Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principlesSullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Religion
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles
Sullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Conduct of life; Ethics; Religion and ethics
Who the gallery in this particularly Divine comedy may be I really do
not know. I strongly suspect that if the piece were put upon the
boards--and everything is now dramatised, from the trials of Satan to
the Dreyfus case--the gallery would be the emptiest department of the
theatre. And this opinion I am pleased to see confirmed by the closing
remarks of the review above noticed, which warns the Christian bishops
and pastors of the present day that the comparative merits of one set
of "orders" as opposed to those of another set have "little interest
and not much meaning for nine Englishmen out of ten".
But what, I think, the average man would be interested to know is
whether there be such things as "holy orders" at all. Very many of
them are, in this matter, I believe, in the position of those
interesting Asiatics who "knew not whether there be such a thing as a
Holy Ghost," and I think it will be abundantly easy to show that the
ignorance of the ordinary man as to the precise nature of "orders" was
shared in also by our Asiatic friends whose existence is noticed in an
early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We shall therefore proceed
to show the groundlessness of the entire controversy from evidence
which satisfactorily establishes that the authentic form of
Christianity, as fixed by its founder and his followers for two
centuries, admits of no such thing as a priesthood in the sense
contemplated by the disputants whose wordy warfare has now, we
understand, been closed for ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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