and insists on the faithful exercise of the understanding in all our religious inquiries. The New Church therefore repudiates and condemns the old dogma that we are to believe blindly, or that, in religious matters, the understanding is to be held in servile subjection to faith. And while it never exalts human reason above Divine revelation, it inculcates, as an imperative duty, the free and faithful exercise of our rational faculties upon whatever claims to be such revelation, and counsels us to accept for religious truth nothing against which our reason revolts, or which fails to commend itself to our rational intuitions.
Religion without Asceticism.
Prior to the year 1757, asceticism was, in the popular mind, intimately connected with religion, and was looked upon by multitudes of professing Christians as forming a very considerable part of it. Religion was held to be something quite incompatible with any sort of indulgence in worldly pleasures, and more closely allied to austerity and gloom than to cheerfulness and joy. All kinds of amusements—even dancing and the drama—were held to be positively sinful, and unfit, therefore, for religious people to indulge in.
But the New Church teaches a different doctrine on this, as on all other subjects. It believes and teaches that the loves of self and the world
