We have learned
that God does not want us, as universal man once believed, to sacrifice
the dearest object of our love. We have learned that he does not want
us to sacrifice our first-born child, as the old Hebrews used to, and
the remains of which custom are plainly visible throughout the Old
Testament everywhere. We have left behind these old types of religious
thought and life; but the world has lost nothing in the process. The
world has not left religion behind. The whole process of growth and
development in the sphere of the religious life and the development of
man has been one of outgrowing crude and partial and inadequate
thoughts and feelings about the universe and God and man and duty and
destiny.
We do not care so much about ceremony as the world did once. The most
civilized people in the world are not so given to these things in their
religious development. We do not care so much about creed as they did a
thousand or five hundred years ago. We do not believe that God is going
to judge us by our intellectual conceptions of him and of our fellow-
men. And I suppose it is true, always has been true as it is to-day,
that the adherent of any particular form or theory of the religious
life has the feeling that, when that is threatened, religion is
threatened; and he defends it passionately, fights for it, perhaps
bitterly, feels justified in opposing, perhaps hating, those he regards
as the enemies of God and his great and sacred and religious hopes.
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