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Updated: June 26, 2025
Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr.
A defence of her opinions, published in London in 1699, and a collection, which followed soon after, of her translated letters, had considerable influence with many earnest spirits who chafed at the coldness of the times, and cared little for other faults so long as they could find a religious literature in which they could, at all events, be safe from formalism and scholastic or sectarian disputings.
It is common to associate with the idea of Scholasticism, or the theological and philosophical School-science of the middle ages, a system of thought and instruction, embracing, indeed, the highest questions of knowledge and existence, but at the same time not venturing to strike into any independent paths, or to deviate an inch from tradition, but submitting rather, in everything connected, or supposed to be connected, with religious belief, to the dogmas and decrees of the Church and the authority of the early Fathers, and wasting the understanding and intellect in dry formalism or subtle but barren controversies.
It is something even to have a form so rich in the associations of home and of church, of the prayers of childhood, and the centuries of Christian worship. And yet this prayer is first of all a protest against formalism. "Use not vain repetitions," says Jesus, and then he goes on to give this type of restrained, unswerving, concentrated prayer.
The allusive and allegorical features which had long been traditional in the pastoral likewise suited the topical and occasional nature of the masque. The connexion, however, with the stricter forms at least, was never very close, the tendency on the part of the pastoral to confine itself to a mere external formalism being even more noticeable here than in the case of the regular drama.
There is, of course, no contradiction in this: but the reader might well ask how I knew the change from the base 11 to the base 12, in Plate XII., to be one from temperance to luxury; and from the cornice f to the cornice g, in Plate XVI., to be one from formalism to vitality.
Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the Mediæval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness.
But when He trod on their toes, when He ripped up their pretensions, when He began to show His antagonism to their formalism and traditionalism, then they did not know where He came from. And there are many of us who are very polite to Jesus Christ as long as He does not interfere with us, and who begin to doubt His authority when He begins to rebuke our sins.
Froebel, with his belief in human instinct, naturally went to what he called the mother's room, which we should call the nursery, and to the garden where the child finds his "bright round smooth pebble" and his "brilliant quaint leaf." No one would seek to under-value the importance of sense discrimination, but it can be exercised without formalism, and it need not be mere discrimination.
The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the charlatan Haeckel.
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