Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
Both of these men brought an atmosphere of grim ecclesiasticism into the house. They were the black-garbed, sanctimonious emissaries of superior forces. Mrs. Gerhardt felt as if she were going to lose her child, and watched sorrowfully by the cot-side. After three days the worst was over, but there was no bread in the house. Sebastian's wages had been spent for medicine.
At this time I knew nothing of a liberal church. If I had, I doubt if I was in a condition of mind to consider it. I was so utterly disgusted with ecclesiasticism as I knew it that I was but little prepared if at all, to give anything of the kind fair consideration. The pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme. I abandoned everything but God.
The tendency to exalt the letter of what is spoken or written, at the expense of the spirit, is as much of the essence of ecclesiasticism as of legalism. "Si dans les règles du salut le fond l'emporterait sur la forme, ce serait la ruine du sacerdoce."
Our religious influences have created a race of men mentally docile and obedient to the dictates of tyrannical ecclesiasticism. It has created a fear of truth, and our minds are still brutish and puerile in our methods of reasoning. Credulity has led to stultification, and stultification of the mind is the bitter fruit which we have been reaping for thousands of years.
But we have not yet reached in this discussion the tap-root of the evil tree of human ecclesiasticism. The fundamental error underlying all other errors on this subject, was the idea of an absent Christ.
When we note that in the Holy Land, in Persia, and in the United States of America certain exponents of Christian ecclesiasticism such as Vatralsky, Wilson, Richardson or Easton, observing, and in some cases fearing, the vigorous advances made by the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh in Christian lands, arose to stem its progress; and when we watch the recent and steady deterioration of their influence, the decline of their power, the confusion in their ranks and the dissolution of some of their old standing missions and institutions, in Europe, in the Middle East and in Eastern Asia—may we not attribute this weakening to the opposition which members of various Christian sacerdotal orders began, in the course of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ministry, to evince towards the followers and institutions of a Faith which claims to be no less than the fulfilment of the Promise given by Jesus Christ, and the establisher of the Kingdom He Himself had prayed for and foretold?
Yet Jefferson in his time was frequently called an atheist and merely because men in those days did not distinguish as clearly as we do today between ecclesiasticism and religion, between formulated and essential Christianity. So we are brought back each time to Jesus' two fundamentals and these come out every time foursquare with the best thought of our time.
With regard to ecclesiasticism in the lower branches of education, while convinced that popular control over the secular branches, leaving the religious branches of such education completely in the hands of the clergy, is the ideal arrangement, one must admit that there is a striking testimony contained in the Report on Primary Education drawn up in 1904 by Mr.
He proved himself peculiarly qualified by nature to construct and direct a secret political machine a machine whose operations were never to be observable except to the close student of Utah's ecclesiasticism a machine that was to be all the more effective because of its silent certainty.
The time has certainly come to begin to discharge the idea of religion, in the United States, from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and churches and church-going, and assign it to that general position, chiefest, most indispensable, most exhilarating, to which the others are to be adjusted, inside of all human character, and education, and affairs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking