Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
Such a general statement as this must, of course, be qualified. Even the
most devout whose faith and character have alike been fashioned by an
inherited religion in which the personality of God is centrally
affirmed, find their own thought about God fluctuating. So great a thing
as faith in God must always have its lights and shadows and its changing
moods. In our moments of deeper devotion and surer insight the sense of
a supreme personal reality and a vital communion therewith is most clear
and strong; then there is some ebbing of our own powers of apprehension
and we seem to be in the grip of impersonal law and at the mercy of
forces which have no concern for our own personal values. New Thought
naturally reflects all this and adds thereto uncertainties of its own.
There are passages enough in New Thought literature which recognize the
personality of God just as there are passages enough which seem to
reduce Him to power and principle and the secret of such discrepancies
is not perhaps in the creeds of New Thought, but in the varying
attitudes of its priests and prophets. One may say, then, that the God
of New Thought is always immanent, always force and law and sometimes
intimate and personal. However this force may be defined, it carries
those who commit themselves to it toward definite goals of well-being.
The New Thought of to-day reflects the optimistic note of the scientific
evolution of a generation ago. It is not exactly "God's in His heaven,
all's right with the world," but it is the affirmation of streams of
tendency whose unfailing direction is toward happiness and success.
If an element of struggle be implied in the particular sort of salvation
which New Thought preaches, it is not at least clearly brought out.
There has been amongst us of late a new and a very dearly bought
recognition of the element of struggle which seems to be implicit in all
life. The optimistic evolutionary philosophy in which New Thought roots
itself is on the whole justified neither by history nor the insight of
those who have been most rich in spiritual understanding, nor, indeed,
by the outcome of that philosophy in our own time. The happy confidence
that we do not need to struggle, but rather to commit ourselves to
forces which make automatically for happiness and well-being, has only
involved us more deeply in a struggle where in some ways the smug
happiness and well-being of representative New Thought literature seem
more remote than ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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