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But while admitting the existence of these superstitious and pseudo-religious notions, we must not imagine that they composed the whole portraiture of Luther's early life. He was, as Mathesius describes him, a merry, jovial young fellow.
We have had one instance of the sort of thing that might be expected, The Sign of the Cross, in which a commonplace melodrama was mixed up with hymns and pseudo-religious talk and miracles, and a ballet as immodest, as pulse-disturbing, as any given in the theatres or the halls.
To tell one of these pseudo-religious women that the whole attitude of her externally sanctified life is a sham emotion, would rouse anything but a saintly spirit, and surprise her beyond measure. Yet the contrast between the true, healthful, religious feeling and the sham is perfectly marked, even though both classes follow the same forms and belong to the same charitable societies.
He became, of a sudden, most morbidly and fanatically I was about to say religious: but that is not the word; let me call it pseudo-religious. His strong sense and cultivated taste did not allow him to delight in the raving tracts of illiterate fanatics and yet out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense.
He became, of a sudden, most morbidly and fanatically I was about to say religious: but that is not the word; let me call it pseudo-religious. His strong sense and cultivated taste did not allow him to delight in the raving tracts of illiterate fanatics and yet out of the benign and simple elements of the Scripture he conjured up for himself a fanaticism quite as gloomy and intense.
It was on this latter basis that he secured a prize, in the person of the Reverend George Bland, ex-revivalist, ex-author of pious stories for the young, skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men's souls are so easily lulled into self-satisfaction.
In the light of my anecdote, the explanation is obvious. The first thing the gulf did was to swallow up Paley, and the Disorderly Designer, and Shelley's Almighty Fiend, and all the rest of the pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path since the hopes of men had turned to Science as their true Savior.
Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world.
There was in him none of the emotional nature and little of the spirituality that go to make the complete Christian. His strength lay in his temperance, prudence, justice, and courage, eminently the pagan virtues; and indeed he was from first to last a great pagan, who lapsed now and then into the pseudo-religious platitudes of the eighteenth century deists.
Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the vindictive utterances were broken by pictures these, too, of a religious or pseudo-religious nature.
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