Monday, March 4, 2013

A Cry From the Depths

Religion is a cry from the depths. The noblest natures among men have been religious ones. No soul of mighty faculties, of sensibilities strong enough to sound the depths, fine enough to feel the heights, of this world-mystery and grandeur, has been an indifferent, irreligious soul. They have bowed to the royalty of religious truth, either by their joyful possession of it or by their cry for it. Only the surface of our nature can nourish an atheistic plant; when its deeps are ploughed, the latent seed of faith begins to germinate, and the promise of a piety vigorous and sinewy as the structure of the oak lifts itself above the soil.

—    Thomas Starr King (died March 4, 1864)

Justice Is Deeper

The spirit that has a sense of justice quick and large, and lives by it in relation to his fellows, and tries to organize more of it through himself in society, lives deeper than the man of intellect and infinitely deeper than the man of pleasure. The affections are richer than money-making and the truth-seeking capacities, and the richest affections are those which bind us consciously to the Infinite. Every kind of life is essentially superficial that does not bring the human heart nearer to the Infinite Presence and Love.

—    Thomas Starr King (died March 4, 1864)

Thomas Starr King, 1824-1864

Sunday, March 3, 2013

On Truth and the Poet

It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action today which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement.

— William Godwin (born March 3, 1756)

Sins of Omission

If I were a duly licensed pardoner, I should have a number of nicely engraved indulgences for what are called sins of omission. Not that I should attempt to extenuate the graver sort. I should not hold out false hopes to thankless sons or indifferent husbands. To be followed by such riff-raff would spoil my trade with the better classes. I should not have anything in my wallet for the acrimonious critic, who brings a railing accusation against his neighbor, and omits to sign his name. Some omissions are unpardonable.

I should, at the beginning, confine my traffic to those sins which easily beset conscientious persons about half past two in the morning. We have warrant for thinking that the sleep of the just is refreshing. This is doubtless true of the completely just; but with the just man in the making it is frequently otherwise. There is a stage in his strenuous moral career which is conducive to insomnia.

— Samuel McChord Crothers (1857-1927)

What Is a Good Character Today?

Let us be done with the notion that religion is confined to petty pieties and small constraints.  All too often men [and women] who have possessed these pieties have wrought great evil. ...  You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart.  You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer.  A good character today is shaped by greatness – greatness in vision, greatness in courage, greatness in insight, greatness in purpose and devotion.

— A. Powell Davies (1902-1957)

William Godwin (1756-1836)

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Born Again

I believe that one is converted when first one hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling one's hitherto unconscious self. I believe one is born first unto oneself — for the happy developing of oneself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and the pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again upon entering maturity; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers [and sisters]. Then, it appears to me, one gradually formulates one's religion, be it what it may. A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

— D.H. Lawrence (died March 2, 1930)

The Fellowship of Human Love

The fellowship of human love, in its very might and beauty, looks above itself for

its own completeness and interpretation. Not till, hand in hand with those we love, we have bowed our hearts before the Love that is above us; not till our half-discordant wills have found their harmony in a Will that is above them all; not till we have seen behind all beauty of form, and sound, and human soul, the beauty of the Soul of souls; … not till, with growing knowledge and with deepening love, we have felt ourselves drawing into ever closer communion with God, … not till then do we know what it is for which we live and work and are ready to die, not till then have we a gospel, not till then shall we be fired with a love and supported by a faith to which all things are possible, not till then shall we know why we are here and what we have to do.

— Philip H. Wicksteed (1844-1927)

Friday, March 1, 2013

The Soul of the Cultural Body

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of individuals to preserve the autonomy and individuality of their existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive humanity had to wage for its bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon humankind to free itself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Human nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of humans and their work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each person more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.

— George Simmel (born March 1, 1858)

A Still More Perfect Day

When the Roman went into the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, he found there no image of deity, and to him the shrine was empty. And yet that shrine was the symbol of a nobler God than any of which the Pantheon could boast. And there are some who scorn our spiritual faith which hesitates to speak God's name or express His nature in a form of words. But to us, on whom has dawned the vision of boundless realms of progress and the ideal of unattained perfection, God is the divine Presence which besets behind and before, the Life of our lives and the Soul of our souls; and Immortality gathers up into one conception the intimations and hopes of a glory yet to be revealed, of vistas of future beauty and harmony for which we strive, seeking after every deepening twilight for a still more perfect day.

— Frank Walters (1845-1908)