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Updated: July 20, 2025
Religion to him was a round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a subjection to the dominion of the letter, which never touched the heart, nor bowed the spirit down in penitence and humility before God. The Pharisee's whole concern was with externals; but Christ declared that he who is only right outwardly is not right at all.
The sacrificial system should have destroyed spirituality; in fact, it produced the Psalter, 'the hymnbook of the second Temple. Pharisaism ought to have led to externalism; in fact, it did not, for somehow excessive scrupulosity in rite and pietistic exercises went hand in hand with simple faith and religious inwardness.
Here, then, as elsewhere, we see that the difference between the morality of externalism and the morality of self-realisation is a difference, not of degree but of direct antagonism, the difference between a poison and its antidote, between the cause of a malady and the cure.
It was not the time for Such a One to slight the proprieties and 'reasonable conventions of life. The truth is, the devotion of his disciples has left us minute pictures of the man, so that we see him ... particular as to the clothes he wore; and from this too the West gathers material for its charge of externalism.
The spirit of New Japan is indifferent to religion; but this is not due to an inherently non-religious or irreligious nature, but to the empty externalism and shallow puerilities of the only religions they know. How can they be zealous for them or recognize any authority in them?
With all of this, it is strange to find a man of so much learning who had so little sympathy with the comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on behalf of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly known.
The spiritualistic movement opened the gates for the expression of skepticism, which the formalism, the tyranny, bigotry, and externalism of the Church awakened in the minds of the people of every enlightened Christian nation; and the result has been a criticism so pungent, and an examination so thorough and direct, into the deformities of the Church, that she has been obliged to contemplate her own condition and the rottenness of her position, until she fairly trembles at the view of her disjointed parts.
Still, they made their yearly journeys to Jerusalem, and participated in the great convocations, which, in outward splendour, eclipsed memories of the past; but they realized that the glory had departed, and that the mere husk of externalism could not long resist the incoming tides of militarism, of the love of display, and the corrupting taint of the worst aspects of Roman civilization.
I have conversed with some who seemed to me set on knowing and doing the will of God, who showed, so far as I could obtain an insight into their character, a reverent, earnest, humble temper, as if they had come under the power of the few passages, occurring here and there in the Quran, which inculcate spirituality of mind and love to all men, and as if they had in a measure escaped from the externalism so prominent in that book, and from its hard, fierce, bitter tone towards all who refuse to receive it as a revelation from heaven.
It was seen to be entirely inward, an affair of the heart and soul and mind, and, ulteriorly, an affair of the body and the natural life. The religion of Rome, with its constant emphasis on works of men's piety and the merit resulting therefrom, had become thoroughgoing externalism. So many prayers recited, so many altars visited, so many offerings made, meant so many merits achieved.
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