The Religious Life of LondonRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Religion
The Religious Life of London
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
Mr. Conway is a very advanced thinker. The character of his preaching
and praying is purely theistic. He wars with dogmas in every form. It
may be a wing to-day, a fetter to-morrow. For him there are no sacred
books, or rather he places them all on an equality. For his motto he
goes to India, and quotes the Brahma Somaj. In this respect he is a true
follower of the late Mr. Fox, whose fascinating oratory owed very little
of its charm to that which orthodox Unitarians or orthodox Christians
hold highest and holiest; whose aim was more to pull down than to build
up, and who had a greater faculty for the exposition of Christian
fallacies than for the enunciating of truths and principles needful to
humanity in its hour of temptation, distress, danger, or death. Few have
his exquisite humour, his power of sarcasm, his acquaintance with modern
literature, his copious command of polished language, his expressive yet
calm delivery, his gentleness almost as touching as that of woman; but
that which was lacking in him often made men his inferiors in intellect,
his superiors in the art of arousing the spiritually dead, or in giving
to the moral wastes in our midst the vigour, the beauty, the fertility of
life.
THE SECULARISTS.
It is a sign of the times when Infidelity visits the workshop or the
factory, and challenges the admiration of the men in fustian—the men
whose hard labours and horny hands have helped to make England what it
is, and who in an increasing ratio are making their influence felt on the
Exchange where capital seeks investment, in the ancient halls where the
teachers of the next generation are training, in the study of the
political philosopher, in Parliaments where practical people assemble to
legislate after their necessarily imperfect fashion for the general weal.
It is said of Sir Godfrey Kneller that he was deeply shocked at hearing a
common labourer invoking imprecations on his own head. Some such feeling
must be entertained by the old-fashioned, scholarly sceptics at all times
met with in highly intellectual communities. Religion was a good thing
for the poor; it taught them to know their place, to be humble,
industrious, and not to murmur when deprived by human agency of the
rights to which all are born, or when by the same agency they were made
to bear innumerable wrongs. For such religion was intended; and for such
considerations it was right and proper that it should be accepted by
society—sanctioned by the law—its ministers rewarded and salaried by the
State. It was under the influence of some such feeling that Napoleon the
Great is reported to have said, if there were no God, it would be
necessary to invent one; and in a proportionate manner do the
philosophers feel alarm and indignation when the working man, for whom
such trouble has been taken,—for whom religion has, as it were, been
discovered,—for whom an Establishment, the most richly endowed with this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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