Chapter 6

What are the things that are in question? What are the things of which we are sure? Take, for example, the matter of Biblical criticism, as to who wrote the book of Chronicles, as to whether Deuteronomy was written by Moses or compiled in the time of King Josiah. Are there any great spiritual problems waiting for those questions to be settled? Do you need to have that matter made clear before you know whether you ought to be an honest man in your business, whether you ought to judge charitably of a friend who has gone astray, whether you ought to be helpful towards your neighbors, whether you ought to be kind to your wife, and whether you ought to lovingly train and cultivate your children?

Take another of the great questions, as to the authorship of the Gospel of John. I shall be immensely interested in the settlement of that if the time ever comes when it is settled; but it would be a purely critical interest that I should have. I am not going to wait until that is settled before I lead a religious life. I am not going to let that stand in the way of my helping on the progress of the world.

I tell you, friends, that these matters that are in doubt, that need an infallibility to settle them, are not the practical matters at all. We look off into the vast universe around us, and question about God. Is he personal? Can we have the old ideas about him? One thing is settled: we know we are the product of and in the presence of an Eternal Order, and that knowing and keeping the laws of the universe mean life and happiness, but the opposite means death. That is the practical part of it.

We know that the Power that is in this universe is making gradually through the ages for righteousness; and we know that the righteous and helpful life is the only manly life for us to lead, for our own sake, for the sake of those we can touch and influence.

Are we going to wait for criticism to settle metaphysical problems before we do anything about these great practical matters?

Whatever your theory about Jesus may be, you can at least be like him, and wait; and, when you see him, you will love him, and know the truth about him, if you cannot before.

Matthew Arnold, an agnostic, has put into two or three lines, which I wish to read now at the end, what might well be the creed of the person who doubts so much that he thinks nothing is settled. If you cannot say any more than this, here is all that is absolutely necessary to the very noblest life:

"Hath man no second life? Pitch this one high. Sits there no Judge in heaven our sin to see? More strictly, then, the inward judge obey. Was Christ a man like us? Ah I let us try If we, then, too, can be such men as he."

THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PRESENT RELIGIOUS DISCUSSION.

SCIENCE tells us that the law of growth is embodied in the phrase, "the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest." As we look beneath the surface in any department of human endeavor, analyze things a little carefully, we discover that this contest is going on. We know that it is not confined to the lower forms of life or the order of the inanimate world. It is a universal law. We are not always conscious of it; but, when we do think and study, we discover it as an unescapable fact.

In the religious world, for example, between the different thoughts and theories which are held among men as solutions of the problems of life we find this contest going on. Here, again, it is not always noticed; but in the mind of any man who thinks, who reads, who reflects, this process is apparent. This view is considered, another view mentioned by somebody else is set over against it, and the claims of the two theories are brought up for judgment. And so there goes on perpetually this debate. Now and again it comes to the surface, and attracts popular attention. We have been in the midst of an experience of this kind for the last two or three weeks here in New York City.

But the thing I want you to note is -- and that is the great lesson I have in mind this morning that all of this superficial discussion of one point or another is only an indication of a larger, deeper contest. When, for example, men are debating as to the infallibility or inerrancy of the Old Testament, as to the story of the creation as told in Genesis, as to the nature and work of Jesus, as to the future destiny of the race, when they are discussing any one of these particular problems, they are dealing with matters that are really superficial. Underneath these there is a larger problem; and to this problem and its probable issues I wish to call your attention this morning.

There are two great world theories, complete each in itself, both of them thinkable, mutually exclusive, one of which only can be true, and one of which must finally become dominant in the educated and free thought of the world. These two theories I wish to place face to face before you this morning, call your attention to some of their special features and note the claims they have on our acceptance.

Before doing this, however, I wish you to note that there are indications of a dual tendency on the part of the human mind which has not been manifested in the development of these two theories alone, but which has had illustrations in other directions and in other times.

In the early traditions of Greece and Rome you find two tendencies on the part of the mind of man. There was, first, an old-time tradition which placed the Golden Age of humanity away back in the past. The people dreamed of a time when Saturn, the father of gods and men, lived on the earth, and governed directly his children and his people. In that happy time there was no disease, no pain, no poverty. There were no class distinctions. There were no wars. The evil of the world was unknown. That was the Golden Age which a certain set of thinkers then placed far back in the past. They told how that age was succeeded by a bronze age, a poorer condition of affairs, how the gods left the earth, and ill contentions and evils of every kind began to afflict the world. This was succeeded by the age of brass, that by the age of iron; and so the poor old world was supposed to be getting worse and worse, lower and lower, from one epoch of time to another.

But also among these same people there were another set of traditions, illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the story of Prometheus. According to this the first age of humanity was its worst and poorest and lowest age. The people lived in abject poverty and misery. They were even neglected on the part of the gods, who did not seem to care for them, but treated them with contempt. Prometheus is represented as pitying their evil estate, caring more for them than the gods did; and so he steals the celestial fire, and comes down to the world and presents it to men, and so helps them to begin civilization, a period of prosperity and progress. For this he is punished by the gods.

The point I wish you to note is that even among the Greeks and the Romans there were two types of mind, one of which placed the Golden Age in the past, and the other of which placed it in the future as the goal of man's endeavor and growth.

A precisely similar thing we find in the Old Testament, so that these two types of mind appear among the Hebrews. In one of these we find again the Golden Age, the perfect condition of things, placed at the beginning. There was a garden, and man and woman were perfect in it. There was no labor, no toil, no pain, no sorrow, no fear, no trouble of any kind. But that was followed by sin, evil, entering the world, by their being driven out; and so the world has again been going from bad to worse, as the ages have passed by.

On the other hand, among the Hebrews, as illustrated in the writings of the great prophets, the master minds of the Hebrew race, there is the opposite belief manifested. There is no fall of man, no perfect condition of things, no Golden Age at the beginning, in the prophets. There is none in the teaching of Jesus. Rather do they look forward with kindling eye and beating heart to some grander thing that is to be.

Here is this dual tradition, then, in the world, in different parts of the world, this dual way of looking at the problem of life.

Now I wish to place before you the two great contrasted theories of the universe. In presenting that which has been dominant for the last two or three thousand years, two thousand, perhaps, speaking roughly, I am quite well aware that I shall have to seem to tell you what you perfectly well know, what I have said on other occasions; but it is necessary for me to run over it, and I will do so as briefly as I can, setting it before you in outline as a whole, so that you may see it in contrast with the other theory which I shall then endeavor to set forth also as a whole.

According to that theory of the world, then, which lies at the foundation, the old-time and still generally accepted theory of Christendom, the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. It was created in a week's time. This was the general teaching until thinkers were compelled to accept another theory by the advances of modern investigation. The world was created inside of a week. God got through, pronounced it good, and rested. Then in a short period of time we do not know how long evil entered this world which God had pronounced perfect. Satan, a real being, the leader of the hosts of the fallen angels, the traditional enemy of God, who had fought him even in his own heaven and been cast out, invades this fair earth. He seduces our first parents, gets them to commit a sin against God which makes them his enemies, turns them into rebels against his just and holy government. The world, then, is fallen. Now from that day to this the one effort on the part of God, according to this theory, has been to deliver the world from this lost condition. Jonathan Edwards, for example, published a book called "The History of Redemption." He conceived the entire history of the world under that title, because the history of the world, according to this theory, has been the history of the effort of God to deliver man from the effects of the fall.

Now let us note the story as it proceeds a little further. The world exists for I think I have a date here which may interest you 1,656 years, God meantime doing everything he could, by sending angels and special messengers and teaching the people; and he had accomplished so little that the world was in such a condition that he was compelled to drown it. So came the flood. After that, he chooses one family, one little family and the descendants of that family, one little people, and bends all his energies to the education and training of that people,-- a small people inhabiting a country on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea just about as large as the State of Massachusetts.

For more than two thousand years he devotes himself to the training of this people. How does he succeed here? He sends his messengers again, his angels, his prophets, one after another. He inspires a certain number of men to write a book to deliver his will to the people, fallen into such condition that they are incapable of discovering the truth for themselves. But, after all his efforts, they are so far from the truth that, when the second person of the Trinity appears, they have nothing to do with him except to put him to death. After that, God sends the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to organize his Church, spread his truth, convert men, bring them into the Church, and so fit them to be saved. And, after two thousand years of that kind of effort, what is the result? They tell us that not more than a third part of the inhabitants of the world have heard anything about it, that the majority of those who have heard about it reject it. Mr. Moody told us last year that in this country, which we love to think of as the most favored and highly civilized and intelligent country in the world, out of seventy millions of inhabitants, not more than thirty millions ever see the inside of any kind of church. I do not vouch for the accuracy of the statistics. I wish to impress upon you the result of this theory of this six thousand years of endeavor on the part of God to bring his own children to a knowledge of his own truth. The upshot of it is that the few, the minority, will be saved, and the great majority eternally lost.

Now here is one world theory, one scheme of world history which I wish you to hold clearly and as definitely as possible in your minds, while I place alongside of it another theory.

According to this other, God did not suddenly create the world in a week or in a hundred thousand years. It is a story of continuous and eternal creation. As Jesus said, with fine and noble insight, "My father worketh hitherto." He did not recognize that God was resting on any day or through any period of time.

The world, then, has always been in process of creation. The same forces at work in accordance with substantially the same laws. The world has been millions of years in this process; and the process all around us, if we choose to open our eyes and note it, is still going on with all its wonder and divinity. And we know, as we study the heavens above us, or around us rather, with our telescopes, that there are worlds and systems of worlds in process of creation on every hand. We are permitted to look into the divine workshop and observe the divine method.

The world, then, is always in process of creation. This is the first point in the new theory. It follows, of course, from this that we are to hold the story of the antiquity of the earth, the earth millions of years old, instead of six thousand or ten thousand.

And then, in the third place, it tells us the story of the antiquity of the human race.

All scholars, for example, as bearing on this I will give you just this one illustration, know that there was a civilization in Egypt, wide- spread, highly developed, with nobody knows how many ages of growth behind it, there was this civilization in Egypt before the world was created according to the popular chronology that has been generally received until within a few years.

We know that man has been on the earth hundreds of thousands of years. This is the next point in that story.

In the next place, they tell us a wondrous tale of the origin and nature of man, tracing his natural development from lower forms of life. When I say "natural," I do not wish you to think for one moment that I leave out the divinity; for, according to this story of the world which I am hinting and outlining now, God is infinitely nearer, more wonderfully in contact with us, than he ever was in the old. Natural, then, but divine at every step, so that we are seeing God face to face, if we but think of it, and are feeling his touch every moment of our lives.

No fall of man, then, on this theory. No invasion of this world by any form of evil or any evil person from without. This story of the fall of man came into the world undoubtedly to account in some philosophical fashion for the existence of pain, of evil, and of death. We account for it on this new theory much more naturally, rationally, more honorably for God, more hopefully for man.

The history of the world, then, since man began has not been by any means a history of universal progression. Evolution, however much it may be misunderstood and misrepresented, does not mean the necessity of progress on the part of any one person or any one people, any more, for example, than the growth of the human body is inconsistent with the fact that cells and composite parts of the body are in process of decay and dissolution every hour, every moment of our lives.

Nations grow, advance, if they comply with the laws, the conditions, of growth and advance; and, if not, they die out and disappear. And so is it of individuals. But, on the other hand, in the presence of the loving, lifting, leading God, humanity in the larger sense has been advancing from the beginning of human history until to-day; and the grade, dim glimpses of which we gain as we look out toward the future, is still up and still on.

According to this theory of the universe, there does not need to be any stupendous breaking in of God into his own world after any miraculous fashion. We do not need an infallible guide in religion any more than anywhere else, unless we are in danger of eternal loss because of an intellectual mistake. We do not need any stupendous miracle to reconcile God to his own world; for he has always been reconciled. We do not need any miraculous bridging of any mythical gulf; for there never has been any gulf. And the outcome, not as we look forward are we haunted by fearful anticipations of darkness and evil; as we listen, we do not ever hear the clanking of chains; as we look, we know that the dimness that hangs over the coming time is not caused by "the smoke of the torment that ascendeth up forever and ever." It is a story of eternal hope for every race, for every child of man and child of God.

Here are these two theories, then, two schemes of the universe and of human history. Which of them shall we accept?

I wish you to note now, and to note with a little care, that you cannot rationally accept a part of one theory and a part of the other, and so make up a patchwork to suit yourselves. Take, for example, the one question, Is man lost or is he not? He is not half lost or sort of lost: he is either lost or he is not lost. Which is true? If he is not "lost," then he does not need to be "saved." He may need something else; but he does not need that, for the two correspond and match each other. Let us think, then, a little clearly in regard to this matter, and remember that the outcome of the conflict between these two theories must be the supremacy of either one or the other.

Now, before I come to any more fundamental and earnest treatment of the subject, let me call your attention to certain things that are happening to the old theory.

How much of that old theory is intact to-day? How much of it is held even by those who, being scholars and thinkers, still hold their allegiance to the old-time theology? Let us see. The story of the sudden and finite creation of the world is completely gone. Nobody holds that now who gives it any attention. They have stretched the six days of the week, even those who hold the accuracy of the Genesis account, into uncounted periods of time. So that is gone. The antiquity of man is conceded by everybody who has a right to have and express an opinion; that is, by everybody who has given it any study. Every competent and free scholar knows to-day that the story of the fall of man and the whole Eden story, is a Babylonian or a Persian legend that came into the life of the Jews about the time of their captivity, and was not known of till then among them, and did not take hold on the leading and highest minds of their own people. And there are, as you know, hundreds, if not thousands of clergymen in all the churches to- day who are ready to concede that the story of Eden is poetry or legend or tradition: they no longer treat it as serious history. And yet, as I have said a good many times, they go on as though nothing had happened, although the foundation of their house has been removed. Only theories which stand in the air can thus defy the law of gravitation.

Nobody to-day who has a right to have an opinion believes that God ever drowned the world. That is gone. As to the question as to whether we have an infallible book to guide us in religious matters, there are very few scholars in any church to-day, so far as my investigations have led, who hold any such opinion. That is gone; and the Bible, the Old Testament, at any rate is coming to be recognized, not as infallible revelation, but as ancient literature, immensely interesting, full of instruction, but not as an unquestioned guide in any department of life.

There are many among the nominally old churches who are coming to hold a very different theory concerning Jesus, his life, his death, and the effect of his death on the salvation of man. More reasonable ideas are prevailing here. In every direction also there are thousands on thousands who are becoming freed from that horrible incubus of fear as they look out towards the future.

As you note then, point after point of this old scheme of the universe is disappearing, being superseded by something else; until I am astonished, as I converse with friends in the other churches, to find how little of it is really left, how little of it men are ready, out and out, to defend. In conversation with an Episcopal clergyman a short time ago on theological questions, we agreed so well that I laughingly said I saw no reason why I should not become a clergyman in the Episcopal Church.

Now, friends, what I wish you to note is this: that there is not one single point in this old scheme of the universe that can be reasonably defended to-day. It is passing away from intelligent, cultivated human thought.

And note another thing: it is a scheme which is a discredit to the thought of God. It is unjust. It is dishonorable in its moral and religious implications. It is pessimistic and hopeless in its outlook for the race. It does not explain the problems of human nature and human experience half as well as the other theory does, even if it could be demonstrated as truth.

Now let us look at the other. The other theory is magnificent in its proportions. It is grand in its conception and in its age-long sweep and range. It is worthy of the grandest thought of God we can frame; and we cannot imagine any increase or heightening or deepening of that thought which would reach beyond the limits of this conception of the universe, magnificent in its thought of God. And, instead of being pessimistic and hopeless in its outlook for man, it is full of hope, of life, of inspiration, of cheer, something for which we well may break out into songs of gladness as we contemplate.

And, then, it is true. There is not one single feature of it, or point in it, that has not in the main been scientifically demonstrated to be God's truth. I make this statement, and challenge the contradiction of the world. Whatever breaks there may be in the evidence for this second theory that I have outlined, every single scrap and particle of evidence that there is in the universe is in its favor; and there is not one single scrap or particle of evidence in favor of the other. As I say, I challenge the contradiction of the scholarly world to that statement.

It is true then. Being true, it is God's truth, God's theory of things, the outline of human history as God has laid it down for us; and, as we trace it, like Kepler, we may say, "O God, I think over again thy thoughts after Thee."

Now I wish you to note one or two things concerning this a little further. There are a great may persons who shrink from accepting new ideas because they are haunted with the fear that in some way something precious, something sweet, something noble, something inspiring that they have associated with the past, is going to be lost. But think, friends. When the Ptolemaic theory of the universe gave way to the Copernican, not only did the Copernican have the advantage of being true, but not one single star in heaven was put out or even dimmed its light. All of them looked down upon us with an added magnificence and a fresher glow, because we felt at last we were standing face to face with the truth of things, and not with a fallible theory of man.