Religion

"It can now be sufficiently established... what is the cause and ground in man himself of that faith: namely, love, zeal of doing right and avoiding wrong. Now this love and zeal are able to be present already either before man heard anything of the commands given to him by God or before he was awakened through this hearing. But if neither occurs this faith of which we speak will never be able to exist in man."

"...the church of England, when she baptizes any one, makes him not a Christian ...the church of England is mistaken, and makes none but socinians Christians."

"Our justification before God is that we are regarded by God as just, or righteous."

"I will make the world believe that I never heard of such a man as Socinus: and if they tell me that I speak his very language as perfectly as if I were a Native of Sienna, I'll face them down that I had it not by fingring of any Socinian Authors, but by a kind of Natural Revelation. Well, this cause must be carried on, and I can do it as well as any man by maintaining that there is but One Article of Christian Faith necessarily to be believ'd to make a man a Christian, necessarily to be believ'd in order to salvation. For if there be but One Point necessary to be believ'd, then the doctrines concerning the Trinity, concerning the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ, concerning his Satisfaction, &c. are rendred unnecessary as to the making us Christians. And this I will shove on under the colour of being serviceable to the bulk of Mankind, of being obliging and merciful to the Multitude and Rabble, and Poor People; though (to say the Truth) I shew my self to be so far from obliging the Multitude that I do them an infinite deal of Mischief. Yet if I compass my End, it is enough, and I care for no more. And my End is this, to hale in Socinianism after a new manner."

"Charles Hartshorne... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...The main tenet of the Socinian heresy is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I ...find it congenial, and consistent with scientific common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. ...We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. ...If we are left behind, it is an end. If we keep on growing, it is a beginning."

"Eph. i.6. "Who hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Our being in him is the ground or our being accepted. So it is in those unions to which the Holy Ghost has thought fit to compare this. The union of the members of the body with the head, is the ground of their partaking of the life of the head; it is the union of the branches to the stock, which is the ground of their partaking of the sap and life of the stock; it is the relation of the wife to the husband, that is the ground of her joint interest in his estate; they are looked upon, in several respects, as one in law. So there is a legal union between Christ and true Christians; so that (as all except Socinians allow) one, in some respects, is accepted for the other by the Supreme Judge."

"Both narrow-minded science and narrow-minded theology stand opposed to free will. ...The philosophical problem of chance and free will are closely related. The Socinian theology deals with both together. Free will is the coupling of a human mind to otherwise random processes inside the brain. God's will is the coupling of a universal mind to otherwise random processes in the world at large."

"In the late 1690s, as a result of the increased prominence of... antitrinitarian views, the English minister Jonathan Edwards launched a sustained attack against John Locke's use of reason in scriptural interpretation and Socinianism. His was the first of many such attacks against the unitarian dissenters, who had yet to declare themselves outside the parameters of the Church. Edwards noted that it was "absolutely necessary, to make one Member of the Christian Church, to believe a Trinity in the Unity in the Godhead." As he noted in Socinianism Unmask'd, this idea was but the "One article of Christian Faith necessarily to be believ'd to make a man a Christian." Edward's ideas... were often adopted verbatim in the writings and sermons of American ministers. ...Edward's ideas went on to form the core of the American rejections of Socinian and unitarian beliefs."

"Nathaniel Lardner, the author of Letter on the Logos, the work [that] Priestley credited with his own conversion from Arianism to Socinianism, had published anonymously to avoid retribution from both the civil authorities and private citizens—in vain as it turns out."

"The Trinitarian believes in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, in essential union with the One living and true God; the Arian believes that the Son, and Spirit, are Creatures; while the Socinian... rejects the personality of the Spirit (except as identified with the Father,) the Pre-existence of Christ; the Atonement; Eternal punishment, (believing that all will be saved;) affirms the materiality, or sleep of the soul; denies the existence of Satan, and the reality of Hell; rejects the Incarnation, and the Fall; and asserts our Lord Jesus Christ to have been a mere man, the Son of Joseph and Mary."

"Whatever the Causes have bin of this suddain Appearance of Socinianism, or whoever were the Authors that have secretly and in masquerade, abetted and encouraged it; much of which lies as yet in the dark; the pernicious effects of it have bin, and are, at this day too Visible. The minds of men... throughout the Nation being strangely corrupted; Infidelity and Scepticism universally prevailing. Some deriding all Religion, which they either laugh at as the effect of Folly and Superstition, or detest as a meer Cheat and Contrivance of some Cunning and designing men."

"We may be all said to be sent by God into the world, without the supposition of a pre-existent soul. Especially are prophets sent from God. But above all Jesus is most properly "the sent of God," as he had the highest and most important commission."

"Against Socinians, Arians, and all other enemies of the truth, the surest defence will be found to be the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Would mankind take their faith from the holy scriptures, and not rest it upon the unstable foundation of human systems, and would no man presumptuously aim at being "wise beyond what is written," heresies would soon vanish away."

"I all along intended... to observe a part of what is said by Dr. Clarke in his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity; which I have now done. And I cannot forbear saying, that his interpretations of texts are generally false, arising, as from some other causes, so particularly, from an aversion to Sabellian or Socinian senses: some of which may be absurd, and unnatural. But I must prefer Grotius's interpretations upon the comparison, above Dr. Clarke's. So far as I am able to judge, Grotius explains texts better than the professed Socinians. The reason may be, that he had more learning, and particularly was better acquainted with the Jewish style. But I am apt to think, that their later writers have borrowed from him, and improved by him."

"Socinians denominate all who advocate the Divine Nature of Christ, "Idolaters;" and if Christ be only a man, they are such. We reply, The men who believe the conformation of our Earth to have resulted from fire, could never be called Neptunists, and the admission of the Newtonian system could not comport with the denial of gravitation; why therefore should those who degrade the Saviour, in rejecting his Divinity, by declaring him to be, a mere man, and who renounce almost all the peculiar features of our Holy Religion, retain the name of Christian? Let them call themselves, rather, by the term Mr. Belsham has chosen, Theophilanthropes, or any other name which describes what they are, rather than what they are not."

"The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate."

"There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them — isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?"

"Preaching has always been a chancy vocation, but in the days of Peter's ministry it was as chancy as that of a Marine platoon sergeant."

"We understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only very faintly – not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice."

"Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself."

"God put the rainbow in the clouds, not just in the sky… It is wise to realize we already have rainbows in our clouds, or we wouldn't be here. If the rainbow is in the clouds, then in the worst of time, there is the possibility of seeing hope … We can say "I can be a rainbow in the cloud for someone yet to be." That may be our calling."

"Those who say life is worth living at any price have already written for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person they will not betray to stay alive. Man's vocation should be the use of the arts of intelligence in behalf of human freedom."

"Cavafy's attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one. His poets do not think of themselves as persons of great public importance and entitled to universal homage, but, rather, as citizens of a small republic in which one is judged by one's peers and the standard of judgment is strict."

"Discipline, so far as it exists, is not of the humanistic or the religious type, but of the kind that one gets in training for a vocation or a specialty. The standards of a genuinely liberal education, as they have been understood, more or less from the time of Aristotle, are being progressively undermined by the utilitarians and the sentimentalists."

"Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase."

"The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim "to interfere in any way in the politics of States." She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation."

"Priestley was joining the ranks of his friends Canton and Franklin … Only five years after they had encouraged him to turn his experimental hobbies into a serious vocation, Priestly had reached the highest pinnacle of scientific achievement."

"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

"A man can't ask for much more than the chance to make a difference in his chosen field of work. Politics is my vocation. I'm forever grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this great country of ours. I know I am a better person for it."

"I have been a loved preacher and writer with a particular vocation. My sermons and books would not have had the same quality without my past of anarchy, vice, and violent atheism."

"Politics, just as economic pursuits, may be a man's avocation or his vocation. One may engage in politics, and hence seek to influence the distribution of power within and between political structures, as an 'occasional' politician. We are all 'occasional' politicians when we cast our ballot or consummate a similar expression of intention, such as applauding or protesting in a 'political' meeting, or delivering a 'political' speech, etc. The whole relation of many people to politics is restricted to this."

"Active asceticism operates within the world; rationally active asceticism, in mastering the world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly "vocation" (inner-worldly asceticism). Such asceticism contrasts radically with mysticism, if the latter draws the full conclusion of fleeing from the world (contemplative flight from the world). The contrast is tempered, however, if active asceticism confines itself to keeping down and to overcoming creatural wickedness in the actor's own nature. For then it enhances the concentration on the firmly established God-willed and active redemptory accomplishments to the point of avoiding any action in the orders of the world (asceticist flight from the world). Thereby active asceticism in external bearing comes close to contemplative flight from the world. The contrast between asceticism and mysticism is also tempered if the contemplative mystic does not draw the conclusion that he should flee from the world, but, like the inner-worldly asceticist, remain in the orders of the world (inner-worldly mysticism). In both cases the contrast can actually disappear in practice and some combination of both forms of the quest for salvation may occur. But the contrast may continue to exist even under the veil of external similarity. For the true mystic the principle continues to hold: the creature must be silent so that God may speak."

"That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough."

"In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; but in the present age it softens the spiritual requirements that are an essential ingredient in human dignity. Thus the slogans of equality serve not so much to elevate individuals to the dignity of being human as to free them from the responsibility of rising to this vocation."

"Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to haver their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can."

"Nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image."

"The home in an industrial society is chiefly a dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to forget about his job and have fun. Novels, magazines, television, and popular cartoons therefore portray "Dad" as an incompetent clown. And the image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get anything you want."

"Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession."

"Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else."

"The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth."

"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."

"Wrongly or rightly you think that I have a right to the name of Christian. I assure you that when in speaking of my childhood and youth I use the words vocation, obedience, spirit of poverty, purity, acceptance, love of one's neighbor, and other expressions of the same kind, I am giving them the exact signification they have for me now. Yet I was brought up by my parents and my brother in a complete agnosticism, and I never made the slightest effort to depart from it; I never had the slightest desire to do so, quite rightly, I think."

"A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten."

"Birds were singing everywhere. The underbrush was full of migrating warblers. That evening I had a long talk with the novice master. I explained to him that I found myself adapted to the monastic life. There was nothing whatever about it that I didn’t like. I had felt no hardships but had enjoyed every minute of it, more than anything I had ever experienced. But I had no vocation whatsoever. Father Anderson was deeply moved and assured me that he understood me perfectly and respected my decision. “I think, Kenneth,” he said, “this experience will turn out to be more valuable to you than you can know now. Let’s hope it will always provide a memory which will be a focus and stable foundation for all your later life.” And so it was. … The liturgical life of the Church moved me because it echoes the most ancient responses to the turning of the year and the changing seasons, and the rhythms of animal and human life. For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition — birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time."

"I have heard from persons in pursuits different from yours — from the lawyer, from the congressman, from the editor, not to mention others, each, with a strange kind of melancholy vanity, claiming for his vocation the distinction of affording the surest inlets to the conviction that man is no better than he should be. All of which testimony, if reliable, would, by mutual corroboration, justify some disturbance in a good man's mind."

"Where the lines of political division are vertical, the men of each occupation and of every social standing separating according to their vocations and principles, the result is healthy and normal. Just so far, however, as the lines are drawn horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous, for such a division means that men are pitted against one another in accordance with the blind and selfish interests of the moment."

"’T is my vocation, Hal; ’t is no sin for a man to labour in his vocation."

"People call me an "actor". What's that? In any case, it has nothing to do with the shit that people have always blabbered about it. It's neither a vocation nor a profession — although it's how I earn my living. But then so does the two-headed freak at the carnival. It's something you have to try and live with — until you learn how to free yourself. It has nothing to do with nonesense like "talent," and it's nothing to be conceited or proud of."