The core meaning of Christ’s teaching lies in the establishment of a direct communion between the human being—the child of God—with God the father.
You ask: what constitutes the primary essence of Christ’s character? I answer: it is his conviction in the greatness of the human soul. In the human being he saw the reflection and image of Divinity, and thus he loved every person, whoever he was, whatever the circumstances of his life and character. Jesus looked at people with a gaze that pierced the material shell—the body disappeared before him. Through the dresses of the rich and the rags of the poor he saw the human spirit; and there, amid the darkness of ignorance and the stains of sin, he found rudiments of strength and perfection of limitless potential, he found a spiritual, immortal nature. In one who has fallen to the lowest depths he saw a being that can be transformed into an angel of light. Even more than that: he felt that there was nothing within him that every human being could not attain.
— Channing
In the present tendency of our society, in the new importance of the individual, when thrones are crumbling and presidents and governors are forced every moment to remember their constituencies; when counties and towns are resisting centralization, and the individual voter his party—society is threatened with actual granulation, religious as well as political. Of course each poor soul loses all his old stays. Is not this wrong? Is not this dangerous? It is not wrong, but the law of growth. An infant soul must learn to walk alone. At first he is forlorn, homeless; but this rude stripping him of all support drives him inward, and he finds himself unhurt; he finds himself face to face with the majestic Presence, reads the original of the Ten Commandments, the original of Gospels and Epistles; nay, his narrow chapel expands to the blue cathedral of the sky.
— Emerson
One can perceive God either intellectually or morally, based on faith. An intellectual perception of God is unreliable and prone to dangerous errors; on the other hand, a moral understanding ascribes to God only the qualities that demand moral deeds. Such faith is both natural and supernatural.
— After Kant
Do not merely seek a moral life, aim above morality.
— Thoreau
Fear everything that stands between you and God—the Spirit that dwells within your soul.
