This is the age of revision. Churches are all hurrying to catch up with
the world. There is a desire to square ideas with facts, and shape beliefs
with knowledge. Religion must suffer in this process. Something will be
lost, but only what is bad, false and wrong. Creeds are out of date. They
are behind the times. They are the dead leaves from the tree of knowledge,
the dead branches on the tree of life. The world’s faith is in the living;
in the bud, the blossom, the promise of things—not in the husk, the shell,
in dead and useless things.
New creeds are to take the place of old ones. What people believe now, not
what people believed hundreds or thousands of years ago, must be put into
a profession of faith. For a man to profess what his father and mother
believed is to make birth useless and existence valueless. We are to live
to add to life, not to repeat it. Is theology the only thing that people
put their trust in? A theological creed has to be accepted with the eyes
shut. We want a creed of the heart, of the head, of the senses, of the
whole man. There is no theology worth believing in. The creed of the
church is a gravestone.
If we were to make a creed for the world of men to accept we would make it
out of human hearts. We would go where a man had helped another; where a
woman had sat beside the sick and suffering; where man had been crucified
for being true; where he had been burned for being honest; where he had
stood against the world protesting against its wrongs and proclaiming the
right, and where he had fallen with a martyr’s crown upon his forehead;
and we would write these into a creed, and have men say: I believe in men
and women who have lived good lives, who have taken the unfortunate by the
hand and lifted up the fallen, who have pardoned a woman’s fault, who have
shown their love of truth by being true, and who have done right even when
they were wronged for so doing.
The grandest life is the grandest creed; and, if man’s faith was faith in
what has made the world better and brighter and happier, he would be
better off than by believing in a God that is cruel, unjust and unkind,
and in a heaven where the highest joy is found in laughing at those who
are in hell.
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It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought was not a
church member.
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We do not say that another world is not worth a single thought, but rather
that this world is worth all our thoughts, and needs them.