People From London

"To acclaim that the Bible contains the Word of God is not to say that all its words are the words of God."

"We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life."

"Reason will take us so far on firm ground. But then there must be the leap in the same direction, if the truth of those facts in religion which are only reached by faith are to be enjoyed. . . It is taking the road of evidence as far as it will go and then, with the energy provided by meditating on the character of God as Christ revealed him, making a leap of faith, only to land finally in a conviction as strong as proof can supply."

"We use the word divine because the word human is not big enough. He is so much more like God than any other. But the word “divine” is really only an expression of Christian agnosticism. I am quite ready to say that I believe in the divinity of Christ, but I do not know what it means, nor can I find anyone who can explain what it means, least of all some of the theologians from Paul onwards. I sincerely believe that he is the Savior of the World, and if I am immediately challenged about what he saves men from, my answer is that he saves men from the utter despair which would fall upon a thoughtful man, who, conscious of high aims and immense possibilities within himself, was condemned to try to achieve them without any aid save his own, and purely human help of his fellows."

"For myself, I refuse mentally to close the canon as if inspiration had run out! Why should we follow traditional thought more than modern thought?"

"We must resolutely refuse to judge Jesus by the Bible. We must judge the Bible by Jesus; by the total effect of a consistent personality made upon us from all sources, including our own experience."

"I would like to be able with authority to present the case for believing in God, but I would far rather be an authoritative argument for believing in God. The saints are the best argument for Christianity. They have the highest authority in the world for they coerce us and yet our coercion is a willing one. They drive us along the way which in our best moments we want to go. When we read their lives, and even more when we touch their lives with our own in day-to-day living, we meet Christianity’s unanswerable argument. We know, with an authority nothing can resist or overcome, that Christianity changes lives and that if Jesus Christ were given a chance he would change the world."

"There is no authority for God’s existence except the inward conviction that is born of mystical experience."

"No doubt analytical psychologists could tear it all to bits and explain it in the jargon of this or that psychological school. Critics could trample on my dreams and say that it was too much in the realm of feeling to have any value, but so is falling in love. Is that not real, and highly significant, and life-changing? So is the state of mind induced by music, or by some of the glories of Nature, or by some of the works of man. . . All I can say is that to me it was an experience of God, never to be denied. . . No one who has had such an experience can ever doubt but that in the end good will triumph over every form of evil, and that every life, however humble, frustrated, indifferent or even careless, is in the care of this Power and within a Plan, vast beyond our power to imagine, which will work out in a blessedness which brings utter satisfaction and quality of bliss for which there are no words."

". . . while we must not thrust beliefs on people, belaboring their minds to try to make them accept orthodoxy, we may set these same beliefs before people, showing them the rich truth which we have found and which they may come to receive as their questing mind develops and grows."

"I hold that the self-authentication of truth, or, in other words, seeing, is the authority, and the only authority there is in the field of religion."

"The factor that makes us question the authority of the expert is that we are personally emotionally involved in the result."

"Men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Pope, or an infallible conscience, or an infallible Christ, and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth. I believe all that kind of talk is false. It is false psychology or a failure of insight, and it is the fruit of mental laziness; a refusal to think things through. The most important convictions in religion cannot really be reached on the word of another. We can assent to propositions out of laziness of thought, or a desire to please, or an inability to argue, but one of the reasons why, in a crisis, men often feel let down by their religion is that they glibly assented to this or that, and falsely called their assent ‘belief.’"

"I am saying that truth may certainly be true whatever my opinion may be, but it has no authority with me until I perceive it to be true."

"Any man, to the extent to which he is good, reveals the nature of God."

"Thought must be free to range as it likes over all phenomena and philosophy, unhampered by compulsions. A man cannot be bludgeoned by vulgar threats of damnation, into accepting that what other people say is true."

"My plea is not for an impossible subjectivism. But the so-called infallible church or book has no power unless I feel that what it says is true. And who can decide that but myself?"

". . . there is only one authority. . . that is the authority which truth itself possesses when it is perceived to be true by the individual concerned. . . the alternative procedure, the delegation to external authority, must itself follow an individual’s subjective decision."

"When people said to me, ‘I should like to be a member of the City Temple, what must I believe?’ I used to say, ‘Only those things which appear to you to be true.’"

"When I really believe a thing, I mean that its truth possesses me. . . Truth is self-authenticating, and when it possesses me, nothing can shake it from its enthronement until some greater truth displaces it or gives it less prominence."

"In the cases of nearly all of us, what our fathers were, we are, and we make up our reasons afterwards."

"We still make of prime importance matters about which Jesus said nothing. How can a matter be fundamental in a religion when the founder of the religion never mentioned it?"

"The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvation Army in the band, the Roman Catholic in the Mass and the Baptist in immersion; if the High Anglican likes incense and ceremonial, and the Methodist puts his emphasis on personal experience, the fellowship of the authentic class meeting and Charles Wesley’s hymns, why talk of disunity?"

"No argument or logic carries the same degree of conviction as insight, and it is the kind of conviction by which we know that dawn over the Alps on a perfect morning is beautiful. Argument cannot produce it and doubt cannot remove it. The outward beauty meets the inward recognition and in our hearts we know."

"I am not prepared to hand over to any other person, though wise and learned, or to any institution however ancient or sure of its position, my inalienable right to search for ever-growing and ever-expanding truth. I believe the craving for security in belief is one which arises from within ourselves, and can only be met adequately from resources which are within ourselves. It seems to me that it is far more important for a soul in evolution to believe a few things because it has struggled, thought and suffered to discover and possess them, than it is for it to have a comfortable and orderly faith which it has adopted from any source outside itself."

"If Christ can—and he does—hold in utter loyalty the hearts of St. Francis and John Knox, of Calvin and St. Theresa, of General Booth and Pope John, of Billy Graham and Albert Schweitzer, who hold irreconcilably different beliefs about him, how can belief and uniformity of belief be vitally important? Further, where in the Gospels are we ever told that Christ demanded belief in some theological proposition before he would admit a seeker into discipleship?"

"As I see it, all questions regarding the factual accuracy of Biblical statements—notably such ‘miraculous’ events as Virgin Birth, Resurrection, etc.—are wholly irrelevant to the true issues. Indeed, I should go so far as to say myself that the whole value of the Gospel story to mankind—and it is very great—lies not in its historical but in its legendary, mythical, or ‘typical’ character. It is not, I think, the Sermon on the Mount—or at least not this alone—that constitutes the peculiar contribution of Christianity to human thought, for very similar maxims are to be found elsewhere, and in any event could be deduced from first principles. It is to be found, rather, in the affirmation that all that is best and highest in man, as typified in the person of Jesus, is bound to arouse opposition, is often persecuted and apparently destroyed—yet is in fact indestructible and does perennially ‘rise again’, triumphant over seeming disaster."

"Each thinker has the right to do what Paul did, to set forth truth as he sees it, in the thought-forms of his own day and generation, as long as he does not willfully distort truth merely to fit his own ideas."

"Though not as important as loving, believing certainly matters. It matters so much that, if it has any relevance to the business of living, it must be born in the individual mind, not thrust by church authorities on others."

"Christianity is a love relationship with Christ far below—or above, if you like—differences of belief or different ways of worshiping, far above differences of language or of color."

"Since I have talked with many self-styled * atheists, I have come to believe that the true species does not exist, and that atheism, so-called, is either an emotional deviation in the same category as neurotic illness and with a similar causation, or else the denial of the existence of a mythical figure who certainly does not exist."

"I believe passionately that Christianity is a way of life, not a theological system with which one must be in intellectual agreement. I feel that Christ would admit into discipleship anyone who sincerely desired to follow him, and allow that disciple to make his creed out of his experience; to listen, to consider, to pray, to follow, and ultimately to believe only those convictions about which the experience of fellowship made him sure."

"The Christianity of tomorrow will embrace all truth wherever it is found or however men have come to apprehend it, whether through specifically Christian teaching or through Buddhism or Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism or even through the bleak desert of apparent atheism."

"Why do men hug words to their hearts after the living truth has long since fled from them?"

"Dr. Weatherhead contends that the theological demands of Christianity are a barrier to an honest participation by a great number of people and that many agnostics are much closer to belief in the true God than many churchgoers."

"It is from this viewpoint that he writes in this unconventional book. He makes a strong case for his contention that loyalty to Christ and to his spirit can go hand in hand with the rejection of unlikely theological dogma and creed."

"[He] went as consul to Smyrna, where, perhaps, he first imbibed those loose principles which, in a subsequent publication, too infamous to be particularised, tarnished his reputation as an author…. In this situation [debtors’ prison], one of the booksellers who disgrace the profession, offered him a temporary relief for writing the work above alluded to, which brought a stigma on his name, which time has not obliterated, and which will be consigned to his memory whilst its poisonous contents are in circulation…. In conversation he was very pleasant and anecdotal, understanding most of the living languages, and speaking them all very fluently. As a writer, he shewed himself best in novels, song-writing, and the lighter species of authorship; but when he touched politics, he touched it like a torpedo, he was cold, benumbing, and soporific."

"Traditionalists may be shocked by the opinions expressed here; others will come to welcome them. Regardless of your own views, The Christian Agnostic demands to be read and pondered."

"In fact, many professing agnostics are nearer belief in the true God than are many conventional church-goers who believe in a body that does not exist whom they miscall God."

"Every denomination within organized Christianity contains a valuable truth, but none contains all truth. Each mirrors at its best something of Christ but all are only caricatures of him."

"I reject unchecked subjectivism as the authority in religion. No one can suppose that the final authority in religion is what the individual happens to think is true, unless his decision is preceded by long meditation, the weighing of all the available evidence and prayer for guidance."

"All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice."

"I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions."

"Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it."

"I feeling pretty sensibly that it was not going by the right door and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: "Pooh," says he "my dear, any port in a storm.""

"I wrote it [Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure] to prove that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the the coarseness the School of Venus [L'Ecole des Filles], which had quite plain words. My printer and publisher certainly were deceived by my avoiding those rank words in the work, which are all that they judge obscenity by."

"Your Grace ordered a prosecution against the Printer and publisher of The Memoires of a Lady of Pleasure, the same Bookseller, on Griffiths (as I apprehend) has published within a few Days a book called Memoires of Fanny Hill, the Lewdest thing I ever saw.... I beg of your Grace to give proper orders to stop the progress of this vile Book which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners, and a reproach to the Honour of the Government and the Law of the Country."

"I now wonder that my book could so long, escape the Vigilance of the Guardians of the Public Manners since nothing is truer than that more Clergymen bought it in proportion than any other distinction of men…. The Bishops can take no step to punishing the author that will not powerfully contribute to the notoriety of the book.... a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot."

"Cleland, curious figure. Thought how ’twould have struck you some years ago…"

"[T]hat most licentious and inflaming book"