Chapter 5

There is another point bearing on this matter. If a man pledges himself to accept and abide by a fixed and final creed, he does it either for a reason or without a reason. If he does it without a reason, then there is, of course, no reason why we should follow his example. If he has a reason, then two things: either that reason is adequate, sound, conclusive, or it is not. If it is not adequate, then we ought to study and criticise and find that out, and be free to discover some reason that is adequate. If the reason for his holding the creed is an adequate one, then, certainly, no harm can be done by investigation of it, by asking questions.

If the men who hold these old creeds and defend them can give in the court of reason a perfectly good account of themselves, if they can bring satisfactory credentials, then all our questioning, all our criticism, all our investigation, cannot possibly do the creeds any harm. It will only mean that we shall end by being convinced ourselves, and shall accept the creeds freely and rationally.

It has always seemed to me a very strange attitude of mind for a man to feel perfectly convinced that a certain position is sound and true, and to be angry when anybody asks a question about it. If there are good reasons for holding it, instead of calling names, why not show us the reasons? He who is afraid to have his opinions questioned, he who is angry when you ask him for evidence, to give a reason for the position that he holds, shows that he is not at all certain of it. He admits by implication that it is weak. He shows an attitude of infidelity instead of an attitude of faith, of trust.

There is no position which I hold to-day that I consider so sacred that people are not at liberty to ask any questions about it they please; and, if they do not see a good reason for accepting it, I am certainly not going to be angry with them for declining to accept. The attitude of truth is that of welcome to all inquiry. It rejoices in daylight, it does not care to be protected from investigation.

Then there is another reason still, another point to be made in regard to this matter. People are not very likely to find the truth if they are frightened, if they are warned off, if they are told that this or that or another thing is too sacred to be investigated. I have known people over and over again in my past experience who long wished they might be free to accept some grander, nobler, more helpful view of truth, and yet have been trained and taught so long that it was wicked to doubt, that it was wicked to ask questions, that they did not dare to open their minds freely to the incoming of any grander hope.

If you tell people that they may study just as widely as they please, but, when they get through, they must come back and settle down within the limits of certain pre-determined opinions, what is the use of their wider excursion? And, if you tell them that, unless they accept these final conclusions, God is going to be angry with them, they are going to injure their own immortal souls, they are threatening the welfare of the people on every hand whom they influence, how can you expect them to study and come to conclusions which are entitled to the respect of thoughtful people?

I venture the truth of the statement that, if you should inquire over this country to-day, you would find that the large majority of people who have been trained in the old faith are in an attitude of fear towards modern thought. Thousands of them would come to us to-day if they were not kept back by this inherited and ingrained fear as to the danger of asking questions.

Do I not remember my own experience of three years' agonizing battle over the great problems that were involved in these questions, afraid that I was being tempted of the devil, afraid that I was risking the salvation of my soul, afraid that I might be endangering other people whom I might influence, never free to study the Bible, to study religious questions as I would study any other matter on the face of the earth on account of being haunted by this terrible dread?

And, then, there is one other point. I must touch on these very briefly. The acceptance of these creeds on the part of those who do hold to them does not, after all, prevent the growth of modern thought. It does hinder it, so far as they are concerned; but the point I wish to make is this, that these creeds do not answer the purpose for which they were constructed. They are supposed to be fixed and final statements of divine truth, which are not to be questioned and not to be changed.

Dr. Richard S. Storrs, of Brooklyn, the famous Congregational minister, said a few years ago that the idea of progress in theology was absurd, because the truth had once for all been given to the saints in the past, and there was no possibility of progress, because progress implied change. And yet, in spite of the effort that has been made to keep the faith of the world as it was in the past, the change is coming, the change does come every day; and it puts the people who are trying to prevent the change coming in an attitude of what shall I say I do not wish to make a charge against my brethren, it puts them in a very curious attitude indeed towards the truth. They must not accept a new idea if it conflicts with the old creed, however much they may be convinced it is true. If they do accept it, then what? They must either leave the Church or they must keep still about it, and remain in an attitude of appearing to believe what they really do not believe. Or else they must do violence to the creed, reinterpreting it in such a way as to make it to them what the framers of it had never dreamed of.

Do you not see the danger that there is here of a person's disingenuous attitude towards the truth, danger to the moral fibre, danger to the progress of man? Take as a hint of it the way the Bible has been treated. People have said that the Bible was absolutely infallible: they have taken that as a foregone conclusion; and then, when they found out beyond question that the world was not created in six days, what have they done? Frankly accepted the truth? No, they have tried to twist the Bible into meaning something different from what it plainly says. It expressly says days, bounded by morning and evening; but no, it must mean long periods of time. Why? Because science and the Bible must somehow be reconciled, no matter if the Bible is wrenched and twisted from its real meaning.

And so with regard to the creeds. The creeds say that Christ descended into hell; that is, the underworld. People come to know that there is no underworld; and, instead of frankly admitting that that statement in the creed is not correct, they must torture it out of its meaning, and make it stand for something that the framers of it had never heard of. I think it would greatly astonish the writers of the Bible and the Church Fathers if they could wake up to-day, and find out that they meant something when they wrote those things which had never occurred to them at the time.

Is this quite honest? Is it wise for us to put ourselves in this attitude?

I wish to speak a little further in this matter as to not preventing the coming in of modern thought, and to take one illustration. Look at Andover Seminary to-day. The Andover Creed was arranged for the express purpose of keeping fixed and unchangeable the belief of the Church.. Its founders declared that to be their purpose. They were going to establish the statement of belief, so that it should not be open to this modern criticism, which had resulted in the birth of Unitarianism in New England; and, in order to make perfectly certain of it, they said that the professors who came there to teach the creed must not only be sound when they were settled, but they must be re-examined every five years. This was to prevent their changing their minds during the five years and remaining on there, teaching some false doctrine while the overseers and managers were not aware of it. So every five years the professors and teachers of Andover have to reaffirm solemnly their belief in the old creed.

It is not for me to make charges against them; but it is for me to make the statement that so suspicious have the overseers and managers come to be of some of the professors in the seminary that they have been tried more than once for heresy; and everybody knows that the leading professors there to-day do not believe the creed in the sense in which it was framed.

And, to illustrate how this is looked upon by some of the students, let me tell you this. My brother was a graduate of Andover; and not long ago he said to me that when the time came around for the professors to reaffirm their allegiance to the creed, one of the other students came into his room one day, and said, "Savage, let's go up and see the professors perjure themselves."

This was the attitude of mind of one of the students. This is the way he looked at it. I am not responsible for his opinion; but is it quite wise, is it best for the truth, is it for the interests of religion, to have theological students in this state of mind towards their professor?

Modern thought does come into the minds of men: they cannot escape it. What does it mean? It means simply a new, higher, grander revelation of God. Is it wise for us to put ourselves into such a position that it shall seem criminal and evil for us to accept it? If we pledge ourselves not to learn the things we can know, then we stunt ourselves intellectually. If, after we have pledged ourselves, we accept these things and remain as we are, I leave somebody else to characterize such action, action which, in my judgment, and so far as my observation goes, is not at all uncommon.

We then propose to hold ourselves free so far as a fixed and final creed is concerned, because we wish to be able to study, to find and accept the truth. There is another reason. For the sake of God, because we wish to find and come into sympathy with him, and love him and serve him, we refuse to be bound by the thoughts of the past.

What do we mean by coming into a knowledge of God? Let me illustrate a moment by the relation which we may sustain to another man. You do not necessarily come close to a man because you touch his elbow on the street. The people who lived in Shakspere's London might not have been so near to Shakspere as is Mr. Furness, the great Shakspere critic to- day, or Mr. Rolfe, of Cambridge.

Physical proximity does not bring us close to a person. We may be near to a friend who is half-way round the world: there may be sympathetic heart-beats that shall make us conscious of his presence night and day. We may be close alongside of a person, but alienated from him, misunderstanding him, and really farther away from him than the diameter of the solar system. If, then, we wish to get near to God, and to know him, we must become like him. There must be love, tenderness, unselfishness. We must have the divine characteristics and qualities; and then we shall feel his presence, know and be near him.

People may find God, and still have very wrong theories about him; just as a farmer may raise a good crop without understanding much about theories of sunshine or of soil. But the man who does understand about them will be more likely to raise a good crop, because he goes about it intelligently; while the other simply blunders into it. So, if we have right thoughts about God, it is easier for us to get into sympathy with him. If we think about him as noble and sweet and grand and true and loving, we shall be more likely to respond to these qualities that call out the best and the finest feelings in ourselves.

I do not say that it is absolutely necessary to have correct theories of God. There have been good men in all ages, there have been noble women in all ages, in all religions, in all the different sects of Christendom. There are lovely characters among the agnostics. I have known sweet and true and fine people who thought themselves atheists. A man may be grand in spite of his theological opinions one way or the other. He may have a horrible picture of God set forth in his creed, and carry a loving and tender one in his heart. So he may be better than the God of his creed. All this is true; but, if we have, I say, right thoughts about him, high and fine ideals, we are more likely to come into close touch and sympathy with him.

And, then, and here is a point I wish to emphasize and make perfectly clear, this arbitrary assumption of infallibility cultivates qualities and characteristics which are un and anti-divine.

Let us see what Jesus had to say about this. The people of his time who represented more than any others this infallibility idea were the Pharisees. They felt perfectly sure that they were right. They felt perfectly certain that they were the chosen favorites of God. There was on their part, then, growing out of this conception of the infallibility of their position, the conceit of being the chosen and special favorites of the Almighty. They looked with contempt, not only upon the Gentiles, who were outside of the peculiarly chosen people, but upon the publicans, upon all of their own nation who were not Pharisees, and who were not scrupulously exact concerning the things which they held to be so important.

What did Jesus think and say about them? You remember the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. Jesus said that this poor sinning publican, who smote upon his breast, and said, "God be merciful to me a sinner," was the one that God looked upon with favor, not the Pharisee, who thanked God that he was not as the other people were. And, if there is any class in the New Testament that Jesus scathes and withers with the hot lightning of his scorn and his wrath, it is these infallible people, who are perfectly right in their ideas, and who look with contempt upon people who are outside of the pale of their own inherited infallible creeds and opinions.

We believe, then, that the people who are free to study the splendors of God in the universe, in human history, in human life, and free to accept all new and higher and finer ideas, are more likely to find God, and come into sympathetic and tender relations with him, than those who are bound to opinions by the supposed fixed and revealed truths of the past.

We reject, then, these old-time creeds for another reason, for the sake of man. A long vista of thought and illustration stretches out before me as I pronounce these words; but I can only touch upon a point here or there.

One of the most disastrous things that have happened in the history of the past and it has happened over and over again is this blocking and hindering of human advance, until by and by the tide, the growing current, becomes too strong to be held back any more; and it has swept away all barriers and devastated society, politically, socially, religiously, morally, and in every other way.

And why? Simply because the natural flow of human thought, the natural growth of human opinion, has been hindered artificially by the assumption of an infallibility on the part of those who have tried to keep the world from growth.

Suppose you teach men that certain theological opinions are identical with religion, until they believe it. The time comes when they cannot hold those opinions any more, and they break away; and they give up religion, and perhaps the sanctities of life, which they are accustomed to associate with religion.

Take the time of the French Revolution. People went mad. They were opposed not only to the State: they were opposed to the Church. They tried to abolish God, they tried to abolish the Ten Commandments; they tried to abolish everything that had been so long established and associated with the old regime.

Were the people really enemies of God? Were they enemies of religion? Were they enemies of truth? No: it was a caricature of God that they were fighting, it was a caricature of religion that they were opposed to. When Voltaire declared that the Church was infamous, it was not religion that he wished to overthrow: it was this tyranny that had been associated with the dominance of the Church for so many ages.

This is the result in one direction of attempting to hold back the natural growth and progress of the world. If you read the history of the Church for the last fifteen hundred years until within a century or two, and by the Church I mean that organization that has claimed to speak infallibly for God, you will find that it has been associated with almost everything that has hindered the growth of the world. I cannot go into details to illustrate it. It has interfered with the world's education. There is only one nation in Europe to-day where education has not been wrenched out of the hands of the priesthood in the interests of man, and that even by Catholics themselves; and that country is Spain. It pronounced its ban on the study of the universe under the name of science. It made it a sin for Galileo to discover the moons of Jupiter. And Catholic and Protestant infallibility alike denounced Newton, one of the noblest men and the grandest scientists that the world has ever seen, because in proclaiming the law of gravity, they said, he was taking the universe out of the hands of God and establishing practical atheism.

So almost everything that has made the education, the political, the industrial, the social growth of the world, this infallibility idea has stood square in the way of, and done its best to hinder. Take, for example, an illustration. When chloroform was discovered, the Church in Scotland opposed its use in cases of childbirth, because it said it was a wicked interference with the judgment God pronounced on Eve after the fall.

So, in almost every direction, whatever has been for the benefit of the world has been opposed in the interests of old-time ideas, until the whole thing culminated at last in this: Here is this nineteenth century of ours, which has done more for the advancement of man than the preceding fifteen centuries all put together. Political liberty, religious liberty, universal education, the enfranchisement and elevation of women, the abolition of slavery, temperance, almost everything has been achieved, until the world, the face of it, has been transformed. And yet Pope Pius IX., in an encyclical which he issued a little while before his death, pronounced, ex-cathedra and infallibly, the opinion that this whole modern society was godless. And yet, as I said, this godless modern world has done more for man and for the glory of God than the fifteen hundred years of church dominance that preceded it.

For the sake of man, then, that intellectually, politically, socially, industrially, every other way, he may be free to grow, to expand, to adopt all the new ideas that promise higher help, hope, and freedom, for the sake of man, we refuse to be bound by the inherited and fixed opinions of the past.

Now two or three points I wish to speak of briefly, as I near the close.

We are charged sometimes, because we have no creed, with having no bond of union whatever. As I said a few Sundays ago, they say that we are all at loose ends because we are not fixed and bound by a definite creed.

What is God's method of keeping a system like this solar one of ours together? Does he fence it in? Does he exert any pressure from outside? Or does he rather place at the centre a luminous and attractive body, capable of holding all the swinging and singing members of the system in their orbits, as they play around this great source of life and of light? God's method is the method of illumination and attraction. That is the method which we have adopted. Instead of fencing men in and telling them to climb over that fence at their peril, we have placed a great, luminous, attractive truth at the centre, the pursuit of truth, the love of truth, the search for God, the desire to benefit and help on mankind. And we trust to the power of these great central truths to attract and keep in their orbits all the free activities of the thousands of minds and hearts that make up our organization.

Then there is one more point. Suppose we wanted an infallible creed; suppose it was ever so important; suppose the experience of the world had proved that it was very desirable indeed that we should have one. What are we going to do about it? I suppose that men in other departments of life than the ecclesiastical would like an infallible guide. Men engaged in business would like an infallible handbook that would point them the way to success. The gold hunters would like an infallible guide to the richest ores. Navigators on the sea would like infallible methods of manning and sailing their ships. The farmer would like to know that he was following an infallible method to success. It would be very desirable in many respects; it would save us no end of trouble.

But it is admitted that in these other departments of life, whether we want infallible guides or not, we do not have them. And I think, if you will look at the matter a little deeply and carefully, you will become persuaded that it would not be the best for us if we could. Men not only wish to gain certain ends, but, if they are wise, they wish more than that, to cultivate and develop and unfold themselves, which they can only do by study, by mistakes, by correcting mistakes, by finding out through experience what is true and what is false. In this process of study and experience they find themselves, something infinitely more important than any external fact or success which they may discover or achieve.

So I believe that a similar thing is true in the religious life. It might be a great saving of trouble if we were sure we had an infallible guide. I am inclined to think that a great many persons who go into the Roman Catholic Church, in this modern time, go there because they are tired of thinking, and wish to shift the responsibility of it on to some one else.

It is tiresome, it is hard work. Sometimes we would like to escape it: we would like infallible guides. But I have studied the world with all the care that I could; and I have never been able to find the materials out of which I could construct an infallible guide, if I wanted it ever so much.

Whether it is important or not to have infallible teaching in the theological realm, there is no such thing as infallibility that is accessible to us; and I, for one, do not believe that it would be best for us if there were. God is treating us more wisely and kindly than, if we were able, we would treat ourselves; because it is not the discovery of this or that particular fact or truth that is so important as is the development of our own intellectual and moral and spiritual natures in the search for truth.

Lessing said a very wise thing when he declared that, if God should offer him the perfect truth in one hand and the privilege of seeking for it in the other, he should accept the privilege of search as the nobler and more valuable gift, because, in this seeking, we develop ourselves, we cultivate the Divine, and work our natures over into the likeness of God.

And now at the end I wish simply to say that God has given us the better thing in letting us freely and earnestly and simply investigate and look after the truth, cultivating ourselves in the process, and being wrought over ever more and more into the likeness of the divine.

And I wish also to say, for the comfort of those who may think that this lack of infallible guides is a serious matter, it may astonish you to have me say it, that there is not a single matter of any practical importance in our moral and religious life concerning which there is any doubt whatsoever. If anybody tells you that he is not living a religious life or not living a moral life, for the lack of light and guidance, do not believe him.