HPB-SB-5-43: Difference between revisions

{{Style P-Poem|poem=A brave old man was he,

Of ancient name and knightly fame,

And chivalrous degree.

He ruled our city like a lord

And brooked no equal here,

Yet ever for the townsmen’s rights,

Stood up’ gainst prince and peer.}}

Lastly, religious culture demands attention, and in this I think that we are advancing in more rapid strides than the rest of the world. A final creed absolutely prohibits growth; it says to its devotees:—“Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther; outside these limits you must neither think nor speak.” Thus is growth prohibited, except among those whose minds have developed in spite of external pressure, until they are obliged to burst the chains of unhallowed authority; they then fly to the other extreme, become scientific materialists or secularists, and adopt the demoralizing system of living only for the body and for this life. Such men often lead good lives, but they do it in spite of their creed. The scientific materialist is somewhat akin in his nature to a Spiritualist. He searches the field of nature, reverently exhumes truths which in their ultimates are beyond his reach, outgrows the narrow cramping creeds of the time, but, having nothing much better to put in their place, treats them with partial respect, yet in times of severe trial sends up a wail, a supplication, to the Unknown God. Such are not far from Spiritualism. Little of the persecuting influence comes from them, although false ideas about them have been established by a few inferior individuals in their ranks. The secularists are of another order. They are a religious sect, fighting for a dogma, possessing no knowledge of the nature of “matter” so far as it is revealed by the experiments of Clerk Maxwell, Thomson, and others, but clinging to fancies of their own with which they have encrusted the word. Culture would not necessarily flourish under their rule any more than under the control of the Puritans; they are a ponderous, matter-off-act body, deficient—as Mr. Markley has well pointed out—in the poetical sentiment. They are among those already mentioned who would make short work with Westminster Abbey, and who could never say within its walls or cloisters,

Where Tudors and Plantagenets were lying all around;

I stepped with noiseless foot as though the sound of mortal tread,

They understand beefsteaks and dollars, but with few exceptions they appreciate poetry as much as they do the hieroglyphics of the prehistoric Mexicans.

{{HPB-SB-footer-footnotes}}

<gallery widths=300px heights=300px>

london_spiritualist_n.287_1878-02-22.pdf|page=5|London Spiritualist, No. 287, February 22, 1878, pp. 87-8

</gallery>