Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
The interest of New Thought is most largely in the present tenses of
life; its future in an eternal progress which should, of course, imply
immortality. New Thought is hospitable to truth from whatever source
derived. It is particularly hospitable to the suggestions of oriental
religions and, as far as it has taken form as a distinct religious
movement, it is becoming more and more markedly a kind of syncretism, a
putting together of religious elements drawn from widely universal
sources and it patently seeks nothing less than a universal religious
fellowship in which the values of all true faith are recognized and
which is to be under the control of what science has to say about the
world without and psychology of the world within. In a sentence New
Thought is an outstanding aspect of the unconquerably religious in human
nature, seeking to subdue to its own ends and inform with its own spirit
the new material which science, psychology and comparative religion have
put at our service in the last two generations.
If New Thought diverges from the accepted Christian theology in many
ways, it runs parallel in other regions with what is enduringly true in
the Gospels, and it runs parallel also with not a little of that
endeavour after theological reconstruction which is loosely known as the
New Theology. We are generally under a compulsion to reconstruct our
creeds and adapt our religious thinking to whatever is true about us in
our understanding of our world and its history and its mechanism and the
laws of our own lives. Theology must take account of a creative
evolution and a humanity which has struggled upward from far-off
beginnings along a far-flung front and the findings of Science and the
intimations of Psychology.
It will need a deal of pioneering to find roads through these new
regions and such adventurous souls as seek new paths, with a daring
disregard for ancient landmarks and a true passion to find religious
meanings in new facts and forces, are really serving us all. There is
the danger, however, that in the very freedom of their speculation they
may be too impatient of old experiences and hallowed certainties, for
these old experiences themselves are deeply rooted and testify to
realities which we may be compelled to let in by the window, once we
have put them out at the door.
IX
THE RETURN OF THE EAST UPON THE WEST
THEOSOPHY AND KINDRED CULTS
_Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East. The
Far-Reaching Results of This Process_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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