How much misery would have been saved to Europe if Christians had been satisfied with the Sermon on the Mount!
Bokhara is said to have contained more than three hundred colleges, all occupied with theology, but ignorant of everything else, and it was probably one of the most bigoted and uncharitable cities in the world. "Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth."
"He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small."
Theologians too often appear to agree that
"The awful shadow of some unseen power Floats, though unseen, among us"; [1]
and in the days of the Inquisition many must have sighed for the cheerful child-like religion of the Greeks, if they could but have had the Nymphs and Nereids, the Fays and Faeries, with Destiny and Fate, but without Jupiter and Mars.
Sects are the work of Sectarians. No truly great religious teacher, as Carlyle said, ever intended to found a new Sect.
Diversity of worship, says a Persian proverb, "has divided the human race into seventy-two nations." From among all their dogmas I have selected one--"Divine Love." And again, "He needs no other rosary whose thread of life is strung with the beads of love and thought."
There is more true Christianity in some pagan Philosophers than in certain Christian theologians. Take, for instance, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Plutarch.
"Now I, Callicles," says Socrates, "am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that day. Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when the time comes, to die. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict."
"As to piety toward the Gods," says Epictetus, "you must know that this is the chief thing, to have right opinions about them, to think that they exist, and that they administer the All well and justly; and you must fix yourself in this principle (duty), to obey them, and to yield to them in everything which happens, and voluntarily to follow it as being accomplished by the wisest intelligence."