Every person, as every institution, and, above all, every religion is to be judged not by the amount of atrocities or the wrong committed but by the right conduct.
It is a tragedy that religion for us means, today, nothing more than restrictions on food and drink, nothing more than adherence to absence of superiority and inferiority.
The world is touched by sacrifice. It does not then discriminate about the merits of a cause. No so God - He is all seeing. He insists on the purity of the cause and on adequate sacrifice thereof.
Things sacred should not only be touched with the hands, but unviolated in thought.
[Lat., Res sacros non modo manibus attingi, sed ne cogitatione quidem violari fas fuit.]
Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts. There is one sun. There is one God. Let us have one religion. Then all mankind will be brethren.
Any spirit that permits compromise with the world is a false spirit. Any religious movement that imitates the world in any of its manifestations is false to the cross of Christ and on the side of the devil.
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.