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In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus, a technical, rigid, and painful adherence to rules, fastings, obtrusive prayers, and petty ritualisms, which form the essence and substance of all pharisaism and all monastic life; based on the enormous error that man deserves heaven by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself, though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for twenty years without once descending; an eternal unrest, because perfection cannot be attained; the most terrible slavery to which a man can be conscientiously doomed, verging into hypocrisy and fanaticism.
They prided themselves upon their nominal, external, hereditary connection with a system of revelation, they trusted in mere ritualisms, they had ossified religion into theology, and degraded morality into casuistry.
Once he was under the dented tin dome where he sat for so many years he became so firm a stickler for the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not practice the law in their shirt sleeves.
This was the creed of Milton and of Bunyan; and yet with both Milton and Bunyan the imagery of the senses is employed as the means not of concealing but revealing the things of the spirit. From the lecture-room of Göttingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica.
Thus, however it came about, here is this Psalmist, David or another, standing away back amidst the shadows and symbols and ritualisms of that Old Covenant, and rising at once above all the mists, right up into the sunshine, and seeing, as clearly as we see it nineteen centuries after Jesus Christ, that the way to escape condemnation is simple faith.
That has always been the way. This Psalmist is no exception to the devout souls of his time. For though, as I have said, externalisms and ritualisms filled a place then, that it is an anachronism and a retrogression that they should be supposed to fill now, still beneath all these there lay this one ancient, permanent relation, the relation of trust.
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