Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
In fact, any living Christian experience is always in process of
adjustment. Those who conceive a dogmatic religion as an immovable
religion, as a collection of cut and dried formulae which each
generation is expected to learn and repeat and to which it has no other
relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is
not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the
Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any
danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with
them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that
there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to
the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt
to live a truly Christian life is a never-ending, inexhaustible
adventure. Only those can miss this fact who have utterly misconceived
Christianity as a barren set of prohibitions, warning its devotees off
the field of great sections of human experience. There are those who
appear to imagine that the primary business of Christianity is to deal
with sin, and that in order to keep itself occupied it has to invent a
large number of unreal sins. Unfortunately sin, as the deliberate
rejection of the known will of God, exists; and, fortunately, the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ Who came into the world to save sinners also
exists. We can be unendingly thankful for that. But it is also true that
the action of Christianity is not exhausted in the negative work of
dealing with sin. Christianity is primarily a positive action for the
bringing about and development of the relation of the soul with God in
the state of union. We may say that Christianity has to turn aside from
this its proper business of developing the spiritual life to the
preliminary work of dealing with sin which kills spirituality and
hinders its development. But it is not necessary to make the blunder of
assuming that this dealing with sin is the essential work of
Christianity because it has so continually to be at it, any more than
it is necessary to assume that the essential work of a farmer is the
digging up of weeds. Surely it would be no adequate treatise on
agriculture which would confine itself to description of the nature of
weeds and of methods of dealing with them. There is a branch of theology
which deals with sin, the methods of its treatment and its cure; but
there are also other branches of theology: and the direction of the Holy
Scripture is not to get rid of sin and stop; but having done that, to go
on to perfection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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