Sunday, August 17, 2014

Unfettered Faith & the Reformation


Well, I am old and still trying to figure life out.

I love what my daughter once told me when she was a teenager.  "Mom, it scares me to think about life."
"Really?  Why?"
"Because life is so strange it blows my mind away and the only thing stranger than life is no life.  I don't like to think about these things!"

Well, that's one reason we all keep busy.

I have lately busied myself reading on-line from a couple of volumes  of "History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century"
by d Aubigne'.
                                    Image result for images of old bookscommons.wikimedia.org

It was published in 1845 and that was the main reason I wanted to read it.....or should I say read at it.
Old books fascinate me as I think of the long-departed author and the world of yesteryear.

I did find some interesting thoughts embedded in the work and so I share the following about full liberty of faith, but paraphrased:

Unity in diversity and diversity in unity, is a law of nature as well as of the Church.
*

We are about to contemplate the diversities, or, as they have been called, the variations of the Reformation. 
These diversities are one of its most essential characteristics.
*
Truth is like the light of the sun: it descends from heaven one and ever the same; and yet it assumes different colours upon earth, according to the objects on which it falls.




How dull would creation be if this boundless variety of forms and colours, which gives it beauty, were replaced by an absolute uniformity!
Image result for images of natureimagico.com




But how melancholy also would be its appearance, if all created beings did not form a magnificent unity!
Divine unity has its rights, so also has human diversity.

In religion we must suppress neither God nor man.

If you have not unity, your religion is not of God; if you have not diversity, the religion is not of man; but it ought to be of both.



Would you erase from creation one of the laws that God himself has imposed on it,—that of infinite diversity?
[221] 



Well, that is what this history said.




Thanks for sharing this moment with me, 
Riverwatch