Article May 24, 1900 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from T. L. Cuyler, Channing

In a preface to an English edition of "Theologia Germanica," published in 1854, Charles Kingsley said: "In many obscure passages of this book words are used, both by the Author and by the translator, in their strict, original, and scientific meaning, as they are used in the Creeds, and not in the meaning which has of late crept into our very pulpits, under the influence of Locke's philosophy. When, for instance, it is said that God is the Substance of all things; this expression, in the vulgar Lockite sense of substance, would mean that God is the matter or stuff of which all things are made; which would be the grossest Pantheism: but "Substance" in the true and ancient meaning of the word as it appeared in the Athansian Creed, signifies the very opposite; namely, that which stands under the appearance and the matter; that by virtue of which a thing has its form, its life, its real existence, as far as it may have any; and thus in asserting that God is the Substance of all things, this book means that everything (except sin, which is no thing, but the disease and fall of a thing) is a thought of God."

Note.—The italics, capitalization, and punctuation of the text were strictly followed.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a recent address before the Harvard Religious Union on "The Transcendental Movement in New England," said: "Transcendentalism was neither a doctrine nor a tangible belief, but rather an impulse of self-emancipation, hampered though it was by the conservatism of the times. As a reaction from the old Puritan theology, it excited a storm of abuse and persecution as furious as it was undeserved. Theodore Parker was the leader of the movement. He held views on the interpretation of the Scriptures which to-day would be considered far from radical, and yet on account of them he was denied election to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in spite of his great scholarship."

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