Part 2 (1/2)

These, then, for preliminary considerations.

Now let me raise the question as to what has been taken away. You remember I said that I have taken nothing away, Unitarianism has taken nothing away. But the advance of modern knowledge, the larger, clearer revelation of G.o.d, has taken away no end of things. What are they?

Let me make two very brief statements right here. I am in the position, this morning, of appearing to repeat myself; that is, I must go over a good many points that I have made from this platform before. But please understand that it is not on account of lapse of memory on my part. I am doing it with a distinct end in view, which can only be attained by these steps.

In the next place, my treatment has so much ground to cover that what I say will appear somewhat in the nature of a catalogue; but I see no other way in which to make the definite statement I wish to lay before you. I am going to catalogue, first, a lot of the things that modern knowledge has taken away. Then I am going to tell you some of the things that modern knowledge is putting in place of what it has removed.

In the first place, the old universe is taken away; that is, that little tiny play-house affair, not so large as our solar system, which in the first chapters of Genesis G.o.d is reported to have made as a carpenter working from outside makes a house, inside of six days. That little universe, that is, the story of creation as told in the early chapters of Genesis, is absolutely gone. I shall tell you pretty soon what has taken the place of it.

Secondly, the G.o.d of the Old Testament, the G.o.d of most of the creeds has been taken away, that G.o.d who was jealous, who was partial, who was angry; who built a little world, and called it good, and then inside of a few days saw it slip out of his control into the hands of the devil, either because he could not help it or did not wish to; who watched this world develop for a little while, and then, because it did not go as he wanted it to, had to drown it, and start over again; the G.o.d who in the Old Testament told the people that slavery was right, provided they did not enslave the members of their own nation, but only those outside of it; the G.o.d who indorsed polygamy, telling a man that he was at liberty to have just as many wives as he wanted and could obtain, and that he was free to dispose of them by simply giving them a little notice and telling them to quit; the G.o.d who indorsed hypocrisy and lying on the part of his people; the G.o.d who sent a little light on one little people along one edge of the Mediterranean, and left all the rest of the world in darkness; the G.o.d who is to d.a.m.n all of these people who were left in darkness because they did not know that of which they never had any chance to hear; the G.o.d who is to cast all his enemies into the pit, trampling them down, as Edwards pictures so horribly to us, in his hate for ever and ever. This G.o.d has been taken away.

In the third place, the story of Eden, the creation of man and then immediately the fall of man and the resulting doctrine of total depravity, this has been taken away. That man was made in the image of G.o.d, and then, inside of a few days, fell into the hands of the Power of Evil, and that since that day he has been the legitimate subject here on this earth of the prince of this world, that is, the devil, and that is taught both in the Old Testament and in the New, that man is this kind of a being, this is forever gone. There is no rational, intelligent, free belief in it left.

Then the old theory of the Bible has been taken away, that theory which makes it a book without error or flaw, and makes us under the highest obligation to receive all its teachings as the veritable word of G.o.d, whether they seem to us hideous, blasphemous, immoral, degrading, or not. This is gone.

Professor Goldwin Smith, in an article published within a year, treats the belief, the continued holding to this old theory about the Bible, under the head of Christianity's ”Millstone.” He writes from the point of view of the old belief; but he says, if Christianity is going to be saved, this millstone must be taken off from about its neck, and allowed to sink into the sea.

If we hold that theory, what? Why, then, we must still believe that, in order to help on the slaughter of his enemies on the part of a barbarian general, G.o.d stopped the whole machinery of the universe for hours until he got through with his killing. We must believe the literal story of Jonah's being swallowed by the whale. We must believe no end of incredibilities; and then, if we dare to read with our eyes open, we must believe immoral things, cruel things, about men and about G.o.d, things which our civilization would not endure, were it not for the power of tradition, which hallows that which used to be believed in the past.

This conception of the Bible, then, is gone.

Then, in the next place, the blood atonement is gone. What did that mean to the world? It meant that the eternal Father either would not or could not forgive and receive back to his heart his own erring, mistaken, wandering children unless the only begotten Son of G.o.d was slaughtered, and we, as the old awful hymn has it, were plunged beneath this fountain of blood I Revolting, terrible, if you stop to think of it for one reasoning moment, that G.o.d cannot forgive unless he takes agony out of somebody equal to that from which he releases his own children! That, though embodied still in all the creeds, has been taken away. It is gone, like a long, hideous dream of darkness.

Belief in the devil has been taken away. What does that mean? It means that Christendom has held and taught for nearly two thousand years that G.o.d is not really King of the universe; that he holds only a divided power, and that here thousands on thousands of years go by, and the devil controls the destiny of this world, and ruins right and left millions on millions of human souls, and that G.o.d either cannot help it or does not wish to, one of the two. This belief is taken away.

And then, lastly, that which I have touched on by implication already, the belief in endless punishment is taken away. Are you sorry? Does anybody wish something put in the place of this? The belief that all those except the elect, church members, those who have been through a special process called conversion, these, including all the millions on millions outside of Christendom and from the beginning until to-day, have gone down to the flame that is never quenched, the worm that never dies, to linger on in useless torture forever and ever? Simply a monument of what is monstrously called the justice of G.o.d! This is gone.

Now, friends, just ask yourselves, as you go home, as you think over what I have said this morning, as to whether there is anything else lost.

Is there anything of value taken away? Let me run over now in parallel fas.h.i.+on another catalogue to place opposite this one, so that we may see as to what has been our loss and as to whether there has been any gain.

In the place of the little, petty universe of Hebrew dream, what have we now? This magnificent revelation of the Copernican students; a universe infinite in its reach and in its grandeur; a universe fit at last to be the home of an infinite G.o.d; a universe grand enough to clothe him and express him, to manifest and reveal him; a universe boundless; a universe that has grown through the ages and is growing still, and is to unfold more and more of the divine beauty and glory forevermore. Is there any loss in this exchange?

Now as to G.o.d. I have pictured to you, in very bald outline, some of the conceptions of G.o.d that have been held in the past. What is our G.o.d to-day? The heart, the life, the soul, of this infinite universe; justice that means justice; power that means power; love that surpa.s.ses all our imagination of love; a G.o.d who is eternal goodness; who from the beginning has folded his child man to his heart, whispering all of truth that he could understand, breathing into him all of life that he could contain, inspiring him with all love and tenderness that he could appreciate or employ, and so, in this way, leading him and guiding him through the ages, year by year and century by century, still to something better and finer and higher; a G.o.d, not off somewhere in the heavens, to whom we must send a messenger; not a G.o.d separated from us by some great gulf that we must bridge by some supposed atonement; a G.o.d nearer to us than our breath; a G.o.d who hears the whisper of our want, who understands the dawning wish or aspiration before it takes form or shape; a G.o.d who loves us better than we love ourselves or love those who are dearest to us; a G.o.d who knows better what we need than we know ourselves, and is more ready to give us than fathers are to give good gifts to their children. Is there any loss here?

In the third place, the new man that has come into modern thought. Not the broken fragments of a perfect Adam; not a man so crippled intellectually that, as they have been telling us for centuries, it was impossible for him to find the truth, or to know it when he did find it; not a being so depraved, morally, that he never desires any good, and never loves anything which is sweet and fine; a being totally depraved, a being who, as one pa.s.sage in the Old Testament tells us, is so corrupt his very prayer is a sin; conceived, born, in evil, and all his thoughts tainted, and drifting towards that which is wicked. Not this kind of a man. A man who has been on the planet hundreds of thousands of years, who has been learning by experience, who has been animal, who has been cruel, but who at every step has been trying to find the light, has been becoming a little truer and better; a being who has evolved all that is sweetest and finest in the history of the world; who has made no end of mistakes, who has committed no end of crimes, but who has learned through these processes, and at last has given us some specimens of what is possible by way of development in Abraham and Moses and Elijah and David and Isaiah, and a long line of prophets and seers of the Old Testament time; not perfect, but magnificent types of actual men; who has developed in other nations such men as Gautama, the heroes and teachers of China, like Confucius; then Aristotle, Plato, Socrates; the n.o.ble men of Rome; who has given us in the modern world the great poets, the great discoverers, the great philanthropists; those devoted to the highest, sweetest things; musicians and artists; who has given us Shakspere, who has given us, crowning them all, as I believe, by the moral beauty and grandeur of his love, the Nazarene, Jesus, our elder brother, Son of G.o.d, and helper of his fellow-man; this humanity that has never fallen; that has been climbing up from the beginning, and not sinking down. Is there any loss here?

Then let us see what kind of a Bible modern science and modern discovery and modern scholars.h.i.+p and modern life have given us.

Our Bible is the sifted truth of the ages. There is not a pa.s.sage in it or a line for which we need apologize. There is nothing incredible in it, except as it is incredibly sweet and good and true. It is the truth that has come to men in all ages, no matter spoken by whose lips, no matter written by what pen, no matter wrought out under what conditions or in whatever civilization or under whatever sky.

All that is true and sweet and fine is a part of G.o.d's revelation of himself to his children, and makes up our Bible, which is not all written yet. Every new truth that shall be discovered in the future will make a new line or a new paragraph or a new chapter. G.o.d has been writing it on the rocks, in the stars, in the hearts, on the brains of his children; and his hand does not slacken. He is not tired: he is writing still. He will write to-morrow, and next year, and throughout all the coming time. This is the Bible.

We believe, for example, that the saying of the old Egyptian, G.o.d shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, is just as divine and sweet as when said in the New Testament. We believe that the Golden Rule is just as golden when uttered by Confucius hundreds of years before Jesus as it was afterwards.

We believe that the saying about two commandments being the sum and substance of the law was just as holy when Hillel spake them as when Jesus uttered them after his time. All truth is divine, and part of G.o.d's divine revelation to his children.

Here is our Bible, then. Now let me speak about Jesus, and see if our thought is less precious than the old. In my old days, when I preached in the orthodox church, Jesus was never half so dear, so helpful to me, as he is now. If I thought of him at all, I was obliged to think of him as somehow a second G.o.d, who stood between me and the first one, and through whom I hoped deliverance from the law and the justice of the first. I had to think of him as a part of a scheme that seemed to me unjust and cruel, involving the torture of some and the loss of most of the race. You cannot pick the old-time Jesus out of that scheme of which he is a part. I could not love him then as I love him now. I could not think of him as an example to follow; for how can one take the Infinite for an example? How can one follow the absolutely Perfect except afar off?

But now I think of Jesus and his cross as the most natural and at the same time the divinest thing in the history of man. Nothing outside of the regular divine order in it. Jesus reveals to me to-day the humanness of G.o.d and the divineness of man. And he takes his place in the long line of the world's redeemers, those who have wrought atonement, how? Through faithfulness even unto death.

The way we work out the atonement of the world, that is, the reconciliation of the world to G.o.d, is by being true to the vision of the truth as it comes to us, no matter by the pathway of what suffering, true as Jesus was true, true even when he thought his Father had forsaken him.