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Updated: May 12, 2025
I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms" ecclesiasticism and subjectivism both of which may be said to be the being primarily occupied in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether any Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter.
How can they believe that the world was made out of nothing, completed in a week, finished just as we see it now; that it has undergone no change, but that its parts have worked so indifferently as to require incessant interventions? THE ERRORS OF ECCLESIASTICISM. When Science is thus commanded to surrender her intellectual convictions, may she not ask the ecclesiastic to remember the past?
The Bishop of Brechin said well the other day: "Liberality in religion I do not mean tender and generous allowances for the mistakes of others is only unfaithfulness to truth." And, with the same qualification, I venture to paraphrase the Bishop's dictum: "Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth." Elijah's great question, "Will you serve God or Baal?
On the one side a mighty host, its right the Pharisees of ecclesiasticism and ritual, with their banner of authority, making void the law of God by their tradition; its left, and never far away from their opposites on the right with whom they are strangely leagued, working into each other's hands, the Sadducees denying angel and spirit, with their war-cry of unfettered freedom and scientific evidence; and in the centre, far rolling, innumerable, the dusky hosts of mere animalism, and worldliness, and self, making void the law by their sheer godlessness.
Anyone else can demonstrate it who chooses to make the experiment. My own weakness is such that I have made the experiment but partially; but partial experiment convinces me beyond all further questioning that the witness of the great pioneers is true. Nor is this conviction to be classed as idealism, or ecclesiasticism, or mysticism, or anything else to which we can put a tag.
This peculiar antithesis nowhere more striking than at Venice, on the one side, religious fears and hopes; on the other, keen insight into the ways of ecclesiasticism led to peculiar compromises.
The angry God, who will not relax his frown save at the sight of blood, is conveniently forgotten in the more refined circles of ecclesiasticism, and is now left to the meditations of Little Bethel or Breton peasants.
The remarkable personality with which the religious side of the Reformation is pre-eminently associated was a child of his time, who had passed through a variety of mental struggles, and had already broken through the bonds of the old ecclesiasticism before that turning-point in his career which is usually reckoned the opening of the Reformation, to wit the nailing of the theses on to the door of the Schloss-Kirche in Wittenberg on the 31st of October, 1517.
Thus we see, in an age which acknowledges the complete emancipation of the human reason, the supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment, Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith" than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism.
This is, to my mind, the inevitable result of that method of reasoning which is applied to the confutation of Protestantism, with so much success, by one of the acutest and subtlest disputants who have ever championed Ecclesiasticism and one cannot put his claims to acuteness and subtlety higher. ... the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.
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