From whatever cause, whether as a reaction against the mode in which
this great truth has been at times presented, there have been, and
there are, attempts to supersede Christianity because of its
narrowness. Religion must not be identified with any one name: God
manifests Himself to all, and no Mediator is needed. Theism,
therefore, the worship of the One Almighty and Eternal Being, not
Christianity, in which a Human Name is associated with the Divine Name,
can alone pretend to be the Universal Religion, the {139} Religion of
all Mankind. It is not the first time that such an attempt to do
without Christianity and to do away with it has been made. In the
eighteenth century there was a similar movement. To this day at
Ferney, near Geneva, is preserved the chapel which Voltaire erected for
the worship of God, of God as distinguished from Christ as Divine or as
Mediator between God and man. Voltaire thought that he could overthrow
and crush the Faith of Christ, but he none the less erected a temple to
God. The Deists upheld what they called the Religion of Nature and
repudiated Revelation. _Christianity not Mysterious; Christianity as
old as the Creation_, were among the works issued to show the
superiority of Natural Religion, its freedom from difficulties, its
agreement with reason, its universality. The most enduring memorial of
the controversy is Bishop Butler's _Analogy of Religion to the
Constitution and Course of Nature_, {140} in which it was argued that
the Natural Religion of the Deists was beset by as many difficulties as
the Revelation of the Christians, that those who were not hindered from
believing in God by the problems which Nature presented need not be
staggered by the problems which were presented by Christianity. Bishop
Butler's argument was directed against a special set of antagonists, an
argument, it may be said, of little avail against the scepticism of the
present day. The argument seems to have been unanswerable by those to
whom it was addressed. The grounds on which they rejected the
Revelation of Christ were shown to be inadequate. When they accepted
this or that article of Natural Religion, they had accepted what was as
difficult of belief as this or that part of the Revelation which they
rejected. The mysteries which existed in the religion with which they
would have nothing to do were in harmony with the {141} mysteries which
existed in the religion which they declared to be necessary for the
welfare of society. That retort may be made with even more effect to
those who so far occupy that same ground to-day. They rejoice to
believe that there is a God, that He is not far off, that He
communicates Himself to their souls, that the love which we bear to one
another is but a faint image of the love which He bears to us, that the
noblest qualities which exist in us exist more purely, more gloriously
in Him, that we are in very deed His children and are called to
manifest His likeness. It is by prayer, both in public and in private,
both in congregations and alone with the Alone, that His Love and His
Help can be comprehended and used. He is no absent God: His Ear is not
heavy that it cannot hear, nor His arm shortened that it cannot save.
With this belief we, as Christians, have no dispute: we gladly go along
with Theists in asserting it: we {142} only wonder at their
unwillingness to go along with us a little further. For if God be such
as they glowingly depict Him, if our relations to Him be such as they
esteem it our greatest dignity to know, there is nothing antecedently
impossible in the thought that One Man has heard His Voice more
clearly, has surrendered to His Will more entirely, than any other in
the history of the ages and the races of mankind: nothing antecedently
impossible in the thought that to One Man His Truth has been conveyed
more brightly, more fully than to any other; that in One Man the
lineaments of the Divine Image may be seen more distinctly than in any
other. If God be such, and if our relations to God be such, as Theists
describe, why should they shrink with distrust or with antipathy from a
Son of Man Who has borne witness to those truths in His Life and in His
Death with a steadfastness of conviction which none other has ever
surpassed; Who, according {143} to the records which we possess of Him,
habitually lived to do the Father's Will and died commending His Spirit
into the Father's Hands: a Son of Man Who could truly be said to be in
heaven while He was on earth? If God be such, and our relations to God
be such, as Theists describe, would not that Son of Man be the
confirmation of their thoughts? Would not His testimony be of infinite
value on their side? Would He Himself not be the radiant illustration,
the eagerly longed for proof of the truth for which they contend? They
believe in God: why should it, on their own showing, be so hard to
believe in Christ?