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth," with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite woman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered.
Jesus but applied to himself distributively as logicians say those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just missed.
I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene no matter how festal I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting! Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism.
However much of elegant leisure the more solid and instructive lecturers may have, Mr. King is always wanted. He is, in some respects, the most popular writer and preacher of the two denominations which he equally represents, being a sort of soft ligament between the Chang of Universalism and the Eng of Unitarianism."
The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon any God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that sense of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence of the religious experience, it was the True God that answered them.
The moralizing religion of the Prophets was calculated to bring about the regeneration of the individual, regardless of national ties; but at that moment the chief point involved was the nation. It had to be established and its organization perfected. The universalism of the Prophets was inadequate for the consolidating of a nation.
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