The deepest religious seer, who ever spoke on earth, charged the ecclesiastical functionaries of his day with making the commandment of God of no effect by their traditions.
All over Christendom a cumbrous mass of doctrines and ceremonies has thrust aside the pure and simple teaching of Jesus, and again made the commandment of God of no effect, because of priestly traditions. Belief in technical dogmas, a ritualistic worship of the person of Christ, paying tithes to the church, attending its services and repeating its formulas, are put above the practice of intrinsic truth, justice, and good-will. In consequence of this divorce of religious insight from religious worship, miserable formalism flourishes on one side, and dreary skepticism and worldliness abound on the other. Plainly, the same thing needs to be done for the religion of Jesus himself, perverted by the churches of Christendom, which he did for the more ancient system of faith, which the Pharisees at that time had degraded from a savor of life to a savor of death.
A religion of tradition converts Christianity into a spasmodic act of history. A religion of insight contemplates it as the continuous miracle of the divine order of nature and life, wherein each acts his part, and reaps as he sows, in the double sphere of law and grace. However opposed in appearance Science and Religion may be, they are never hostile, but thrill everywhere in unison. Myth is truth enveloped in fiction. The vulgar mind gives all its belief to the mythical Phoenix, while real insight thinks adoringly of Truth. Like one of those enormous icebergs, which breaks off and drifts about in the Arctic summer, till it becomes interiorly so honey-combed with disintegration that the Eskimo holds his breath while passing it, the whole gigantic fabric of the popular creed of Christendom has become so pierced by critical light and warmth, so riddled and rotted with doubt and dislike, that the average attendant at our fashionable churches dares not point his inquiring finger at it, lest the entire bulk tumble about him in intellectual slosh. In place of the exclusive incarnation of God in Christ, let us see Him incarnate in every man, in proportion to the wisdom and goodness and self-sacrifice of that man,— yea, in every creature,—in proportion to the spiritual capacity of that creature to receive him.
