It must appear impossible, that theism could, from reasoning, have been the primary religion of human race, and have afterwards, b...y its corruption, given birth to polytheism and to all the various superstitions of the heathen world. Reason, when obvious, prevents these corruptions: When abstruse, it keeps the principles entirely from the knowledge of the vulgar, who are alone liable to corrupt any principle or opinion. LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine... for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our religion ... is itself profoundly sad--a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants... full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language--so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The religion of the Bible is the best in the world. I see the infinite value of religion. Let it be always encouraged. A world of ...superstition and folly have grown up around its forms and ceremonies. But the truth in it is one of the deep sentiments in human nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every good cause gained a victory when the Union troops were triumphant. Our final victory was the triumph of religion, of virtue,... of knowledge.... During those four years, whatever our motives, whatever our lives, we were fighting on God's side. We were doing His work. What would this country have been if we had failed?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrib...le putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[In the old religion of the Indians in New Mexico] the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the e...lemental life of the cosmos.... To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we say "science" we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can ...mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas--of conceptions,... which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »