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Show Reorganization and First Building: 1901-1920 shells of discarded religious faiths. With the growing light of larger knowledge the ghosts of ignorance and superstition have vanished. one we by one. cherish It may well be that many or all of the religious theories today will go as the rest have gone,"! In caustic criticism of the Christian churches of the Rev. Brown "The Christmas day, Gospel: preached Being Preached" on 20 December 1908, in which he said that the people who really keep the spirit of Christmas are those "who have a word of genuine hope for the hopeless, good tidings for the poor, a message of gladness for the oppressed of the earth. They are not of of a worn-out fundamen the menders and patchers system tal injustice. They are the heralds of the dawn of the new day of freedom and brotherhood and [oy.''" William Thurston Brown was certainly not an orthodox Christian, for a close friend later described his philosophy: "Humanity was his God; the human race his Supreme Being. During his Easter sermon on 11 April 1909 Rev. Brown explained his views on immortality, which to him referred a sermon on How and Where It Is . .. ,,45 to the eternal consequences of one's acts: Immortality is a question of quality and not of quantity, a question of the now and here, not at all a question of the future. Religion has nothing to do with a future existence, for the simple reason that our minds cannot know any such thing The assurance or conviction of immortality never comes to any All the soul from mere argument or reasoning or authority. half so not been now have philosophers that have lived or that live potent in creating in men's souls the belief in immortality as the simple life of a Galilean peasant whose teaching hardly contains a .... hint of the idea of 43 44 H The Salt Lake Tribune. 3 a future life. February 1908, 7. The Salt Lake Tribune, 21 December 1908. 2. W. M. Kerr. "A Tribute Salt Lake City, 1891-41 [Salt to Lake the Rev. William Thurston City, 1941],located in Ms Brown," First Unitarian 508, Bx 49, Fd 3. Society of 73 |
