Personal Credo and Life Values

Abstract

In a very real sense, a man’s religion is what he most deeply believes in and what commands his deepest loyalty and devotion, whatever its outward form or its label. When going to church on Sunday becomes for him a matter merely of habit and of conformity to community or folk ways, it remains a religious act, if at all, only in that his doing so may be symbolic of his belief in something more than just “going to church.” When in public worship he repeats a creed, many of the individual tenets of which have become completely meaningless to him — if not in fact almost an insult to his intelligence — this act, too, has lost any religious meaning, except, again, as it may still remain for him a kind of symbol of non-rational values, and except as joining in with the congregation in its repetition in solemn worship itself gives that act a kind of religious value.

Forms and ceremonies are useful in public worship, but they ought not to take the place of essentials.

Where the moral sense is entire there must be a sense of religion.

Immense are the blessings that proceed from the union of pure religion with morality.

(All from Kames’s essay on “Morality considered as a branch of duty to our Maker”)