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Updated: May 8, 2025
Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body and soul. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday, like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege. But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion of the man.
The rude beginnings of myth in every age and country bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted are similar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their special grammar of representation. But two highly developed mythical systems two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and the Indian will grow every day farther and farther apart.
About this time Gall and Spurzheim published their works on phrenology, followed by Combe's "Constitution of Man," his "Moral Philosophy," and many other liberal works, all so rational and opposed to the old theologies that they produced a profound impression on my brother-in-law's mind.
The obelisks were thus the symbols of the two great correlative conceptions of the sun in the heavens, and his satellite and representative on the earth god and the king. This Egyptian faith, as attested by the obelisks, the oldest of all the creeds, antecedent to the theologies of India, Greece, and Rome, ceased not to be venerated till the advent of Christianity swept all material worship away.
Expository preaching has had a notable revival in the last three decades, especially among liberal preachers; that is, among those who like ourselves have discarded scholastic theologies, turned to the ethical aspects of religion for our chief interests and accepted the modern view of the Bible.
But this is really not less anthropomorphic than the form in which the god idea meets us in the popular theologies. Its anthropomorphism is only, to unobservant minds, less apparent. The conception of an intelligent, personal being controlling nature is not fundamentally less objectionable than the frankly man-like being of the early theologies.
The times demanded intellectual as well as moral consolation; and the disintegration of ancient theologies needed to be repaired, that the new ethical impulse imparted by Christianity might rest upon a plausible speculative basis.
I believe that one of the greatest dangers of the present day is the general atmosphere of insincerity in such matters, which is fast producing a scepticism not as to any or all theologies, but as to the very existence of intellectual good faith.
Paul until our own time is involved in this bare statement and since our theologies have never been able to explain this whole great matter in any doctrinal form which has secured universal consent, we must simply fall back upon the statement of the fact and recognize that here is something to be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine.
In the same way, why can't you take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common sense."
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