LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
Cliap. Copyright N o. _
Shelf —^V:—^ C.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
REASON AND FAITH
a 9. h-^i^
REASON
AND
FAITH
BY
REV. A. S/FISKE, D. D.
NON IN SOLO
PANE VIVIT HOMO
WASHINGTON, D. C.
THE NEALE COMPANY
431 iiTH St. N. W.
1900
1
UbPRpy «f Congpoas
Two Copies Received OCT 22 1900
C«pynght entry
SECOND eopv.
Ofiiv*f«( to
ORDti^ O'A'ISION,
>-
-fs^
Copyright, 1900
BY
The Neale Company
PREFATORY.
This little volume is written with no theolog- ical or philosophic motive. It is largely but a retrospect of the painful steps by which one soul rose up out of angered and bitter depths to a rational faith and peaceful standing. Many in our time are dazed at the dark problems of this world, angered at its all-encompassing evil and doubting that it can be goodness which is throned over such domains. For those in such hard and honest case the Author has profoundest sympathy. It is in the hope that this book may suggest steps towards a reasonable light to some in such dark- ness, that he ventures to offer it to the public.
He will be amply rewarded if it may be as
'* Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's stormy main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. Seeing, may take heart again."
A. S. F.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Thk Atheistic Argument from the Exist- ence OF Evil 9
II. The Tkeistic SoIvUTion of the Probi^em
OF Eviiy IN the W0R1.D 22
III. The Rationai. Ground of Christian v
Faith 36
IV. The M1RAC1.E Reasonable . . 55
V. The Justification of the Unjust .... 69
VI. The Wonder of the Word 85
VII. Why I Believe in God 102 >
VIII. A Conclusion of Sound Reason 115 '
IX. The Unity of Christ's People 127
X. The Way of Certitude 141
XI. Rkason and Faith 153
J
REASON AND FAITH
CHAPTER I
THE ATHEISTIC ARGUMENT FROM THE EXIST- ENCE OF EVII.
The whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together ujitilnow, — St. Paul.
Sin in the individual soul, cherished, persisted in, practiced wantonly, is doubtless the keenest incentive to the denial of the existence of God. A holy, just, and almighty personal God, ruling and judging the world, is an intolerable thought to a consciously guilty violator of holy law ; and we can get rid of notions that breed horrors for us. But it is not my purpose to deal thus sum- marily with this vast and sorrowful business.
Whatever the real motive to atheism, its argu- ment, its justification to reason, has ever been the evil of the universe. Nor is it strange that its cogency should be, to many, irresistible. The first attack, and that of most sweeping power, runs against the orthodox and historic proposition
lo Reason and Faith
of a unity of being and administration, through the universe and all stages of moral existence, which carries evil in character and estate over into the after- worlds. The argument runs, — let us put it as strongly as may be, — " It is impos- sible to believe, it is monstrous to affirm, that a good, wise and all-powerful God should create freely innumerable souls, endow them with fairly limitless capacity for happiness or misery, bestow upon them the awful gift of immortality, and then doom them to an eternity of woe, utter and remediless."
If it be answered, ''He does not doom them so ; He simply gives them the choice of courses and lets them have their own way," the answer is short and sharp : ' ' But, though they have a certain freedom, it avails them little, for they come into the world by no choice of their own, with such physical appetites and propensities that they do, without exception, run into evil. Nay, the physical impulses and the selfish side are so much earlier in development than the intellectual or the moral that the selfish and the animal get fine start, controlling power, before reason and con- science come into the field at all ; and ever after they abide, a constant, besetting and inexpug- nable energy in all men. Then the material and earthly besetment is such as to be a perpetual and overmastering pressure towards evil. The collocation of individuals into families, groups, and races of kindred frailness and evil makes ex- trication from it so difficult as to be practically
Reason and Faith ii
impossible for even the stoutest souls. Orthodoxy admits that sort of impossibility. Moreover, sci- entific and philosophic observation make it certain that heritage from ill generations gone starts us with such bias of constitutional structure as to give no man born of woman a fair chance. So clear is this that all scientific, philosophic or theo- logical creeds have made this evil heritage the very basal point of their systems. The element of personal freedom is so encumbered by these sinister conditions as to be of very little account. As matter of fact, all races of men and all indi- vidual souls are, consciously and demonstrably, involved in evil ; and this evil is fatal, insomuch that all generations are merely born to die." All this, they say, is inconsistent with the idea of a free, good, all-wise and all-powerful God. Such a God would not, ought not, to have created such a race — a race of immortal sinners, to sin and suffer on forever. Yet here such a race is. There can be, therefore, no such God. So runs the argu- ment.
Or, leaving the wider question of the eternities. * ' A good God of this world ? Look ! Johnstown there, a happy and prosperous community, over- whelmed by its flood. Those peaceful and indus- trious towns at the foot of one of Japan's glorious mountains. In a moment the mountain topples over upon them, destroying the villages and thousands of lives. Behold Chicago on fire. See the Yellow River — ' China's sorrow ' — her muddy waters full of tens of thousands of floating, ghastly
12 Reason and Faith
bodies of dead men, women, and children ! See millions perishing of hunger in India and thou- sands in Cuba. Remember Europe depopulated by the ' Black Death.' Hear the death shrieks ringing almost yet from all the fair valleys and rugged mountains of Armenia. Witness the furious devastations of war, the countless dead, the agonies of the mutilated, the anguish of the millions in the homes out of which all the glory and joy are gone. Watch the mother beside her darling who writhes and dies a slow death of agony in her arms, the innocent prey of torment for which she or all the world can do nothing ! Yet this God could, by an easy act of will, have prevented it all ! Nay, say this. A man takes another's life. He is a murderer, guilty of the supreme of ghastly crimes, is worthy of detesta- tion and of death, is not fit to live. Yet, see the generations die in pain, wasted by diseases offen- sive and intolerable ! What of your God who kills, by an ordinance that knows no exception, every man He has made ? He might have made them to live forever, or could just translate His children, in the midst of smiles and praises, to their happier climes, surrounding their depart- ures out of this to the worthier worlds with every token of love, joy, and blessedness. But how He does it! Your good God, indeed ! " Answer, if you will : ' ' All this is the play of law. ' ' ' ' What of that ? Does that better the case for the lawmaker ? What He does by law. He does Himself. The builder of a bad law is worse than
Reason and Faith 13
the doer of a bad deed. Your God is the respon- sible author of all law, natural and moral, if there be such a God."
Say: *' There is much of beneficence, happi- ness, true weal in the universe, perhaps more than of evil. " " But that is impossible to prove, ' ' they answer. Taking into account the absolute sway of death and the awful numbers who go out of this world after wretched lives, enmeshed in evil still, with fearful probabilities of evil futures, it can not be shown that the good overbalances the evil.
' ' But why any evil at all ? Belittle it as you may, why this appalling sum of human suffering and ill, w^hich can not be disputed or made less than frightful ? Why, if God be great and wise and good ? ' '
So the tide of unbelieving challenge rolls on and whelms the faith of multitudes in our day. Not only do the IngersoUs exultingly cry, ' ' I could have done better, ' ' but throngs of humbler and more reverent spirits cry out in agony of mortal question. Multitudes doubt any God who do not deny Him. They shrink back and say, *'I don't know." They doubt, shrink and say — nothing ! They live on, doing as best they can, to meet what may be, with such hope as is possible in this deathful, rascal earth. What answer is to be made to this awful atheistic argu- ment, which does hold with a wide and ruinous grasp on the souls of many men of all classes in our time ? It is an imperious question which must
14 Reason and Faith
find answer, fair and frank and full, or ever the tide be turned.
The first answer attempted is that of Material- istic Evolution — the answer of allowance — assent to atheism. " There is no God. There is, indeed, no soul. Intellect, will, feeling, love, loyalty, pa- triotism, heroism, worship, are all merely the play of the material atoms in the physical organism. When the organism goes to the dust heap all is gone. There is no good or evil, sin or holiness. There is no freedom of will. Everything is the play of automata, freak of fate. Matter, without God or soul, is merely playing out its nature." To be sure, there is sad puzzle as to how matter got its " Nature," or got to be at all, — whence its inherent ''I^aw" had origin. But that is of no consequence, since philosophy itself is but the inexplicable fracas of the material atoms of the brain, and rational cause there is none, and reason itself is but a phantasmal jargon of material stuiF in transient and chance activity. All this, indeed, so conflicts with the verdict of consciousness, so contradicts the facts of conscience and the phenomena of all society and life, so reduces to blank absurdity all the modes of possible social law, all the dicta of duty, reward and penalty, order and government, as to make it a miracle that any sane soul should hold it. Nay, to hold it, souls have to deny their own existence, leaving themselves without the faculties for either rational denial or afl&rmation of anything ; making all the pompous seeming of reason a sheer diddle of
Reason and Faith 15
automata. To one's wonder, those who hold the doctrine are always talking and acting, most absurdly out of all logical consistency, about free- dom and dignity and guilt and obligation, and right and wrong, and blaming and ridiculing people whose atoms don't play the fool just like their own. Let us laugh ! They have even held that the old notions of God and duty ought to be taught the average man for his restraint, as if automata could be taught ! as if there were any ^' ought" at all !
A second answer has been made by affirmation that into this roil and moil of evil God has intro- duced a power to reverse and overcome it. That He has by His Son made it possible, even easy, for every man to be rid of the disorders of his na- ture by consent to its sublime re-creation ; to be rid of the curse of evil done, by repentance of it and its free, full pardon ; to be lifted into such right, loving, holy behavior and character as shall fit him for, and assure him of, an immortalit}^ of blessedness. That, so far, is well, were that the universal destiny. But this scheme of the Gospel was so long in coming and is, yet, so far from having come to all men — so many refuse its grace when they do know it, and go on all the worse for it ; it has, so, no advantage for so vast numbers of the human race ; so many have abso- lutely no chance at it ; so many candid spirits are perplexed by it — can not see their way to it ; it has visibly worked for relatively so few the great salvation ! Let now the largest answer be
1 6 Reason and Faith
made that is consistent with broadest orthodoxy, namely, that the vast multitudes who die in in- fancy receive its benefits. Nay, let it be said that the general work of the Holy Spirit reaches all races, even outside the specific knowledge of the Historic Christ, so preparing a multitude, how- ever great, to a grace by which they virtually receive Him, or do accept Him when, perhaps in the very hour of dying. He is revealed to them and so enter into glory renewed souls ; say all that, and that so the great majority of the hu- man race may have been saved. Say more, that in the long future of a rapidly evangelizing world, of a fully evangelized world, these majorities of the redeemed will sweep up to the huge out- numbering of all that ever have or ever shall miss the eternal salvation ; say all this, as orthodoxy does dare to say it, still that awful remainder — the whole of earthly suffering, the whole of the after-penalties of the unsaved ! Go outside of this orthodox answer. Say, with the Universalist : '' All men are to be saved at the long! last. Sin is to be punished here and hereafter ; but all punishment is remedial, and all will come home, at last, to God in peace and glory.'' Still the remainder! Earthly suffering in vast volume and suffering beyond the grave, how long and serious you know not ! Still the heart rises up in the face of Johnstown, beside the famine-stricken millions of India or the flooding woe of China's devouring river, or Armenian horrors, or Cuba's starving tens of thousands ; or beside the wan
Reason and Faith 17
face of the child in helpless agony, to demand, "How is this, if God be almighty, if God be good ? Man ought to have been made, if made at all, holy and happy here, and so forever to demonstrate the wisdom, power, and goodness of his Creator, nay, to prove His existence at all, or to make it possible to believe in Him.'' Unbe- lieving reason goes further and says, ' * In the day in which He made man, He, being infinite in knowledge and in power, must have foreseen all the issues of His creative work." There was no compulsion upon Him to create. Freely, of His own will, He created all, knowing all that should come of it, to every creature, as well as to the whole creation. In that executive act of creation, therefore, He did, in fact, determine all that was to be. In that Divine decree, which is not aflfirmed by revelation or in theology merely, but which is axiomatic in any philosophic thought of an all- knowing, creative God — an absolute postulate of theistic thought, all must have been determined. No use to say that you believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful God who, creating all things, did not know the issue of all things. That were to bar out from His infinitude the outcome of His own act, to cut ofi* from His all-knowledge the whole future of His own creation. You can not save his goodness by denial of His Deity. What a God you have, then, shorn, finite, bewil- dered, overwhelmed ! It is mental imbecility to say that a God who knew all futures, all issues of His creative act, then freely created, yet did
1 8 Reason and Faith
not determine the things that were to be. It is contradiction in terms, impossible to reason. The decrees of God are necessary to the conception of an inj&nite creative intelligence. He knew what was to be ? It '* was to be '' then ! Who settled that ''it is to be" ? Who but He who freely created the thing that *' is to be '* ? The decree of a foreknown creation was the decree of all that was to come of it, all that ever has come of it or ever will.
Could we see, now, that all this creation were running well, working the weal of the orders of being which compose it, for the present and for the eternities, then we could have no trouble in the way of faith in God. Could we even see, through the veils and mists of present evil, suf- fering, sorrow, sin and death, surety of a to-mor- row of eternal weal for all, we could veil our faces before the mystery of the present and wait the unrolling of the scrolls of futurity, singing the songs of an assured faith and a grateful love. THAT we can not find in the revelation from which we learn all that we know of the future, most of what we know of God, and all that we know to alleviate the conscious and the observed miseries of this human life and death. That revelation has doleful voices of foreboding. Thunders of judgment reverberate through its corridors. The woes of the present waken echoes from within the barred gates of the grave. The chances that lie over there are the very motive of the revelation. The analogies of the present life
Reason and Faith 19
make fearsome suggestion of hurt for those who venture, sinful and unrepentant, out of this into the worlds to come. If so much of sin and the woe of it, covering, blighting, cursing life be per- mitted here, who is to say that, under the admin- istration of the same God, there is to be none of it in other and after worlds ? Who is to say that, under the fuller development of the evil that is regnant in many souls to the last of the earthly life, there is not to come in the long hereafter the fuller measure of ill which the fuller measure of developed desert must bring ? None has looked for ground of such affirmation in the Divine Word more eagerly than have I. None would rejoice more than I should such new light break forth of it. It does not. That it did not come when I waited for it long, flung me once, not into denial that there was any God, but into an awful hatred of Him. I could not deny Him but only His holi- ness and goodness. For, to deny His being, and see the universe shorn of all meaning, purpose or reason, bow down to the mere grind of luck or law that had no maker ; to see the races going to the dust heaps of the ages without significance ; to hear mankind wailing its woes and raving its wraths and mooning its inane laughters out upon the mere grind of a soulless fate or an idiotic chance, which grinds us all to death and obliv- ion,— O that were too ignoble, too horrible! That were worse than any hell ! To believe my- self and man nothing ; to learn that honor, virtue, heroism, worship — all that makes for dignity and
20 Reason a7td Faith
worth in man — are phantasms, of no more qual- ity than the craving of hunger or of lust, or than the automatic convolutions of the worm beneath your foot, this is to deny every conscious fact of your own constitution and of the society of man, is to degrade and deny yourself !
But here the evil is. Here are we in it, for in- dubitable and awful fact ! To deny the existence or the goodness of God abates no jot of the horror, but adds the element of an absolute hope- lessness,— a blank despair. If there be a God who can overrule, we find a ray of hope. If a God wise, mighty, and good, there may be com- plete relief for reason and sanity. There must be such a God or the universe is without reason, — an unmitigated terror, and the ending of it by universal suicide and oblivion the only rational hope. Our disbelievers cut us off" from that by telling us that matter is eternal, was never created and can never cease its cursed play. From this grind of aimless and hideous curse, I flee to God as the only escape from madness !
Here the evil is. We are all involved in it. And here God is. There must, then, be some theory of the universe and the permission of evil in it couvsistent with these facts, — sinful and suffer- ing man and a holy, almighty, all-wise and all- loving God. If this permitted evil shall prove, after all, but the mode and necessary process for the development of the loftiest of possible created moral Being and definitely designed to effect it, as I suppose and will try to show, we can unite in
Reason and Faith 21
exultant Hallelujahs to His great and blessed Name. The evil and suffering of the worid shall redound to the glory and joy both of God and man.
After all, I can only close as I began. The common, practical source of atheism is no specu- lative diflSculty, but consciousness of guilt and free refusal to turn from it. That consciousness raises the certainty that, with a holy God reign- ing and judging, it will go hard with guilt every- where and forever. So men can and do fight down and out their own intuitive and rational certainty that there is such a God. In so far, atheism is sin. To live in God's world, the life He gives and sustains, as if there were no God, is easily the supreme of all evils that are in the earth and the source of all the curses of time and of eternity, — occasion of all the wailings that have been, are, or shall be.
22 Reason and Faith
CHAPTKR II
THE THKISTIC SOI.UTION OF THE PROBLEM OF
EVIIv IN THE WORI.D
Who are these which are arrayed in white robes ? and whence came they? These are they which came out of great tribula- tion^ and have washed their robes and made them, white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in His temple ; and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hun- ger no more, neither thirst a^iy more: neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed t-hem, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. — St. John.
Many kindly and thoughtful souls, touched by the miseries of this present life, and haunted by the dread consequences of evil in the eternity that is coming, — wretchednesses which do visibly har- row with tribulations multitudes here, and which do, presumably, hang over the future of so many of our fellows, — are ever standing, perplexed and baffled, before the agonized question, *'Why is evil permitted in the universe?" Failing of sat- isfactory answer, from the doors of that awful problem multitudes have been thrown into anger against the very order of the world, into denial of the inspired Word, into refusal to believe even in the existence of any God at all. With Huxley, they say, ''Since thousands of times a minute, if our ears were sharp enough, we should hear sighs
Reason and Faith 23
and groans of pain like those Dante heard at the gates of hell, the world can not be governed by what we call benevolence." At any rate, they are tossed into angry rejection of the doctrine of any persistence of evil and misery beyond the grave, or, like Tyndall, into a confused agnosti- cism in the whole sphere of religious and, some- times, of moral truth. The strain which this fact of evil puts on the hearts of all men and upon the faith of many is almost or altogether too heavy to be borne.
But here the evil is past contradicting. Here it has been from earliest history and reaching out into the future of this world, ravenous as ever, and here it is as a foreboding of the eternities, in spite of us. It must be consistent with some scheme of the universe. What scheme, then ? A chance universe ? Too much of plan, order, ad- justment of means to ends for that, and too much, I may say, of hopeless horror for any soul to let it rest in that. Fate ? That answers no question, for a fate requires an arbiter of fates, a God ! A malignant Power, then, over and under all ? Too much of beneficence, of wisdom, power, and skill directed to world's weal for that. The normal order of Nature is for weal. On the whole, the vast majority of men are glad that they live, have lived, and are to live yet. After all, men do, almost universally, feel that Goodness is on the throne. Hardly a blasphemer in his wrath is able to say, ' ' This Power of the universe is ma- lignant, and the God is the Devil ! ''
24 Reason a?id Faiih
Well, then, is it a God who, having made the world and set it running, then retired from busi- ness, out of all its processes, and left it alone to work out its own destinies ? Hardly that. He could not do that. He could have had no right to do that. He must, creating, have known all the issues of its evil ; could have had no right to set it out and let it run its course of evil, unobstructed and uncared for. On such terms, it is not irrev- erent to say, ' ' He had no right to create at all. " A God were that like the creator of the Frankenstein, with a horrible and uncontrollable thing for a universe on His hapless hands to mock His pow- erlessness or His heartless unconcern. Either the Creator can interfere and will not, or He would interfere and can not. In either case He were something else, and other, than our God.
What theory of the creation is left, then ? Only this, that a wise, good and almighty God, creating, set afoot the best, worthiest, loftiest scheme of things that could be and presides over it for its highest welfare. I can see no other alternative. Still, this evil is here and often in- tolerable and overwhelming,
I^et us go reverently back past the ages, beyond the stars, into the Eternity when none but God is. He alone fills immensity. But his soul stirs in creative purpose. Somewhat shall be beside him- self. Somewhat, then, worthy of Himself, the highest and best then of creative possibilities.
This work of a Creating God, — what will it be ? No wonder of worlds beautiful as earth and stars
Reasoji and Faith 25
will be lacking or sufl&cient. They will come into being and harmonious order. They will be filled and clothed with every exquisite class of vegetable life, springing from every fitness of earth and soil and water and air and light and heat for their growth and splendor. But all is insentient still, so not the highest. All good in its realm, but not the best that can be. Sensation, motion, intelli- gence wait. So then the multiform and beautiful orders of animal life, exquisite in structure, keenly alive in sensibility, amazing in power and variety of function. A wonderful world of life teeming in water and air and over all lands. Every mote or mammoth contributes a definite sum of pleasure to the volume of the enjoyment of the universe and, so, a definite element of motive to the creative plan of a God who loves happiness and creates it and for it. But, after all, is this an object ample enough to become THE motive in this immense visible creation ? Certainly not, if aught higher be possible. And higher there surely is. He Himself is intelligence, free and holy. He is goodness, love, character. He is a free moral in- telligence, acting, that is, always under the clear discrimination between right and wrong and al- ways with the right. Now the crown and motive of this new and grand creation shall be a thing created, indeed, and so finite, but created in His own image — a royal creature, with power to dis- criminate between right and wrong, like Himself, under all the obligations of righteousness, and with a free will to act in view of this eternal dis-
26 Reason and Faith
tinction so in His Image. A creature this shall be with capacity of vast intelligence, with indefinite possibilities of culture and growth, with keen sus- ceptibilities to pleasure and pain, all fitted for in- definite development, with an eternity of time and a universe of opportunity for it. A creature, this, capable of all the grand passions of love and joy and beauty and holiness ; of a grandeur in being only less than His own as the finite must be less than the infinite, and like himself in character. A Being, a Character, — grandly worthy of love, for society with Himself in interplay of holy sym- pathy and fellowship forever !
An exquisite machine is admirable, but can not elicit respect or affection. We can not enter soci- ety or sympathy with it. A beautiful and grace- ful animal is admirable and you may come to love it in a way, but it can never win your respect, your love in the higher human and moral ranges of it. The difficulty is that it can not achieve character, has no morality, is below the ranges of the higher being. Character only can aspire to moral praise or blame, to be respected, honored, loved. No creation, save one crowned with a race capable of character and of grandeur in it, would have been at all worth a creator's while. That is what we want to find for object and sovereign in this crea- tion, and that is what we find in man, — a soul capable of character, and majesty in it, immortal and equal to the fortunes of an infinite spiritual universe. Character is the thing essential.
What, then, is essential to character? First,
Reason and Faith 27
an everlasting and necessary distinction between right and wrong, a distinction of contrast in the very nature of things. Second, an intelligence capable of discriminating between them. Third, a discriminating intelligence which must ever recog- nize its obligation to the right and the personal guilt of wrong-doing. And, fourth, freedom, under that sense of obligation to choose at will the one or the other. These are the essentials to character-making. Without them, or either of them, character is impossible and morality a phan- tasm. This style of being, given the law of growth, time and opportunity, will come to grandeurs enough to account for and reward any lavishness of expenditure on the creation of which it is the crown, and the scheme of things that shall accom- modate and develop it.
This we should rationally forecast as the creative design, and this, as matter of fact, we find.
Evil, then, in a moral universe ? Its possibility is the forever-necessary condition of morality. A moral standard is a necessity, with moral con- trasts. A moral universe is inconceivable without it. In order to moral character, there must for- ever be an evil at hand which the will may choose and follow if it so elect. A possible evil to be wrought and a will forever free to work it, is the absolute condition of virtue. Annihilate that possible evil and that free will and you sweep out the very idea of moral character. There is no virtue in, and no praise for, going one road when you must go and there is no second way to choose.
28 Reason and Faith
There is no character in doing the right when you must do something, and there is nothing wrong which you can do. The praise and worth of character is that it sturdily takes the right when it might have taken, and had mighty temptation to take, the wrong. Liberty to, or prohibition of, wrong are alike temptation to it.
God, then, in order to character in His Universe, must leave every candidate for its honors or its shame, free to choose either good or evil, — free, everywhere and forever. The great poet states the case with fairness and power.
** God made man just and right, Sufl&cient to have stood, tho' free to fall. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Of true allegiance, - — constant faith, or love, Where only what they needs must do appeared, Not what they would ? What praise could they receive When Will and Reason , of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity, Not Him ? . . . He, else, must change Their nature and revoke the high decree. Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained Their freedom.— Par. Lost, Book IH, 98."
This line of thinking for me, long a restless and angry wonderer at the gates of this mystery of permitted evil, settled the question. If any real moral universe, then evil must be forever possible to every moral being. If possible, and the freedom of action be real, then, in the multi- tude of free souls, amidst the infinitely numerous contingencies which surround action, the actual commission of evil is nigh to an absolute certainty.
Reason and Faith 29
In the innumerable choices of free souls the tre- mendous probability — the moral certainty — is that every one of them will, some time, fall into evil.
But then my soul fled, angered, backward into raging protest : ' ' God had no right to create a moral order at all, seeing it must involve this fearful fact of actual and mortal evil ! '* Well, then, He is holy, wise, and good and did do it ! That, may be, ought to settle it, — for faith. But it is too summary for any other state of mind. It will not answer at all for many eager and sensi- tive spirits, in deep waters of doubt and trouble.
Let us try a further line of thinking, which has brought to one soul, at least, a final and a vast relief. If God intends the very highest order of finite being, how shall He get it? I suppose, perhaps am bound to suppose, that the highest possible work of mere creative power and wisdom was wrought for souls in physical conditions, when he produced in the garden of the world a moral being stainless and equipped for eternal development in intelligence, power and holiness. Character, as we have seen, is the result of free and intelligent choice between good and evil. Character, in this sense, is no more a possibility to creative power than is an after without a before, a two without a one, or a round square. A result of experience can not be created without the ex- perience, nor the result of choice without the choice, and character is a result of choice. What God did create was innocent souls, in exquisite
30 Reason and Faith
bodies, in a world fitted for their grand develop- ment, with all motive to it and immortality and other worlds for eternal growth. But now in order to character a free and established will, to choose forever the thing that is right, — that is, and forever must be, left for the actor to develop. It can be created only by the action of the free soul. To establish such a will, — such a charac- ter,— free action is necessary. To establish it in its most regnant and stalwart estate what can be so sure a process as an observation, nay, as an experience, of the opposite effects of right and wrong-doing and being ? For the secure suprem- acy, through all worlds and eternities, of personal righteousness, what should be such buttress as actual vision of the curse and ruin of evil ? What save the personal experience of its handling, the suffering of it, the mighty wrestle with it, and the final overcoming of it ? This should bring, shall bring, must bring, the soul that has made the grand fight, and come through it into the perfectly pure likeness of Christ, to a grandeur of moral estate inconceivable on any other terms whatever. It knows sin, has seen and felt the horrible curse of it, has taken up arms against it, laid hold of almighty grace to battle with it, has overcome, and stands now perfect and radiant in the Christ's likeness ! That is the highest type of character — the character our God is going to establish, is establishing, has been through the ages establishing at the top of the universe, through experience of sin and victory over it.
Reaso7i and Faith 31
These redeemed shall ''judge the Angels" ! The song of their final exultation is to be on so fine and high a key of love and gratitude, of experienced grace and of holy joy, that none but they can ever learn it. None others have had the thrilling ex- perience of which that ecstacy is born. For none others did the Christ even dare to die. Of none others is it written, " God so loved " ! For them alone — the Blood-washed — was that manifesta- tion, impossible save in sacrifice for the redemption of sinners. For them the Robes of Whiteness, the Crowns of Splendor surpassing, the very Likeness of the Christ ! These, so redeemed, shall move amidst all the worlds forever without faltering or falling. Adam, the innocent, fell. Sinless angels lost their first estate when their trial came. These will never fail. They know sin and have found the august power now, serenely and joy- fully to overcome it. The Jasper Walls and Pearly Gates and mighty towers of the Heavenly City are not the defense of Christ's redeemed be- cause they shut them in from temptation and wall the Devil out. Their eternal security is in their armed and panoplied, their tried and per- fected, character, as safely to be trusted now as the Christ's own, everywhere and forever.
In the very structure of character, love, grati- tude, sympathy and devotion are the most power- ful elements. In this Divine work of redemption from sin our God reveals Himself to the universe and to sinners in such grace and glory of love, in such relations of Saviour, sacrifice, sufferer, helper,
32 Reason and Faith
friend, as can exist between Him and none but sinners. They are brought nearer to His heart by the Cross and agonies of their salvation and in all the great history of their Sanctification than, so far as we can know, other souls have ever come. By the awful depths of their experienced ruin and the magnificent heights of their achieved redemption, by the agonies of the love that saved them, they stand forever in a gratitude far beyond that which the experience of any others, so far as revealed to us, can occasion. So we are permitted to see how it is that of them alone it is said, * * they are Sons of God,'' "they are joint heirs with Christ," are ''to sit down with him in his Throne," are to be "like Him when they see Him as He is " ! " O beata culpa, quae mihi talent Salvatorem Meruisti! '' (" O happy sin that hath deserved for me such a Saviour ! ")
It seems to me clear, then, that in free moral being, coming out of sin through the strenuous conflicts of Christ's Redemption, given to play of these supreme passions of love, gratitude, and devotion to Christ its personal Redeemer, exer- cised by a new fervor of love to man and hearty endeavor to save him into blessedness for this life and the next, nourished by the sweet sympathies of all souls passing through a like experience, walking in the personal fellowship of Jesus here and given an Eternity for holy growth, we have the most perfect conceivable conditions of the highest possible finite grandeur — the certainty of the being who shall best satisfy, delight and
ReasoJi a7id Faith 33
glorify the God of Creation and Redemption. If so, the problem of evil permitted in the world is solved, and the Creation was well worth while and ought to have been set afoot.
If, now, our God is going to develop vast mul- titudes into this splendid and eternal grandeur and felicity, as we do believe is to be the case with the immense majority of the human race, why, then, Glory be to His holy and blessed Name ! I might stop here, but will not, for now you chal- lenge me with the other side, — the characters that go on in sin, unredeemed and irredeemable, — that awful other side ! It must still be said, '' they are free." They have their own way, make their own choice. All of them, in Christendom at any rate, might have been redeemed but would not. All of them outside of Christendom would doubt- less have been saved had they but lived up to the light they had ; may, for aught we know, have been redeemed in multitudes. O, the sheep which Christ had ''not of this fold " !
Another thing is to be said, needs saying with infinite emphasis, to all orthodoxy. No soul, not one, in Christendom or out of it, will ever get in any eternity one hair's breadth, or one feather's weight of evil, beyond that which he actually de- serves, after every apologetic circumstance is given its full, generous allowance. Not one un- fair pang will come to any unsaved soul through the eternities — not one which itself, or the uni- verse of just and gentle spirits will think to be undue. There will be no accusations of God's
34 Reason and Faith
justice or goodness even among the unsaved. Not one of all souls would choose to have its free will, and, so, its moral being annihilated. Every man could have been saved if he would, and no man wants to be saved against his will. No man anywhere fails of salvation unless he freely chooses recognized sin and persistently follows it. None is lost through honest mistake or misunderstanding.
That in a moral universe free evil doing should not entail sorrowful consequence, were both ab- surdity and outrage, upturning the moral system, defeating and abolishing it. Evil consequence must beset free evil character everywhere and al- ways, so long as that character persists ; forever if that character be finally fixed. That would seem an axiom to sane minds. Unless somebody can prove for us a redemption of character at or after death, which proof is thus far sought in vain, then the presumption must be that evil experiences pursue evil character hereafter, as here, through the forever of evil doing and evil being. But, as I have said, this pursuit will never be for any soul arbitrary, vindictive, nor sharper than absolute desert, with all mitigating conditions taken into full account. The lost estate of one soul will be a very different thing from that of another, ac- cording to the just measure of differing deserts.
One thing more. That in a world where every- thing is tainted with wanton sin, anything should be wholly free from the pain which is the trail of the serpent, were a thing inconceivable to sanity. That even the innocent should suffer by conse-
Reason and Faith 35
quence of the sins of the guilty in this world of close-knitted society is inevitable, and only a part of the wide experience of the horrible nature, heritage, and contagion of evil which must be re- lied on to teach the supreme abhorrence of it and nerve to bravest fight against it. If, now, our God so adjusts things that for every redeemed soul and every innocent suflFerer there shall come ample compensation for all of earthly pain and sorrow in the added glories of the eternal future, there can be lodged against him no complaint. Of that added ' ' weight of glory ' ' there is full promise in the Gospel of our Blessed God.
Finally, here the sin and sorrows are. Con- cerning them but the four theories already men- tioned are possible, — Chance ; Malignant Deity ; a God fallen asleep, careless or unable ; or the Providence of a Benignant Heavenly Father, who, through all mystery and darkness, is working all things together, from the dawn of creation to high noon of the heavenly splendor, for the highest weal of His creatures. One or other of these theories you must take. As for me, the last is mine ! It only is consistent, as I see things, with either reason or morality, with revelation or rational theism. To take either of the other no- tions ought to drive a man to the mad-house. In this you shall find peaceful and adoring rest of reason and of faith, — a blest harmony of the universe, yourself and God. Into that holy peace may we all enter and in it abide !
36 Reason and Faith
CHAPTER III
THK RATIONAI, GROUND OF CHRISTIAN FAITH
Be ready ^ always, to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.
— St. Peter.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be saved. — Sr. lyUKK.
BkliKVK ! The Gospel magnifies faith. Its salvation is by faith. This Christian believing is often taunted as "blind, unreasoning." Denial of the Christian faith likes to st34e itself "ration- alism." Disbelievers boast themselves "free- thinkers, " as if we were cut off from free thinking and they had a monopoly of it. That is voluble anti-Christ slander, despite any action of any ecclesiastical assemblies of this or any age — slander to be resented and resisted, indicted for public judgment and mulcted in damages. We declare that we are, and ever will be, free-thinkers, rationalists par-eminence. The corner-stone of Protestantism is its appeal to private judgment, to individual reason. Its great battles are all fought out on that line, through the summers and winters of the centuries, are, have been, are to be. Its literatures are a vast and mighty argumenta- tion. Its name and history are protest against prescription of faith or proscription of "free thought. ' ' The old injunction, ' ' Prove all things,
Reason and Faith 37
hold fast to that which is good/' i. e., that which stands the test of keen sifting, was laid on the world, not by the new disbelievers, but by the Great Apostle of the most rugged faith. It has been Protestant law and practice from the first. Hold fast in faith and firm in behavior, that which weathers all stress of crucial question ! Be able and be ready to make fair answer of reason for your faith to every man that challenges, is the immemorial order of the Gospel.
Faith is not credulity — the acceptance of a thing without or contrary to reason. Processes of reason reach it and substructures of reason sus- tain it. Faith is built on rational induction from what seem to the believer well-attested facts. Some things for foundations we know by con- sciousness, indisputably. Some we take for fun- damental on testimony, reasonably sifted. Others we reason out, logically, from established data, and so put into the structure of our vital faiths. But every Christian faith has been reached and held by title of the most deliberate and thorough processes of reasoning which its holders could master, and has been championed by the learning and argument of the ages. Nothing has been taken for granted. How could it have been ? We have staked our highest, uttermost, present and eternal, all on these issues of faith. Men, races, nations, and those most forward in intelligence, enterprise, science, philosophy, and soundness of mental and moral fiber, — in genuine nobleness of manful quality, — in obedience to these faiths
38 Reason and Faith
have laid aside their venerable past, the traditions of a revered antiquity, their personal, social, moral and national customs. They have done it, not in masses and, so, easily, as waters in a body when the crevasse opens — but one by one, each soul for itself, shaking oflF its old habits, cutting loose from its past, and from its present environments. They have done it often with fierce inward con- flicts. Often through bitter outward opposition, through scorn and contempt and outcasting from circles of kindred and friends, through hatred, malignity and deadly persecution have they come to their new faith and obedience. No man can picture, can conceive, the crucifixions of inward agony and outward conflict which have marked with bloody sweat these conversions from the old heathenisms to the new faiths, all along the story of Christian progress. Millions have ventured, have suffered, loss of country, home, estate, good name, life itself — through horrors of martyrdom — for their new believing. Now face it ! Have these best and noblest races, these purest and wisest of men, done all this, endured all this, think you, without the deepest and most intense exercise of reason concerning the facts of their faith ? It is credulous, vicious, infamous outrage on all that is humanly decent to affirm it. It is to profane the graves and deride the memories of the generations of our great ancestry, to blaspheme the most heroic movements of the mind and heart of the human race to do that. Vilifiers, have done ! Hold your sacriligious tongues from defaming the
Reason ajid Faith 39
holy dead who have agonized the world up to its high estate and the holy living who are yet press- ing it up to loftier triumphs in the heroisms of a faith born of purest reason !
Why, to-day it costs to turn from worldly, sen- suous or selfish living, from some scientific, lit- erary, or social ambition to a simple, loyal obedi- ence to Jesus of Nazareth. Costs fight with self, conflicts of soul and a world of oppositions and finger pointings from without. Let some man of the world go down, to-day, to his club and tell them that he is seeking the pardon of his sins and turning to Christ his Saviour. Will it not cost ? It were hero-work ! Would any venture that save in obedience to the profoundest rational con- viction ? I trow not ! Let some skeptic go to his skeptical club with such an announcement. Could he do it without the power behind him of a mighty conviction of the verity of the despised faith ? I suspect that Charles Reed never did an- other thing half so heroic, or that cost him half so much, as the avowal of his discipleship at the feet of Jesus. Ouida was more a heroine turning from her sensational fiction to the bosom of the Church of Christ than ever she pictured in her stories.
Let a young man here in study, his ambitions and enthusiasms kindled for, say, the bar, who has struggled through poverty and hardness under that inspiration, an avowed enemy of the Gospel ; let him with the well-earned honors of scholarship, and the rainbows of great expecta-
40 Reason a7id Faith
tion ahead, let him now turn from it all and give himself to a lowly ministry in Jesus' name. Has he done it without the most thorough conviction of his reason as to the substantial verities of the humble vocation to which he responds ? To ask is to answer such a question !
Augustine and lyUther and Calvin and Wesley and Edwards and Mark Hopkins, Bushnell and Park and Storrs and John Hall ; the Alexanders and Hodges and McCosh, Dawson and Dana and Henry ; Daniel Webster and Gladstone and Bis- marck,— all the hosts who have been and are staking their present and eternal all on the Faith, — are they doing it without ground of reason ? Intellectual giants, some of them heroes of moral victory, not fools any of them, honest to the very core of their grand natures and princes in the realm of reason, it is stupidity to charge such men with a faith that is blind and unreason- ing. Earth's greatest have deliberately, after struggle and hard battle of reasons, given them- selves to faith, in the full exercise of all their noblest faculties. We know it by their testimo- nies, by their lives and by the monuments of Christian literature, science, art, poetry, philoso- phy and theology which they have builded or are yet rearing with unabated ardor and splendor of genius. Friends, it is ludicrous for the pigmies to stand down there charging these giants, from Paul to Edwards, these hosts of earth's intellect- ual princes and potentates with an unreasoning faith. Reason against reason, brain against brain,
Reason and Faith 41
faith has no terror of relative measure or weight with modern agnosticism or infidelity. Let your flippant champion of modern agnosticism put him- self in the brain scales against John Calvin, Bishop Butler, Jonathan Edwards or Daniel Webster ! For struggle, cost, sacrifice, in embracing and maintaining their faith and in forwarding it through the earth, let champions of something else in this w^orld stand out for comparison in stalwart and rational honesty. Let them show the work the}^ have done for institutions of learn- ing and philanthropy, for the intellectual develop- ment of the race, beside that which the devout believers have been and still are doing in these lines ! "By their works 3^e shall know them."
We, of the Christ's part, in this w^orld, believe by grace of what seem to us most large and ample reasons, after fullest exercise of all our rational forces. The free-thinkers are, by vast odds, its Christians, not its atheists or agnostics. Outcry against dogma ? What, then, is dogma ? " Dogma " is what seems true. Faiths, dogmas, must govern every man — do absolutely and must forever control every free and rational act of life. Some dogma is the spring of every voluntary movement. Until a man believes something he remains inactive, — can onh^ act, rationally, on the motive of some faith. The dogma that this or that will make money governs every man's busi- ness ; that this or that will give pleasure rules the pleasure seekers ; that this or that will lead to power commands the ambitious. The philan-
42 Reason and Faith
thropist or reformer holds the dogma that such a course will help man, and so acts. Every man has his dogma — his creed — and lives by it. The dogma that beef gives strength puts it on the breakfast table ; that exercise is hygienic wisdom, sets men astir ; that home is blessedness, builds it ; that fire warms, sets hearths ablaze, and so on everywhere.
Man, uncertain about a thing, in the condition of agnosticism, sits still — acts only when he be- lieves. No agnostic speaks or acts till he becomes a positive believer in his agnostic dogma. Other- wise he is a hypocritical impostor. Faith only is the actor, does all, literally all, that is done, and into these working faiths of all sorts goes the best reason of every sane human being. Into the faith that shall get him dollars or pleasure or re- pute goes so much of studious reason as the case calls for, a moment to this, an hour to that more serious thing, a week or month or year of deep enquiry to that, as the magnitude of the interest or the intricacy of the elements of the problem may require. Into the settlement of those august faiths on which eternities depend, character, des- tinies through immortal careers — into that work do go, as ought to go, the deepest and most thor- ough labors of which human reason is capable. He blasphemes man who denies that. All save the mad, the reckless, the trifling, have done, are doing, and ever will do that. You, out of Christ, failing to do that, are missing the finest exercise of your intellectual faculties, living frivolously,
Reason and Faith 43
in an awful presumption unworthy of any reason- able immortal. It is fair to speak of such as ' ' thoughtless ' ' sinners, because they flee thought on the themes most serious and imminent, on which it is their highest moral obligation to think and act. To let these things of religion go by de- fault, unconsidered, or with a mere casual atten- tion, is not frivolity alone, it is guilt towards not God only, but towards man as well. God has constructed you and your fellows for these prob- lems and bidden you and them, on your and their loyalty and eternal felicity, to consider and frame life upon them. Neither you nor I have any right to shove them aside for a day !
Now, for ground work of believing in these matters, whither does reason turn ?
I. We rationally consider the fact of the prac- tically universal and so intuitive apprehension of some God. Our own consciousness and the testimonies of mankind settle it that there is such a practically universal apprehension. Reason concludes that such an aptitude, such an intuition, of the soul of man can not be illusive. Lungs presuppose air ; fins, water ; feet, solid ground for standing ; eyes, light!; ears, sound ; knowing fac- ulties, objects of knowledge ; affections, objects of affection ; moral faculties, a real distinction be- tween right and wrong ; instincts of worship, an object of worship ; apprehension of God, God ! So, by valid yrocess of scientific reason our race-
44 Reason and Faith
intuitions of God argue the fact of God. At the very least, this universal intuition must remove all antecedent improbabilities of His existence.
II. Thinking on. Effect presupposes cause ; contrivances, a contriver ; design, a designer ; adaptation of means to ends, an adapter. A world is here full of effects, contrivances, adapta- tions endless in variety, wonderful in ingenuity, on scales of infinite minuteness and astounding vastness, of such sort as to evidence wisdom, power, and goodness past any limits we can set. These facts set reason to its task. Science pushes back so far as it can go and finds there a ' ' force ' ' universal and always acting behind every phenom- enon of the universe. Back of the Moneron is the source of its enduement with the potenti- alities of life. Reason takes these things, puts them together and says, ''intelligence, will, a power supreme, goodness unspeakable are mani- fest in all the works of this great cause. A per- son,— therefore He, — practically infinite, since at least beyond our power to set, or to conceive. His limitations. As He works through all the realms of the one system of the visible universe, through all historic spaces and before all organized matter, then practically infinite and eternal is He. This faith of the one infinite, eternal, per- sonal God is the only rational, working hypoth- esis of the universe. So, of best reason, theism, monotheism, is the faith of all the civilized world, save a mere handful of materialists, who have not,
Reason and Faith 45
even in science, a single great name* to back their credulity, — their incredible dogma of denial of God, — their dogma about which they are more truculent and intolerant than any Christian believ- er is about any doctrine of the Christian faith !
III. Then Reason says, "All these human in- telligences are equipped with moral sense. A universal tendency exists to range all voluntary action in one of the two categories, as right or wrong. This impulse is found to serve a wide and noble range of practical purposes in life, set even to command all life. The Creator, then, must have planted that impulse in view of some real and eternal discrimination between things good and evil. We conclude, then, rationally, that the moral quality of righteousness must be regnant in Him who framed a universe in which the moral discrimination is supreme.
IV. Thinking on, still freely, we find the consciousness of wrong done to bring a certain trembling for consequences through all souls, an apprehension of retributive results for evil. We find that everywhere, in all grades of intelligence — or lack of it — and in all ages. Some law, then, graven by the creative Law-giver, upon the uni- versal soul is discovered. This apprehension looks on to the end of life, the moment of dying, with a strange and universal anxiet}^, with the
* There are agnostics enough, but atheists, — who are they ?
46 Reason and Faith
instinct of an afterwards — of an immortality and awards beyond the graves. This tremulousness of conscious guilt runs through all and to all sorts of penance, in agony and costly gift, in sacrifice with blood, and is yet unsatisfied. All this argues immortality and retributive futures.
V. Reason surveys this all, wonders if a good God will leave his creatures in such fears, so great travail, so deep a darkness, to die in it without letting in upon them some light, and concludes that He will, somewhere and somehow, bring to man the light and power to meet his need and relieve his anxious agonies.
VI. Looking, thinking, freely j^et, lo ! we find what claims to be express revelation from God of Himself, and of man's relations to Him — of his duties, sins and great salvations — a written Word, containing just such a figure of God, in all natu- ral and moral qualities, as the creation has led reason to forecast ; a law precisely such as from the conscience and of consciousness we ought to expect ; a law of absolute righteousness ; contain- ing a record of man's origin and history on the earth, such as, from its known constitution and historic conditions, it ought to be ; giving account of the origin of the visible universe in strange accord with all that is scientifically believed about it to-day ; announcing immortality for the soul in accord with the conclusion of uninspired reason ; dealing with the problems of sin and penalty
Reason and Faith 47
and possible redemption in the very way which we ought to expect from the study of the soul itself and of God, and ofiFering to man the fruition of his highest hopes both for character and felicity and showing him how he may escape both sin and its evil consequences. Now, given a rational basis, such as we have found already, for any no- tion of God, as a Person, a moral Being, good and responsible for a moral universe, I affirm that it is supremely rational to expect such a revelation of Himself and His will and the modes of His government, with its rewards and penalties. Such a revelation, by the highest exercise of reason, ought to be anticipated. Lo, here it is ! The only one which the civilized world feels at all to answer the rational requirements. Every pre- sumption of reason is in its favor.
VII. Reason, then, goes to weigh its specific evidences. Is it a genuine thing from God ? Of course I can go into no detail of so vast a matter here, nor need I, since I am but repelling the charge that our faith is blind and unreasoning. These laborious studies of evidence have occupied the labors of multitudes of earth's greatest, and their published w^orks crowd the libraries of the whole world. I only refer to the simplest proof. On the first page of the Book is an account of the creative ages, their order and process. The ac- count w^as held absurd, as a literal record, until the riper science of the last half century discovered with wonder and with awe that it is a more accu-
48 Reason and Faith
rate and literal epitome * of what really was the creative process and order than can this day be given, in an equal number of words, by any mortal in any language now used by the human race. Who gave that hidden knowledge of what God did when none but God was ? Who gave it to the darkness of thirty centuries ago, to be ridiculed, the scoffer's joy, till rediscovered during our own day ? We may stand there on the first paragraphs of the Bible and challenge mankind to account for that, and be content to let the battle of reason be fought out on that alone. But reason finds, on every page of the Book, the God who is what, from Nature, He ought to be, but who never was nor could have been conceived by man else than by this revelation of Him ; a God transcendently at odds with all the gods men have invented. It finds there records of the history of man which could not have been manufactured and put on him as true without having been his actual experience, and which, if true, are at every point the work of Divine interposition ; records which account for man as we find him in all historic ages ; records strangely verified by all modern research amidst the buried monuments of long-extinct civiliza- tions. It finds there figures of men who never could have been conceived unless they had lived and whose lives are continually and visibly handled of God. It finds there miracle, as it
* It matters not to this statement that specialists claim a certain amount of overlapping of one stage of creative process upon another. The order, as a whole, is correct.
Reason and Faith 49
ought to and must, if God would verify his rev- elation of Himself to reason, in those or any ages, or manifest himself for righteousness in men. It finds there unmistakable and voluminous and minutely detailed prophecy of remote and improb- able futures, which history has most lucidly and loyally fulfilled.
It finds there, as fulfillment of prophecy, as culmination of all ritual observance and aim of foregoing history, a sublime Figure, — a man, — outcome neither of any Jewish nor Gentile civil- ization or ideal, opposite to all, yet summarizing all. He was as much a Jew as Saul of Tarsus, as much a Roman as a Jew, as much a modern as an ancient, as good a Chinaman as Confucius, as good an Englishman as Gladstone, as fine an American as any man who walks the streets of Washington to-day. His story is as compelling in one language as another and his discourses and precepts and parables are as effective in one con- tinent and one civilization as in any other. This Figure is of the Universal Man, — the Ideal, the Spotless, the Perfect Man ; the only good man without confession and repentance of sin in all history. He brought in a new scheme of truth, yet but the old interpreted; a new scheme of salvation, yet but the old consummated. He es- tablished a wholly unexpected and inconceivable style of kingdom, which is yet but the old king- dom with a new spirit. He set forth a wholly unique standard of character, which was yet but the fulness of the ancient type. He showed a
50 Reason a?id Faith
new face of God which yet had been ever shin- ing through the veil of the old dispensation. This Man overthrew all the ideals of His own or of any older time, and all the ancient inter- pretations of Him who was to come, yet most literally and radiantly fulfilled them all. He cast down all former ideals of salvation, yet brought in the fulness of all the salvations that had been foretold. That Figure — the majestic, beautiful, and sinless Christ, who must have come from God, since no man was ever like Him. Who must have lived, since no man of His or any time, much less the four simple, untaught fishermen who portrayed Him, could have invented Him. That Figure is, after all, the Miracle of the Book.
'^ If Jesus Christ is a man, — And only a Man, — I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him, And to Him will I cleave alway.
^' If Jesus is a God, — And the only God, — I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell, — The earth, the sea and the air."
So a modern poet sings.
Wendell Phillips declares, ' ' Christ is marvelous, wonderful ! He was himself a miracle. The miracles he wrought are nothing to the miracle he was, if at such an era and in such a condition of the world he invented Christianity. I can not be so credulous as to believe that any man in- vented Christianity."
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Here is the Book, written by forty men in dis- tant ages, men of varied cultures or of none, in many stations, with many different immediate aims, in all varieties of literary style, yet one Book, all its parts converging to one end, and that an end undreamed of by any of its writers, each part harmoniously forwarding the great whole ; a book born in dark times, yet supreme and commanding through ages of earth's best light, commanding more and more in these latest times. Its records scholarship finds genuine, what- ever the age in which they were produced. Par- allel records of secular history but confirm them. Buried monuments of antiquity rise from their sleep of ages to buttress the Word. No attack upon its genuineness or its general historic cor- rectness has yet been successful, though a world of sagacious and pugnacious learning and ignorance has been brought to bear upon it. Champions of Christian faith eagerly covet thor- ough investigation, and every investigation makes dearer and more impregnable their fortress. False interpretations are getting blown into the air; unwarranted dates and names are being eliminated, perhaps. But this is only the destruc- tion of the human masonries and the reduction of the fortress to its original impregnable sufficiency as the infallible guide of religious faith and prac- tice. In that reduction all stout defenders rejoice. When all the mere human masonries are swept away there will be left all that is precious to the soul and nothing which the artilleries of modern
52 Reason and Faith
critical warfare can in the least affect. Using then, and freely, profoundest reason on all these things, every demand is met, and we conclude, ''This is, indeed, a very revelation of God and His will for man."
VIII. But this is not all. We call men to the proof of actual experiment. The Gospel and its Book propose to handle precisely the things we ought to expect, — God, Man, Sin, Righteousness, Immortalities, Redemption. Whence came I ? Whither go? How be clear of my trembling consciousness of guilt? How escape the perdi- tions of my sin ? How come to holiness and bliss ? These are the vital questions which must have answer before the bar of reason. Exact and most reasonable answer comes from this source, and from this alone, from no other under the whole heaven. Here we have a doctrine of God, of man, of immortality , of sin, and of redemption from it. In Christ the promise is of pardon for all the past on the most rational condition of a true and real repentance which breaks the guilty identity of the old-time sinner. In Him we are to find, on purely rational terms, the renewal of the sur- rendered soul — its re-creation into righteousness and true holiness. The whole nature is now dominated by holiness and the love of it, by love of God in the wonderful Christ, and for all fellow men, and the entire being is given up to the mighty handling and guidance of the Holy Spirit. These are exactly the things which reason would
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forecast as necessary to perfect man, justify the universe and glorify its Creator. Proof? Well, then, it has been tried. Tried for centuries. Wherever tried, under whatever conditions, the nations have leaped into new life, have come up into liberty and grandeur and command in the world's affairs. The races which have tested its redemption are those which to-day wear the crown of the world's hope and kingship of its future. Christendom is Civilization ! Consider individ- ual lives. Souls by the myriad have, as matter of scientific fact, laid aside their old sins, found conscious pardon, rest, peace, holiness — found in Christ all that is promised ; have gone through long lives in this world's eye-sight, exulting in every sweet grace and heavenly beauty of char- acter and behavior ; have grown marvelouslj^ like their Lord and died at the last in triumph, visibly fitted for the felicities of the Christian's Heaven. Millions have taken the straight, short cut to demonstration of the Gospel's verity by trying it. A proof which I affirm to be supremely satisfac- tory to any sane reason and which no processes of mere argumentation can undermine. To satis- faction of candid reason you can come on the basis of mere argument. To verification of the abstract reasoning you can come by trying the experiment of Christ's grace for yourself. Reas- ons are good, commanding, irrefragable. But reasons are good for nothing unless you act on them. Believe, not about the Lord Jesus Christ, but believe on Him. We offer you the firmest
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ground of reason inexpugnable and then propose the instant demonstration of personal experiment. We rest the case with this two-fold challenge. Try it ! Consciousness shall justify reason and our faith shall stand in the triumphant certainty of personal experience, against which all the powers of earth and hell can not prevail, before which the gates of heaven shall swing open for eternal joy ! Be that your wisdom and your fe- licity ! Yours and mine !
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CHAPTER IV
THK MIRACIvK RKASONABI^K
Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and jf^.— Jesus the Christ.
As WK have already seen, the existence of evil in the world, with its observed results and its revealed consequences, has been the most prolific source of skepticism concerning the existence of a personal and good God. This doubt of the exist- ence of such a God is the root of disbelief in miracle. The delighted scorn with which the dis- believers alight on the proposition of a miracle as *' superstition," *' absurdity , " ''impossibility," as ' ' incredible on any testimony, " is a thing wonder- ful to observe. Believers in these "fables " and ''fairy tales " are " ignorant," "credulous " and wholly destitute of the critical literary or historic sense, or any sense at all ! Any tolerable degree of culture will, necessarily, obliterate all traces of such a faith, they cry. It is difficult to over- state the unmeasured contempt, mounting into wrath, which they visit on us belated and be- nighted believers in the " Wonder Book." Well they may cry out so, for granted a miracle, even one little one, then God ! Then is the Gospel true !
Every creed, of believer or disbeliever — for each is alike the holder and the slave of a creed —
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every creed is a system of beliefs logically inter- locked and springing naturally and necessarily from some root-proposition which commands it. The more logical, that is, the more capable of consistent and consecutive thought and the more in the habit of it the man is, the more certain he will be to seek till he find consistency in all his believings. Now the logical root of faith in miracle is God — a person free, active, concerned for the happiness, righteousness and highest weal of His creatures. The logical basis of denial of miracle is denial of any such God.
What, then, is this thing — Miracle ? Exactly enough for our present purpose, it is this — God has, on occasion, so interfered with the ordinary processes of Nature as to demonstrate His own active personal presence and will in the affairs of men. The intervention proves to the observer an agency superhuman. Divine. He stands in awe and says, ''God " ! and is so made ready to hear and obey. Supernatural ? Not necessarily so. It may be a handling of Nature in a way perfectly open to a power and wisdom finer than man's. We can not say that it is even a contra- vention of Nature's ordinary laws, but the ob- server is sure that it is such a handling of them as manifests to him the Deity. Devil's miracles are not incredible, given a credible Devil. On the basis of a credible infernal kingdom, modern Spiritualistic performance may have infer-human and genuine manifestations amidst its mass of bald imposture.
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Taking now, as true, the fundamental propo- sition of all religious faith, "There is a God, a personal God, freely active in the universe He has created, " it is not impossible that He should manifest Himself in it by special and extraordinary touches of power at any moment and for any pur- pose whatever. I myself can, you can, anybody can, by the incoming of his personal agency, modify, handle, manifest himself, by interferences with the established order of things, in a thousand ways. We do it constantly. Indeed that is the only means we have of manifesting ourselves at all to each other. Each of our bodies reflects, partially absorbs or refracts from their right lines the rays of light, so as to be thus and thus visible to others. Each of us at will stirs such vibra- tions of the all-surrounding ether as to make him- self audible. Each of us is, at every moment of voluntary action, producing phenomena in Nature which, but for these personal agencies, could not have existed, and which demonstrate this per- sonal existence. We ourselves are above mere physical nature, not super-natural, but super- material, and forever impressive upon the ma- terial world. What absurdity, then, to imagine that the personal, free, all-wise, and almighty God who made the whole scheme of Nature is incapable — the only Incapable of the universe! It is not impossible that God, if there be one, should manifest Himself in His own universe by phenomena in the physical world which He alone can produce. That is as an axiom of theism. If
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it be not impossible to Him it is not, necessarily, incredible to us. If there be no such God, then miracle is neither credible nor possible.
But, granted that miracle is possible to a free and active God, who does exist, is it not yet so im- probable that we can not believe in its occurrence on any testimony ? Suppose, now, that this per- sonal, free God stands in relations of affectionate concern in — even of responsibility for — the weal of the sentient creation He has made. Suppose that He loves, not only, but loves to be loved — that He has a Father's heart, and here is the race of His children, who are vastly ignorant of Him and their relations to Him. He wants their love, their gratitude, their worship. It be- comes vastly probable that He will, if He can, reveal Himself to them. Suppose that they need, for their owm development in power, in intelli- gence, in character, in the finest elements of love, gratitude and loyalty, and so in blessedness — sup- pose, I say, that they need for all these the clear knowledge of an affectionate Heavenly Father, near by and concerned, instantly, on their behalf, is it not hugely likely, then, that He will take the measures needful to so impress upon them His presence, care, and love ?
Suppose now, further, that having made them in the highest type of created finite being, in His own image, free and moral creatures, the}^, using their unquestionable prerogative of liberty, have gone into evil, wrought on themselves curses be- yond number or measure — ruinous, as, indisput-
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ably, they have done. Suppose that, by their free and wanton sins, these topmost creatures of His world have blinded themselves to spiritual vision, destroyed their spiritual sensibilities, approached suicide on the higher faculties, and gone down to live in the basements of their natures like scullions in the kitchens. Suppose that they have gone unconscious of the vast realms of being, reality and activity beyond the material, visible and tangible, as is demonstrated by the actual va- garies of materialism and atheism, which claim to know naught of either God or soul or any be3^ond or above ; and as is demonstrated with equal force by multitudes who have not gone mad in theoretic infidelity, but only live in practical forgetfulness of all but flesh and sense — suppose all this, and that God has not given them over to the remediless results of their suicidal work, but still loves and cares and determines on restoration of the spirit- ual life, on the uplift of fallen man to a higher and grander estate than that from which he had cast himself down, — What then ?
All this of man's ruin and misery is not merely revealed fact, but fact of history, of observation and oi experie7ice. This, being so, a Divine pur- pose to recover and restore ought to be, if God be and be the God we take Him for ! Had man re- mained in his holy or innocent estate, alive to spiritual vision, sensitive to spiritual approach and access, all spiritual processes for his develop- ment might have been of mere nature, on the range of his unmarred natural powers. There
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might have been no need of anything super- human, all might have been level to the appre- hension of every man. Now the whole problem is altered. Man has alienated himself from God ; or, if you choose to say that, has never risen to range of the spiritual at all ; is, at any rate, in total misapprehension or forgetfulness of Him ; has set up sticks and stones and hideous things — beasts, birds, reptiles — for gods, and worships them with lust, debauch, and even murder. He so has lost what else had been his natural power to recognize God, the One, the Living and the True. There has followed the whole train of earth's horrors for the time that now is and for the eternity that is to be.
What, now, is left a free, personal God who loves and would redeem to the splendors of moral and spiritual power and the beauty of Holiness such a race ? He can intervene to demonstrate Himself in ways of miracle and wonder. There is nothing in that impossible to Him and so in- credible to us, if there be due occasion for it. The occasion is here, grand, awful and imperious as the redemption of this multitudinous race of ours, — the crown of His visible creation, — from intolerable curse and shame into peers for the kingdoms and courts of eternal glory. Is it not likely that He will bestir Himself, make Himself known, as the one God, the only and living God, almighty and all-wise — the Father, Lover, Sav- iour of such a race, out of such miseries, into such splendors ? Surely He will if He can ! Surely
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He can if He will ! So infinitely likely will He be, being the God He is, to do it, that it seems to me the one thing any sane reason must expect with what amounts to practical certainty. Nor are we Christians alone in this expectation. The human race has ever refused to credit any revela- tion as from the gods or any system of relations with them, or of service required which has not authentication by supposed miracle. The univer- sal expectation of man everywhere is that any real God will manifest Himself by the works, the tokens of Godhood. The antithesis of miracle is ''no God," or a mere-force God, manifest only in play of changeless and inexorable law, and so never to become demonstrable to reason as any- thing but blind force. A doctrine this which can never satisfy the heart or kindle the mighty pas- sions of Redemption !
Here stands the case, then. A race made in His own Image, or at any rate, capable of loftiest de- velopment into it, the very aim and crown of the visible creation, beloved of God and designed for His eternal fellowship, but gone in sin out even of knowledge of Him, sunken into intolerable misery and hopeless of betterment under ordinary play of natural law ; that hopelessness proven by ages of sinking from bad to worse, in all history : and here a God, free, personal and affectionate, able to redeem and save sublimely ; able to get at them by extraordinary action amidst the phenom- ena of Nature ; able to get at them in no other way without still more extraordinary^ and super-
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natural means ; able, so, to bring them into play of the loftiest motives, powers and passions which can inspire the human will. In such case, will he do it ? Aye, if He be indeed such a God as we take Him for. He will. He must, for He is in- finite compassion and power.
It is useless to cavil, saying, " Why did He let them fall into so sad a case, then ? ' ' It is clear that He did do that — and we have seen that that permission was a necessity in a moral universe. It is worse than useless to urge that this notion of a creation in innocence, a fall and a redemption by miraculous intervention is a scheme of after- thought, of awkward mistake and bungling rem- edy, for it has been shown in a former discourse, that it is the way of the development of the sub- limest conceivable type of finite character. There is about it no blunder, after-thought or awkward- ness, but divinest stroke of splendid art and power for erection of beings God-like, on Thrones beside His own. God did not make things and get them wrong and then have to step in and set them to rights. He created moral beings in a moral uni- verse, free, therefore, to sin and fall — a being who would forever need the inspiration and helpful power of a God present to his consciousness. It was of the eternal plan that such a creature, so needing Him, should have Him in authentic and realized handling of His life and the world. The plan of intervention by Divine sign is the original, aboriginal plan for the development of the race, through gratitude, love, great fight for righteous-
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ness, up into fitness for Peerage of the Heavens. Sin and Redemption are not afterthoughts ; and miracle, by which God breaks through the fixed order of Nature to reach the heart of man with His boundless Grace, is no bungle, but the Master- piece of Redeeming Art !
How get men to know God? By stroke of miracle only has He demonstrated Himself. See, as matter of fact, how well He is known to those who refuse to accept miracle and superhuman modes of revelation ! Not one of them pretends to know anything about Him, not even so much as to affirm whether He be at all. Agnosticism, denial of any possible knowledge about Him or His existence is the best they can do without the miracle, even in the light of this last year of the nineteenth century ! How much better could they fairly suppose the old Israel of Egypt or the Jew of the Judges, the Kings, the Christ's times, to have gotten on in Divine science without Divine authentication of the Divine facts, than they them- selves can now ? How would the Jew have gotten out of Egypt or how would the world have gotten on without the redemptive energies developed through these miraculous interpositions? But by stroke of miracle He convinced Moses of Himself and authenticated His commission to face and face down the proudest empire of the world. The bush that burned, unconsumed ; the voice, the rod, — a serpent, an Egyptian god and then a rod again, — the leprous hand clean again, these made Moses — Moses ! By stroke of miracle
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after miracle He convinced Israel and Egypt of His very and only God-head. By perpetual re- currence of miracle He established His govern- ment over His people and taught the world Him- self, His attributes and His claims. By miracle He authenticated His revelations and His mes- sengers, when there seems to have been no other way in which He could have done it. By crown- ing miracle of grace in Jesus, the Christ, his in- carnation, his life, his death, his resurrection, He showed so His Father-heart to man that we are melted, broken, repentant, lifted into raptures of love and joy and worship, are set out into lives of holy service and careers of grandeur. Let them tell me of a Christ, the Christ, in whose birth there was no miracle, in whose life there was neither superhuman deed nor claim to superhuman power, I answer, ' ' There has been none such ! ' ' There is not a jot of proof of any such. The only story that purports to give us a Christ at all is that on whose sacred pages blazes miracle wrought and claim to superhuman origin and power and authority over all the realms of life and duty and sin and destiny. They demand a feat of supreme credulity and unreason, namely, that I shall suppose these Evangelists to give us a true and reliable picture of the Christ, on whom I can depend, as a historic person of such and such quality, as speaking such and such words, addresses, parables ; they were truthful and worthy of credence, so that we have got a verit- able Christ, — Saviour of the world, leader and
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topmost of mankind, through their testimony, — yet I must reject their story of His birth, its ante- cedents and circumstances, must deny their every account of his openly-wrought miracles, to which he himself pointed as such ; must cast out their every quotation of His claims to Divine power and knowledge ; must afl&rm them to have deliberately testified, as eye-witnesses, in the very province and generation of those who were eye-witnesses with them, and who, in their hostility, were but too eager to convict them of falsehood, to innum- erable lies, drawn out in elaborate detail, circu- lated while He was yet alive, unrebuked of Him, scattered broadcast soon after His death ; then, further, to believe that these same men gave the labors of all their lives, faced all perils, took all damage and endured the expected horrors of martyr deaths in a more than madman's frenzy for their tissues of fable and falsehood. They ask too much for my credulity ! Why, they even ask that out of such a jargon of lie and folly I shall get a Christ for world's perpetual homage and secure salvation. This is the most astound- ing stretch of credulity yet demanded in the his- tory of mankind. The denial of the superhuman in the Christ, from the Incarnation to the Resur- rection, and all the marvel that came between, is to fling the whole story of the Evangelists into the waste-basket of classical — of less than classi- cal^— myths. If these men were mistaken, or worse, about his miraculous birth, then was He * * born in sin ' ' indeed ! If thev told men that He
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turned water into wine, He should have corrected their mistake. Did they claim that He opened the eyes of the blind at Jericho, then He did it or connived at their falsehood, and all Jericho must have been in the secret ! Did they falsel}^ claim that He raised up Lazarus from the three days' dead ? Why, all Jerusalem was stirred by the fact, and Jesus must have known the claim. Were these things and the words of Jesus claiming to be one with the Father and the like claims to Divine power scattered through all the Testament, foisted into the story afterwards? What basis have we, then, for confidence in what remains ?
Do you say that the Christ must have lived, since no such conception of character and life could have been formed except on a living model ? Aye, verily ! But the exact things which make such a personage inconceivable without the living model are the things which have to do with the superhuman side of Him. It would not have been impossible for the man who told the story of Lazarus to conceive and write out the merely human side of Jesus. The difiiculty is in con- ceiving, without the model, the Divine in the Human, — the Human in the Divine. The diflS- culty in creating a fictitious Jesus is in exactly these points where the disbeliever claims that all is fiction !
That these simple-minded, simple-hearted, brave and loyal fisherfolk of the Gospels could have constructed of their own genius the picture of the Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, is incredible.
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That they could have taken some great man and put on him these fables of wonder and miracle and gotten them believed, among a hostile people of his own country and generation, is more in- credible. That such men as these, who lived in the faith of the Divine One whom they had known so intimately and portrayed so simply, gave their pain-filled lives to the propagation of a false story and then died for fables of their own construction is too much to ask of credulit}^ itself. That out of such a conglomerate of duplicit}^ and stupidity as the Gospels are on the anti-miracle theor>% any critical or historic sense can get a real and historic Christ and a real, authentic Christian doctrine, is too much for sanity. That out of such a conglomerate could have come the magnifi- cent resultant, — the Christian world of to-day and the exultant expectation of the more glorious to- morrow, — would be greater miracle than any which stumbles faith in all the records of the Evangelists ! It is easier for reason to accept the Divine-Human Christ of the Gospels, with all his *' Wonderful Works," than to account for that august Figure and Life in any other way.
The believer's position, therefore, is this : A personal, free and active God, affectionately con- cerned in and responsible for man, can, and will be infinitely likely to, interfere in superhuman sort for the rescue of the beloved race, when it has fallen into misery and peril. There is nothing incredible or even unlikely about it. It is to be expected, when the circumstances demand it.
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The circumstances have demanded it. The evi- dences of miracle are to be weighed and sifted like the evidences of any other event, but with a very tremendous presumption in favor of and not against it, when due occasion has arisen for it. Doubt of miracle springs from, or will resolve it- self into, doubt of God, Inexorable logic lands us there. Our God, if He be, and be what we think Him, will manifest Himself from the realms of the spiritual nature, to lift us up and bring us back to knowledge of Himself and to estabhsh in holiness and felicity all who will be persuaded.
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CHAPTER V
THE JUSTIFICATION OF THK UNJUST
That He might be just and the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. — St. Paul.
This passage is the Great Apostle's statement of the most difficult problem of the Gospel. Law, sin, condemnation, redemption — God just, yet justifying the sinner — these are the elements of the supreme paradox. "Plato, Plato,'' said Socrates, ' ' it may be that the gods can forgive deliberate sin, but how, I can never tell." Justi- fication of the unjust ? The naturalist, the mate- rialist, the rationalist, with one accord pronounce it even unthinkable. The problem is serious, vast and difficult — so much so that its consideration here leaves no time for prelude.
The matter of discussion will be seen to turn, necessarily, on the relation of repentance to justice in the Divine administration. If we can not find sound, rational ground of procedure here, we shall be tossed in wide seas and in peril.
At the outset, the ideas of justice and govern- ment need be carefully disentangled in thought. Justice is not government, but only the regulative element in it. It is not even so much as the end or final cause in law and government, but only the
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controlling principle in their methods. The ends sought in government are quite aside from mere justice. Those ends are expediencies, and are as manifold as the interests of individual men multi- plied by the millions and societies of men. They pertain to all questions of physical existence and activity, property, inheritance, trade, commerce. They touch, with a sort of sweeping omnipotence, all the intellectual, moral and spiritual forces and interests of men in society. They cover ten thou- sand questions of necessity, expediency, taste, tradition, culture, conventional rights, which may have been originally outside any considerations of justice. Justice is merely the regulative prin- ciple under which laws should be set up and ad- ministrations conducted. Justice is an abstract idea. Law and government are very concrete af- fairs, set afoot for myriads of practical ends, not for the sake of embodying justice, though they should be in accord with it. If you use the fig- ure of soul and body for illustration of the rela- tion between justice and government, it must be only to use justice as the law of correspondence between a true soul and a normal body. Justice is a moral attribute in God or man. Government is a definite scheme of laws and administration for specific ends in the universe. Justice were yet the regulative fact in the soul of God, though there were no creation and no government. Jus- tice is the same always and everywhere, while rightful forms of law and government are as varied as the natures and conditions of the gov-
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erned and the objects to be reached by legisla- tion,— variant even to contradiction, — yet the one as rightful as the other. Expedients, then, exist in law and government, in endless variety, to suit the circumstances, consistent with justice, illus- trating it ; but they are not it nor may they be confounded with it. They are not so nearly it as the government is to being the governor, or the governor to being his law, or the creator to being the creation, or the principle on which he creates. All this may seem too plain to need the saying ; but great confusion of thought and language has existed here which must be cleared.
As the law and government of God are not jus- tice, though just, so justice as men reckon it is another thing than law or government. Our ideas of justice must be cleared of the notions which arise from the human administrations of it, — a difficult thing, too, to get really done. The moral quality — justice — is the same in us and in God. Here lies His Image in us. Its relations to human law and administrations are analogous to those it holds in the Divine. But now we have to insert, for vital and awful diflFerence, the facts of human fallibility and weakness, not to say sin, over against the all-wisdom, all-power, and all-goodness of God. Justice, in the Divine admin- istration and handling of it, will be in vast con- trast with the human handling. In the latter the business becomes, through no fault of law or leg- islator or court, but of necessit}^ a really terrible bungle, and not ideal justice at all. It is at best
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little else than a shift for personal and public safety in continual emergency; is often so crude and rude as to be verj^ like outrage on justice. It has always to wait on men's conditions and external showings and modify itself to his prog- ress. It catches a man at his worst and weakest and grades him at his meanest possibility. It makes no account of his ten thousand loyalties, obediences, conformities ; but lays hands on him in his cups, in his rage, when he is beside himself under passion and temptation too mighty for his momentary frailness. It seizes him in the moment of his physical disorder or mental depression or social captivity or satanic instigation or moral atrophy and damns him for a murder or other outrage which his whole soul abhors and of which, at any average moment of self-possession, he could not have been guilty — from which he may have sprung back, instantly, in the recoil of a very genuine repentance and remorse. His whole life-time, it may be, has held but one hour in which he could have fallen into this thing. But human justice caught him just there and so, away down there at the bottom of his deepest fall ! So through all the pangs, horror, years of unavailing remorse, that brand is there — burned in. That act, — that one isolated act, — out of the myriads of contrasted acts, which do, each one, equally or better index his quality — that one act is made to characterize him, blazons him so long as he is remembered among men. The man is that, so opposite and abhorrent to him ! As matter of
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genuine character, he may never have been down there at all nor fit to be indexed so. This thing, — human justice, — has made one outward perform- ance, which may have been wholly sporadic, in the deepest sense accidental, the indicator of the man — an outward act and not the inward char- acter, has graded, settled the place, penalty, fate of the man. This may well enough have been true outrage on him. Yet it must be admitted that this is the best human justice can do ; that it is even necessary that it be done ; that the doctrine of ' ' eminent domain ' ' must carry here as in property rights ; that the individual interest and right even, must give way to the general. Public weal requires that acts of crime be pun- ished. But no man can fail to see that the whole business is liable to awful bungle and is only a shadow and parody, at best, of that august thing — ideal justice. That is not the avenging of an act, which may not at all index character ; that is not the avenging of an act at all, but only the serene adjustment of condition to real desert, perfect adjustment of estate to character. An act has no conscious moral entity that it be punishable, but only the actor, and he only on the ground of blame's worth in character, and only to the precise measure of that blame- worthiness.
Another sore but unavoidable frailness of human justice follows, which is this : It has a memory ! It grades this day's and to-morrow's estate by the deed of yesterday, while yesterday's character
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may have gone down with yesterday's sun, in the profound shame of yesterday's sin. A new moral attitude may have risen with the new morning's light. The very hour of the crime may, well enough, have left the man in such a sense and shame of it, such horror of himself on account of it, as to have created a fair impossibility that he should ever be capable of the like again. His moral sense may have wakened in the moment of the sin ; the night hours may have wrought him to an undying revolt against the thing and all its class of things. That, however, can not matter to the human tribunal. There the act is squarely proven. Let fall the thunder ! O, poor blind master of the fates of men, no w^onder that in universal art the statues of Justice are blind- folded ! Human justice has an awful memory, but not insight ; while not memory at all, but insight wholly, is the thing essential to the ideal — the real thing — the absolute equity. It must simply observe character; the hour's attitude of inward character must be met by adjustment of condition to desert in the ideal administration. That justice keeps no record. Record were to it of no use. Record is only to ill-supply lack of insight. 7"Aa/ justice of which we speak has vision and no need of record. It is directed by immediate perception, not by memory. Its dealings will accord with record only when possibility of moral change is closed up. Ideal justice is not vengeance upon an act nor visitation upon a record, but a fitting of
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present handling to present deserving. Desert of yesterday laid on the soul to-morrow is injustice unless the soul abide to-morrow in the unchanged desert of yesterday.
I am told that the decisions of few modern judges have more weight with jurists than those of the late Samuel Lee Selden, of the New York Court of Appeals. Asking him once how far the administration at the hands of the courts coincided with absolute justice, I shall never forget the solemnity of his sad reply: "Abso- lute justice has little to do with it. Criminal and even civil law, and judicial handling under them, is mainly a make-shift for public and private utility. The estimate of character and actual desert is so impossible to any tribunal as not to form any large element in it. The most careful execution of necessary laws will often violate every axiom of absolute justice." This was the substance of a to me most memorable and impressive conversation with a man of judicial genius.
A yet further element of the imperfection of human justice is this : In framing and executing laws a large feature is consideration of conse- quences. Heavy penalties and long sentences issue against the crimes that are rife. Stern work must be done against the criminal bias of the time. Rigid severities must avert the current tendency. Yet that set of current does not aggravate, but materially palliates the personal guilt of the act. This human justice, that is, is cursed not only
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with a memory but with foresight and outlook as well ; whereas ideal justice has only insight, only sees what is and adjusts all to that. The con- sequence of a moral act is only part of it in a me- chanical and not a moral sense. With that con- sequence the ideal justice has nothing whatever to do. It deals only with the disposition, motive, purpose behind the act — the character of the actor.
Now over against all these frailnesses of the human stands shining and eternal the serene figure of the ideal and absolute Justice, with its perfect insight of character and desert, with its resources equal to the adjustment of all conditions to the actual deserving. It does not handle formal acts at all, but substantial actors — sets penalties not to deeds but to character. It uses no memory of yesterday, nor foresight of to-morrow, nor out- look, making an instance a sort of safeguard or even an expiatory sacrifice for the general thrift. It is not a judgment on yesterday's record to be executed to-day on a victim whose present moral status may meantime have been wholly revolu- tionized, whose present moral desert may bear to it no relation whatever. Past judgments hold over onl)^ so long as past desert, that is, past frame of moral character, holds. When that gets fixed and changeless, then estate, under absolute justice, gets so ; not till then.
That our God, outside His special scheme of mercy in Christ, will handle souls exactly as they do and not as they did deserve — by insight, not
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by memory, according to present fact and not by record, by desert and not by outlook — ought to be axioms of faith, intuitions. With outward acts and consequences He can manage well enough in His universe. He can rule and over-rule amongst them to make even all men's wraths to praise Him and work the ultimate weal of the whole. He needs none of the make-shifts and actual outrage which must characterize human law and admin- istration in the interest of utility. All that it — this sublime equity — is concerned with is the absolute adjustment of condition, estate to desert, to actual character as it stands before its bar. So much for this matter of justice.
Repentance. What now is repentance ? First thing making toward it is recognition of the wrong done or of the evil of character from which it sprung — an act of moral intelligence, clear and commanding, upon the performance or estate to judge it. The very start is that, for regeneration of a man — fulcrum in for uplift out of the pit. A second experience, drawing very near now to the thing itself, is shame and sorrow for the thing to be repented of. Gloomy but magnifi- cent moving of the soul is this, up out of the bad airs, away from the miasmatic levels and the evil kinships. It is getting out of sympathy with its own evil self, into possibility of better things. Break of moral identity beginning ! Now comes the third, the crucial, the real thing, in re- pentance. A whole determination of the will — the man — to end, to have done with the evil.
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Recognition of sin, shame and sorrow for it, rises to fixed determination to be done with it. This process has always been under impulse of the Holy Spirit, has ever led to surrender of the soul to Him who alone can effect a renewal of the nature itself into holiness ; and every such sur- render issues in the great fact — regeneration, by the grace of God ! Now you have a soul taken squarely out of the category of the former style of sinner — up on a plane of character above its yesterdays, only liable to the yesterdays' pen- alties on some low, mechanical theory of the human, blind, and bungling parody of justice. Can the Divine Justice inflict now upon this repentant soul — this new man — the penalties which a persistent yesterday would have made as inevitable as they were just? Let that shame, sorrow, determination sweep out to cover, with disgust, all the evil of the heart and life. I^et the whole free manhood give itself in mighty pur- pose against all evil, in that profound repent- ance which at once abhors sin and sinfulness, and would forever quit them, giving itself to holiness and to God ! Have you not now a soul wholly removed from the categories of the former sin and set in an entirely new attitude before the court of absolute equity? Is now any record of the past a fair showing of its moral state ? Is the vast accumulation of the sins, defaults, de- formities of that life, up to date of this repenting, an index of what this soul now is and now de- serves— of its real present worthiness ? Which is,
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I take it, the only question possible to be getting itself before the insight of the Divine Judgment.
Why, if human courts were possessed of that perfect insight of the culprit's exact moral frame, as he comes under judgment ; if the public mind were, in like wise, absolutely cognizant, to know how this penitent and remorseful soul is now high above the moral plane on which he stood when the crime he did was possible to him ; did court and people know that these penitent shows of contrition and appearances of holiness were absolutely genuine and controlling, then the in- fliction of the penalty would seem the injustice which it is. Possibly the penalty might still have to be executed. The culprit might still have to admit the necessity of his suffering it as a deter- rent to others and safeguard of society ; but the discrepancy between actual present character and the penalty which only befits a wholly different one would shock the world. A holy and loving child of God and heir of swift glory, far on toward the likeness of Christ, might be seen in the agonies of the cross, the shame of the gibbet, the tragedy of the electric chair. In the eternal ministration of ideal justice, the more appalling spectacle of final infliction in the spiritual world of penalties which would befit only a character which no longer exists will not be set to mar the adorations of the universe ! At the long last will be perfect accord between character and environment. Every soul will be in ''its own place.'' Mis-fits will be forever past.
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Repentance, therefore, with the regeneration which evermore attends it, is at once quittance and acquittance of sin. It is a whole soul turned away eagerly from its past evil, standing in a wholly new attitude of character and desert. Its new frame is absolutely alien to the act repented of, gone out of its realm, ceased from all present responsibility for it, in the very highest moral sense and before any court of the absolute equities. And God is just to justify the penitent ! Could He be just in not acquitting him who has truly repented all sin ?
As I have said, if court and world could know the innermost frame of the penitent convict and be sure of its permanency, all the penalties of just law might be remitted, justice would be served by it, and the public conscience would demand it, not as mere mercy, but as clear justice. The difficulty would be in the loss of the deterrent force of penalty upon others. Men might rush into crime on the assumption that they, too, would repent and so escape. It is not for a moment to be thought that in the final adjust- ment at the barof eternal judgment such pruden- tial considerations will be suffered to deflect the course of Divine Equity. Here it is a necessary make-shift of human ignorance and weakness that has no need nor place in the final, universal, and wholly righteous awards.
The Gospel is God's way of effecting in man this true repentance, this break of guilty identity, by creating anew the soul in righteousness and
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true holiness. Old things, — records and all, — are swept away. All things become new. The guilty identity has vanished ! The new man abhors and abjures the sins of which he was once capable, which did once fairly represent him, which can now represent him no more. Absolute justice can no longer insist on a present responsi- bility for them or present or future penalties for them. Sin repented is sin escaped. Holy quit- tance of sin is acquittance. The old guilt gone, the penalties of it have disappeared. God is just and the justifier of them that so believe.
The life and death of Jesus mean the whole '* moral power '' side of the Atonement. All that ever Dr. Bushnell said of this side of the sublime work is true, and more than ever tongue can ex- press is there. But there is need of more, which mighty "more" the Atonement provides, Bushnell "tossed aside " much that we need cling to. For we are under terms of law and government and not merely of justice. Positive statutes are out and violated. We are all under condemnation. We need somewhat visible and tangible as to what God will do about His broken law. Some formu- lary, with substance under it, of forensic judicial performance which shall give the sanction of formal acquittance before the law we have broken, whose pronounced penalties we have incurred. God will remit them when He justly may. Under the old altar-forms, the sinner, repentant and con- fessing, promising amendment, brought another — a blameless life of dove or lamb, belonging to him,
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his, which had cost him something. The peni- tent^s sin should be solemnly laid on that and its penalty. That substituted life, sacrificed, should be taken by Him who hath right to remit and to fix the terms of remission, as satisfaction of all the sinner's doom. He shall go free ! This was the fore-shadow of the Christ. On Him our iniquities were laid. The Cross was the world's altar. He bare our curse, took away our sins. They are gone that very hour when we in true repentance accept Him as our Sacrifice, — our substituted Life, — offered for our redemption. At the same moment and by the same grace through which alone the sacrifice avails, the penitent receives that regeneration of character which lifts him from the level of his past sin, and makes the whole transaction accord with the eternal equities. We become "Sons of God in- deed*' in the very act of entering the terms of legal acquittal. Our need, so far as the statutes go, is met by the exact terms which set us into the spiritual frames of holiness and love and life in Jesus. The Atonement is effective unto the repentance by which alone it becomes a * ' savor of life unto life "; and so God is just in lifting the penalties of explicit statute law from the head of the violator of it, as He is just in relieving from the general curse of guilt the soul which is escaped from the mastery of and present respon- sibility for it. So only could He be the enactor of ideal and absolute justice in the universe. Whatever of prudential exigency may lie in
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this view of the final justice is fully met by the fol- lowing considerations : Remission of sins is seen to be prudentially possible if attended by these conditions : (i) If it as fully assures the after- holiness as the infliction of the penalty would do ; (2) If it as clearly demonstrates God's eternal and inflexible hostility to sin ; (3) If it as fully maintains the sacredness of the law; and (4) If it do nothing whatever to diminish the terrors of the law upon persistent and unrepentant evil- doers. It is not necessary here to go into detail to show that the justification of the repentant b}- faith does meet perfectly and over-go, by vast measures, each of these requirements. As to the first, the penalties of the law are not redemptive of the sufferer, but retributive and destructive; while this remission of sin to the penitent does redeem him, radically, into personal holiness for- ever more — and more! As to the second and third, the fact that none but the co-equal and eternal Son was a life exalted enough to be a substitute for ours before the violated law ; and that He, venturing into our place, must even die in our stead under the shameful agonies of the Cross to satisfy its claims, vindicates both God's unalterable hatred of sin and the law's sacred and absolute demands and penalties. As to the fourth particular, this remission to the penitent alone does actually set forth the terrors of retribu- tion, to those who will not repent, in so startling and stern a sort that no such sinner can ever be- lieve that the God who spared not His only and
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His beloved Son, when He stood in our stead, will now spare him if he refuse repentance and mercy, if he yet defy the law and abide in wanton sin. As matter of fact, it is only by vision of the Christ, dying to make mercy and salvation just and, so, possible, that men have, or do, or ever will, come to see their guilt and peril in such sort as to repent and turn from it.
How then can we do else than say that Evan- gelical repentance is quittance and acquittance of sin and its penalties, in such sense that justice is absolutely served by it and on such terms as to meet the most exacting prudential and formal requirements of the Divine authority and govern- ment in this world and in all the universe ? On such terms as shall assure to the so redeemed the very loftiest type of personal and holy grandeur of which finite and created Being is capable ? Glory be to His great and just and holy Name ! Amen ! Let Earth and Heaven and every crea- ture say Amen and Amen !
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CHAPTER VI
THK WONDKR OF THE WORD
The Wo7'd of Gody which liveih and abideth forever — St. Peter
The wonder of this Book seems to me not so much its contents — the facts of its revealing — considered by themselves, or in their mutual rela- tions (though it is wonderful in both these par- ticulars), but rather in its relations to the various stages of the progress of mankind. The miracle of the Book is not the source of it, supernal though it be ; nor the coherent consistency of its various parts, produced in so many ages, by so many diflFerent men, with so varied immediate mo- tives, under conditions not of similarity but of violent contrast ; the work of kings, priests, prophets, peasants ; outcome of periods of direct theocratic rule, of judgeships and kingdom ; of wandering escapes, prosperity and adversity ; anarchy and enslavement ; exile, captivity and restoration ; war and peace. That there could have come out of such work, by forty men, through millenniums of time, a book, or, if you choose, a literature, consistent with itself in all its parts, and bearing with unswerving emphasis to an end as single as it is sublime, is indeed a
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marvel, which they must account for who would rationally question its Divine inspiring.
Far more wonderful, miraculous, than all this is the fact that this literature, born in the very ancient times, before the existence of any rational science of the world, or in it, should have fitted those times, been accepted and believed ; should have commanded life and builded character on sane lines ; directed national polity, fixed social and religious institutions, and become the secret of the most singular of racial developments, in so remote and dark a past, and yet should hold so commanding a power in these latest ages of most advanced scientific and philosophic thought and of social, political and moral progress. This is miracle of miracles !
For example, there appeared long ago, — whether you accept the extreme antiquity of the books of the Old Testament or the views of the most radical critics of to-day — either theory ante- dates far enough all developments of modernism, — there appeared an account of the order and process of the Creation. That account closely conforms to what is now held as the last word spoken by modern science in cosmogony. Grant- ing that specialists find obscure traces of a fourth day's creation in the third day's creative work in that great first chapter of Genesis. What of that ? Nobody disputes that the whole grand outline of process is correct. That sublime limning of the creative work is all that was either desired or proposed. Whether the process was an instan-
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taneous one, or one complete in six creative days of twenty-four hours each, or an evolution through **days" which were creative ages, the order is the same. It was an order scoffed at the world over, exultingly denied, till in our own time it has been re-discovered and adopted by all scientific schools. Here then we have an account of the Creation and its order and processes which satisfied the earliest enquirers into these vast secrets, which stirred their sense of God, moved them to worship, kindled for them moral and spiritual inspirations, and helped to make them the progenitors of the highest spirituality of the race. It was a true account, not intended to teach geology or chronology in detail, but simply to hold the faith and mould for highest of then possible character the race to which it came. Theirs was a simple age. It knew no science as such. Of geology and geologic time they had no notion whatever. A revelation made to them in the terms of the modern conceptions of evolution- ary or geological processes would have been in- comprehensible and absurd ; could not have won credence or found any element of power ; would have been no revelation at all. The whole work of revelation in such terms would have been de- feated by the terms themselves. But here we have it, true for all ages, yet in such form as to be adjustable to the advancing knowledge of every period, from the simplest to the most highly de- veloped. Was that ever true of any other book ? For every advance of knowledge we find here in
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the account itself the key to the new interpreta- tion. See, for the word ''day" in the story. The first verses of the second chapter give you the word as signifying the whole creative period. Over and over in the same book of Genesis it is used in the same sense. When it became obvious to scientific knowledge of the facts that the earth underwent a long process of creation, there was no need to force the language of the story. There was no ''twisting and torturing" of the text, as has been so often and flippantly said. The old text was perfectly hospitable to the new under- standing of the facts. Nay, it had abundant rea- son to rejoice in the better knowledge which refuted the profane jeers of the disbelievers of many ages, and returned the faith of the civilized world to the substantial accuracy of that knowl- edge which could then have been gained only by revelation from God. The point of wonder is that an account of this vast business should have been given in that old time which did not offend its infantile intelligence, while yet it anticipated the finest discoveries of the ripest period of fullest research.
So with the great astronomic facts in which the new light exults — the Mosaic "firmament." The ancient world, even far down to modern times, accepted it with its own interpretation as a solid arch supported on huge pillars or vast walls planted in the ocean which roared around the verges of the earth, or as a crystalline sphere or a series of them, enclosing each other and holding
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up the waters above or between them ; revolving the sun, moon, and stars, each fixed in a "firma- ment" of its own. Suppose that the story of Genesis had contained the detail of the modern science of astronomy ! No mortal, until these later times, could at all have comprehended or accepted such a revelation. It would have seemed absurd. It might as well not have been made till within the last century. All the effects of the revelation would have been lost and these cen- turies of light could not have arrived. When, at last, the old notions of the heavens were vanished, lo, there stands the great Revelation with its '* firmament," as hospitable to the new knowledge as it was hospitable and helpful in the times of the former ignorance.
In the old days men were wont to attribute all that is to the immediate handiwork of God. Since there were so many things of so many sorts going on that one could not take care of them all, they supposed an innumerable host of gods, each look- ing after his own part of the business. When the one God thundered Himself back into the faith of Israel He revealed Himself in the terms of that universal idea as Himself doing directly all. So the revelation was comprehensible to them, took hold on them ; held, developed and made them believers and so made them great. Had it set forth the God in the terms of our modern understanding, He would have been no God at all. The modern understanding should never have come. Nevertheless, the old revela-
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tion was true, exactly as true now to us who hold that he does a multitude of things through secondary agencies; that He has set into nature force by which He accomplishes, as if He worked everything out by fingers, hands, and articulate words in some human tongue. There is neither deceit, illusion, nor mistake about it. It is but revelation of needed and helpful truth, partly or more fully made, in terms of their and our under- standing and as they and we were and are able to receive and get the advantage of it.
Every advance of human understanding will lift the veil a little more fully from the partly con- cealed truth, will make the fuller interpretation and the more marvelously display the Divine wisdom and the holy art with which our God has adapted His one supreme written Revelation to that which He has made in Nature and in our own advancing intelligence and spiritual under- standing. That this could have been done in the Old Testament writings — that this ancient litera- ture could have been so supplemented and con- summated in the newer yet very old writings of the New Testament and in the new spirit of the Christ himself in such way that there should be no fatal break; that all should be, and should seem to be, one scheme of a progressive and now consummate Divine self-revealing, is the wonder of wonders — the miracle of miracles !
The wonder increases as it stands amidst com- mentaries of the obstinate and brutal reluctance of the ecclesiastics of all names and times to giv-
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ing up an ancient interpretation of the Word however irrational and absurd. It is not to be denied that theologians, councils, Popes and churches have again and ever again sought to chain the truth of the Divine revelation to their miserable interpretations and misinterpretations of it. It is a strange and awful story ! Men have been excommunicated, tortured, martyred because they came to think that the earth re- volved on its axis and around the sun, for does not the Book say that the "world is established that it shall not be moved " ? " The sun riseth and goeth down"? Multitudes have suflfered the like fates because they held the earth to be a globe ; that there might be inhabitants at the antipodes ; or because they did not hold that comets, diseases, and storms were the direct work of the Devil, or of God ; or for denial that all lunatics were possessed of evil spirits whom the priests could exorcise and cast out. Ponderous theologians have interpreted the poetical expres- sion " the windows of heaven" as absolute, literal, scientific fact, and set forth whole ranks of angels whose special duty was to open the lit- eral casements and let down upon the earth the waters stored up in the vast cisterns above the water-tight firmament ! Another rank of angels had for its work the labor of trundling out each morning from some store-house of God the sun for the day and the moon and stars for the night, and setting them in their places in the fixed frame- work of the heavens ! Witchcraft was the belief
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of the church universal for how many dreary ages. Protestant Germany was for two centuries the fiercest murderer of innocent women, chil- dren, and men charged with the witches' hellish arts. A hundred thousand wretched creatures were tortured and executed in Germany in the hundred years from the middle of the sixteenth to that of the seventeenth century ! John Wesley, near the end of his life, declared that to surrender the belief in witchcraft would be to give up the whole Bible ! The literal creative day of twenty-four hours ; the certainty that He- brew was the original language which Jehovah spoke with Adam in the Garden ; the antiquity and inspiration of the Masoretic vowel points in the Hebrew — these were vital matters to the Orthodox Catholic faith, and the thunders of the church were launched against all unbelievers. For a long period the taking of interest for money loaned at any rate whatever was a mortal sin, banned by Papal authority, and so confined to the Jew alone, who accommodated the church- men, princes, prelates and Popes at enormous usury, and, demanding repayment, got confisca- tion, rack, thumb-screw, or lost not the money alone but liberty and even life.
To these and a hundred other quite as absurd vagaries of interpretation the verities of faith have been tied up by the most solemn fulmina- tions of church authority, both Protestant and Catholic. The woes of the church have been hurled upon all disbelievers in these interpretings.
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The Infallible Church has made these intolerable mal-interpretations of Scripture essential articles of faith, and doubt of them has been punished as Mortal Sin, worthy of present death and eter- nal torments. By each of them it has been long and fiercely affirmed that the Church, the Bible, and Religion must stand or fall. Over and over it has been contended that the Incarnation of our lyord, the entire Gospel, must be a lie if the rev- olution of the earth around the sun were a fact, or if the coming of a comet were a natural event, or if lunac}^ or disease were not a possession by infernal powers, to be treated by ecclesiastics and not by physicians. However it may be with the inerrancy of the Book or its original autographs, interpretations through sad ages by an infallible or a fallible church have made grievous work with it. They have bound the intellect and the heart and conscience of man to his vast hurt and long hindrance. For the slow and exceedingly danger- ous sweeping out of so many of these forced and false interpretations and illogical inferences we have to thank science — science oftenest in the hands of reverent Christian scholars, who suf- fered as infidels in their brave obedience to their high commission from God to defy for the truth's sake and Christ's and man's, an authority grounded neither in reason nor a worthy under- standing of the Divine Oracles.
But the point on which I am insisting is that the wonder of the Word lies here ; in spite of all the settled and authoritative use of it to support
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current absurdities as to actual fact, yet when any fact in nature or in life has once come to be settled, by science or a corrected interpreting of the Word, it immediately appears that the simple Word as it stands, without any twisting or forc- ing, is as hospitable to the new-found fact as to the old notion. The Book stands the only, and the everlasting, monument of a literature and law which have met the need and been hospitable to the current intellectual development of each age to which it has or was destined to come. All other literatures and bodies of law have gone ef- fete and obsolete with the civilization for which they were devised. This has but increased in glor5% wide fame and controlling power from age to age. It shines with increasing lustre in these boasiful latest times. It becomes the treasure of the literature of many tongues and the hope of the hearts of many peoples whom it is lifting from savagery into a gracious Christian civilization. The most keen and merciless critic and historian of the hideous fallacies of ecclesiastical interpreta- tion and the furies of ecclesiastical bigotry and cruelty affirms of the great old Book, '' Of all the Sacred Writings of the world, it shows us our own as the most beautiful and the most precious ; exhibiting to us the most complete religious de- velopment to which humanity has attained, and holding before us the loftiest ideals which our race has known.'*
The Book of a religion which is to be universal must be a Book for all time and all peoples. That
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is a criterion which no human genius could hope to meet. A Book which for all times, all races, all civilizations or lacks of civilization, in all lan- guages and under all circumstances, is to be and is loved, believed, reverenced and obeyed im- plicitly as the last word of truth, duty and priv- ilege is an achievement unapproachable, even unimaginable, to aspirations of sublimest human genius. There are some models of beauty in architecture which stand tbe criticism and win the admiration of the ages. There are some statues which embody a splendor of plastic art which will never be surpassed, calling forth an admiration which will never be outgrown. There are some canvases whose even, faded colors will be the despair and wonder of all artists to the latest time. There stand three or four poets and divine poems whose fame is like to be as lasting as the earth itself or as the love of beauty in the hearts of men. Yet these in their sovereignty claim no dominancy over the intelligence of men, no control of their faiths, no governance of their wills, no authority upon their morals, no guidance of their lives. But here is a Book which assumes to correct the intelligence, set the moral standards, master the will, mold the characters, shape the societies, and control the behaviors and even the affections of men — of all men everywhere and al- ways. A Book is this which, as a matter of un- disputed and indisputable fact, has done all these things for multitudes wherever it has been known, for millenniums. Its sway is at this moment
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more widely extended than ever before. Its truth is leavening more thoroughly than in any preced- ing age all forms of truth avowed by civilized men and more pervasive of all literature. Its inter- pretations, save where an ''infallible" and intol- erant theolog}^ has forced them, have most perfectly fitted the highest possible holy efficiency of its revealings to every age to which it has come. And it has had a mightiest hand in the produc- tion of all that is worthiest in humanity. Its potency in the enlightened applications of its fullest revelation to our own day, in perfect ac- cord with all the finally ascertained facts of reason, science, and philosophy, is obviously the only possible solution of the sorest and most perilous problems of our — as of all — time, and is besides the mighty pledge of the solution of the immense questions of life and immortality beyond the veil. It is as unique as it is sublime.
That Book ! Its supposed friends — its custo- dian church — have misconstrued and misrepre- sented, proscribed, banned, burned, and adored it ! They have wrought monstrous crimes and infinite charities and salvations in its name. Under its banners they have laid waste continents and up- builded splendid races from absolute savagery. For conservation of its supposed teachings they have withstood with fire and sword and rack the coming in of the new light which should but the more fully illumine and enforce its Divine mean- ing. Its enemies have ridiculed, defied and blas- phemed it and its truths and its God. On the
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sites of their burnings of its most devoted adher- ents have risen vast structures for its universal distribution. The very room in Geneva in which Voltaire exultingly prophesied that in fifty years the Bible would be forgotten became the dis- tributing center for that Holy Word through Switzerland and continental Europe. Charles Bradlaugh's famous ' ' Hall of Science, ' ' seat of an atheistic propaganda in London for twenty years, has passed into the hands of the Salvation Army ! The great old Book has suffered enough at the hands of its friends to have blotted any other book that was ever written out of the firmament of the world's literature. Its enemies have scorned and confuted and annihilated it out of the faith of the whole earth times out of number, but for all that it has thriven only the more securely in the unfading love and loyalty of an ever-increasing multitude of happy and holy believers who are living joyful lives of its grace and would, if need were, lay them down serenely for the sake of its sacred Name.
My contention is that a book or literature, of commanding truth, put in such shape as to win the acceptance, form the character, and mold the destinies of the simplest ancient times, building them into a Divine faith of incomparable value and beauty, into a reverent and worshipful frame obedient to the best righteousness which they could comprehend, and ever, from age to age, into a better than anything that had preceded, then at the end of the progress of light and right
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thus far in the advancing centuries, proving itself absolutely harmonious with the new universe of scientific and philosophic truth as it is now under- stood, and as effective for faith and character as it has ever been, demonstrates its Divine origin as demonstration could by no other means have been effected, as can by no means be contro- verted. The very fact that it has been so long and bitterly misunderstood and set into antag- onism with the ripening results of rational inves- tigation, that those results were so fiercely battled against and so reluctantly admitted by the parti- sans of the old interpretations, is the best possible vindication of the fact that it can be no product of man's genius, but a literature of the Divine inbreathing.
There has come at last, thank God, through all the Protestant Churches in the most enlightened quarters of the earth, a serene certitude that all truth is one, that no discovery of fact in the uni- verse can be irreconcilable with any other. Faith, therefore, simple and unperturbed, waits for the demonstration of truth in any realm of it and by any process; holds to the old till the new is ascertained ; is wholly ready to accept whatever is duly determined by the recognized authorities in the varied fields of research ; and rejoices in every new ray of light thrown into the secrets of the working of the God of Nature and of Reve- lation. The same spirit is penetrating, more slowly but as surely, the old church which has claimed infallibility. Because of that claim it
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has the harder task ; so difiScult, I believe, that it will have to give up its age-long boast of having everywhere and always believed and pro- claimed a perfect and consistent doctrine in every " Ex- Cathedra " utterance. Such surrender is inevitable, and will only establish it on a firmer basis of truer faith and power.
This joyful welcome to new light all around the ecclesiastical horizon, whencesoever the shining may come, will bring all churches and religious systems and sympathies into vital unity and a vital power which will conciliate the confidence of candid humanity and hasten the day of the Gospel's triumph and the world's consummation. Ripening science and philosophy, systematizing all known truth and seeking the yet undiscovered through all the realms of Nature, will find the harmonizing supplement to all their truth and the final reason for all, and their unifying prin- ciple, in the Book ; will find in those who love it their most ardent champions and devoted in- vestigators. The reason and the heart of the Christian world will no more antagonize any candid investigation or fair settlement of any truth in any realm of human enquiry.
Kven in the regions of the ''higher criticism" the Christian consciousness only waits for some- what to be agreed on and fairly established. It understands that every exhibition of nervousness and irritability in the face of these enquiries is a demonstration of its own uncertainty about the foundations of faith, unbecoming and impossible
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to the real believer. It is fully justified in that waiting till the devout critics can agree. We have no business to go rushing into new notions till the *' notions" are settled into facts. The settled facts will be accepted. The Book will be found unmarred. The old foundations of its truth will be unshaken though a thousand human in- terpretations and understandings of it may be dispersed to the four winds, to the glory of God. Every Word of God, written on parchment or graven in Nature, abideth forever. Every au- thentic Word of God, wherever written, is for the heavenly upbuilding of man into a final estate of God-likeness. In the one system of the uni- verse no one fact can be at odds with any other fact. No one truth can root out any other truth, or mar it. The Spirit of God is under every rev- elation in what we call * ' Nature ' ' as in what we call ' * Revelation. ' ' Only let the men of Science, of Philosophy, and of Religion be cool, candid ; till each his own field, and wait until a truth is decided and agreed upon by its qualified experts before they announce it. The only science which is to be dreaded is that which boasts itself as omni-science ! That science is falsely so called which, knowing something about an Earth- Worm, supposes itself, therefore, to know all that can or can not be known of God and the soul and the ongoings of the infinite. Only let the men of each field of truth stand to their own work in their own lots, find the truth in their own lines and trust each other, and there will
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be not only no further semblance of ''warfare'* between science and religion — as there never has been any in reality — but there will be no more conflict between science and theology, or between the men of science and of the church. These conflicts have been precipitated too often — necessitated, glorious in outcome — by the church itself, presenting its strange interpretations, its imperfect theologies, and its yet more imperfect life as the only and as the all of religion. God and all good men hasten the great day of the final truce — the recognized harmony of all truth, gathered from whatever fields of Divine revealing for human discovery ! In that great day it shall be seen,— THE BOOK,— epitome of all sub- limest truth, source of vital power, way of grace, secret of redemption, radiant with the glory of man and God ! Speed its mighty revealings ! Hasten its rising as the Sun of Righteousness upon the horizons of every race ! God give wis- dom, zeal, amplest means and swiftest success to every agency which seeks its universal dif- fusion, its perfect understanding and its divine dominancy over the heart and life, the business, society and government of every man at home and in the uttermost parts of the earth and the sea ! Amen and Amen !
I02 Reason and Faith
CHAPTER VII
WHY I BKlvlKVK IN GOD
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. — King David.
I AIRWAYS did believe in Him, even when, with shame I say it, even when my heart was full of impotent rage against Him, or rather against the being I took Him for. Probably that was because I was taught so to believe. I took this faith just as I believed what people told me about Europe, or the stars ; just as children believe fairy stories and Ghris Kringle. Father, mother, everybody else around took God for granted, so the child did, as matter of course. It never occurred to the child to question His being, all-power, wisdom, goodness, and so on.
Then I suppose before reason begins to weigh these matters there is in eflfective play a sort of universal, at any rate, a powerful and very widely diffused instinct for God which chimed in well with the surrounding atmosphere of theistic be- lieving, which grounded the belief of Him, that . is, of some sort of a God — would, perhaps, have done it without any teaching whatever. For all races of men, without any fairly proven excep- tion, even in the most infantile savagery, anterior
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to any development of a real public opinion, do fall into some notion of a Power above and be- yond them, which notion stands for God, or gods, worship, and religion. It curiously happens, also, that progress made and advance in intel- ligence and civilization do not tend to confuse and destroy this original impulse of faith, but the rather to clarify and develop it and to es- tablish some more or less fit cultus of outward observance for its more thorough grounding. Nay, it is even philosophically and scientifically observed that the crude religious ideas of any people and their rituals of Divine observance are often the prime factors as well as heralds and auspicious portents, of intellectual, social, moral, and governmental advance. So one can not de- clare, does not know, whether this constitutional bias towards some shape of theism would not, independently of teaching and of reasoning, have landed him in an almost inexpugnable conviction of a Supreme and Eternal One.
One must suppose, also, that his earliest no- tions about the qualities, functions, attributes of this God came from current teachings about him, not questioned yet by the unreasoning intelli- gence of the child. He has taken it all in a lump on trust. There it lies in his little soul, undisturbed and undigested, just as it was re- ceived. There it may lie through childhood, youth, manhood, old age, and know no perturba- tion for time or eternity. There it may live, thrilling with power, abolute in control, molding
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and mastering every force of the active and be- nignant life, unchallenged and fraught with fine salvations, working out a serene and beautiful simplicity of character, basis of a holy group of love's master passions — motive and great reward of all in the soul and in its performance. Blessed that simple faith which never knew a question and is incapable of a doubt ; that believing which at first depends implicitly on authority and in- stinct, and then afterwards reaches up to grasp the Great Reality by a conscious experience which is like vision, which is demonstration to him who so sees — demonstration which no argu- ment of doubt and no difficulty in actual observa- tion or experience can ever for a moment perturb. Blessed indeed, but it may be not the supremely blessed. It may well be that the struggles with candid doubt, the struggles that overcome, even through agonies and perils, are cultures of char- acter, and evolutions of power and ways of an ultimate beauty and joy beyond all that these undisturbed serenities could ever have wrought for the souls of men. Bunyan's terrific battles in the precincts of the ' ' City of Destruction ' ' were the secret of his mastery in the Christian Pilgrimage. Hardihood, militant aggressiveness and stalwart massiveness of faith and character are like to come of these successful wrestles with candid doubt which make it pay in the long run. Experts through great and perilous experiences, tried souls mighty in trained attack and defense — what in grand exploit and adventure and hardy
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enterprise may not the untried and boundless worlds beyond have in store for such equipped and seasoned spirits ? O, this future of the other worlds ! It must present vast necessities, im- mense vicissitudes, incomparable enterprises to break the monotonies and rouse the enthusiasms and create the majesties of eternity, to make Heaven sublime. What journeyings, moment- ous missions, soul-kindling responsibilities and hardy adventures shall fall to the lot of God's sturdiest saints, messengers of grace and princes of eternal kingdoms amongst the huge, innumer- able worlds of His boundless empire of the forever and ever ! This life is, at best and largest, but a preparatory kindergarten arrangement for the real, maturing life that is beyond, which is to open on us in the vast reality of the endless to-morrow. Who knows but that every struggle and over- coming in the realms of candid doubt may be the method of a victorious prowess in the hereafter, which could not else have been achieved ? Nay, that is it. That must be its inevitable result.
But to come back to our way of faith in God. By and by, out of childhood's sweet believing, reason will assert itself. ' ' Why ' ' will become the immense imperative. It can not be repressed and must not. Mere authority will not answer. Tradition, or a sheer "taking for granted," won't do any longer. Investigation of facts, reasons, conditions, must begin, and shall never end. Woe waits him who would set it bounds. It breaks through all prescription, ventures into the
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most sacredly guarded enclosures. Most surely of all, because the most solemn field of all, most fraught with destinies, will it enter the sacred secrets of the soul, its origin, destiny, liberties and obligations ; into the holy habitations of God himself, to know his being, his laws, his character, his relations to his universe and all the souls of it. These questions will not down at any bidding. If there be claim of authoritative revelation along these lines, that claim will be scanned with intensest scrutiny, the bases of it investigated with most careful concern. On these questions, least of all, will awakened reason rest on inade- quate authority. It ought not so to rest. It must sift the authorities.
Now, when this enquiring begins, sound reason will make account of the common consent with which the belief in God has been held and taught. That good and loving and holy souls have believed so long, so widely, so thoroughly and to such sweet and grand results in character and perform- ance as their faith has surely wrought, will give a basis for the reasonable presumption that their faith is well grounded. Reason will not believe that sheer falsehood can work so well ; can not rashly toss that proof of God aside.
Then if multitudes of people, wise and just and good, shall testify that, through their faith in God, they have come to an actual fellowship with and personal experience of Him, it will be a brash and uncandid spirit that shall, without sturdiest reasons, brush such testimonies aside as not going
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far to prove the mighty existence in which they have so effectively believed.
Then if not these only — but all men have a natural aptitude, instinct, for believing in Him — ^ that will seem to reason a strong added presump- tion of his actual existence. For when men see an eye they infer light ; a fin, they say water ; wings and lungs prove air ; a foot, solid surface for its standing. Speech means a hearer ; thought, objects of thought ; love, the beloved. Reason, recognizing these universal correspondencies, finding a universal instinct and impulse toward believing in God, will hesitate to deny that it does, powerfully, declare the fact of God.
So the argument starts with a strong theistic presumption, which far more than neutralizes any conceivable antecedent improbability in the mat- ter. Now pure reason takes note of the obvious facts of this material universe. Its vastness astonishes and bewilders. Its immensity of re- sistless forces amazes. Its innumerable forms of matter, its wonderful variety of organisms, the intricate delicacy of the millions of organic struc- tures, the exquisite workmanship displayed in organs of creatures so minute that only the most powerful microscope can reveal them to the eye of man, all these combine to overwhelm us in amazement. Then the enduement of inorganic matter with its afiinities, its cohesions, its gravita- tions, its crystallizations, its electric forces, its adaptations for transmutation into new and wholly alien forms of vegetable and animal organism —
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a miracle, indeed, which evolutionists like I^e Conte and Dawson and many more declare that mere evolution can never account for — are subjects of new wonder. This income of life itself, in the vegetable world, enfolded in a seed, laying hold on all the elements of earth, air, water, using sunlight and shadow, heat and cold, chemical afl&nities and electric mysteries, cohesions and gravity, and building out of the same soils and climates — by some witchcraft of its own — a rose, a lily, a weed, an oak, a luscious fruit, culling out its flavors, its colors, its forms, with so subtle an art that man can never even account for or so much as follow its selections or its processes, will chal- lenge reason.
As you see the gentle surrender of this whole realm of the vegetable life to the necessity and the development of the higher order of the animal world, what words can express the perfectness of the complete adaptation, or the wonder of it. In the animal, what labarynthine construction in each organ, itself made up of many intricate ma- chines ! Then the adjustment of organ to organ, the symmetrical emplacement of each to the needs of all, and their interplay in the final unity of a miracle of beauty, agility, strength, and glad utility will cry out, '*How comes it?^' The whole marvellous creature, put in control of a nervous center, with its radiating net- work of nerves, communicating the fiat of the will to every organ of the wonderful whole and commanding its instant obedience and utmost tensity of action.
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Now add to this marvellous thing of organism, not merely sensation, perception, intelligence, consciousness, will, — but conscience, the moral imperative, love, hate, worship, power of self- sacrifice, joy and sorrow, hope, the free society of men at the top of the observed order of things. For after all the wonder of the universe is not its units of matter or of life, or of intelligence, or of conscience, but the unity of them all in the absolute oneness of the universe. The miracle of the plant is not its blossom but its root, stem, leaf, blossom, fruit, parentage ; its relation to soil, rain, air, sun, gravitation ; to the inorganic of which it thrives on the one hand, and to the sustenance, happiness, joy of all the realms of life above its own to which it contributes itself. The amazement of the thoughtful observer is not at the structure of the eye, or ear, or foot of the animal, marvellous as is each, but at the infinitely curious and exact collocation of all into that supple, agile, beautiful, powerful creature, or into the man, with his intelligence, will, morality, soulhood, linked in with all the natural forces of the universe, matter, cohesion, gravitation, chemical and electric forces, the sun the stars, and all the ongoing of past time and coming eternities. Each individual entity, from least to greatest, linked indissolubly into every other entity of all the earth, the sun, the stars, for ever and ever — that is the wonder. Convulsions ages and ages ago heaved up the continents and tossed to their heights the hills and mountain ranges of
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to-day's life and delight for man. Ages of ice ground out our fertile soils, digged out our fair valleys, smoothed the sites of our great cities, and ploughed the mighty water-ways for our com- merce. Nothing is, or ever was, that has not played with admirable exactness into every other thing that is or has been. The universe is one mighty harmony so complex and amazing as to bewilder and overwhelm. Its infinitely varied individual features are contrived to play their functions into the great whole. Each is for the infinite all and the infinite all is for each, on one plan that runs through every orb and atom, every life and movement of the creation.
Reason looks on with increasing wonder as every access of intelligence widens its horizon. It cries "plan"! "A Planner, then." Contriv- ings mean a Contriver. These innumerable con- trivings, all on one system, however varied their functions, indicate a Designer. Their multitude and sweep and majesty indicate a designer of im- measurable intelligence, resources, and power.
But beyond this, this plan through all the uni- verse tends, so far as we can see it, to the service of one order of being. The inorganic bears up the organic. The organic ministers to the higher, conscious, sentient animal life. These orders of the inorganic, the vegetable, and the sentient ani- mal life all serve man — the one being endowed with reason, conscience, moral and spiritual life. Science, philosophy and all reason unite to per- ceive that man is the consummate flower, the
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reigning king in this earth. Whether you believe the new theories of evolution or hold the older notions of man's incoming, still the man is the aim of all nature, the unifying element of its significance, the obvious design and ultimate, supreme outcome.
Now reason gets busy with man himself, makes analysis of him, finds the body wonderful, con- necting him with the whole material universe; the intellect far beyond that of any other creature and capable of indefinite development ; a will that is free ; nigh infinite sensibilities to pleasure or pain ; a necessity for discriminating in every act between what is right and wrong, and a character which grades him as worthy of praise or blame, to be loved or abhorred. Up towards this being the innumerable designs in all below do visibly and undeniably tend. To produce, sustain, and develop this free moral character, capable of an immense and enchanting beaut}^ and power, worthy of infinite and everlasting praise and love, all the lesser and the larger contrivings fit wonderfully into each other and all together press towards this — press towards and produce this ! Millions of special contrivings, amazing in themselves, all work together absolutely, and all sweep on to this ! What can reason say ? If contrivance mean a Contriver, what an infinite Contriver have we found here ! If all this infinite contriving means this moral character of such beauty and loveliness and everlasting strength at the top and the end of the planning, and if holy
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design signifies anything as to the designer, what shall sound reason say of this Designer ? If even men of pure science declare that they find, at start and movement of all things in the universe, an ever-present and active Force that makes for righteousness, tell me. What of that Power ? It is vast beyond any human limitations, wise and resourceful beyond conceiving. Its normal running makes for weal, beauty, righteousness and joy. Its consummation is a superb and holy moral character. That designing Power, then, must be moral, must be an infinite holiness and love. If a distorted reason should so misinterpret the working of this scheme of things as to esteem it tending to misery in estate and evil in char- acter, it would yet have to say, '' an infinite, but a devil on the universal throne." The argu- ment, from the evil that is permitted in the world, that the designing and governing power of it is such an infinte malignant, has been, I hope, sufficiently disposed of in a previous discourse. Atheistic argument, there is none. As matter of fact, there is no name of any prominence in the ranks of scientific, philosophic or other thought, of a man who will declare himself an atheist to-day. That there are declared agnostics in plenty is true enough, but the wild voice of the atheist is heard only in ranks of a mad revolt against all law, order, property and life, amongst the wild beasts who roar against civilization and for chaos. For the evil that is in the world, for which the free will of man is alone responsible,
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the matchless grace of God has provided sovereign remedy, free, rich, and tender as a Father's love, as the heart of Jesus, and glorious as highest Heaven ! Friends, when we have seen that possible evil is the sole possibility of character, as I hope we have, and that the most radiant of all char- acter must be outcome of experience in tremend- ous conflict with evil, and that the plan of God is actually developing, at the top of the universe ; that character in splendid perfectness, in innum- erable multitudes, in the vast majority of all souls ; when we know that no soul, in any world, will ever suffer one feather's weight beyond its just desert, after all palliating circumstances are given their full force before the bar of a gentle justice, I believe that sound reason can leave all special instances of extremest ill, in absolute peace, to the holy administration of a God who is kinder than man, and freely consent that there must be mysteries in his conduct of universal ajBFairs, with which we have neither the powers nor any bus- iness to meddle. However it may be with others, I have detailed, with as much distinctness as I have been able, the process of arrival, by one soul, at least, at a happy theistic rest, a repose of trust on which it is able to stake its eternal destinies, by which it can live in joy, and be not afraid nor reluctant to die. That God, as Author of all, sustainer, ruler, a just and holy and most loving personal One, working all things from the Crea- tion to the redemption and consummation of all, for the establishment and the glory of an uni-
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versal Kingdom ' ' wherein dwelleth righteous- ness" and Righteousness only, seems tome the only working theory which can account for the universe, which does account for it satisfactorily to reason, leaving but a fringe of mystery, exactly as should be in a scheme of the Infinite before a finite intelligence. Such a God seems to me the only hypothesis which can avert despair, which can consist with any sound and happy sanity ! It seems to me that, on the simple con- siderations which we have now taken, without taking into view the more metaphysical lines of argumentation, without reckoning at the aspira- tions of the soul as for a kinship with some Higher Soulhood, of the spirit in man as stretching itself upward as by some spiritual gravitation towards a spiritual universe which attracts it by natural law, and wherein it may find its grandest, its only real function. I say that, on the simple considera- tions we have now taken, it seems to me that the soundest reason will not hesitate to believe in God, — that HE IS, nor to adopt the immortal utterance of that Apostle who knew Him best, when he affirms by inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that ^^ God is LOVE."
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CHAPTER VIII
A CONCI.USION OF SOUND REASON.
Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. — Joshua.
If a God, and such a God, what then ? Wh}^ then he is a very considerable figure in His uni- verse ! A factor indeed ! The factor worth con- sidering. Without the God there is no possible doctrine of a soul independent of matter. There is nothing but matter in the various forms and stages of temporary arrangement. There is no life except of the material organization, and dependent on it. When the organization is dis- rupted the life is gone annihilate. There is for it no future. There is no soul. There is no basis for morality save a mere transient utility, which has no voluntary quality, but is merely automatic — atomatic. A utility is that at which only the very highest and most uncommon organizations will ever arrive, which can only provide distant and uncertain motives, which can not curb the appetites and passions craving immediate gratification; which can not give com- mand to any altruistic or remote considerations whatever. In the grave uncertainty of any to-mor- row the to-day will forever carry the day — ought
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to do it, so far as there can be any ' ' ought ' ' at all. But on this basis there is none. You say- that there ' ' ought " to be consideration for the other living, conscious organisms ? Why these living things, you and other, are but the necessary play of material atoms ! Necessary ? Then automatic ! There is no will, no liberty. If they chance to play in such sort as to advantage their fellow organisms, that is well enough, — but if they do not, nobody is to blame. There is no more room for praise or blame at the play of these atoms in the brain of a man than for the play of kindred atoms in the atmosphere, in the lower animal, in the roots of a noxious plant. Morality is gone forever with God and the soul as inde- pendent of matter and its organic play. All effective sanctions of action are gone when action is absolutely determined by the collocation of material atoms in the physical structure. On this scheme there can have been no plan whatever in the universe. It can be but the fortuitous onrunning of mere chance. There can be no such logical idea even as that of fate, for fate means a somewhat which fixes it. Fate, on the materialistic theory, means nothing but chance. On the materialistic no-God, no-soul-theory, there can be no reason, no motive, no right, no wrong, no object save the momentary gratification of the momentary impulse. If anybody can see anything but hell in that, why, then, he can be nothing but a beast. But now, God is. He created all, no matter whether by direct immediate
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creative fiat or through secondary agencies, in a moment or by processes ages long and still con- tinuing. He is sustaining all, whether by direct upholding or by that fixity of method which we, for convenience, call *'law," but which we can never define save as an observed method.
If this be true, a thing follows, as light the sun. We and all things are His. The "fee- simple'' of all that is is vested in Him. There is, can be, no title in the universe, to any hold- ing but such as is derived from Him. You, I, all men, and all the things they may have, are His of absolute and eternal right — not yours, mine or theirs, but His. If you have produced anything it is by the powers with which He endued you. You wrought with the materials which He put at your disposal in the time He has given for His service. The title to possession of all you have wrought is in Him alone. Logic, then, law, natural, common, universal and neces- sary— afl&rm the inexpugnable title of this Creator and sustainer of the worlds to us and to all that the worlds contain. As we are free moral agents with logical and moral powers, there is but one attitude in which we can rationally stand towards Him. That is the attitude of a complete consent to his control as absolutely and forever and in all things His. The holding of yourself or of any- thing that is in your hands as against His right of immediate control, is an attempted robbery 01 God. An unsuccessful and disastrous attempt at that, but none the less criminal for its hope-
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lessness, and all the more absurd — absurd even to the ludicrous ! The attitude of any soul believing in God, yet failing to recognize him as his owner by an absolute title, is one of flagrant dishonesty. Such a one is an attempting embez- zler of all that he is and of all that he can lay his hands on. And that attempt, too, is on the most shameful terms of gross ingratitude, for all he is and has are the vast trust which that God, the owner, has reposed in him for his culture, development and happiness, and for the great uses of the kingdom of righteousness and peace and beauty in these circles of humanity. It is not merely a common crime of embezzlement, but the aggravated one of the embezzlement of be- nevolent and trust funds and forces. Take heed, my friends. This were very serious breach of manly honor. From it any honesty ought to recoil. Are you, then, holding yourself and all that the good God has intrusted you with as His agent and steward, not as your own, but as His very own ?
As our absolute owner He is, of course, our Master, with fullest authority upon us. For all our being and our doing we are immediately responsible to him. Our employments, recrea- tions, societies, studies, are at His option. Our emplacements, conditions and all that, are matter for His control and approval. Now this is not wild exhortation, but merely statement of the very coldest conclusions in sheer logical neces- sity from the admitted fact of a God, whose we
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are — conclusions from which none who believe in such a God can escape. Every proclamation of duty must have logical basis of common reason. Here is such reason irrefragable, which simply, but imperiously, calls every man to recognize his responsibility under it.
But now we must remember that this God of ours is a ruler and king in His universe. He has wider responsibilities than those that connect with our individual concerns, or even with the concerns of this world. Our performance affects others more widely than we are apt to think, may well reach more widely than we can possibly know. His right to govern absolutely His king- doms, the realms of His own creation no sanity can question. If He rule them not, who shall? Who can? But rightful rule involves a loyal obedience. If God be a King by unquestionable title, then are we his bounden subjects, owing an allegiance as perfect as His Sovereign Right. To refuse such loyal allegiance is rebellion, anarchy ; high, aye, highest treason ! As that government is just, holy, for highest weal of all the earth, as it is the only government of it that is either rightful in authority, adequate in resources or in power, the only one that is even conceivable, the crime of refusing to take the oath of allegiance, and of actual neglect of the duties of loyalty be- comes to reason the more monstrous and insane. It is, so far as that soul's power is concerned, the upturning of the government, the only possible government of the world and of the universe. It
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is the bringing in of chaos, so far as his act can do it. It is the supreme of sin, — of moral and mortal crime. Now again this is not pas- sionate and wild rhetoric, but only the very coldest of unimpeachable logic. Every hamlet, city, state, nation, must have a government with its laws and administrations. Without these there could be no order, security of useful labor, property or life. So in the great world or the uni- versal realms there must be governor and gov- ernment. For you or me to fling out of this vast administration of God in His world is indeed the supreme of guilt. No harm, except to myself, in this revolt of so insignificant an item as my soul ? Well, I have no right, in defiance of God, to hurt or destroy my own soul. It is outrage on Him to hurt, shame or destroy it. It is His treasure, His glory, the one significance of all. But the guilt of such rebellion is as if I had the power to overturn the very throne of the King Himself. This sort of personal disloyalty has filled the earth in all its ages with miseries intolerable, with shames past name or number, wrecking bodies of men, pulling in pieces homes and hearts, breaking down morality, bringing ages to shame and destroying great nations and races of mankind in all the agonies in which nations have had the way of perishing. I^et no meanest and least significant of men imagine that his revolt from God is innocuous because he is himself insignificant. That is a devil's lie. His revolt is the supreme of the guilt of which he is capable.
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That is the cool pronunciation of logical reason in the premises.
But now this government and administration of the Sovereign of the worlds is so absolutely just that revolt from it is proof of a character so deformed as to shock all moral ideals. Besides the rightful authority for rule this King has every imaginable qualification for a perfect ad- ministration of perfect and beneficent laws. He has absolute knowledge, perfect insight of char- acter, motive, performance in the soul of every one of His subjects. He knows absolutely how to fit means to ends. He has ample resources of power to back and enforce His government. His is the only rule on earth in which no subject has ever suffered or ever can suffer any instance or any measure of injustice at governmental hands. That He has not shut out all evil from His universe is only because he must leave men free in order to moral being. All the real evil, injustice, wrong of this or any world has been in the way of revolt against the just and holy law and person of the Divine Ruler of all. No man has ever suffered or ever shall at the hand of God any feather's weight of wrong. If he suffer so at the hand of man the hand that strikes the blow crashes first through the aegis of the Divine protection, dashes aside in sacrilegious defiance the safeguards of the Divine law, and shall suffer the just Divine avenging. The secret, then, of revolt against God and His government must be a deep unlove for the righteousness and
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holiness of it and of Him. That rule hedges him in from a thousand evil and hurtful things and shuts him up to the things that are sweet and pure and holy. So come his alienations and rebellions. So have come all that has outraged man and wrecked the ages. It has been wrought in despite of God.
Now this God is in His own person the perfec- tion of all that is great in wisdom, power, justice, truth, therefore to be admired of all the right- hearted of the moral universe. But He is the eternal goodness as well. The perfection of all love and loveliness is in Him. The normal, sane, holy of the whole creation wonder at, love and adore Him. The sinless angels bow down before Him with ascriptions of ecstatic worship. The white-robed saints sing the lofty songs of ever- lasting praise. There is nothing in Him to repel any just, pure and holy soul, but everything to attract and hold it in everlasting and enthusiastic delight. All perfections in Him are infinite. Flaws and faults to repel there are none. Rever- ence, aw^e, adoration are the natural, the inevit- able outcome in any normal spirit. Who has it not is in some strange attitude of intellectual illusion or moral obliquity. Worship thou the God over all, blessed forever !
But now this God has watched over an erring and sinful world with an infinite patience and for- bearance, trained it in a slow and reluctant knowl- edge of Himself, taught it as it was able to bear the instruction, prepared it to the fuller and final
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revelation, then came, out of all dimness and dis- tance, showed His very face, heart, will, in Jesus of Nazareth. The Man Divine ! The Man Beau- tiful ! Seeing Him so, we have not merely good- ness, mercy and righteousness, but Love in its loftiest form, and infinite in its measurelessness. A love is manifest in Him of the Holy for the unholy, a pity that knows no bounds, that will uplift the very nature of the evil into a holiness that shall mean eternal beatitude ; that shall set the weakest and frailest of sinful men into the grandeur of His own likeness and the splendor of fellowship with Himself in His eternal Home. A love it is which will do this, not by an easy fiat, but by an infinite sacrifice, of Himself, through a life of humiliation, exile, weariness and pain, bearing all the ills of a poverty-smitten humanity; through a death of infamy and anguish, bearing the sins of a world and all its evil ages as if they had been His own ; bearing them in extremest agony in the Garden and on the Cross, expi- ating them in His own body and soul, on the cursed, blessed Tree, so bringing His Ransom to every man, from all His guilt — '' O Love Divine ! O Love excelling ! ' ' And beyond this, behold a new gift, the mighty Spirit breathed on men to quicken them into spiritual recognition of their needs, into apprehension of God, into vision of the Christ, till they shall cast themselves at His feet, willing captives of this love supreme and Divine ! In that surrender they find a Divine touch of renewing grace for the very soul and
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rise up into passions of holiness, gratitude and responsive love to Him who hath so first loved them. If there be such a God, who hath '^so loved,'' and if I believe it, is it not monstrous in me to fail of a grateful and most tender and loyal and matchless love for Him ? Do I say, '' Why, He is so great that He can not care for my love or my personal attitude towards Him, anyway '' ? Strange reasoning that ! What He wants in us His children is character. What character is that which bears no loving gratitude for infinite favors, undeserved, amazing and redemptive and at awful cost? Such character were less than human, worse than brutal. One saying that, forgets that love loves love. The greater the love, the greater its love for love. The love of God makes infinite claim for love returned. That return of love for love satisfies the heart of our God as no sacrifice or service besides can do. That return of the human love for the love Divine is not only the proof of the new heart of the great Redemption, but is the way of its greatness. This power to love the holy and the beautiful, the God and His Christ, is itself holiness and beauty. When that love comes to absorb and command us, then dull duty and heavy obligation cease to press, and sweet liberty in the chosen holiness is life and life more abundant. We have entered, so, the life and likeness of the Christ. We are making fast for the * ' Perfect Manhood ' ' which is the goal for us of the ' ^ Mighty Love ' '
Now the logical sequence of an intellectual be-
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lief in a God such as our God seems to us, is, in- disputably, the mandate of the Greatest Master of morals, the conclusion of reason, and the final word of the theistic conscience, *'Thou SHALT love the Lord, thy God, with all thine heart and all thy mind and all thy soul and all thy strength" ! Thou shalt ! Now I say again, I have made no frantic or fanatical appeal. I have carefully abstained from the effort to stir your emotions in this or any one of the addresses of this series. It has been a cool appeal to fair reason and to nothing else. In this discourse I have done nothing but say that if you at all believe in the God in whom we do all believe, you are solemnly bound by sound reason, real sanity, to submit yourselves with all you have and are, or hope to have and be, to Him as His own and not your own ; to render to Him every obedience and active service which He requires of any obedient soul, and that you do all this in the liberty and with the gladness of an over- coming love. The facts of the case, as we hold them, demand all this. No man, woman, or child can be acquitted of the most grievous sin, before the bar of his own reason, judgment, or conscience unless he be in that attitude. If he plead some inability, I point him to the great source of all ability in this matter. He has but to lay his disabled heart into the hands of One mighty to renew and make it able. He shall get, so, a New Heart. His plea of inability will avail him naught. His only plea for neglect or post-
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ponement will be that of unwillingness, which is but confession of his voluntary guilt and most irrational behavior. The true, reasonable course is clear as the day. The time to take it is now ! lyCt REASON, at last, have way.
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CHAPTER IX
THE UNITY OF CHRIST'S PEOPI.E
That they may be one, even as ue are one. — Jesus The Christ.
Critics, scoflfers, disbelievers, superficial ob-
ser\'ers, and Romanists are wont to oxy out upon the diversities of name, order, and faith amongst the Evangelical Sects. At first glance there seems reason. The last census gives us about one hundred and twenty-five Christian denomina- tions in this republic I We have thirteen st^'les of Methodist, thirteen of Baptist, sixteen of Lutheran, twelve of Presbyterian, and so on. Endless schism and division, it seems. The Papacy stands proud of its seamless robe ; scofiers cr\' on us and we are put on the defensive. ''Out of the one Book of infallible truth, lo, how man}^ faiths ! " ' ^ If God did indeed give man a revela- tion of Himself and the way of a sinner's salva- tion, it ought to be definite and comprehensible b}^ all men and in the same sense." ''How can you wonder that we refuse to credit your Book, when you devout believers interpret it in so con- trar}^ ways and are in endless dispute about it among yourselves ? " So the question runs.
Well, then, let it be frankly said that denomina- tions have split and multiplied beyond good reason
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and, sometimes, quite beyond good temper. There is now no good reason for twelve kinds of Pres- byterians in this country. There are no corre- sponding divergencies of faith. The church was broken into North and South by the civil war. That is over and its issues settled. The Scotch Presbyterians were broken by great historic crises in their own land, largely over questions of church and state. Their divergencies are chiefly tradi- tional now. The Dutch Reformed abide by the traditions of their origin, or, if there be still reason for their separation from the larger body of Pres- byterianism, it lies in their large church endow- ments which might be imperilled by merging into another ecclesiastical organism. The Baptists and Methodists are broken into their fragments chiefly by traditional prejudices and variant em- phases on ecclesiastical methods, without serious divergencies on essential points of doctrinal belief. All these minor subdivisions in each great denom- ination might well be — ought to be — merged. That would be vastly to the advantage of the kingdom of Christ and the prosperity of the churches. One group of Presbyterians, for example, will sing nothing but the Psalms of David. Another will not use any musical instrument except the human voice in their service of praise. Another will not vote or take civil ofiice, or fellowship those who do it, till the state, in its constitution, writes God and His Christ the supreme Ruler of the nation, and so on. The passing of the Confederacy, sole cause of the breach, leaves yet the Northern and
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Southern Presbyterians separate. May that schism soon be healed !
The thing, however, to be noted is that all these branches of the denominations hold substantially the same doctrinal positions ; are separated on questions that have nothing to do with the great features of the Gospel. They are all equally Evangelical, It would make large saving of machinery, labor, and cost should we consolidate all these petty divisions into grand and solid unities under the common denominational name. lyCt us find the "common denominator^'!
Now we come to the larger question of the de- nominations themselves. The first thing to be said is that all the denominations called Evangel- ical agree absolutely as to the essential and funda- mental teachings of the Word of God and as to what are those fundamentals. Their divergencies are along lines of confessed non-essentials. Each admits that the others hold all that is essential to salvation, sanctification and effective service. They diverge on questions of mode, as for immersion as the mode of Baptism which separates the Baptist from the great mass of the Christian world. The Congregationalist differs from his twin brother the Presbyterian only in his preference for what he esteems a more free and democratic autonomy of the individual church. The Episcopalian holds to the ' ' Historic Episcopate ' ' for his differentia- tion from other protestantism. The Methodist wants for government an elective Bishopric, which is but a general superintendency of the churches.
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It is perfectly correct to say that the divisions of the Evangelical Christian world into denomina- tions are not due to differing interpretations of God's revelation of Himself or of His plan of sal- vation. Nor are they commonly due to even differences of emphasis as to the relative import- ance of these doctrines derived from the great Book. As between the Calvinist and Arminian it is such a difference of emphasis on the Divine and human sovereignties, without the denial of either, which separates them. The Methodist prays Calvinism with all his might, while the Presbyterian preaches and works free-will and responsibility with an equal energy. All Evan- gelicals stand firm with one foot on each of these two grand phases of revealed truth.
The real reason for so many organizations of believers in the Divine Word and the Divine Christ must be sought elsewhere than in the divergence of consent to any of the cardinal doctrines of grace. All evangelicals alike hold to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, — three persons in the one God ; the miraculous concep- tion and birth of our Incarnate Lord ; His sacri- ficial death in atonement for our sins ; His resurrection, ascension and enthronement in glory and His second coming to restore all things in a redeemed earth. They all alike believe that man was created in innocency, that he fell from that estate into sin, the consequent sinfulness of all the race, and the ruin which has come of it ; in his inability to save himself, but in a full
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and free salvation in Jesus Christ through repent- ance, regeneration and forgiveness by faith ; in the resurrection of the dead and everlasting life in the world to come for all true believers. These are the essentials of revelation, and to them all we assent unhesitantly under whatever denomi- national banners we may be mustered.
When now we come to inferences from the Word and to historic conclusions in regard to forms of church government and the like, arrivals are divergent. Some judge that the New Testa- ment indicates a primitive church under the rule of teaching and preaching Elders, the latter being the primitive Bishops. Others reckon that it rather presupposes a democratic-congregational order ; others that it provides a full-fledged Dio- cesan Bishopric ; others that it starts at once in a Papacy under the domination of Peter the Primate and the Vicegerent of Christ Himself. So the Christian world divides itself on these confessedly secondary and non-essential things, mainly matters of inference and questions of his- tory, on which men may diverge without the least failure of faith in or supreme loyalty to the Word. These divisions multiply, as I have said, on occasion of questions still more remote from these grand essentials in which all are one.
Then come matters of ritual, remoter still. Some are so constituted that they love best to worship in set forms of stately order regularly recurring through all the years, written into books of form, linking together the worships of
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the old ages with the present, and yet to carry the reverence, loyalties and praises of generations now unborn. They want the habitual in which they can suffer no surprises, no lapses from good taste nor much of bending to current circum- stance. They want little of the bursting in of momentary enthusiasms in their service. They love to give way to the esthetic in worship and so surround it with stately architecture — cathe- dral columns, arches, nave and transept, aisle, choir and altar. They array their worship in majestic music, their ministrants in gorgeous symbolic vestments with pomp of ceremonial. So come the Ritualistic churches, holding yet the like precious faith with all Protestantism. Others love the wholly extemporized service with full liberty to vent the fervid passions and enthusiasms of the hour and of their great salvation in ''amens" and "hallelujahs" and ''glory to God" in the midst of the most solemn acts of prayer and adoration. Others of stiller sort, while they want the extemporaneous, yet when they feel most deeply are the most profoundly hushed into silence before God, can not bear to have that stillness of soul broken by any outward demonstration. They want their worship direc- ted and inspired by intelligent display of the Divine truth, and so emphasize preaching, — Gospel teaching, — as center and spring of wor- ship. So all harmless and normal tastes, tradi- tions, forms and grades of culture demand and find their satisfaction, their advantage, in the
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various modes of sincere worship somewhere in the range of the denominations, all equally loyal to the essential verities of evangelical Christian faith. The Methodist goes the straighter, swifter and more exultingly to heaven, shouting, sing- ing, and with observation, for his free ways. The man of form and ritual goes the more serenely, with the greater dignity and certainty, home to his glory by way of the prayer-book and cathe- dral, led by his bishop in gorgeous robe with gilded crosier. Let him go thither in full confi- dence of his apostolic succession ! We will go in the quiet and reverent stillness of our Presbyter- ian formlessness and extemporaneous prayer, un- hampered by extended ritual, finding profit and delight in our more emphasized side of instruction, inspiration and edification, which comes of the larger importance of the sermon in the service of God's house. So we love to worship in audito- riums rather than in the vast cathedral spaces, where worship, if followed at all, must be fol- lowed by aid of a book, and where scenic effects are apt to take the place of our appeals to a reas- oned faith.
Advantage, then, or disadvantage of an organic unity of Christendom, for which so many are in these days so earnestly contending, as if the prayer of our Lord that ' ' they all may be one ' ' meant that ? With such unity, they say, all the agencies for the world's redemption might be consolidated into one irresistible supremely effective and world- embracing system, saving an immense amount in
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men and money now wasted on needless and costly machineries of the one hundred and fifty different churches. Grant that that might be true.
Then there would be no waste of energy by inter- ference of various agencies in a given field. One little village, able to support one church, would not be cursed with a half dozen weak, warring rival organizations in Christ's name, to the scan- dal of the Gospel — which may be true.
Then the one church, under the one control, could concentrate all the enterprises for man's uplifting into one intelligent and consistent plan and bend all the energies of Christendom, along straight lines to that end, which, again, might be true.
Then they urge that the great object of our lyOrd's Prayer, namely, ''that men might be- lieve, ' ' would be accomplished. Seeing the Chris- tian world in solid unity, unbelievers would be overwhelmed with the conviction of the verity of the faith which had wrought so solid a consent of the rational world and embodied it in so mas- sive a unit. The Devil — your enemy — can stand the irregular assaults of one hundred petty skir- mishing parties, but would quail before the mighty on-coming of solid Christendom in arms for the kingdom — which might perhaps be.
Well, then, am I an enthusiast for such organic unity ? Far from it, at present or in any near future. I do not believe that such a vast consol- idation of all Christendom into one organization, with one creed and ritual, would so readily win or
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so well serve and hold all the variant tastes, tra- ditions, cultures and constitutions of mankind, as can and do these various organizations in the Christ's name. As things are there is some creed, some form of worship, some ideal of service, which is suited to every class, type, and condition of humanity, which appeals to and is likely to win, as no regimen of any one church whatever could do. My taste does not suit another's, nor does the other's mine. My intellectual, social, moral and spiritual nature is better served by the order of one church than it could be by that of another, but that does not settle the matter for the other. The many men of many minds will be best served in Christ by the many churches of many kinds. It is therefore that in Divine Provi- dence these many denominations have come to be and to be each one so richly owned and blest of God. They have not been a providential mistake. They have not labored under God's curse. They have been established and built up with prayers and serious convictions and under Divine guid- ance ; have stood, each one for something that needed emphasis, or at any rate liberty, and have done great work for God and man.
Then much, very much, is to be said of the development of energy, zeal and enthusiasm in each of these bodies living and working alongside each other. We are not perfect yet. Rivalries are not an unmixed evil. Three small churches, which can neither of them live easily, will be far more likely to do large work for a town or region
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than one big one which is rich and strong enough to get on without special effort. Each of the three little ones has to work to live, and there is laziness enough in spiritual as in temporal things, to tempt a getting on with as little effort as may be. Suppose that, in this city, there were but one denomination of Christians. It would be big and rich and in need of nothing. It would set its type of observance, life and service. It would grow proud, careless and corrupt or at least con- tent. Now, with so many distinct denominations on the ground, each is on its guard and good be- havior. Each must be active to hold its own and win new adherents. Each must keep itself pure, alert, and Christly or it will suffer. None can lapse far from the standards of the Christ in the midst of so many which are standing for the same Master. Not only is this true in the home lands but abroad. The zeal, sacrifice, heroism and suc- cess of one church in one great field of the heathen world fires the hearts of all to a holy rivalry for the salvation of men which is hastening on the day of the world's redemption. Look back to the times when one vast, rich and powerful ecclesias- ticism reigned over the civilized world. It grew corrupt, infamous, tyranous and intolerable, till to save the very fundamentals of religion its sole supremacy must be overthrown. That over- throw was the salvation of the Roman Catholic Church itself, as well as of this modern time. The sole church of any state or nation soon becomes the state church, which is in its very ideal an in-
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justice and oppression, and in practice lets into the sanctuaries of religion all the corruptions of the state on which it depends. Such a church tends as resistlessly as gravitation to the crushing out of free thought and the compulsion of the conscience. Acts of conformity, with the Inqui- sition to back them, are the logic of the one church, a visible, organic and portentous unity. In no land to-day which one sole church dominates is that church pure or even decent, or the bodies, properties, souls or thoughts of men free. The one church assumes to control the present govern- ments, societies, homes and lives of men, and to wield the awful sanctions of eternit}^ for enforce- ment of the outrages of time. The nearer such a sole church of a nation or race should come to complete success, that is to the unquestioning allegiance of the entire people, the more awful would be its baleful power. The universal sway of one ecclesiastical system, unquestioned and without a rival, would mean the enslavement of the race and the wreck of the Gospel ; would be, in the present default of human perfection, more to be feared than any other conceivable calamity. It may do, possibly, in the Millenium but not now. But how shall men know what to believe in this diversity of the sects ? Believe ? Wh}^, believe what they all hold in common, if you must believe by direction of others and not by 3^our own investi- gations. That central plexus of doctrine stands out clear, rings out in all the confessions. The diversity of sects which hold that is but the fullest
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possible evidence that that is the teaching of the Word. If everybody, from every point of view, differing in everything else, is at one with every- body else on these points, then they must be the essential Christian teaching. No one church of the organic unity could bear so irrefragable a tes- timony to the essentials of Bible truth. It is es- tablished, not by the mouth of one witness but of a hundred and fifty denominations of Christians from as many different points of view, and diverg- ing in their conclusions freely except on these grand central things. What testimony so tre- mendous as that could be conceived ? Each of these divergent sects converging and at one on these central truths, holding these contents of the faith precisely alike, is a witness of independent weight as to the veritable teaching of the Holy Word. Those things which have been ''every- where and always believed by all ' ' must be Bible doctrine. No man can be at sea as to those essen- tials if he have any desire for harbor !
Nor is there now any expenditure of zeal and energy in quarrels of the sects. We are not war- ring with each other. There is more of strife between the Low, Broad, and High in the English State Church, or between different elements in the Roman Catholic Church, than between all the Evangelical denominations of the world to-day. The rivalries here are but the blessed emulations of various regiments, divisions, and corps of the one grand army of our King. We are trying which can run the fastest and farthest to reach
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the souls of men ; whicli can fight the toughest battles against the Devil ; which can give most, do most, suflFer most for Jesus and His Kingdom. We do not hate, mistrust, baflfle and thwart each other. Each presses on in its own field and line, crying ' ' God speed ! Make haste ! ' ' to every other; and each, for every other, is going faster and farther and fighting better and achieving the more grandly. The Rough Riders at San Juan Hill cry to the Tenth Regiment, '^Come on ! '' and the Tenth Regiment shouts back, " Here we are with you ! See who will get there first ! ' ' So they win.
The unity for which the Redeemer prayed, — a perfect unity of spirit, of love and of great co- work, — is well nigh come, is gloriously visible amongst all the divisions of the Protestant Evan- gelical host. Only the non-evangelical, the Romanist and the caviler see a hostile and con- flicting host on this side. We have and will have none of it. We have field enough and work enough without strife within ourselves.
Organic unity ? Impossible ! For the only proposition of it so far, is on terms that we all turn back to the bosom of the old Mother Church of Rome, or run flocking into the circumscribed spaces of a church which in the United States counts but six hundred thousand members to our eighteen millions, into the narrow communion of the only Protestant Church which unchurches us all, bars our pastors from its pulpits, denies the validity of our ordinances and Sacraments and
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turns us over to the ' ' uncovenanted mercies of God!" It offers such unity, not on the great essentials of the Gospel, but on acceptance of the Historic Episcopate, that is on the basis not of revelation but of tradition and studies in history whose conclusions are disputed by the learning and piety of the greater part of the Protestant world. Organic unity can only come, if at all, ought only to come ever, on the basis of the cen- tral and essential things of the clear revelation of God.
Organic unity ? Impossible on any, at present, visible terms ! And undesirable under any present conditions ! Vastly perilous, for this age, were it possible ! It is not that unity for which Our Lord was praying in His wonderful intercession. The unity for which He longed and for which the Christian world is seeking is not one of form but of spirit, and can not, assuredly, be forwarded by seeking to impose as its condition an ungrounded inference of men for the Oracles of God. Least of all can it be hoped for on condition of universal assent to a historic proposition which the vast majority of students of history utterly deny.
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CHAPTER X
THK WAY OF CERTITUDE.
If any man will do the Father^ s will he shall know the doctrine.
— Jesus, the Christ.
Doing the will, then, is the way to clear light of truth. Knowledge here is not complete ; yet definite, comprehensive knowledge is desirable and sufficiently practicable. The Master is tell- ing us the way to get it. Not study, reflection, investigation, but something else ; viz., practical application of the thing that is already clear. You are to yield yourself in actual obedience to the truth you already have in any line in order to get more of it. So pursuing, you will get that ''more." Our modern philosophers are telling us just now that most of our confident beliefs are reached not at all by simple process of reason. They are just beginning, nineteen centuries be- lated, to catch up with Jesus.
If you are at work in chemistry you must use the chemical laws you know, and by experiment come to progress. In mathematics use all you have mastered in order to reach the higher walks among the stars. You cannot use multiplication and division until you have mastered addition
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and subtraction. The text is little else than say- ing that you must avail of the first rung of the ladder in order to reach the higher. To get your cherries from the top branches of the tree you must climb the trunk. To make progress in truth you must use what you know, must mean real business, have a practical aim, be not a mere dilettante, playing with it. That of all lines of truth is general law. But as you come up to the realm of truth that is great, more vital than math- ematics and chemistry — to the kinds of truth which lay hold on the moral and spiritual in man and the universe, whose issues are of infinite and immortal concern, there can be no safe trifling. Dilettantism — playing with truth up here — is moral depravity. Every truth up here is a moral imperative. To know here and not to do is sin, disloyalty, ruin. Down there in the chemistries you may know mainly in the interest of knowing, with no purpose of practical use ; but up here in the domain of conscience, to know is to come under the supreme obligation, the absolute neces- sity. Each truth is the maundement of God. Not one is to be sought fairly or held guiltlessly in the mere interest of knowing it. Not one can be harmlessly stored away unused. Now and here, then, there can be no intellectual candor in quest of truth unless there be readiness to apply that already known. Of course, if one will not conform to the truth he has he is reluctant to admit more, which being known, will only fling him into more glaring inconsistency and more
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flagrant guilt. No, he who will not square character and conduct to the moral and spiritual truth he holds, can not be a candid seeker for more truth, he may be false to it. His whole purpose will be to get rid of what he has because it stings and goads him as guilty. He does not want anything further in that line.
I cannot resist the conviction that the secret of much of the skepticism which men boast — of all which they boast — concerning religious truth, lies right here. This truth requires holiness of heart, rectitude in life, supreme service of God, and continual effort for redemption of men . The average man is averse to all that, and therefore, by all the energy of the evil in him will not admit the truth of divine revelation or the verity of the divine requirement. Skepticism is oftenest not the outcome of serious and candid inquiry, but of the uncandid attitude which will not obey the truth it knows and so determines to deny it and admit no more. Candor reigns only in the soul which is obedient to truth so far as it has found it, and candor is essential to attainment of truth.
Of course I am not speaking of the solemn doubts of men like Romanes, who lived long enough to recall his former unbelief and re-enter the church of his childhood's communion, and who declares out of the depths, "I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe has lost to me its soul of love- liness. When at times I think, as at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hal-
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lowed creed that once was mine and the lonely mystery of existence as I now find it, I shall ever find it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible. ' ' Whose heart has not been touched with the like wail of Pro- fessor Clifford, as he sailed away from England to his death, too early to get back to the old moor- ings of faith from which Professor Romanes launched to his glory in the serenities of a Christ- ian peace.
That sort of unbelieving we must respect and stand in awe of. But that is not the common type. It has candor and is now swinging back, through all the realms of science and philosophy, to the old land marks of at least theistic believing.
Now, further, somebody down here is com- plaining that all spiritual truth is not made clear. It ought to stand out definite and indubitable, they say. I say, no. What good if it did ? Men would not obey it. It is a mercy of God that He does not bolt in on the unwilling soul the whole bulk of moral and spiritual truth. It would only aggravate the guilt and curse of the disobedient. If one will not obey the truth he knows, why should more of it be thrust on him, that he may be false to it ? Time enough for more when he uses what he has got. Every man clearly knows enough to make a moral test of him, to show what his attitude toward righteousness is. Paul declares that. It is, so, a vast mercy of God that only candor — i. e., the purpose to conform to
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known truth — can make thorough mastery of moral and spiritual truth.
Who knows and will not do — many stripes; who knows not — few. Who will not do — the less he knows the better.
Further, to do the known will of God — /. e., righteousness — is to come into that deepest and most indisputable knowledge of experience. The man has tried the truth and knows it as it has worked in his own case. '' Nobody need talk to me now, I 've tried it and know." Coleridge was asked once, ' ' How can I know that the Gos- pel is true ? ' ' That keenest and most brilliant of philosophers, and not wont to be chary of words, simply answered, ''Try it." Put alongside the brilliant Coleridge the old woman whose Bible was marked all through '' T " and ''P." Asked what that meant she said, '' Why, I come to a promise and I try it in prayer and faith and mark it *T,' — ' tried.' And when the promise is ful- filled to me I mark it ' P,'— ' proved.' " She and Coleridge, from the two extremes of the intel- lectual realm, are at one. That is it. Put the Gospel to the test of experiment. That is the way it was meant to be used. It is no curiously devised scheme of intellectual subtleties. It is not a mere mental gymnasium. It is of value only as a practical life scheme. It is a working force without one theory or fact of mere specu- lative interest. It is a practical force not to be grasped by mere intellect, only to be understood when felt. It is light which you can know only
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by experience, as the blind can never know sun- light or color. It is a life which no man can know until he lives it ; a warmth none can know save by basking in it ; a love none can understand but the lover ; a power none can conceive until it thrills him — until, using it, he finds its divine mightiness ; a joy which only the rejoicing can know ; a peace which passeth understanding, save of those who sit in its holy enfoldment. The peace which Jesus gives His own comes as the world gives not, and is of a sort the world knows not, nor can break. Now it is the way of nature, and of the new nature, that one experience of inspiring truth shall kindle passion and create power for another and a finer. This vestibule is so fair, I must press within the doors of the tem- ple. This holy place is so enchanting, I must enter with reverent audacity the Holy of Holies where God is. One rich experience makes us all- athirst for another. So the soul is led on from grace to grace and glory to glory, up into the same image, up into the very likeness of Christ, up into his eternal palaces on high.
You see now, I think, the doctrine of the text. Moral, religious, spiritual truth is all for the direction of life, creation of character, practical application. Who will not obey and apply what he knows of it, will only be damaged — dammed more deeply — by having the whole mass of that unwelcome truth dumped upon him. He faces out toward it in a frame of repugnance to which candor is impossible. Belief of it, and of more of
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it, would but distress, irritate, and plunge the man into deeper guilt. That attitude of spiritual repugnance can wholly distort mental operation and enable one to wholly discredit spiritual truth, and does that to wide and appalling extent ; and, finally, the spiritual truths are of such sort as can not in the great body of them be really known, save by their experience. You must see, then, the tremendous force of the words of our lyord. He only who doeth the will shall know the doctrine.
But now the text implies that to an extent the will and doctrine are known already, written in men's hearts so that they may be put on trial, proven, and lead on to the fuller apprehension of all truth ; that the great test of candor, earnest- ness, the moral attitude of the soul may be made. Oh, I am not making with you now a plea in the interest of any mere speculative. There is like to be in every social group an element which, while believing certain religious propositions, is yet in doubt as to many others, and excuses itself from venturing out on the truth it does hold for fear of the deeper waters into which it may get after a little. It is looking out for consequences after it gets beyond the distance it can now see. It is afraid to commit itself fully to the truth it holds, for dread that it may not find further truth enough to live by, or may fail of loyalty to it. It is that attitude of many, maybe most of us, to which I speak. It is a wide unrest, a half agnostic grop- ing in the dark, of our time, in the church as
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well as out of it. I would fain help my fellows out into rest, light, sure standing. So I say the simplest, directest thing that can be said : You are somewhere and know something. Begin, then, just where you are ; conform character and be- havior at once to what you know. That is the will of God, that you obey instantly the truth you know. That, for the present, is the whole will of God for you. Obey that will and lo ! the promise — you shall know ! Promise absolute, un- conditional. Do that and you shall know. Mental law promises that ; the law of moral and spiritual truth promises that ; God guarantees it. If you fail to obey the truth you know, you wouldn't obey any other truth along that line. When you use what you have it will be time enough to give you more.
To illustrate. I began once this line of imme- diate urgency with a young man, an editor, of keen, intellectual furniture and good culture, who had lost belief in a personal God, and cast away the old wives' fable of a soul. He was in a decline, but comfortable and about the house. ' ' I know I can't live," he said, ''but when I die, that's the end." I set out our Christian thought of the soul, and its grand life after the body, as well as I could. He could only say listlessly, ' ' It may be, but I don' t believe it. " I caught at that ' ' may be ' ' and pressed it. "There may be an immortal soul, then ? " '' Yes. " " There may be a God, then!" ''H'm, possibly." '* He may then know us, care for us, help us? " '* Oh, it is possible,"
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but listlessly. '' Well, then, it is possible, if you and I should ask Him and promise Him to act on any truth He might show us, it is possible that He would lead us to see things exactly as they are ? '' He looked up and said, ''Why, yes, it is possible/' Then I said, ''You are an honest, candid man ; will you frankly accept and act reas- onably on any truth into which you may be led in that way ? ' ' He answered unhesitatingly, ' ' Yes, indeed." I fell on my knees and prayed thus : " O God, if there be any God, show this man his soul, if he has one ; give him the fact about immor- tality, if there be any ; and about what he must do and be, if there is anything that should be done, for Christ's sake, if there be any Christ, Amen." And he said "Amen," with emphasis. ' ' That is exactly the prayer for me — the only one to which I could have said 'Amen.' " He prom- ised me that he would use that prayer himself, and would hospitably entertain and act on any truth of which he should become convinced. He was as good as his word, prayed that prayer sin- cerely, but at first without expectation, then more earnestly, then incessantly. As his unbelief began to melt away, point by point, new truth was reached and put to use. It was beautiful, wonderful, inspir- ing to see how the lyord led him, until he exulted and triumphed in God.
One midnight, six months later, he called his wife, who had been an unbeliever with him, to his bedside, and said, "My darling, I am going now to Jesus, my Redeemer, and yours. With
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the dawn I shall be over there with Him in Heaven. You and the children will be here alone. God help you ! Will you come on after me, and bring the children with you to me up there? I shall be watching for you whenever you come." She made the sacred promise and they sealed it there with a holy kiss, and she kept it sacred, and with her children the widow is on her way to share with him the glory in which he has been dwelling for twenty years.
Dr. Bushnell was a tutor in Yale College, dur- ing a time of great religious interest, and was an unbeliever. In unrest himself he was distressed lest he might be hindering many young men who were prone to follow him. Yet he could not be- lieve far enough to help them or even to get out of their way. His great and generous heart was full of trouble. At last he said, ''There is a dis- tinction between right and wrong. That I know. I do believe in a God." Then he threw himself on his knees, dedicated himself there passionately and forever to serve and do the right so far as he could see it, and to contend against the wrong for- ever, and to seek new light that he might follow it. Thenceforward, standing for the right, seek- ing of God to know it more perfectly, one doubt after another was resolved, truth after truth came clear and flaming upon his soul ; he followed it unhesitatingly, until he stood through all his great and holy manhood a foremost figure in all spiritual and intellectual realms for half a century of grand and saving work. He totally dedicated
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himself to obedience to all the truth he clearly knew, grew in it to the insight of a seer, the stat- ure of a giant, and the glory of a saint. These facts have been published since, but he outlined that phase of his early life as we rode together in the saddle over the rolling prairies of Minnesota, in the first year of my ministry.
My appeal, then, to all men who are troubled and hindered by speculative doubts, — as who is not who reads and thinks ? who do not know on any wide scale what they believe, — is, '*Give yourself, like Bushnell, in an instant surrender to the spiritual truth you do know." If you only believe there is a God, give yourself to him in absolute surrender, soul and body, forever, and ask him for further light to truth and duty. If you only know a contrast between sin and holi- ness, then dedicate yourself utterly to holiness and its pursuit, its championship, and you shall come to know all. It is step by step, one step at a time ; so arrival is made. If you wait to see all the way before you begin your march, you will never start. God is pressing you toward His heavenly kingdom. You don't know about elec- tion or effectual calling, or the saint's persever- ence ; about the theories of inspiration or atone- ment ; haven't given much attention to theology anyway ; can't even recite the shorter catechism, may be. What of that ? I am sorry about all that in a way, but what of it ? Yield your whole soul under pressure of the Holy Spirit to God in the mighty vow to follow instantly and to the
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end all the light you get ; cast yourself on Him like a child in the dark, and if there be a God He will not let you fall into the abyss. That you yield yourself to Him if there be any God must be the will of God. Do this will and it is not in the nature of things or of God that you should fail to know all righteousness as need of the knowledge comes. ^' The simple, entire and affectionate sur- render of the soul to God, if there be any God, must be salvation, ' ' and the all of it. Here let us stand together, amidst all the swirl of faiths and doubts, stand together secure, however much or little of the great system of truth we may chance to know. He will not suffer any soul that is wholly and lovingly surrendered to Him to stum- ble on and perish in the dark. Why should He ? He will not fling away any life dedicated to Him in faith. How can He ? As God is God He can not.
This, then, is salvation here and now, every- where and always — hearty surrender to God. ^'This do and thou shalt live." This do and thou shalt know all doctrine that man needs know, and have all power that man needs have, and become all that man needs be on earth or in heaven. This is salvation, — full salvation, — the all of salvation. This? Why this, right here and now, for all of us ! Quite as well now as to- morrow, here as elsewhere. Quite as well — vastly better !
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CHAPTER XI
REASON AND FAITH.
Come now and let us reason together^ saith the Lord. — Isaiah.
The Creator has endued man with reason, not for rust but for use. It is in the range of the highest faculties, up here with the conscience and the spiritual. I^ike the conscience, it is called on for service in every free act. Its ofl&ce is to col- late the facts set in upon us by the senses, by consciousness, by testimony, or from whatever source ; to consider their evidence, arrange them in their relations, systematize them, and to estimate their relative and their absolute importance and order all life in accord with its conditions and en- vironment. Between pretended and actual fact it must be the arbiter. It places before the con- science the data for obligation. It passes on and authenticates to the spiritual nature the facts of the spiritual world for its basis of reality, else the spiritual is the degeneracy of superstition pure and simple. Just as action in the common, every- day life of man without sanction of reason is in- sanity, so is action in spiritual or moral realms without its sanction insane. John lyocke says,
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**lie that takes away reason to make way for revelation puts out the light of both." Reason must justify, or conscience must condemn, every voluntary act. Man dares not exclude reason from its high function in any sphere of human interest on peril of his manhood — on peril of running counter to the decrees of God recorded in every department of nature as well as in the written Word.
We have before, in this series of discourses, re- flected on the strict reasonableness of the expecta- tion that a personal, free, and intelligent God, if there be one, interested in and responsible for man, will reveal Himself; that he will surely do it if man stands, in any way, in need of special knowl- edge of Him, His laws, His relations to His creatures, or of his own destiny and wise prepara- tion for it. We have further seen that it is supremely reasonable to believe in such a God ; that such a belief is, indeed, the only fairly work- able hypothesis in any field of science, philosophy or morals. It is, therefore, the natural conclusion of sound reason that there must be, somewhere, such a revelation of these greatest matters of human concern. If there be such a revelation extant it is unquestionably in this Book. There is none other which, to the reason of mankind, has show of like august claim. This has justified its claim by inexorable proofs, not only through investigation of its evidences internal and external, but by actual experiment of its power in the up- lift of individual men and in the glory of the na-
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tions which have embraced it and sought approx- imately to apply its sublime law.
Now, by the very hypothesis of the need and the reasonable expectation of such a Divine rev- elation, it is to be anticipated that, when it comes, it will contain much of vital truth which the reason unaided could never have reached. Such content alone can justify revelation to reason. It were strange conceit in man to suppose that he, so infinitesimal a part of this universe, could make for himself mastery of all that he needs to know of it ; or to imagine that he can completely under- stand all that is clearly revealed. Revelation is of the Infinite which only the Infinite can fully comprehend. No finite intelligence may imagine that it can, or ought to, wholly comprehend all that is revealed. Any one of us would need a good deal of study to understand the mechanism of an intricate loom for weaving the elaborate pattern of a silken ribbon. Keenest intellects have searched for ages the secrets of the visible universe, and none has found the last word of revealing na- ture along the lines of his little ' ' closed sphere ' ' of investigation. The universe is vaster than its material side. Its spiritual basis is incapable of investigation by scientific ' ' instruments of pre- cision ' ' or mathematical formulae. We can not master it by the senses. We have not ranged through and learned it by experience. Only on the narrowest verges of it are we yet hovering. To its depths and lengths and heights we have not penetrated. It hath not entered the heart of
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man to conceive the fulness of that vast unex- plored. Were it all laid out before us I suppose that its terms would be so outside our experience that it would still be incomprehensible to us. Only when we ourselves shall have entered those infinite invisibilities and become of their awful order shall we begin fairly to comprehend them. That is fair conclusion of pure reason. That is not to discard reason nor to slur it, but to use it with supreme freedom and just appreciation.
Yonder man who will believe nothing which he does not understand ? A lecturer once announced that he was to speak in a certain hall on the proposition that you should ' ' believe nothing that you can't understand." An old farmer met him and asked, ' ' Are you the man who is going to lecture over at the hall to-night?" "Yes, sir ; I am." '" What is it you are going to talk about?" He told him. "Now, that's curious, isn't it? I've been a good deal puzzled about one thing. That is my pasture over there. I suppose that you can tell me how it is that those colts eat the grass and it comes out hair all over them, and the sheep eat the grass and it comes out wool, and the pigs eat it and it comes out bristles, and the geese eat it and it comes out feathers. That bothers me, and I'm mighty glad to find a man that can tell me all about it. Can't? Why, don't you believe it? I tell you it's just so. Can't ? Well, I reckon I won't go to the lecture, then, if you are stumped by such a little thing as that ! "
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Yet on these vast matters of God's revelations of Himself and of the invisible and spiritual universe men are saying that it is unreasonable to believe anything that you can not understand ! Such ajQ&rmation is the acme of unreason. No man, thinking, would accept as a revelation from God that which contained nothing to transcend the powers of the mere unaided human under- standing. By that token you would affirm it the work of man, and as a revelation worthless and needless. Man needs revelation from God only to make known to him things which he ought to know, but which are so far above him as to be out of his unaided reach, — so beyond him that they will be dim with mystery, — relations of so super-sensuous sort that it is impossible that he should yet altogether comprehend them. We need from revelation such propositions in regard to sin and its penalties and redemption from it as none but God could make — such as in motive, in process and in their nature, to be beyond the scope or authority of reason. Till we are as great as God He will be the august mystery of mysteries as He is the holy of holies and the in- finite of infinitudes. His sufficiently, yet parti- ally, unveiled truth will stretch away into the fathomless and the insoluble mysteries for joy of unravelling to all eternity. O thou speck, thou flitting mote of an instant's tarrying on the outer rim of a minute section of this little wheel — the earth — who can not comprehend even that, will you, such and standing so, looking off" into the
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tremendous machineries of an illimitable, spiritual infinitude, lift up your hand in the face of God revealing, to swear that you will believe only what you understand ? That were ineffable con- tempt of reason ! That were blasphemy of com- mon sense ! Reason itself demands of revelation what is beyond itself.
As to what is contrary to reason ; a very differ- ent thing from that which is beyond reason. Reason is given to guide all action and to estab- lish all faith. Its highest function — its supreme responsibility — is to weigh the grounds of our most momentous actions and most solemn beliefs. I can never persuade myself that the great Author of reason, — essence and source of all truth, as of all things, — has cut away from the ofi&ces of rea- son the majestic realms of the spiritual, which must command the most important activities and vital problems of man here and of his destinies hereafter. These are the exact themes fittest for the exercise and most effective development of his loftiest powers. They stir the profoundest rational interest and make most directly for gran- deur of reason. Through the rational faculties, too, they make most mightily for the evolution of the moral and spiritual in the race. It is in- credible that these inspiring ranges of loftiest truth in regard to which all men must act should lie outside the field of reason. It is not true, rea- son is not ruled out by revelation. You may, you must, be required to believe much which reason could not have discovered for itself ; but you are
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not required to believe anything that is contrary to reason. You are never in religion to act irra- tionally, that is, without or contrary to reason. That were sheer madness and mockery of God !
''Yet," you say, ''Yet we must accept re- vealed things which quite transcend the powers of unaided reason." Surely. Revelation from God, if of any use at all, will contain such truth. What, then, is the function of reason in regard to it ? This, to discover whether there be reason- able ground for accepting the supposed revelation as truly from God — that is, as a genuine thing. Having made that investigation and settled it that its claim is justified, reason demands accept- ance of the contents of the revelation. This accept- ance by the reason is intellectual faith, correctly called a "rational faith." It is, so far, precisely like your belief in the reports which you receive on the authority of those who know, about lands, peoples, and customs of parts of the world of which you have had no experience. It is precisely as reasonable as your belief, on the authority of the astronomer, in the coming of an eclipse which you could not at all calculate for yourself. Ra- tional faith in the revealed facts of religion is exactly like your intellectual acceptance of the obscure facts of well-attested science on the au- thority of experts. We everywhere do and must plant absolute and controlling faiths on authority, — faiths concerning things which we never have and never could have discovered or even investi- gated for ourselves. In accepting and acting con-
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fidently on these innumerable beliefs, we are act- ing in accord with the most imperative dictates of highest reason. These faiths established on au- thority are the vast majority of all the practical believings of mankind and are of such sort that life on earth would be impossible but for their holding. These things surely believed may have appeared in a high degree opposite to all antece- dent probability, as once seemed all the now dem- onstrated facts of astronomy or even the sphericity of the earth itself. It is reasonable to accept these facts on authority. Neither you nor I have dem- onstrated them, but we do not scoff at each other for believing them. The improbable becomes rational when it is proven ! It is no more con- trary to reason, for it is fact.
Now if you compare the conclusions from a mere human authority with the authentication of a Word of God, when you have rationally settled it that you have a Word of God, what does reason say? Why, surely, that human ''demonstrations^* have contradicted and reversed themselves in tens of thousands of instances ; that to-day is forever reversing yesterday as yesterday did the day be- fore ; that man is fallible ; that his pronunciations are not always reliable ; that he is capable of pre- judgments which wholly warp his candor ; that he is not always honest ; that he is capable of being deceived and even of deceiving others delib- erately. The best of human authorities it is wise to question and cross-question often, especially when they venture into realms outside the mere
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physical, material and mathematical sciences. The most dangerous phase of science is that which deems itself omni-science ! But if reason has set- tled it that we have an authentic Word of God in Revelation, then reason says : ' ' Believe, believe implicitly. The God knows. He can not be mistaken and He can not lie. He alone can, to a certainty, know these out-of-sight and out-of- hearing things about which we need most of all to be assured. Hear Him and heed. Only be careful of right interpreting ! " That is the voice of sound reason. If there be anything there which seems antecedently improbable, why then it seemed so to the King of Siam that water should ever be so solid that men could walk on it or to the ancient world that the earth should be revolving at such an incredible speed on its axis, or that there could be inhabitants at the Antipodes, clinging to the surface, head-downwards, for their lives. Of course there will be before-hand im- probabilities in a revelation of such beings, worlds, destinies as these with which the great Revelation must deal. But in it there will be, can be, nothing which is contrary to reason — for there can be in it nothing which is not true.
There may be in it things which reason, in its present limitations of knowledge, can not reconcile with each other. We ought to calculate on that if we rationally consider our littleness and the narrow reach of our vision. But if anything there seems absolutely opposite to reason, we must be- lieve that we have thus far misinterpreted the rev-
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elation itself, or that it has crept in there by some human copyist's or translater's fault. Contradic- tion to reason can not be in the genuine revelation of Himself, by Himself to man. God is the su- preme Reason and has made us in His image. He is the supreme Truth and can give us only truth. Highest reason bids us believe implicitly what reason declares has come from God.
Reason's work, then, is to establish the fact of a Divine Revelation, the verity, the nature, the extent of the Divine inspiration in it ; the genuine- ness of the documents which convey it ; to fix the Divine intent of it ; to settle whether this section — say the book of Job — be merely biographic narra- tive or a sublime religious drama ; whether that be a story of actual life or a sweet religious idyll of the ancient time, or a holy allegory of penitence and eflFective obedience ; whether this book or song does really belong to the record of revelation or not ; to clear the whole question of obscurity and incertitude ; to relieve its difficulties so far as may be ; to point the reasonable way of solving its seeming inconsistencies ; to fairl}^ interpret it, and then to command faith in it. Reason and scholarship surely have here business enough in hand, and must be allowed their full liberties of most exhaustive investigation. To deny them their legitimate functions here amongst the foundations of faith were to bar them from their highest use — their chief design ; were to sweep away the very basis of a rational believing ; to make faith itself a mere and an idle superstition.
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Freest range and widest liberty for the intelligence of man in the exploration of these loftiest themes in the finest fields for its development and grand- est realms of its spiritual exercise is reason's just demand. Happily, prohibition of such investiga- tion can no longer be enforced on men. Reason will ever find here its most enchanting, inspiring, and fruitful field — win its most brilliant successes and grow to its most stalwart grandeur ; while faith will come, through its investigations, to its most immovable foundations and inexpugnable defenses. None fear the ultimate results save those who distrust the real validity and genuine- ness of the ground- works of their believing.
But reason has a further function. That any- thing whatever has yet been found in this revela- tion which is necessarily contrary to reason I have been unable to discover. That much has been forced upon it and tortured out of it that is wholly opposite to reason and morality and com- mon sense is sadly to be affirmed. This has been effected, however, by misconception of the design, the intent and the nature of the Book which con- tains the record ; by torture and violence done it ; by ignorance and conceit ; by cruelty and ambi- tion. For the explosion of these hideous misin- terpretations and misapplications we are indebted to the brave and free use of reason often in the face of monstrous intolerance and persecution even unto death, for the truth's sake. Thanks be to God that he has inspired the reason of man to fling off* from his revelation of himself a horri-
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ble mass of monstrous misunderstandings which dark and cruel ages had interposed between him- self and the heart of man whom he would redeem, — misconceptions which could only alienate all rational intelligence from His Word and His Per- son. It is to reason, enlightened of God, that we owe the tenable defenses of the Book and the Gospel in these modern times.
lyaying these antique absurdities aside as the mere curiosities of a dark past, certain things are yet objected by many as contrary to sound reason. It is said that it is so contrary to reason that a good God should suffer the intrusion of evil into a moral universe. But the evil is here to a cer- tainty. If there be the contradiction, then God is not, or is not good. Candor, however, will ad- mit that even in these discourses it has been fairly shown that the free possibility of evil choices and evil performance is essential to the existence of a moral universe.
It is said that for a holy God to justify any guilty soul were itself contrary to reason and con- science. I believe that consideration of that matter has shown with clearness that such a jus- tification of the soul which has found through Christ a real and genuine repentance is not only consistent with reason but demanded by the high- est moral reason.
It is said that the interference of God with the ordinary course of nature in the way of miracle were contrary to reason. I believe that it has been seen that, granted a free personal and ben-
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eficent God and a race which needs knowledge of Him and His presence and good will, reason, instead of rejecting the evidences of such inter- vention, even forecasts and demands it.
It is said that the notion that God would pro- vide so strange and costly a redemption for so insignificant a race as ours on so petty a planet as this is an absurd proposition. The answer is that God is love, that this planet is not insignificant, and that man, endowed as he is and set out on an eternal career for majestic development, is in no sense of a contemptible significance, but the rather the candidate for the highest of all possi- bilities of superb finite moral and spiritual being, in these majestic eventualities wholly worthy of the wonderful forces and processes of creation, providence and redemption.
With these objections fairly answered, what further large and general presumption can lie against a rational and restful Christian faith? Everything lies in the results of a fair study of the evidences of revealed religion in its own fabric and in the world's experience of its demonstrated effects.
All the hard and sorrowful mysteries of life are, indeed, not solved in these solutions. A fringe of as yet insoluble mystery reason itself declares must still hang about the secrets of the Divine administration of a universe vast and eternal like this of which we are a part. All particular in- stances in a system of which we know so little must go over for their solution to a future when
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we shall be better capable of their comprehension. Having seen that evil will surely exist in a moral universe and that out of it and by agency of it is to come the loftiest of conceivable moral and spiritual being, sound reason finds no difficulty in referring such remnant of present mystery to the revealings of the endless future. Indeed it is ob- viously best that something, — something much, — should be left for a loving faith in and submission to such a God as is our God. It were ill for us to be ever walking by the sight of our eyes and never in need of the vision of a simple trust. The horrible conceit, the awful ennui of a man who knows everything and all its reasons is intol- erable. Life on such terms would get flat, stale and unprofitable. Invention, investigation, pro- gress would cease and the powers of reason itself would die. Reverent reason is content with the words of the Master, ' ' What I do thou knowest not now but shalt know hereafter, ' ' ought to be content and is. It knows now or is set to find out all that it can safely manage !
So, then, reason has another and a final word. These things revealed and believed constitute the substance and sanction of all obligation. They become the commanding facts and forces of life. They are the secret of our creation, enduement and preservation. They constitute our oppor- tunity, privilege, and Divine prerogative. They are our sublime franchise in the universe. By this rational faith we are to come to our grandeurs, princedoms and great dominions ; to our eternal
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beatitudes, likenesses to Christ and to our home in His glory and the heart of His love. Holding this rational faith it is the sum of all duty — the very maundement of the Highest, which we can only defy or neglect to the absolute ruin of our moral, intellectual, and spiritual being. Such neglect or defiance is chaos, anarchy, hell. It is the only thing on earth or in hell that is to be feared. It is desert of the worst. It is the thing against which reason, putting on at last the robes of judgment and ascending the throne of con- science, pronounces awful sentence. That sentence of enthroned reason will be ratified on the Great Day before the assembly of the moral universe, in the final judgment of Him whose word is Destiny !
Reason, then, in the Protestant, Christian Faith, is to find its freest field, its highest function, its perpetual labor and its fullest rest ; is to lift man to his final splendor and give to Christ His eternal and universal Crown ! Right well did Browning sing,
** I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth or out of it ! "
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