Great Throughts Treasury

"The unity of God, the freedom of man, and the creation of the world. Upon these three pillars, and upon them alone, rests and must rest every revealed religion."

"We know with far more clarity that our will is free than that every event must have a cause. Could we not argue in reverse and say: Our concept of causality must be quite incorrect since there could be no freedom of will if causality were correct?"

"In those times of early culture and of the crudest, most sensual, and most notorious cult of idolatry, a complete necessity for the bearer of the divine word... It gives us a diet of the highest style and with a purely spiritual tendency such as natural science was in no position to produce in those days."

"It is the way of concluding from the certain to the uncertain, from the known to the unknown, from the revealed to the hidden, from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual... In the end, I hope to present to you the full effect of revelation; I say, the effect, what it is - how it came about, do not ask me. I shall not be able to answer. Even as the natural scientist cannot answer questions as what came first, the chicken or the egg. I am just a sinple natural historian in my fielde; I can define for you the genus and the species with reliable signs, but not the "how" of its origin."

"Only in the theology of the Old Testament do we find closer confirmation and develoment of the thought: The revealed God is free Creator, Father of natural law in the material world and of the freely active spirit in the entirety of creatin. This, I believe, is a loftier view of the essence and purpose of revelation than the view that the canon consisted of statutes framed for the preservation of a short-lived state system and for its elevation to a freer life in God... In a word; the term law does not fit the Old Testament at all.. Its main purpose is the revelation of a fact, a real Being and His realtionship to nature."

"There was but little consolation in the postulate of practical reason... The God of ethics, this postulate of practical reason, occupied the throne... God exists because an unmediated and unmotivated moral law exists. There would be no virtue if there was not God!"

"Providence saw to it that the chosen instrument, the living organ, for the reception and transmission of the highest thought of which mankind was capable be given the most suitable and purest material for this function. The instructor of all nations, the priest-people of God and the spiritually firstborn, was therefore to receive a bodily quality that would facilitate the comprehension of that unique thought and not render more difficult the people's treaching vocation by grosser material. "

"His faith [a Jew's] should be based on inquiry, on induction. He will believe only those conclusions that inquiry and induction force him to accept, even as the thinker must take on faith his undemonstrable principles, and the chemist his atomic weights... Thus, reason suffices in everything that goes by the name of truth and bliss of soul in faith, as the organ of comprehension and as the highest arbiter, which speaks the final, decisive verdict."