Word: religion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Also, no code of ethics is an adequate substitute for religion. For if it be manmade, it can be remade by other men, and its true name is mores, which are transient. And even if, like the Ten Commandments, an ethical code has a religious origin, but is not newly illuminated for each generation by fresh drafts of religion, then its followers are trapped in what Santayana calls "the snare of moralism, that destroys the sweetness of human affections by stretching them on the rack of infinity...
Such testimony kept Christ on his throne. It preserved the infinite mystery of a religion which, had the Arians won, said Carlyle, "would have dwindled away into a legend." Without its saints and mystics, no religion is long for this world. For the ultimate purpose of religion is not right behavior, or right opinion, or any earthly glory or virtue. Its purpose is that of a window through which the selfless eye may see its way to that final necessity of the human spirit, Godhead and immortality...
Mysticism Today. In this, its real purpose, lies the real difficulty of religion for modern man. It is not to be taken up with reservations, lightly. The fact that most men do so take it is the reason it may fail them. For although religion is practical and can still do much good in the world, its strength at any period is measured by the number and quality of its mystics, of its "God-intoxicated...
There are indeed as many dangers as there are comforts in true religion. As the churches cannot survive without it, so we need the churches to protect us from its untutored excesses. Happy is he who can find his religion within the ancient wisdom of a church; happy the nation! But our age, if it is to be a religious age, must be also an age of rediscovery. That will take us through much travail before we find our spiritual home...
...road to religion marked FOR SAINTS ONLY? Is the plain, non-mystical citizen wasting his time working for the wife & kids-instead of sweating out the Dark Night of the Soul in holy poverty...