This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Revenge is a common passion; it is the sun of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble; but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.
While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child's but a man's religion - men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience.
Children | Experience | Man | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems.
Capacity | Education | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Prejudice | Problems | Science | Wisdom |
Religion is not a perpetual moping over good books. Religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances, these are necessary to religion - no man can be religious without them. But religion is mainly and chiefly the glorifying of god amid the duties and trials of the world; the guiding of our course amid adverse winds and currents of temptation by the sunlight of duty and the compass of Divine truth, the bearing up manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honor of Christ, our great Leader in the conflict of life.
Books | Duty | God | Good | Honor | Life | Life | Man | Praise | Prayer | Religion | Temptation | Trials | Truth | Wisdom | World | God | Leader | Temptation |
I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?
Desire | Fear | God | Heart | Love | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |
Carry religious principles into common life, and common life will lose its transitoriness. The world passes away. The things are seen as temporal. Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past. But religion does something better than sigh and moan over the perishableness of earthly things. It finds in them the seeds of immortality.
Better | Business | Immortality | Life | Life | Past | Principles | Religion | Will | Wisdom | World |
See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality - that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off the sproutings, all wild and luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core.
Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind.
Aims | Doctrine | Ethics | God | Knowledge | Love | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Wisdom | God |
Let your religion be seen. Lamps do not talk, but they do shine. A light house sounds no drum, it beats no gong; yet, far over the waters, its friendly light is seen by the mariner.
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |
Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.