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Reverence as the Heart of Christianity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
Extract
When we stand by the sea and watch a storm dash huge waves on the rocks with furious roar and tumult, the power of the ocean fills us with awe. When the storm passes by and the night comes on and the stars shine out, at first one by one and then in throngs, till the great dome is all aflame and infinite spaces open above us, lighted with innumerable fires,—while the grandeur of the scene awakens awe, the mystery and boundlessness of these evening skies awaken wonder also. But when the day dawns and we look around us and see some lovely landscape, we no longer feel either awe or wonder; both have disappeared with the shadows of the night and the mystery of the stars; we feel only admiration. Then, if we enter some home where sons and daughters gather around the chair of an aged mother, we see that they feel no awe, for she is feeble and they are strong; and perhaps there is no admiration, for her form may be bent and her features wrinkled; but when her children think of what her sweet goodness has been to them through many years, they feel a nobler sentiment. It is not mere respect, however, such as we always render to age; it is not mere gratitude and love; it is reverence.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1911
References
1 For even the most intense feeling of a Divine Presence in the beauty of the universe does not involve any feeling of self-surrender to a higher goodness. Therefore the aesthetic recognition of God is a mere admiration which we welcome on account of the pleasure it gives us; yet simultaneously with this aesthetic feeling the feeling of self-surrender to goodness may be awakened by some moral ideal, in which we recognize a revelation of God which commands our reverence and obedience.
2 So Caird, Edward says, “The natural man [that is, the savage] is capable of fear and presumption, but never of reverence; he can be superstitious or profane but never religious. In other words, he does not really look up to the power before which he trembles, or, in any sense, conceive it as a better self, with which he can identify himself, even while he bends before it. And this means that he does not in the proper sense worship at all; for he does not rise to the idea of any being who deserves the name of God, as being higher than the self and yet not a mere object or not-self” (The Evolution of Religion, vol. i, p. 179)Google Scholar.
3 A Catechism of Liberal Faith (Unitarian Sunday School Society, 1895), p. 67Google Scholar.