The new light on the old truth

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Preface

A company of thirty men met recently in the library of one of their number on six consecutive Monday evenings and invited me to address them on the modifications of religious faith resulting from the investigations of scientists and the researches of critics. They were men of affairs, most of them manufacturers, all of them prominent in business or professional life. For an hour I talked on the great themes of the spirit; then for an hour, often for an hour and a half, there were questions and discussion.

The city in which these discourses were given is one of the busiest and most prosperous in New England. That men of large responsibilities volunteered to give an evening a week to consider religious topics is an indication of a deeper note in our American life.

The addresses were delivered extemporaneously and have been written out from memory, with only slight modifications and additions.

viii PREFACE

The address on the Bible was somewhat longer than the others, and, being written out more fully, has been divided into two chapters. The specialist will find nothing new in these pages. I cannot boast that any original light has shone upon the old truths through me. The words are the utterance of a preacher who hopes that within the range of his vision he has seen clearly.

I wish to acknowledge indebtedness to Professor Douglas C. Macintosh and Rev. Wilbert L. Anderson, D.D., for helpful suggestions. Charles Allen Dinsmore.

CONTENTS I

THE MODERN WORLD AND THE MODERN MAN

Introduction. — The changed world. — The modern man ; new bases of thought ; larger freedom ; scientific spirit; changed motives. — The two schools of the new theology. — The seat of authority in religion .... 1

II

The record of an inspired race. — Method of the writers. — Priest and prophet. — The higher criticism. — Early religious life of Israel. — The work of Moses. — The critical period. — The services of David and Solomon. — The first continuous narrative. — The second narrative 29

III THE BIBLE (continued)

The prophets. — Deuteronomy. — History reedited. — The Captivity. — Its literary activity. — Jerusalem rebuilded. — The priestly account of Israel's early history. — Night of legalism. — Broad sympathies shown in Ruth and Jonah. — Contest with Hellenism. — Christ, both priest and prophet. — The reconstruction of the New Testament 57 x CONTENTS

IV

His place in the evolution of humanity. — God's progressive revelation of himself. — Incarnation in an individual in the interests of the race. — Redemption by conformity to type. — In what sense was he perfect. — Our highest symbol of the Eternal. — The line between the divine and human. — The mood of to-day regarding miracles. — Christ's consciousness of God. — His realization of the Father. — His ethical sonship. — Difficulty of proving his sinlessness. — Unsurpassed in the sphere of religion. — His conception of his mission. — His ability to satisfy our spiritual needs. — Christianity does all that a religion can be required to do 93

New symbols of the divine majesty. — New conceptions of God. — The perfect vs. the militant God. — Materialism a waning philosophy. — John Fiske's strong argument for the existence of God. — God known in experience. — Contrast between Huxley and Phillips Brooks. — Differences between good men are differences of language rather than of experience. — New view of the nature of sin. — Its source in animality, ignorance, and perversity. — Its unnaturalness. — The waning consciousness of sin. — New conception of the way of salvation. — New ideals of character. — Modern meaning of faith. — Our larger look backward. — Broader views of the grace of God. — New interpretations of the atonement. — New vision of the gospel as social .... 129

CONTENTS xi

VI

The sense of the infinite. — Consciousness and molecular action. — Inability of the imagination. — Reason vs. the senses. — New approach through the evolutionary hypothesis. — The outcome must be worth the cost. — What life has already attained. — Man at the summit of the physical is a child in the spiritual order. — New light from personality. — Society of Psychical Research.

— The resurrection of Jesus. — Personality and the soul.

— We are potential persons. — The quality rather than the continuity of life. — Assumed by the perfect man, a premonition in imperfect men. — Tennyson and Browning. — Need of a future to make life rational. — Man too heavily endowed for temporal conditions. — The " More " prophetic. — We trust the fidelity of God. — Words of Martineau. — An endless sleep desired by some. — Conceptions of the future. — Annihilation. — Final restoration. — The persistent choice of evil 165

VII

The permanent and the changing in humanity. — The goal of life. — The essentials.— -Spiritual certitude. — The sons of Martha aud the sons of Mary. — The simple and universal elements of religion. — The peril of mature years. — Schleiermacher's enthusiasm created by his new vision of truth 199

THE MODERN WORLD AND THE MODERN MAN

THE MODERN WORLD AND THE MODERN MAN

I am deeply sensible of the honor of being selected to address this company of men. To consider with you the great themes of the spirit is indeed a high honor, and I shall seek to be worthy of this rare privilege by expressing with utmost frankness my sincere convictions on these topics so vital to us all. At the close of each address the subject will be open for discussion. By the give and take of free debate the benefit of these evenings spent together will be reciprocal. In gatherings such as this we are continuing the best traditions of New England. This little stretch of territory has been famous for industrial leadership. Men like you have taken riches out of these iron hills. Yet, notable as has been its industrial supremacy, New England has been especially distinguished for intellectual astuteness and moral power. While our fathers toiled incessantly with the hand and with the brain for material wealth, they were not forgetful of the sovereign matters of the spirit. They realized that the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. After the tasks of the day they gathered about their spacious hearths, and before the blazing fires

" reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute."

This habit not only sharpened the New England mind to finest subtilty, and toughened its fibre ; it created the rigorous New England conscience ; it gave to our fathers a profound realization of the significance of life; it enlarged and glorified their imagination, and nourished in them an august sense of eternal truths. For a body of business and professional men to meet together at the close of the day to discuss the stupendous themes of religion is certainly in keeping with the noblest memories of New England. It places us in a great and holy succession.

Doubtless you were all reared in the strict faith of the fathers and trained in its stern morality. I surmise that most of you have considerably modified your inherited religious conceptions, finding it impossible to look at life as your fathers viewed it. Being intellectually awake, you are aware that modern scholarship has removed many of the ancient landmarks, and that the new light pouring into the world from recent scientific investigation has dissolved many of the old creedal structures. Being absorbed in practical affairs, while you dimly know of altered conditions, probably you have lacked the leisure to inform yourselves of the changes which have taken place. You have left the shelter of the ancestral faith and have not yet built for your minds a new home which is complete and satisfactory. For a man needs a domicile to protect his mind from spiritual storms and terror as really as he needs a house to guard his body from the inclemency of the weather. I imagine that you often wonder how much is left of the old faith, and ask whether the new equals the old in power of comfort and in authority over conduct. Perhaps you even go further and question whether the men of to-day can have religious certitude and be as sure as were the fathers of the reality of the things of the spirit.

My task is not the ambitious one of answering all these interrogations. But according to my ability I hope to make evident and persuasive the new approach to religious truth, to describe the knowledge which has come to this generation through its earnest study of nature and of man, and to set forth the essential verities of religion as they are held to-day by constructive modern scholars.

I

The Modern World

First, let us consider the changed world in which men live to-day. Dante has been called the " voice of ten silent centuries." In his "mystic, unfathomable song" the mind of the Middle Ages, its ruling ideas, its philosophy, find imperishable expression. The poet believed in a snug little universe which could be interpreted by a complete system of thought. The earth he conceived to be the centre of the material creation, with heaven beyond the stars and hell underneath the crust of the earth. Man, in the exercise of his free will, merits the one or the other. That he may walk in the way of spiritual and temporal happiness God has provided two authoritative guides, the Pope and the Emperor. A closely reasoned theology attempted to interpret all man's experiences with the divine. Through the fall of Adam the trail of the serpent lay over all humanity. Man, a finite being, could not pay this debt of sin against infinite holiness. An infinite penalty was demanded. Hence the God-man suffered to the full the punishment required by justice and canceled the obligation. By baptism the soul entered into the merits of Christ and was freed from the eternal consequences of sin. Whatever sins were committed by penitent spirits after baptism must be expiated in this world and in purgatory. For the redeemed there was provided a stately heaven whose angels were classified and whose hierarchies were named. For the reprobate there was an endless hell of " anatomized damnation-"

Copernicus shattered forever this tiny shell of mediaeval cosmogony; the Eeformation challenged the infallibility of the papal system ; the political enfranchisement of the people destroyed the pretentious theory of the divine right of kings. But theology remained Ptolemaic and mediaeval. Men still believed in the six days of creation, they counted six thousand years since Adam, and they had a welldefined scheme for saving humanity from the results of the Fall. Within our own generation this closed system of thought has received a blow as fatal as that which shivered the cosmogony of Dante's time.

In 1859 Darwin published his " Origin of Species." This patient investigator did not originate the theory of evolution, as he is popularly supposed to have done. The conception of a progressively developing order of nature was a familiar one to philosophers, but Darwin gave an exposition of the probable method of the origin of species which was at once so clear and so well substantiated that a philosophical speculation was transformed into a scientific generalization. Darwinism has been greatly modified and evolution is still an hypothesis, but beyond question the "Origin of Species " was the chief initial impulse to the movement of thought which has carried the modern man completely away from the standpoint and the conceptions of former generations. His point of view, his methods, the prevailing spirit in which he performs his tasks are changed. He lives in a universe measureless in duration and limitless in space. The conviction of a progressive rather than a static order, both in nature and in history, is fixed in the educated mind. It is as generally assumed that an academically trained man is an evolutionist of some sort as it is assumed that he is a gravitationist. In all sciences this generalization is recognized as a working hypothesis. Within our own generation its revolutionary influence has been felt in every department of knowledge. The men now living have been required to look at the old faith in this new light. Some of you remember the clash of conflict when the new views first met the old, and all of us were born before the sound of battle died away.

The theological implications of this new method of approach to religious truth are veryclear. The world, instead of being six thousand years old, tells its years by the hundreds of thousands. Man no longer considers himself a newcomer ; he traces his lineage to a remote antiquity. Instead of the fall of the race in Adam, we assert the ascent of man. Life and destiny no longer appear simple and explicable, but open to us with fresh wonder and hope.

II

The Modem Man

Because one lives in the twentieth century he is not necessarily a modern man. He may have the soul of a mediaeval inquisitor clothed in modish fashion. The modern man is one who is controlled by the spirit and tendencies which are characteristic of this age. He is different from his fathers because he has established a new starting-point from which to do his thinking; his habitual mood is peculiar; his methods are unique; old motives have been outgrown, and he insists upon examining truth with a searching test not always employed in the past. Altogether he is different from the fathers both in attitude of mind and in habits of thought.

Men of to-day begin their thinking from a new basis. The time-honored method has been to assume some prominent fact, such as the sin of man or the sovereignty of God, or some theory of inspiration and revelation, and upon this rear a logically constructed system of thought. The faults of this method are obvious. Disprove the major premise and the superstructure collapses, to the confusion of believers. We are seeking more secure foundations. We appeal from the authority of every spiritual Caesar to life. We would know what man has learned in his age-long experience. The laws he has discovered, the spiritual adventures he has passed through, the intuitions he has developed, the religious consciousness which his long journey has fashioned, we believe furnish the only sufficient facts from which to draw our conclusions. We base our thinking not upon an authority which may be questioned, or a metaphysics which may be disproved, but upon the facts revealed by experience. Accumulated experience quickens insight into the nature of things. The modern mind trusts more to its intuitions than to its logic. It highly esteems the universal and spontaneous judgments of spiritual men, for the supreme truths are spiritually discerned. To the facts of experience and to the intuitions of the soul it entrusts itself. Its knowledge of the foundations will enlarge, but the base is rational and secure.

With so broad a field of observation the modern man must be free and open-minded. In a scientific age he must have that spirit so finely described by Mr. Huxley : " Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads." Not since the creation have there been so many minds, free in their action and scientific in their methods, employed upon religious truth. It would be inconceivable if the harvest of knowledge and vision were not rich.

The modern man is eminently practical. He has little taste for those lofty and refined speculations which produce no perceptible difference either in character or in conduct. He keeps close to the known, and to what approves itself as vital to the individual and to society. He is not interested in a gospel which is largely occupied in showing how God can forgive sin, and provide a way of escape from the wrath to come. It must be able to save men now from the power of evil and the blighting curse of fear.

Some of the old motives for living the religious life are no longer operative, while others are receiving greater prominence. From primitive Christianity to the present day, superstitious fear has been a universal and sovereign compulsion driving men into the church. They crowded the sanctuaries and accepted the creeds through dread of something after death. Such fear is no longer a primal motive. Few to-day believe in the prison-house of torture which jso affrighted former generations. This rapidly vanishing motive is being replaced by two others, which, though never absent from the religious life of the past, are now more than ever prominent. One is the desire to be right with God and man. We know that these right relations must be achieved and sustained. We are aware that we come far short of fulfilling our own ideals. We are conscious that we need help. We are persuaded that the law of the spirit of life in Christ will set us free from the law of sin and death. We confess and obey him because he enables us to be the men we wish to be and to live the life we desire to live. Closely akin to this is another motive. We wish our lives to count for something in the world. We are anxious to make a real contribution to the race. Therefore we put ourselves in line with that Increasing Purpose which is unfolding through the ages. We wish to take our proper place in God's plan and to bear our share in the fight he is waging against the powers of darkness. Men to-day in ever enlarging numbers are living the religious life as in the Great Taskmaster's eye, to apprehend that for which they have been apprehended of God,

The modern man looks at truth with a very different perspective from that familiar to the fathers. He has been so powerfully influenced by the doctrine of evolution that he is persuaded that man grows in his apprehension of truth, and that God's revelation of himself is progressive. No perfect system of truth, or institutional plan, has come down from heaven to men to be preserved inviolate at all hazards. Ideas and institutions, he realizes, must be studied in their origin and development, and are not to be considered as crystallized into a permanent form. New light shines upon both church and doctrine when he perceives that they are not final, but are progressive disclosures whose form is determined by historical conditions.

The changed world has produced a changed man. With liberated mind, from a fresh point of departure, with an enlarged perspective, by new methods, governed by high motives, applying a novel test to truth, the typical religious thinker of our times approaches the realities of the spirit confident that new glory will stream from the ancient fountains.

The question of the date of the beginning of the modern world is being vigorously discussed in Germany. The Reformation is the boundary usually assigned to the dominance of the mediaeval spirito But the reformers held the Catholic conception of creation, the fall of man, and the theology growing out of it. Most of them maintained the necessity of the union of church and state and the authority of the civil powers in matters spiritual. Their views of the world and their methods of Reasoning were not dissimilar to those of Catholic theologians. The mediseval shadow has rested upon the world even until now.

The truth is that the modern day has had a gradual dawning. Dante has been called the first modern man. His lofty spirit, like

catching some gleams of the coming day. At the Reformation the whole east was aglow. The morning waxed brighter when the church was separated from the state and the authority of king and bishop was cast off. But the modern as distinguished from the mediseval world did not come in its glory and joy until the notion of a static universe was discarded, and men, knowing that the forms of reality are ever changing, felt free to follow truth into all her hiding-places. There have been free individuals in all the Christian centuries, but ours is the first generation since the days of the primitive church which has enjoyed the freedom of faith.

Ill

Two Schools of Religious Thought

Modern religious thinkers assemble themselves into two quite distinct groups. One interprets spiritual realities through the medium of nature, while the other searches the spirit of man and his history. When the hypothesis of evolution first assumed sovereign importance, many men felt that now for the first time faith could rightly understand and defend its history. Some of them were trained scientists, and into the world of the spirit they brought the temper and method of scientific research, essaying the bold task of formulating religious conceptions through the medium of their enlarged perceptions of nature. One writer of this school who won popular recognition was Mr. John Fiske. That he was an accurate and convincing writer on scientific themes Charles /Darwin himself attests. "I never in my life," he writes Mr. Fiske, "read so lucid an expositor, and therefore thinker, as you are." The title of one of his books, " Through Nature to God," throws light upon his habitual method. He studied the " Idea of God," the " Destiny of Man," the " Life Everlasting," in the fresh light which had come to him through nature. Another author of equal fame was Mr. Henry Drummond. Profoundly interested both in religion and in the facts of the laboratory, he wrote " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," and the " Ascent of Man." These titles sufficiently indicate his attempt to study man and his spiritual life through the new knowledge of nature and its laws. Other writers less widely known found genuine enrichment to faith in tracing the wisdom of God in creation. " Through Science to Faith," " The Religion of an Evolutionist," " Science and Religion," are the names of books written by this school of thought, and they indicate its method.

Quite distinct from this group is another body of thinkers, who, while they are not blind to the light from nature and work in an atmosphere modified by its influence, are supremely concerned with the spiritual constitution of man and his experiences with God. They believe that the Eternal has revealed himself in the personal spirit of man more fully and intimately than in the grandeur of the material universe. God is to be studied in his highest work, which is the personal spirit of man. Personality, therefore, rather than nature, is their master word. They affirm that the higher life of man reveals more clearly than the processes of the chemical laboratory the deepest reality of the universe. Personality is the golden key unlocking the mystery of our world and of our cosmos, or there is no key. What is loftiest in man must be the best interpreter of what is loftiest in the universe. The spirit of man in its varied religious experiences, and especially that spirit as it has come to its perfection in Jesus, is the supreme fact for investigation. The thinkers to whom persons and personal relations are of supreme importance have written many books. The titles of some familiar volumes will sufficiently indicate this school and its trend of thought : " Through Man to God/' "Theology and the Social Consciousness," "Social Law in the Spiritual World/' " Personality and the Christian Ideal." These two groups are not antagonistic, but are mutually supporting. Those who find in man the key to the universe need to study the order and vastness of the cosmos to comprehend the wonder and greatness of God, while the approach to him only through nature tends to pantheism and the submergence of personal spirit in the deeps of natural forces. We construct our truest conceptions of God and his ways by combining those revelations of himself which he gives through nature and through man.

IV

Religious Authority

The modern man, acknowledging that new light has come to this generation through our enlarged views of nature and our more comprehensive study of man, inevitably asks himself whether the added light gives more or less certainty to his faith. Religion should speak with a voice of unhesitating authority. It should point out the way of life so clearly that the wayfaring man need not err therein. It must declare a law of conduct whose sanctity cannot be doubted. The light it sheds must be from the Eternal Fountain. Its premises must be clear of all suspicion of being the shining and phantasmal dreams of men. We have received no new light, but rather fatal darkness, if the Rock of Ages does not appear more distinct, more extended, and more impregnable. We have delusion and not light unless religious certainty is increased.

The mediaeval man had peace and joy because an infallible church had spoken. Our fathers replaced the authority of the church by the authority of a book. If we give up the belief in verbal inspiration and in the infallibility of a hierarchy of priests, have we found something more credible? Has the assurance which made our fathers strong in battle, and gave our mothers calm in the night of their sorrows, been increased unto us ?

A simple illustration will make clear how august and indisputable is the authority which speaks to the modern man. A friend, having spent the evening with Carlyle, was saying good night as the two stood upon the doorstep. The visitor, looking up, remarked on the glory of the starlit night. The Seer gazed for a time on the inconceivable majesty of the heavens and then exclaimed, " Mon, it 's just awful ! " But suppose that Carlyle, after glancing upward, had said, " I see no stars ! I never heard of them ! What are they? I perceive only blackness above." The visitor would have been dumbfounded. Let us imagine that he goes through Chelsea and London questioning all whom he meets, and that he finds that no one can see the stars or has ever heard of them. Amazement possesses him. He hurries to the library, but he can find no book which hints at any brightness in the heavens. He detects no intimation that in all the preceding ages any one has seen the stars ! He is the only human being who has had that vision ! He can draw but one conclusion. If he alone can discern the black depths above to be studded with stars, he must be subject to an hallucination. He may well doubt his sanity.

But the facts are far otherwise. The same constellations he sees, Carlyle sees also. Every one in the city who looks up has the same perception. He finds that men in the Middle Ages were studying the mystic influences of these same clusters. The Hebrew Psalmist sang of their glory, and the Babylonians bowed before them in awe and wonder. He knows that the stars exist because of the testimony of unnumbered generations. They have seen the vision. They have tested it by every means available, and they have not been put to confusion. We live in unperturbed certainty of the reality of the stars, though no man was ever caught in the silver mazes of the Pleiades, or grasped the sheath of Orion's sword. The vision of the individual has been verified by the vision of the race. The universal consciousness has rendered its verdict in favor of lights above, and trained minds have discovered and explained their governing laws. The general consciousness, verified and interpreted by experts, gives us certainty of the stars.

Let us suppose that instead of alluding to the stars Carlyle's guest had spoken of God, human sinfulness, duty, and the Sage had exclaimed : " God, sin, duty ! what do you mean ? Those words represent no thoughts that ever entered my mind, or any experience of my life/' The man would be puzzled and would doubt Carlyle's sanity. Suppose that he wanders about the city, questioning every one whom he meets, yet finding none who even so much as dreamed of a Superior Being. He consults the records of the past and finds no intimation that any man ever thought of Deity, or duty, or redemption. Poor man ! he realizes that an asylum for the insane is his proper home.

But how different are the facts. To Carlyle the ideas of God, man's frailty, duty, are more familiar than the brightness of the stars. Their mystery and significance constantly fill his mind. Every man in England and throughout the world knows something of their meaning.

In the eighteenth century Wesley proclaimed a gospel of reconciliation. In the thirteenth century the Schoolmen pondered the Almighty's way of redemption. In ancient Greece iEschylus lifted the drama to the elevation of moral ideas. Upon the banks of the Nile, in Nineveh, in Jerusalem, these conceptions were familiar. Humanity's consciousness of spiritual realities resembles in its universality its sense of physical reality. Germany's most profound philosopher, Immanuel Kant, once declared : " Two things fill my soul with always new and increasing wonder and awe, and often and persistently my thought busies itself therewith : — the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Kant was as well aware of his moral personality and its necessary connections with an august moral order as he was of the material splendors above his head. Men have experienced a material world, and they believe in it. They have also experienced a spiritual world. They have come in contact with God, and they have been persuaded that from the Eternal there has come to them light, and wisdom, and power. The sovereign religious ideas are the expression of the thinking and life of the race.