This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need
for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality,
but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion,
this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical
Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with
all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their
special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As
well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen,
or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical
Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest
man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust
indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine
of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660),
Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological
Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban
VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the
Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and
philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily,
simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in
its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those
elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are
true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all
undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously
valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold
the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious
instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and
imperfect, which environ such a soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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