Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
And whenever the lightning edge of a conviction like that cuts its way through the formalisms and traditionalisms and hearsay repetitions of conventional religion, then there comes what came to Gideon, the swift thought, 'And if this be true, if I really do touch, and am touched by, that living Person whose name is Jehovah, what is to become of me?
He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn.
English Art seemed to be running down; cold formalisms, classicalities, extravagances, affectations, imitations, "high art," occupied the field almost to the exclusion of better things.
Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
Gathered out of their ruins by the second Babylon, gathered by the Papal Church in the extremity of her sin; raised up by her, not when she was sending forth her champions to preach in the highway, and pine in the desert, and perish in the fire, but in the very scarlet fruitage and fullness of her guilt, when her priests vested themselves not with purple only, but with blood, and bade the cups of their feasting foam not with wine only, but with hemlock; raised by the hands of the Leos and the Borgias, raised first into that mighty temple where the seven hills slope to the Tiber, that marks by its massy dome the central spot, where Rome has reversed the words of Christ, and, as He vivified the stone to the apostleship, she petrifies the apostleship into the stumbling stone; exalted there first as if to mark what work it had to do, it went forth to paralyze or to pollute, and wherever it came, the luster faded from the streets of our cities, the gray towers and glorious arches of our abbeys fell by the river sides, the love of nature was uprooted from the hearts of men, base luxuries and cruel formalisms were festered and frozen into them from their youth; and at last, where, from his fair Gothic chapel beside the Seine, the king St.
By accepting the words in their simple sense, we are thus led to apprehend the immediate presence of the Deity, and His purpose of manifesting Himself as near us whenever the storm-cloud stoops upon its course; while by our vague and inaccurate acceptance of the words, we remove the idea of His presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know: and gradually, from the close realization of a living God, who "maketh the clouds His chariot," we define and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive God inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws of Nature.
As the electricity in the atmosphere may annihilate space by enabling us to flash a thought instantaneously even to a world whose distance is measured in millions of miles, so does this sublime conception of the great Oneness shatter the foundations on which all outside redemptions, priests, sacrifices, formalisms, rituals, sacraments, devilry, hell fire, and the rest repose, by showing every man that he is his own priest and sacrificer.
The difficulties of deciphering them, however, and their many peculiarities and formalisms of style, render them rather of curious historical and archaeological than of literary interest.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking