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.
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.