My Clerical Friends And Their Relations To Modern Thought

Excerpt from My Clerical Friends: And Their Relations to Modern Thought Although I am going to speak of friends, and sometimes even of kinsmen, I feel sanguine that I shall display no indiscreet partiality. Other involuntary errors I may com mit, but not this. I acknowledge, however, at the outset, an instinctive attraction towards the Clergy. The theory of their calling and mission had a charm for me from my earliest years. My unformed intellect accepted with plea surable docility the simple idea that, if we are really a fallen race, such an order oft-men mtg/it to exist. If I know any thing of history, they always have existed. That the type has varied indefinitely, ranging through all possible grades, from the sublime to the grotesque, does not prove more clearly the pliancy and versatility of religious thought than the harmony of its general direction. There is little resem blance between the majestic prophet of Israel and a Roman augur, between the decorous clergy of our own established Church, and the painted medicine-man of the Red Indian 3 yet each of these was evoked by a common instinct, and has ministered, more or less potentially, to a common want. The history of the human family is almost identical with the history of its clergy. They have been, in every phase of society, the living expression of its aims and tendencies; the mirror in which its peculiarities were reflected. Their force is due to the general recognition of their utility. If a good many of them have been mani festly impostors, this only proves that spurious religions generate a corresponding class of teachers; and that all men experience the same want, though not all are able to find its true remedy.7713. Vacation of Me Clergy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.