The Personalist, 1920, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Excerpt from The Personalist, 1920, Vol. 1

This ethical development might have been far more wide-spread among the nations of democracy had there not been another movement contemporaneous With it and which prospered on the soil of individualism. This move ment was religious, and though commonly identified with the name of Wesley, has permeated all surviving forms of Christianity. It turned the Wine of the new enthusiasm for individualism into new religious wine-flasks. Great emphasis was placed upon individual internal experience and upon individual culture. While no doubt this led to many excesses and to some misunderstanding of religious reality, it had the balance wheel of moral and religious devotion which kept it from running into a pure selfish ness like that of Super-manism. When eventual history comes to be written it will be discovered as an inestimable influence in individual restraint, and in the moralization and strengthening of free institutions. Had it not been for this deeper religious influence running parallel with the movement of individualism, individualism could have accomplished little for democracy but ruin. Democracy without moral and spiritual restraint is impossible, and has been so demonstrated from the time of the excesses of the Reign Of Terror to the exaltation of Russian Bolshevism. True democracy means self-government and self-govern ment is impossible without the presence in the individual of restraining moral and spiritual influences.

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