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Started reading
February 8, 2020
Our dislike of his personality was easily accounted for — up to a point, since both of us shared the artist’s point of view that a creed, cut to measure and carefully dried, was an ugly thing, and that a dogma to which believers must subscribe or perish everlastingly was a barbarism resting upon cruelty.
But while my own dislike was purely due to an abstract worship of Beauty, my sister’s had
another twist in it, for with her “new” tendencies, she believed that all religions were an aspect of truth and that no one, even the lowest wretc...
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sine qua non
Her belief was iron; she dared not let it go; yet somewhere underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion. She would help “them” — if she dared. Her question proved it.
for the first time — with that funereal personality,
the woman who, like her master, believed that all holding views of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally.
sincere and kindly character,” I judged instantly, “a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetness towards the world; no hate in him anywhere.” A great deal, no doubt, to read in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my
intuition, a deep and very gentle voice, great firmness in it too.
“You’re as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,” she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.
“Certain hope and peace,” she said, “that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.”
“Tolerates them,” she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, “because it includes them all.”
“Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, ‘There is no religion higher than Truth,’ and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all,” she went on, “because it claims that no individual can be ‘lost.’ It teaches universal
salvation. To damn outsiders is uncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others — it’s according to the way they think and live — but all find peace, through development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation —”
“The thought and belief its former occupants — have left behind.
“What is the world,”
An individual’s world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes
I grant that few people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made suits and make them do.
“None of us have Truth, my dear Frances,” I ventured presently, seeing that she kept silent.
Consider
the legacy of hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly — for only by repudiating history can they disavow it —”
