In our world, true faith has for the most part been replaced by public opinion: people do not believe in God, they believe in what other people teach.
The main and most common way of denying the existence of God consists in always accepting public opinion as absolutely right and attaching no importance to your own consciousness of God.
— John Ruskin
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
— Emerson
People’s misfortune and evil is not so much the result of their not knowing their duty, but of their accepting as their duty that which is not.
The church, the state and society have certain typical forms which mould the thoughts of young people. And when the time comes for the unique qualities of a new generation to manifest themselves, it turns out that their thoughts have already ossified in these forms and are no longer capable of assimilating anything new.
— Lucy Mallory
Faith is not established by majority vote. The one who thinks that a majority points to the true faith does not know what faith is.
Truly, any Society setting out from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The Universe being intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an “infinite Humbug,” why should any minor Humbug astonish us? It is all according to the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody.
— Carlyle
The cause of the plight that our society has fallen into consists in the fact that the people of the upper classes live without any kind of faith, with some trying to replace the absence of faith with hypocrisy, pretending that they believe in external religious forms, others with a brave proclamation of their atheism, a third with refined skepticism, a fourth with a recognition of the right of egotism and its elevation to the level of religious teaching.
The cause of the disease is the rejection of the teaching of Christ in its true, i.e. full, meaning. There is only one way to cure the disease, which is to recognize the full meaning of this teaching. And in our time this recognition is not only possible, but necessary.
The main cause of the evil from which people suffer today is the fact that the majority of people of our time are devoid of any faith.
