The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvati… - Leslie Weatherhead

True, there are some great passages in Revelation, but the book on the whole is like boarding-school plum pudding, where the plums are scarce and far apart.

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.’

Man’s tragic apostasy from God is not something which happened once for all, a long time ago. It is true in every moment of existence. . . . It involves no scientific description of absolute beginnings. Eden is on no map, and Adam’s fall fits no historical calendar. Moses is not nearer to the Fall than we are, because he lived three thousand years before our time. The Fall refers not to some datable, aboriginal calamity in the historical past of humanity, but to a dimension of human experience which is always present—namely, that we who have been created for fellowship with God repudiate it continually; and that the whole of mankind does this along with us. Every man is his own ‘Adam,’ and all men are solidarily ‘Adam.’ Thus, Paradise before the Fall, the status perfectionis, is not a period of history, but our ‘memory’ of a divinely intended quality of life, given to us along with our consciousness of guilt.