Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Religion
Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 1822-1895; Unitarians -- New England -- Biography
There is no irony so great as to call this "flight out of nature"
and the creeds that come of it, "faith." The purity of heart that
really sees God will have a mighty idealization of humanity at the
very basis of its creed, and act on it in all its treatment of the
vicious, the morally incapable and diseased. It is time Christendom
was on the search for it.
In the paper on "Transcendentalism," he says:
Christianity inherited the monarchical idea of a God separate from
man, and a contempt for natural law and human faculty which
crippled its faith in the spiritual and moral ideal. It became more
and more a materialism of miracle, Bible, church. Even its essay to
realize immanent Deity yielded a more or less exclusive,
mediatorial God-man; and it treated personality as the mere
consequence of one prescriptive, historical force, just as
philosophical materialism treats it as mere product of sensations.
Mr. Johnson abhorred the monarchical principle. It was his endeavor to
track it from its origin, through all its forms of institution,
ceremonial, dogma, symbol, from the earliest times to the latest,
through the whole East to the farthest West. This was the burden of his
studies in Oriental religions, the sum of his criticism, the aim of his
public teaching. He was profoundly, intensely, absorbingly religious,
but the form of his religion was not "Christian" in any recognized
sense, Romanist, Protestant, or Unitarian. The most radical thought did
not altogether please him. His was a worship of Law, Order, Cause,
Harmony, impersonal, living, natural; a recognition of mind as the
supreme power in the universe; a cosmic, eternal, absolute faith in
intellectual principles as the substance and soul of the world. God was,
to him, a spiritual being, alive, vital, flowing in every mode.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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