8 quotes
It is easy to see how superstition, with its false glosses, mocks God, while it tries to please him.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)
No religion is genuine unless it be joined with truth.
When we come to a comparison of heaven and earth, then we may indeed not only forget all about the present life, but even despise and scorn it.
The true wisdom of man consists in the knowledge of God the Creator and Redeemer. This knowledge is naturally implanted in us, and the end of it ought to be the worship of God rightly performed, or reverence for the Deity accompanied by fear and love. But this seed is corrupted by ignorance, whence arises superstitious worship.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)
In doing practically only the things which He testifies He cares nothing about, superstition neglects those which He has ordained and said are pleasing to Him or even openly rejects them. Therefore those who (in order to worship God) establish religions which have their source in their own minds, only worship their own dreams.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1541)
Seeing that this brutish stupidity has overspread the globe, men longing after visible forms of God, and so forming deities of wood and stone, silver and gold, or of any other dead and corruptible matter, we must hold it as a first principle, that as often as any form is assigned to God, his glory is corrupted by an impious lie.
In one word, their theology was in substance this--There is one God who created all the world, and declared His will to us by Moses and the prophets, and finally by Jesus Christ and His apostles; and we have one sole Redeemer, who purchased us by His blood, and by whose grace we hope to be saved: All the idols of the world are curst, and deserve execration.
Just as a maistre Fifi mocks those who hold their noses [in his presence]. because he has handled filth for so long that he can no longer smell his own foulness; so likewise do idolaters make light of those who are offended by a stench they cannot themselves recognize. Hardened by habit, they sit in their own excrement, and yet believe they are surrounded by roses.