top of page
.png){kind=small}
"We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Men quotes
"Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties."
"I can remember going back a couple of years later and, you know, think about it and I was doing a, kind of a political survey, door to door, and everything and I couldn't find any men in the town. It was very strange, you know."
"The apostles were moved, not so much by an intellectual apprehension, as by a spiritual illumination. They met men, and the need of those men whom they met cried aloud to them."
"Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair."
Explore more quotes by William Robertson Smith
"The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin."
"That the God-man died for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the older mystical sacrifices."
"Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men; and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society."
"Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin."
"The god, it would appear, was frequently thought of as the physical progenitor or first father of his people."
"Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged."
"This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost."
"This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths."
"But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches."
bottom of page