Christianity in relation to Freethought, Scepticism, and Faith: Three discourses by the Bishop of Peterborough with special replies by Mr. C. BradlaughBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
Christianity in relation to Freethought, Scepticism, and Faith: Three discourses by the Bishop of Peterborough with special replies by Mr. C. Bradlaugh
If you want to know how I would make a code of morality, I would make it
as you would a bouquet of flowers: from one plot in a garden you cull the
rose, from another other flowers of sweet perfume, from another the
flowers of brilliant hue, until colour blending with colour and fragrance
aiding, your bouquet presents beauty to the eye and sweet perfume to the
scent; so I would take from Shakspere the fruit of his wide grasping
brains, from Swift his brilliant wit, from Montesquieu his great power of
generalisation, from Voltaire his grand irony, from Rabelais his biting
thought, from Spinoza his grand logic, from John Locke his wise reason, I
would take from Dr. Magee his eloquence, and bring them and the thoughts
of the world’s poets and philosophers together. I would make my bouquet
of thought. I say the Bible is not a book to cast away, but to place on
our shelves beside the Koran, the Vedas, and other old-world books, to
mark how the thought of the world has grown. We know that religion has a
hold upon the mass, but I claim for scepticism a higher morality. The
belief in religion is the wearing the old clothes of a former age, the
swaddling clothes adopted in the childhood of humanity, but scepticism is
the bursting out from these old swaddling clothes. It is the effort of
buried brain to burst its grave and stand out alive for human
deliverance.
THIRD DISCOURSE
OF THE
BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH.
CHRISTIANITY AND FAITH.
ON Thursday evening, March 30th, 1871, the nave of the Cathedral,
Norwich, was much crowded with the citizens of all classes, to hear the
third sermon of the Bishop of Peterborough, on “Christianity and Faith.”
Before the sermon the Bishop prayed specially for the conversion of the
infidels present. He selected his text from the Gospel according to St.
John, xx. 29,
“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
His Lordship said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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