The last quarter of a century has seen a vast change in the general
attitude toward organized religion. To some extent that change has
had its points of pause and punctuation; we could tell where one
paragraph ended and another began. In thought, a Robertson Smith
or a Briggs case marked a period. The real range of a theological
debate can never be measured by the resolution of an ecclesiastical
assembly. Its main repercussion is upon the crowd, which becomes
gradually conscious of the significance of the issue. The great
change has come, however, almost without observation, and it may be
said to have affected religion rather than theology. It has shown
itself in lessened church attendance, and in the challenging of the
right of the church to assume the monopoly of religious interest. The
reduction in the number of men seeking to find their life-work in the
Christian ministry is a grave feature; for the temper of the martyr
and the soldier is not dead among us and the call for sacrifice has
always in it a peculiar ring and compulsion. The Christian ministry
is a great and noble calling, in which a man, if he is to have any
happiness in his work, must deliberately put the world behind his
back. But that particular form of sacrifice is losing its urgency.
The war revealed, to those who were actively engaged in it, not
so much a changed condition as unpleasant actualities in the old
condition. It became wofully apparent that religious instruction had
not penetrated as deeply as the religious organizations had imagined.
One never knew whether to wonder most at men's ignorance of what
the Christian Church should have been teaching them, or at their
indifference to some matters which the peace standard of domestic
ethics regarded as vital, or at their continual and magnificent
gaiety of spirit, their glorious comradeship, their mastery of fear.
The war showed how little conventional religion stood for. It also
made it plain that the great words of the Gospel--joy, peace, love,
righteousness, sacrifice--were of the very heart of high conduct as
men understood high conduct, face to face with death, in those most
desperate conditions.
If one asks oneself what it is that has been going on beneath the
surface to bring about so profound a change in religious outlook, one
may say that it has been the challenging of the seat of authority in
religion. In organized religion there have been two main conceptions
of the seat of authority.
The Romanist and high-church view is that authority lies in the
Church, in its continuity of tradition and in its possession of
sacramental power. If men are to be left to their own devices there
will be anarchy in religion. But if they will but look back to the
very foundations of Christianity, they will find a body of truth
steadily handed down, and an efficacy communicated by the laying
on of episcopal hands, transmitted from one generation to another.
They will find a divinely guided history of councils and creeds
through which the deposit of truth has been safeguarded; and the
doubter may commit himself with certainty to this system, which
is the embodiment not only of divine truth but of human wisdom and
practical knowledge. A Scottish Presbyterian is not predisposed to
favor such a conception, but one has to admit its power. The majority
of mankind are neither able nor willing to examine a long course
of church history for themselves, and a strong, dogmatic assertion
and a definite historical position have a vast power with a certain
conservative and clinging and devotional type of mind. There are
many people who have not sufficient intellectual daring to wrestle
constantly with things for themselves. They want certainty. And
so Newman and Adelaide Procter and many other equally pure souls
have found rest in this obedience to authority. There is, however,
particularly in this new land, a different temper springing up. The
community spirit seeks inclusion rather than exclusion. It tries
to use different gifts without judging between them. It will not
nullify categories; it will simplify them. The question of apostolic
succession, except where men are still held to belief in it by
ecclesiastical authority, is ceasing to be an issue, just because
this practically minded world does not see any such monopoly of
spiritual power in one particular church. And, with regard to the
permanence of any creed, we are in an atmosphere which tends more
and more to utter its faith in the language of the day. A man may
be very near to his Lord and yet unable to discern his Lord in
the Athanasian Creed. The process is too long which requires that
the believer search back through all those centuries of tangled
historical stuff before he finds his Master. He does not need to be
either a prophet or the son of a prophet who declares confidently
that the sacramentarian, historically exclusive, miraculous, sanction
of religion is likely to become less and less powerful.
Is, then, the seat of authority for religion in the claims of Holy
Scripture? This has been the appeal of the Reformed churches. At
the Reformation, when the assertion was again made of the rights
of the human spirit to come directly into fellowship with Christ,
Scripture of necessity took a place of new importance. It was the
road of direct access to God. One can understand how, after being
bound in the chains of the Roman Catholic Church, men and women
found in Scripture the glorious liberty of the children of God. Is
it any wonder that they brooded over it until even the translations
themselves seemed to be the very breath of the Almighty? But the
earliest and greatest of the reformers had no such cast-iron view
of verbal inspiration as afterward came to prevail, in its turn
to become a tyranny just as exacting as the old. Both Luther and
Calvin knew far too much of religious history and of the Bible to
be led into any such unbending position. Luther, for instance, had
his pronounced views upon the Epistle of James, which he would
have excluded from the Canon. He was well aware of the doubt which
had prevailed as to the canonicity of the splendid Epistle to the
Hebrews. The preacher of to-day is not wise who neglects Calvin on
the Psalms and Calvin on Isaiah; but Calvin saw clearly that there
were Aramaic elements in the 139th Psalm, and that the ascription of
it to David was impossible. Gradually, however, what was really the
record of a revelation came to be regarded as the revelation itself.
It is not the New Testament which reveals God. It is Christ who
reveals God, and it is the New Testament which gives the story of the
incarnation of the Most High. In the post-Reformation days, however,
when the Reformation, as a mighty revival of personal religion, was
giving place to the time when men were trying to state in logical
and philosophical form those wonderful experiences which they had
lived through of the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible came to
be used as though it were a collection of proof-texts. A creed is
obviously the product of the time when the first overwhelming flood
of enthusiasm has passed, and men have begun to reason about the
experiences through which they have lived. Thus, in the seventeenth
century the doctrinaire view of Scripture stiffened. There was no
attempt to understand the history underlying this great library of
sacred writings. So truculent a book as Esther was believed to be,
every word of it, the breathing of the Almighty, because it found
itself within the sacred boards, while so glorious a record as First
Maccabees was ranked with any other piece of secular history because
its date precluded its inclusion within the Canon. There was no
knowledge of the fact that the early narratives of Genesis had a
relationship to the Babylonian cosmogony; that, the Septuagint being
witness, there had been widely varying texts of the Book of Jeremiah;
that the Hebrew text of Hosea was in places in such confusion that
anything more than a conjectural translation was impossible. The
general and well-founded belief that Scripture was the Word of God
was stretched until it became a new legalism, until it covered
every word of the Authorized Version, and, in the minds of many,
every comma of the splendid translation. That was an inflexible, an
uncritical, an unscholarly position that was perilous. In the minds
of multitudes it linked the truth in Jesus with some conundrum about
Cain's wife. It put the great causes of religion at the mercy of the
negative and unbelieving critic. Many of us remember still the shock
it was to our faith when we found that Scripture was being examined
by the ordinary methods of critical and linguistic analysis; and yet
we now realize that it is through this liberty that our faith has
been re-established and set foursquare to all the winds that blow.
The present condition of things is that, while scholars have made
the adjustment in their own minds, the great majority of believing
people have not. That distinction between the revelation and the
record of it is a delicate and subtle thing compared with the direct
and unsophisticated view that every word within the boards that
contain Holy Scripture is absolutely inerrant, in the most literal
sense of the term. Piety and intellectual acumen do not always go
together. Those who know out of a long experience what Scripture has
been to them, in strengthening and comfort, are jealous with a godly
zeal when they think they see heedless hands laid upon the ark. And
so some good people have tried to beat back the tide by accusing
scholars of unbelief, and again and again the attempt has been made
to control the teaching in theological colleges in the interest of
a particular theory of inspiration. The result is that the teaching
of the pulpits has often become suspect by men poles apart in their
general view. Some, clinging to the old ways, have been looking for
heresy; others, feeling the new breath, have been wondering whether
the preacher was frank. There has thus been unsettlement of a most
profound character, and it is unsettlement upon a really first-class
issue. The Protestant world as a whole has yet to be brought to
understand that the believer's faith in his Lord is something that
will be affected in no way by a discussion of the question whether
the sun did actually stand still upon Gibeon. Such a faith rests on
something much more precious than the authority even of the written
Word; it rests on the witness of the spirit of the believer to the
revelation of God as he finds it in Christ.
If, on the one hand, this unsettlement has caused pessimism and
distress on the part of those who cannot see that a living faith is
bound to be a growing thing, an organism and not a crystal, it has
brought about a very different attitude on the part of many others,
who feel that certain obvious religious duties are incumbent upon
them, even if they may never be able to solve for themselves such
questions as modern scholarship has raised. The social and business
life of to-day has one fine feature, unfortunately quite dissociated
from the Christian Church, although created largely by Christian
people. Men, immersed in business and professional life, have yet
religion in their hearts; they know the need, for their own spiritual
health as well as for the good of the community, of guarding against
the tendency to selfishness and absorption in gain. And so we have
springing up everywhere Rotarian Clubs and Kiwanian Clubs and many
other organizations of similar kind, which foster a genial and kindly
rivalry in well-doing. Once a week men gather and refuse to admit
that they are growing old. They laugh and are happy. They are looking
around for some good thing to do. Is it an industrial training home
for boys, away among the mountains, in the best of surroundings, far
from the city streets; is it the installation of a new hot-water
apparatus in their city hospital--to take two instances known to
me of the activities of a Rotarian and a Kiwanian Club--they throw
themselves into the effort with zeal, and get, as surely they should
do, joy for themselves in the securing of joy for others. Behind
it there lies the feeling that whatever the uncertainties of faith
may be, there are certain duties incumbent upon all who love their
kind. It is better to be unselfish than selfish, better to be glad
than frowning, better to come out of your isolation and know your
neighbor and competitor than to retire into your shell and imagine
all kinds of evil about his persistent activities. Such a movement,
spreading with somewhat of the fire of a crusade, is just another
evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit, another proof that
religion is the most pronounced and permanent bent of the human mind.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and the Spirit
will always manifest himself in varying modes.
What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion
but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the
Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt
to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal,
but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see
that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and
have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply
ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate.
The study of a doctrine such as the Atonement is the best of all
evidence for the fact. On so great a truth the greatest thinkers of
all times have exercised themselves, and the statements made of the
doctrine have been made in terms intelligible to the men of the age
in which they were made. Books which deal with the subject of the
Atonement are invariably stronger on their historical and critical
than on their constructive sides. It is easy to understand now
the defects of so great and permanent a book as Anselm's _Cur Deus
Homo_, or, leaping over many hundreds of years, to question the
adequacy of the statements of Robertson of Brighton, or of MacLeod
Campbell. Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal
truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language
of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their
statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth
itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught
by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly
equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses
exercised to receive the truth. But, while mediæval thought has few
greater names than that of Anselm, _Cur Deus Homo_ is now studied
exactly like Faraday's _Researches_, only as a matter of history.
Human thought has left Anselm behind.
To the trained thinker, of course, this position is the merest
commonplace. The wine of divine truth is ever new, and it has to be
put into new bottles. He does an infinite disservice to faith who
strives to tie it indefinitely to particular statements. The heresy
of yesterday may be the orthodoxy of to-day, and the orthodoxy of
to-day the exhausted formula of to-morrow. The men of this generation
read with amazement the attacks of the sixties on Darwin, attacks
so full of acerbity, so reckless in their bandying of evil charges
and in their ascription of anti-religious motives. And to-day, while
the biologist may still debate the particular issue, we know that
the conception of continuity and development has been of enormous
service in every range of thought. The first debates on the _Origin
of Species_ have given place to a general conception. Einstein,
in the same way, may influence profoundly not only physical but
theological and ethical problems.
And so those who to-day have faith in a living and personal Christ
must not lose courage, even if they do find the envelope in which
that faith was wrapped being torn asunder. This particular envelope
may have served its turn. We have this treasure in earthen vessels.
We may ask as a matter of intellectual curiosity as to the form in
which men expressed their belief some centuries ago, but the vital
thing for us is that to-day we shall have such a form as shall be
intelligible and arresting for us and our contemporaries. Wherever
the Spirit of Christ is quick there will always be the double process
in action, the challenging of old forms and the creation of new. The
speech in the process may vary from generation to generation, but
the process itself is a symptom of life. The desire for change is
no evidence of impiety; it may be the setting forth of the prophet.
The ages which are the ages of godlessness are those in which there
has been no challenging of the accepted thing. In social as in
religious life there are always multitudes whose motto is "Leave
well alone." The position is a complete begging of the question.
Is the situation really "well"? Many to-day in the Old Country sigh
for the industrial conditions of forty years ago, when labor was
subservient and cheap, and when taxation was low. At that time it
never seemed to occur to any one that there was something wrong
with a system in which one-third of the population of a great city
like Glasgow lived in houses of one room, where women went barefoot
throughout the winter months, where the question of the next meal
was an insistent one with tens of thousands. Because the system had
existed so long, the sufferers under it did not challenge it, while
those who profited by it had no sense of the anomaly of a situation
which worked comfortably for them. It was not that men were heartless
or unbelieving. They were tender in their affections and quick
with their charities. But the existence of this condition of great
wealth alongside of abject poverty and degradation was regarded
with the inevitableness of fate. It existed and therefore it was
accepted. It had the sanction of age and was not to be challenged.
The public conscience was not awake. There was no vision and the
people perished. The last seven years have wrought a mighty change.
Apart from any immediate economic issue there has been an alteration
in the general attitude toward the question of wages. A community
is not stable in its ordering nor is it genuinely prosperous if one
main element in its financing is the maintenance of vast industries
by labor so cheap as to be always upon the verge of destitution. The
economic considerations are not the only ones, nor indeed are they
the primary ones. A healthy and contented population is real wealth.
A generation ago our cities emptied their filth into the rivers and
lakes at their doors, and then used dredges to remove the sludge.
Now, under new methods, unclean products are purified by chemical or
bacteriological processes; the effluent is clean and innocuous, and
there is no need for dredging. A great deal of the social rescue work
and philanthropy of past years has been a beginning at the wrong end.
Drunkenness and an iron social system manufactured the criminal, the
wastrel, the lunatic, and we dealt with the waste product. Now we are
trying to keep our rivers clean.
A change of similar character, but even more rapid in its operation,
is taking place in our thoughts of religion. It is coming about
rather by the opening of the eyes than by any special process of
reasoning or by any definite challenging of old methods. We are
becoming not a little wearied of the tyranny of organization. We
are afflicted by "drives" of all sorts; by vast conceptions of "the
world for Christ in this generation," while the streams of Christian
thought are all the while running shallower and more shallow, with
less and less power to drive anything. In the States, as in Canada,
there have been great campaigns for funds which also tried to be
campaigns for spiritual results. It has been discovered to be an
easier thing to raise money than to quicken the spirit. Life remains
as materialistic and as worldly as before, and the temperature is
dropping as with the coming of an east wind on the Maine coast.
Theologically in both countries we are still inclined to fight for
a former condition of things which, as a matter of fact, has ceased
to have power. It is our burden, as it is our glory, to stand in
difficult days. We shall all the sooner come to grips with the real
issue if we understand that it is our business to set forth the
undying Christ as we know him, and not to resuscitate, if that were
possible, the forms and phrases and intellectualisms of an age that
is gone. Back to Christ is the necessity--not the Christ of the
Creeds compounded with the technical terms of Greek philosophy or
the juristic outlook of Roman law, but the Christ of the Gospels.
Any religious awakening which is going to move the common weal will
begin in a revival of personal religion. Public morals are what
personal religion makes them. The power-house is more vital than
the transmission-plant. Wherever one looks it is to find that great
public movements have had their origin in the hearts of consecrated
men and women. Religion does not suffer by changing its form; it will
founder if it be not ever related afresh to Jesus.
It may be taken for granted that an inquiring age like this will
never submit itself to an intellectual position which presents itself
merely on the ground of authority. The Reformation won the right to
think, and in this we shall not be less than our fathers. Whatever we
believe must be in harmony with our reason and our experience. This
does not mean that those who exercise this right to think are become
rationalists. We know ourselves everywhere to be surrounded by the
evidences of a divine purpose: for us the things which are not seen
are eternal. We find in the history of to-day--in the history of
those past seven tangled and tragic years--clear manifestations of
the hand of God. But we believe that in the interpretation of Jesus
personal experience must always have a major part. Our faith must be
something not merely personal to ourselves but of which we can give
some sort of account to others. Christ spoke no more incisive word
than this: "Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it
thee of me?"
There can be no question as to the dire need there is of such
an awakening by which men and women may once again be turned to
spiritual things. War is, under all conditions, and even when waged
for the purest of motives, an unmitigated evil. The saddest things
in war are not the deaths in action. Abnormal conditions, which bring
together millions of men in a cause in which the sense of personal
responsibility is merged in the sacrifice for a general purpose,
produce abnormal results. The old moorings are lifted. The old
restraints, so largely the result of environment and of local opinion
and knowledge, cease to operate. The sense of "mine" and "thine" is
loosened. Continence ceases to be a primal virtue. The idle become
yet more idle and the reckless yet more reckless. And if the results
upon the men who have seen service have been thus evil, the effects
on the stay-at-home community have been even more evil because less
gross. Money has been made in great quantity by those who have no
sense of the stewardship of wealth, and has been displayed with
an aggressiveness that only embitters the way of simple and modest
people. If the morals of men have deteriorated, women may well
consider whether their fashions of dress have not contributed largely
to the general demoralization. There were periods when lewdness
advertised itself by its garb and indecency wore a uniform. It is
not possible now to draw any large generalizations. The pungent
definition of the modern novel as the kind of book that no nice
girl would allow her mother to read may or may not be justified,
but a glance through the pages of the cheap American story magazine
will leave no one in uncertainty as to the kind of thing that is
apparently most marketable. Any one to-day who takes a grave view of
moral and religious conditions need not be afraid of being counted a
misanthrope. Public life will always reflect not inaccurately private
conditions. If ever there was a time when those who name the name of
Christ required to reflect the character of Christ it is now.
Suppose, then, we come to Jesus and ask ourselves what were the
characteristics of the life he lived and the faith he taught, should
we not set down some broad and simple issues which current religious
life might well be reminded of?