In its day the Bible was all very well, no doubt. It was the expression
of the best that the Jewish people then knew in morals. In his time
Christ was a great reformer and a brave man. His philosophy was then an
onward spring, and he detested the shams of the Church.
But with the knowledge we have to-day we should call that man a lunatic
who tried to bind medical science by the teachings of that age, and
maintained that when a man was sick he had a devil, and that if he got
worse he had a whole flock of them. Yet Christ thought that. We should
call the man utterly insane who insisted that Joshua gave us the last
light that is ever to be thrown on astronomy. We should simply look
with pity on one who should try to convince us that the legal profession
ought to be bound by the laws of Moses; and we know that any nation
that attempted to act under his guidance would be soon convinced by the
unerring voice of foreign cannon that somebody had made a mistake.
Science has grown. Philosophy has developed. International law has
sprung up. In religion alone we are asked to accept the standard of
morality and honor of ages that are dead--to take as the last word of
wisdom the reformer's code of eighteen hundred years ago. We may grow in
all else; in this we must stand still. We may use a text-book on
Nature, Medicine, Law, or Mechanics, until by its aid we pass beyond its
knowledge to a higher; but in morals and religion the book that was a
light to the ages of ignorance and superstition, and the production of
its brain, must still be the sole illuminator of a world made wise and
critical and thoughtful by science and deep experience. The fisherman's
lantern, although useful in its day, cannot guide us while we stand
in the glare of electricity. Why stand persistently with our faces
westward, and gaze at the declining light, crying out impotently and
hopelessly as we see it grow dim and vanish?
Our wise men have kept steadily onward, guided by the light of the
breaking dawn; and with their faces to the East their star has never
set. The fishermen's light has sunk below the horizon, leaving behind it
the glow of honest labor and earnest effort to keep their memory bright.
The scientist's star has risen, and with no claim that it is even yet
the highest light--the final promise, it throws its rays of knowledge,
its beams of hope, far into the future, and bids us follow, leaving
the cold embers of the dead past for the warmth and light of the living
future.
The hope of the past is the despair of the future. Stagnation is death.
In movement and thought alone is progress. The wealth of the world is
the brain of the scholar.
The past is dead; peace to its ashes. The future is ours to form on new
models; models deformed by past superstitions, or models though faulty,
instinct with true freedom. You are the jury, what is the verdict?
*****