Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
For most of us no one way of approach--no single type of religion--is
quite sufficient for all the needs of our life. Most of us are
fortunate enough to have at least moments when we feel in warm and
intimate _contact_ with a divine, enwrapping environment more real to
us than things of sense and of arithmetic, and when the infinite and
eternal is no less, but immeasurably more, sure than the finite and
temporal. Most of us, again, succeed, at least on happy occasions of
mental health, in finding rational clues which carry us through the
maze of contingency and clock-time happenings, through the
imperfections of our slow successive events, to the One Great Now of
perfect Reality which explains the process, and we attain to an
intellectual love of God. And in spite of the literary difficulties of
primitive narratives and of false trails which the historical Church
has again and again taken, almost any serious, earnest soul to-day
{xlvi} may find that divine Face, that infinitely deep and luminous
Personality who spoke as no man ever spake, who loved as none other
ever loved, who saw more in humanity than anybody else has ever seen,
and who felt as no other person ever has that He was one in heart and
mind and will with God; and having found Him, by a morally responsive
Faith which dominates and transforms the inward self, one has found God
as Companion, Friend, and Saviour. Where all these ways converge, and
a soul enjoys the privilege of mystical contact, the compulsion of
rational insight, and the moral reinforcement of personal Faith in
Christ, religion comes to its consummate flower, and may with some
right be called "spiritual Religion."
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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