Light On The Hidden Way
- Downloads
- Under 100
- First published
- 1886
- Pages
- 145
About this book
Light on the Hidden Way is a short devotional book by James Freeman Clarke. It belongs to his pastoral writing produced for the Unitarian and broader liberal Protestant audience that his work reached across his long Boston ministry.
The phrase hidden way has biblical resonance from passages in Job and Isaiah that speak of paths God has hidden from human understanding. Clarke uses the image as the organizing concept for a meditation on the inner spiritual life that the nineteenth-century American Protestant devotional tradition treated as the proper concern of serious religious practice.
Clarke's pastoral career at the Church of the Disciples gave him decades of close knowledge of the questions facing serious Christians across the phases of religious life. The recurring questions about doubt, about the experience of suffering, about how to maintain commitment when external life makes it difficult, about prayer and meditation, about the practical demands that authentic religious life makes on ordinary daily conduct, all came up regularly in his work with his congregation. The book draws on this accumulated pastoral knowledge.
The Unitarian framework shapes the treatment throughout. Unitarianism in the nineteenth century emphasized personal moral and spiritual development rather than the strict doctrinal questions that occupied orthodox Trinitarian Protestants. The devotional literature it produced tended toward the practical and inspirational rather than the strictly theological. Clarke writes in plain accessible English rather than the elaborate theological vocabulary that academic seminary writing of the period often used.
The book is short, around a hundred pages in most printings, and reads in an evening or two. For readers interested in nineteenth-century American liberal Protestant devotional writing, it pairs with William Ellery Channing's earlier devotional pieces and with the various works of Phillips Brooks from the following generation. It also sits comfortably with the broader Transcendentalist literature on personal spiritual development.
About the author
More from this genre
See all- V The Vailan or Annular TheoryThe Vailan or Annular Theory
- W Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, 2 PeterWeymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, 2 Peter
- S A Summer's PoemsA Summer's Poems
- S A Second Letter on the late Post Office AgitationA Second Letter on the late Post Office Agitation
- C Christmas at the HallChristmas at the Hall
- S A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to BethelA Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel
Books like this one
Reviews and discussion
No ratings yet. Be the first reader to rate this book.
Rate this book
Pick a star, then sign in. Only readers who confirmed their email can rate.
No comments yet. Share a thought, a question or a favourite passage.
Copyright concern? Read our DMCA policy
Read or download
- EPUB 16 MB
-
KINDLE Send to Kindle Send
- Download the EPUB file to this device.
- Open Amazon's Send to Kindle page, sign in, and add the file. Open Send to Kindle (opens in a new tab)
On a phone: open the downloaded EPUB and share it to the Kindle app.
You can also email the file to your Kindle address (it ends in @kindle.com) from an email address you approved in your Amazon account.
- PDF 1.1 MB
- MOBI 10 MB
Downloads start right away. How to open EPUB on your phone
Book facts
- Author
- James Freeman Clarke
- First published
- 1886
- Pages
- 145
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Religious
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Read online