Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. (R.M. p. 16)

If you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behavior, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms. They may be useful, or harmful; they may be authoritatively ordained, or merely temporary expedients. But the end of religion is beyond all this. (R.M. p. 17)

That religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact. (A.I. p. 41)

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach -- something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. (S.M.W. p. 275)

Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. (S.M.W. pp. 269-70)

Neither religions nor individual men demonstrate their sanctity by their ejaculations. (A.I. p. 21) !!!!!

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. (S.M.W. p. 270)

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. (S.M.W. p. 275)

Apart from religion, expressed in ways generally intelligible, populations sink into the apathetic task of daily survival, with minor alleviations. (Atlantic, Vol. 163, p. 318)

History, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and in particular the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. The uncritical association of religion with goodness is directly negativated by plain facts. Religion can he and has been, the main instrument for progress. But if we survey the whole race, we' must pronounce that generally it has not been so. (R.M. pp. 37-8)

In a communal religion you study the will of God in order that He may preserve you; in a purified religion, rationalised under the influence of the world-concept, you study his goodness in order to be like him. (R.M. p. 41)

Conduct (in communal religion) is right which will lead some god to protect you; and it is wrong if it stirs some irascible being to compass your destruction. Such religion is a branch of diplomacy. (R.M. p. 41)

A religion, on its doctrinal side, can thus be defined as a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended. (R.M. p. 15)

Creeds are at once the outcome of speculation and efforts curb speculation. . . . Wherever there is a creed, there is heretic round the corner or in his grave. (A.I. p. 66)

Whatever be the right way to formulate religious truths, it is death to religion to insist on a premature stage of precision. The vitality of religion is shown by the way in which the religious spirit has survived the ordeal of religious education. (A.E. p. 62)

A dogma which fails to evoke any response in immediate apprehension stifles the religious life. (R.M. p. 137)

Religions commit suicide when they find their inspirations in their dogmas. (R.M. p. 144)

A system of dogmas may he the ark within which the Church floats safely down the flood tide of history. But the Church will perish unless it opens its windows and lets out the dove to search for an olive branch. Sometimes even it will do well to disembark on Mount Ararat and build a new altar to the divine Spirit - an altar neither in Mount Gerizim nor yet at Jerusalem. (R.M. pp. 145-6)

The task of Theology is to show how the World is founded on something beyond mere transient fact, and how it issues in something beyond the perishing of occasions. The temporal World is the stage of finite accomplishment. We ask of Theology to express that element in perishing lives which is undying by reason of its expression of perfections proper to our finite natures. In this way we shall understand how life includes a mode of satisfaction deeper than joy or sorrow. (A.I. p. 221)

The attack of the liberal clergy and laymen, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, upon systematic theology was entirely misconceived. They were throwing away the chief safeguard against the wild emotions of superstition. (A.I. p. 207)

The defect of the liberal theology of the last two hundred years is that it has confined itself to the suggestion of minor, vapid reasons why people should continue to go to church in the traditional fashion. (A.I. p. 218)

Importance arises from this fusion of the finite and the infinite. The cry, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," expresses the triviality of the merely finite. The mystic, ineffective slumber expresses the vacuity of the merely infinite. Those theologians do religion a bad service, who emphasize infinitude at the expense of the finite transitions within history. (M.T. p. 108)

It is customary to undervalue theology in a secular history of philosophical thought. This is a mistake, since for a period of about thirteen hundred years the ablest thinkers were mostly theologians. (A.I. p. 165)

Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments. He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of- all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success. (S.M.W. p. 258)

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. (P.R. pp. 519-20)

The Reformation, for all its importance, may be considered as a domestic affair of the European races. (S.M.W. p. 2)

God made his appearance in religion under the frigid title of the First Cause, and was appropriately worshipped in white-washed churches. (A.I. p. 157)

The more power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. (S.M.W. p. 276)

The life of Christ is not an exhibition of overruling power. Its glory is for those who can discern it, and not for the world. Its power lies in its absence of force. It has the decisiveness of a supreme ideal, and that is why the history of the world divides at this point. (R.M. p. 57)