Leslie Weatherhead: Quotes about the truth

“Each thinker has the right to do what Paul did, to set forth truth as he sees it, in the thought-forms of his own day and generation, as long as he does not willfully distort truth merely to fit his own ideas.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Preface, p. 21, sentence 7.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Truth , Idea

“Reason will take us so far on firm ground. But then there must be the leap in the same direction, if the truth of those facts in religion which are only reached by faith are to be enjoyed... It is taking the road of evidence as far as it will go and then, with the energy provided by meditating on the character of God as Christ revealed him, making a leap of faith, only to land finally in a conviction as strong as proof can supply.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.79 [ellipsis added]

God , Truth , Faith , Religion

“Why do men hug words to their hearts after the living truth has long since fled from them?”

Leslie Weatherhead

Preface, p. 18, sentence 5.
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Men , Truth , Heart

“Let us never imagine that faith can ever be furthered by suppressing doubt, let alone by suppressing evidence. All truth is one, and religion must be as eager as science to know the truth as far as man can perceive it. If something we have treasured as truth is really contradicted by unanswerable evidence, then in the name of the God of truth we must part with it however venerable it may be. Let us never suppose that we can take over faith from our parents without examination, or believe anything merely because another says it is true. But let us not be content with a static agnosticism which never rouses itself to make inquiry. Let us examine the evidence and then in complete loyalty to its trend make a leap both of intellect and will, and, committing ourselves, acting as if all were established, try out in life the faith that carries us on wings after the hard road of fact and reason stops.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.231

Life , God , Truth , Faith

“I am not prepared to hand over to any other person, though wise and learned, or to any institution however ancient or sure of its position, my inalienable right to search for ever-growing and ever-expanding truth. I believe the craving for security in belief is one which arises from within ourselves, and can only be met adequately from resources which are within ourselves. It seems to me that it is far more important for a soul in evolution to believe a few things because it has struggled, thought and suffered to discover and possess them, than it is for it to have a comfortable and orderly faith which it has adopted from any source outside itself.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.58 (Dr. Raynor Johnson: A Religious Outlook for Modern Man. 1962. Hodder and Stoughton. ppp. 122-23)

Truth , Faith , Soul , Search

“Men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Pope, or an infallible conscience, or an infallible Christ, and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth. I believe all that kind of talk is false. It is false psychology or a failure of insight, and it is the fruit of mental laziness; a refusal to think things through. The most important convictions in religion cannot really be reached on the word of another. We can assent to propositions out of laziness of thought, or a desire to please, or an inability to argue, but one of the reasons why, in a crisis, men often feel let down by their religion is that they glibly assented to this or that, and falsely called their assent ‘belief.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.50

Men , Truth , Religion , Feeling

“The eyes would soon grow dim if they had no correspondence with light. The lungs would soon perish without any correspondence with air. The mind that has no relation with truth is said to be in a state of unbalance, and the spirit too must have some traffic with God, its relevant Environment, if it is to maintain its fullest health.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.220

God , Health , Truth , Light

“... while we must not thrust beliefs on people, belaboring their minds to try to make them accept orthodoxy, we may set these same beliefs before people, showing them the rich truth which we have found and which they may come to receive as their questing mind develops and grows.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.61, [ellipsis added]

People , Truth

“It seems strange indeed that so practical and pressing a truth as that of purgatory should be dismissed, while so remote and impractical a doctrine as the absolute everlastingness of hell should be insisted on.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.287

Truth , Hell

“The Christianity of tomorrow will embrace all truth wherever it is found or however men have come to apprehend it, whether through specifically Christian teaching or through Buddhism or Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism or even through the bleak desert of apparent atheism.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.28

Men , Truth

“There is not one judgment day, surely, but a thousand! Every time we confront beauty, truth, goodness or love, our response to them judges us.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.278

Love , Truth , Beauty , Time

“... there is only one authority... that is the authority which truth itself possesses when it is perceived to be true by the individual concerned... the alternative procedure, the delegation to external authority, must itself follow an individual’s subjective decision.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.49, [ellipsis added]

Truth , Decision

“I hold that the self-authentication of truth, or, in other words, seeing, is the authority, and the only authority there is in the field of religion.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.52

Truth , Religion

“Every denomination within organized Christianity contains a valuable truth, but none contains all truth. Each mirrors at its best something of Christ but all are only caricatures of him.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.28

Truth , Christ

“I am saying that truth may certainly be true whatever my opinion may be, but it has no authority with me until I perceive it to be true.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.56

Truth

“When I really believe a thing, I mean that its truth possesses me... Truth is self-authenticating, and when it possesses me, nothing can shake it from its enthronement until some greater truth displaces it or gives it less prominence.”

Leslie Weatherhead

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.31 ,[ellipsis added]

Truth