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Untitled Article
portion to their strength , they look higher and . deeper for wisdom ; they turn away from all but the only safe guidance 5 they find it enough to have Omnipotence to rest upon . Huniaii suggestions , human direction , are for the weak , the bewildered , the backward - for those who are about to enter on a religious life ; or who , having entered , do not clearly discern their way . Prescribed forms , it thus appears , are fit only for the beginning of a religious course , and the higher kinds of express teaching only for certain
states of advancement . A most . important circumstance to be kept in view respecting such aids is , that they are useful only as far as they serve for outlets of feelings , which are wholly independent of them . They are not , or ought not to be , meant to create any new religious sentiment , or to perform any office beyond that of cherishing and directing that which already exists . It follows , therefore , that when piety is perpetually fed by
natural influences , and directed by familiar circumstances , ( as it is in an advanced religious state , ) such aids become not only less needed , but less intimately connected with the purpose to which they were originally adapted . When a man becomes so prevailingly conscious of his own frailty as seldom to indulge a spirit of pride , he has not only less need of
express acts of humiliation at certain hours , but those acts will humble him the less in proportion as his need of humiliation is diminished . To a man in whom a spirit of devotion has become habitual , times , and modes , and postures of prayer , signify less than to a beginner who is devout thus or never . —It seems scarcely necessary to say this , so evident does it appear to those who have in any degree studied the workings of human feelings ; but
we need only look abroad into the religious world to see that these plain facts are not understood ; that by the great majority of Christians , whether real or nominal , those only are believed to have the spirit of the gospel who retain the minutest of the forms under which it is presented to learners ; that the animating principle is pronounced wrong , if there is the slightest variation from the accustomed mode of exhibiting its details .
The prevalence of this enormous error teaches us that there can scarcely be too much caution in the presentation of rules , or too much explicitness in the display of the elements of a religious life . It must ever be the duty of the strong to help the feeble , of the learned in the gospel to instruct the ignorant ; but this duty must be discharged with the most anxious care to separate what is adventitious from what is essential , and to explain how
much human direction is added to divine . This duty is discharged fully and admirably in the work before us , whose value , great as it is as a direct guide to exercises of piety , is enhanced indefinitely by the scrupulous regard to spiritual liberty in which it is conceived and elaborated . It forms a valuable indirect testimony to the emancipating influence of the gospel ; —to that noblest of its attributes , by which it makes man free from al |
Untitled Article
On the Formation of the Christian Character . 807
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1831, page 807, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2604/page/11/
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