Hence
belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are
equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of
them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always
take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the
offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward
ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one
who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in oblations
of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his
worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves
before him, by intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with
costly gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards
men, for in so doing they will imitate, so far as human infirmity
allows, the perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical
side of religion which the Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble
ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary of
inculcating. Thus Micah says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And at a later time
much of the force by which Christianity conquered the world was
drawn from the same high conception of God's moral nature and the
duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it.
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