William Robertson Smith famous quotes

03-17-2025

We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Religious #Men #Thinking
The land of a god corresponds with the land of his worshipers.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Land
The god, it would appear, was frequently thought of as the physical progenitor or first father of his people.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Father #People #Firsts
In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.
-- William Robertson Smith

#People #Religion #Antiques
Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Men #Community #Political
The dissolution of the nation destroys the national religion, and dethrones the national deity.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Religion #Deities
Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men; and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Men #Religion #Fellow Man
The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Sanctuary #Fancy #Worship
In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.
-- William Robertson Smith

#May #Superstitions #Tribes
That the God-man died for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the older mystical sacrifices.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Sacrifice #Men #Ideas
This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis, but it satisfies the conditions of a legitimate hypothesis, by postulating the operation of no unknown or uncertain cause, but only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Religious #Strong #Alive
It is only in times of social dissolution, as in the last age of the small Semitic states, when men and their gods were alike powerless before the advance of the Assyrians, that magical superstitions based on mere terror, or rites designed to conciliate alien gods, invade the sphere of tribal or national religion. In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Men #Age #May
But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Sacred #Essentials #Ancient
Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Strong #Ideas #Imagination
Belief in a certain series of myths was neither obligatory as a part of the true religion, nor was it supposed that, by believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour of the gods.
-- William Robertson Smith

#Religious #Believe #Men

You may also like:

Andrew Lang
Poet
Bronislaw Malinowski
Anthropologist
Charles Darwin
Naturalist
Claude Levi-Strauss
Anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
Anthropologist
Edward Burnett Tylor
Anthropologist
Emile Durkheim
Sociologist
Ernest Renan
Philosopher
Franz Boas
Anthropologist
Herbert Spencer
Philosopher
Jane Ellen Harrison
Biographer
Julius Wellhausen
Margaret Mead
Cultural Anthropologist
Mary Douglas
Anthropologist
Max Muller
Philologist
Mircea Eliade
Historian
Romain Rolland
Dramatist
Ruth Benedict
Anthropologist
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Former President of India
Will Durant
Writer