"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the
interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The
theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's
need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of
transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages,
affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in
his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of
image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the
Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul
by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's
right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's way
with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted
as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater
mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The
theories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible in
a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the
Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great
doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence.
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