And in that little masterpiece of
deep thought and beautiful writing, _The Lost Radiance of the Christian
Religion_, from which I have made most of the quotations in this
chapter, one is conscious throughout of a strong aversion from the field
of dogma and controversy, of deliberate determination of the writer to
keep himself in the pure region of the spirit.
Christianity, he tells us there, has seen many corruptions, but the most
serious of all is not to be found in any list of doctrines that have
gone wrong:
We find it rather in a change of atmosphere, in a loss of
brightness and radiant energy, in a tendency to revert in spirit,
if not in terminology, to much colder conceptions of God, of man,
and of the universe.
"As man in his innermost nature is a far higher being than he seems, so
the world in its innermost nature is a far nobler fabric than it seems."
To discover this man must live in his spirit.
"God," said Jesus, "is Spirit," and it is a definition of God which
goes behind and beneath all the other names that are applied to
Him.
The spirit is love; it is peace; it is joy; and perhaps joy most of
all. It is a joyous energy, having a centre in the soul of man.
It is not a foreign principle which has to be introduced into a man
from without; it belongs to the substance and structure of his
nature; it needs only to be liberated there; and when once that is
done it takes possession of all the forces of his being, repressing
nothing, but transfiguring everything, till all his motives and
desires are akindle and aglow with the fires and energy of that
central flame, with its love, its peace, its joy.
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