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The Parsifal of Richard Wagner at Bayreuth, 1894
The Parsifal of Richard Wagner at Bayreuth 1894 Author:Peter Hately Waddell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: back beyond S. Paul, you leave behind you all the systems of all the schools, and find only the Christ-life at the root: a living personality which was a revelat... more »ion ; a spiritual character as it spontaneously came forth in relation to all its conditions and surroundings. Truths and ideas, which apart from that character might (and have) become false and misleading, when seen filled with the moral significance which it imparted to them are transformed and renewed; and the beauty of that holiness, which created Christian morality, takes the place once more of the abstract conceptions of Church teaching. Few people care to realise how difficult it is to keep in touch with the pure ideal of the Christian religion, the simplicity of Jesus; and few who seek a chapter{Section 4new faith remember that it lies neglected behind them. Our minds in this are no longer our own. We have been born into thoughts and educated into ideas of which we cannot now get rid; and rather than go through the continual labour of examining and analysing these, we read them into the whole Gospel narrative, and are content to take our religion conventionally as we have received it. When by chance we get a glimpse of the simple truth as it was in the mind of Jesus, we feel for the moment as though He Himself were again leading us through green pastures and by still waters. How much more luminous and real the Christian religion becomes when it is seen as the life of Christ! For in His teaching it was the impression which personal contactwith Himself made upon the character that was ever the object He sought. He came that we might have life, and that we might have it more abundantly in Him. The directness of the impression of Christian truth made in ' Parsifal' is heightened by the choice of the subject of...« less