There are many who think they must live without religion because they
cannot be content with the views held by their fathers. The facts on
which the faith of the past was based have come into the light so that
the modern man, examining them, finds himself in all honesty compelled
to question them and often ultimately to call them fables.
The attempt to answer the questions of the clear-eyed modern scientific
mind by accusing it of inherent antagonism to religion is cheap and
ineffectual. There are honest doubters who at the same time are
earnest seekers after truth, who desire the best, who are willing to
pay any price for personal character and social righteousness.
It is because such men are honest that they refuse to be bound by
creeds they cannot believe and to buttress beliefs they cannot indorse.
No greater loss could come to character than to insist that we shall
act and speak a lie in order that the body of religious teaching shall
remain undisturbed. The heresy we most need to fear is that which
blatantly declares one thing while at heart fearing that another is
true.
The old generation in religion is accusing the new of treason to faith
and the new is accusing the old of blindness to truth. When the father
says to the son, "Believe this or be lost," the son answers that he
rather would be lost in company with truth and honesty of conscience
than be saved at the cost of both.
But do these divergencies mean that the man of the modern mind must
give up religion and that those who hold to the traditional views can
find no fellowship with those who see new light? This is more than an
academic question; it presses on every man who, finding in him the
universal thirst for religion, finds also standing before the living
waters him who says, "You can drink only out of this cup handed down
from the fathers; you can approach only on speaking our shibboleth."
Our fathers looked on religious truth as something complete and
unchangeable, once for all delivered to the saints. But they forgot
how different was the truth, as they saw it, from its vision as given
to their fathers. Every age tends to look upon itself as the final
goal and on its views as the last possible statement of truth.
Yet how clearly does the past teach us that our vision of truth is ever
changing. The science of to-day will be largely the folly of
to-morrow. Truth, in any realm, is a country whose boundaries lie ever
before us, whose geography each age must write anew. Truth is a road,
not a terminus; a process of search and not the thing discovered alone.
He only is religious really who opens heart and mind to the increasing
vision of truth, in whom religion is not a cut and dried, fixed and
unchanging philosophy, but to whom it is a method and motive for
living, a process of adjusting himself to all his world in the full
light of all the truth that can come to him.
There is a religion for the man who must deny many things that once
seemed essential to religion; for the man who feels compelled to doubt
all things; it is the religion of the honest, open souled, unreserved
search for truth and the translation of that truth as it is known into
character, and living.
If the setting of the face towards truth means breaking through ancient
theology it also will mean bringing us face to face with the infinite.
It is a good thing to lose the symbol if we only will seek for the
substance. The heart of man cries out for the reality that lies back
of all our words and for the realization of our doctrines in deeds.
When the test of trouble comes, when earth is a desert and the heavens
are brass, we find our refreshing, we find the real resources of
religion not in doctrinal statements, not in formal creeds, but in that
creed which experience has written on our hearts, in the consciousness
of an eternal love not demonstrated by logic, in the sense of the unity
of ourselves and our race with the infinite and divine.
Every day must have its new creed, its enlarging vision of truth, but
back of all lies truth itself, the reality upon which our fathers
leaned and the unfailing springs where they were refreshed and the
glowing visions that led them on. In that reality lies every man's
religion.