PAUL BRUNTON – excerpts from the book A Message
from Arunachala, about religion.
Our disillusioned century has made the unpleasant
discovery that its spiritual guides are not necessarily spiritual; that when
they bless opposing armies or propound contradictory policies with equal
vehemence, they merely reveal themselves as ordinary blind men who hold
opinions, just as you and I and other lesser mortals hold them. And that it is
also true that the custodians of sectarian religion in every land were among the
first to attack true Religion when the latter publicly appeared and was voiced
by the great Prophets. As they drew their stipends for supporting a mixture of
lingering obsolescent superstitions and hardy truths, it was hardly to be
expected that they would support undiluted Truth.
When a religion suffers from spiritual decay, the
people become too dependent upon half-frozen forms and a far-off Deity through
the offices of an unilluminated priesthood. The backs of the latter become
loaded with theological lumber, and the backs of the former with antiquated
futilities. That which should have been as a divine voice to the living, grows
dreary and dull, unable to meet actual needs and constantly harking back to the
death past. Can we blame young men who hesitate to entrust their spiritual
destiny to those who utter dreary platitudes about divinity, but show so little
of it themselves?
Priests whose dogmas are as iron-clad and as
intolerant as they can make them; preachers who are more concerned about
pew-rents that about spiritualizing their own selves; clergymen who are
prisoners of disproved doctrines which belong to their cloth; gaitered bishops
who make the mistake of imagining that a religious organization must be propped
up by the State, backed by its power and fed by its finances, instead of the
Church being inspired enough and vital enough to back up the State with its
spiritual energy; clerics who pour out insufferable cant and sanctified
tomfoolery, their hollow words re-echoed back by the walls of half-empty
churches; persecutors who have failed to grasp the first letter of the alphabet
of true Religion, thus meriting Montesquieu's sagely cynical sentence where he
begged them "if they could not behave as Christians, to behave at least as men!"
- all these sightless servitors of an unreal God should not deplore the
shortcomings of our generation but attend to their own.
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