" NOT AS THE SCRIBES."
THE ordinary man of to-day who is educated, and who reads but lays no claim to scholarship, is often thrown by his reading into religious distress. He feels within himself a necessity for religion, yet he is constantly constrained to ask himself whether a thinking man can continue to be religious in the face of all the new learning. To the confusion of all men but themselves, a group of learned men have taken in band to disillusionize the world, or so the man in the street is apt to think, as he turns sadly from new attempts to explain the origin of what used to be called the soul, and to explain it apart from the supernatural. So many of our instructors take us so far away from St. John's correction that " In the beginning was the Word." They are all ready to write new beginnings to the story of man, and as they struggle to destroy the Divine story of his origin they impress him with the nearness and hopelessness of his end. Small wonder if the thinking world is sad. Is there any real need for this sadness P When the mood induced by his desultory studies ryas passed certain hopeful reflections may occur to the ordinary man. In the first place be may remember, or remember those who remember, the day when ordinary people first began to suspect that the book of Genesis was simply a very ancient attempt to account for the origin of man, of good and of evil. Many people fell into religious despair because they could no longer place any literal credence in the story of the Fall. That blow religion has survived, and since Genesis took its place with other primitive speculations many another book of Genesis has been written to explain the inexplicable. Their authority, like that of the first book of the Bible, will not perhaps be eternal, but at present we ordinary people are sad because we are inclined to believe them, and they do seem at first sight to undermine the foundations of faith. Our grandfathers, however, made a mistake when they thought that vast religious issues depended upon the truth of an old theory of the origin of religion. Per- haps we are wrong in fearing that vast religious issues depend upon the truth or untruth of a new theory of origins. No light has been thrown upon the origin of life by the physicist. He knows what the Hebrew prophet thought no man would ever know. He knows "how the bones do form," but children are still what they were in the time of the prophet, and life is still a mystery. The ordinary man cannot refute the man of learn- ing. In a conflict with him he is unarmed. Is it not possible for a man to hold to his religion, and to hold to it rationally, without any definite theory as to the ultimate origin of its ceremonial, without understanding its evolution, without even feeling certain as to the historical facts of its later development, and yet without taking refuge in obscurantism P To our minds Christianity allows this latitude to its adherents.
Christ's knowledge of human nature has struck every student of His teaching, whether he looked at it from within or from without the circle of His adherents, and Christ believed that well-intentioned people show an extraordinary consensus of moral conclusion. He refused when He was asked to give any authority for His teaching, but He declared upon another occasion that men of good will would find its confirmation within their own minds. "If any man willeth to do his will he shall know of the teaching whether it be from God or whether I speak from myself." In these words Christ claimed inspiration, not only for Himself, but for every man who will make the requisite moral effort to hear " the Word." Now no man can decide out of his own inner consciousness any question which involves study and weighing of evidence. No such question, therefore, can be primarily essential to the Christian religion. Christ taught
that the kingdom of God is within, and that a man must ask himself, and not any other authority, whether what He was teaching was inspired or merely a product of reason and tradition.
What, the ordinary man may ask himself, are the essentials of the religion which Christ taught, and of which He dis- tinctly said that the confirmation lay in the human soul 11 To-day is so completely an age of doubt that it is perhaps easier and clearer and more in keeping with the spirit of the time to state what we mean in terms of doubt rather than of faith. Faith came to the Roman world in the guise of doubt. To all ordinary men, to every man not a born mystic, what we may call the creed of the obvious makes, at least in his worst moments, some sort of appeal. He does not support it by argument, but it presents itself to him at times as simple and horribly likely. It is the homage exacted by the Spirit which Christ personified as "the Prince of this World," of whom He said that he "bath nothing in me." The first tenet of this creed of the obvious is that there is no God. Upon this first article of the secularist creed religion throws a doubt. The world is not obviously governed at all. Yet the good man with a strong determination to bring justice and mercy out of the cruel chaos he sees before him will at least be unable to get away from the idea that what he sees is not the whole truth. Christ assured men that benevolence is at the back of all that we see, and in defiance of reason His words find an answer in the mind of every benevolent man. There are times in the history of the world and of the individual when the answer is less clear and strong than at others, but it is audible ; and when men are in their best mood—that is, WILL most ardently to do right—it is most audible. To go back to the creed of the obvious. Accord- ing to its assertions death is the end. Upon this article also religion throws a doubt—a doubt from which no group of men has ever got away. It is true now—it always has been true— that many individuals of good will cannot realize any life out- side the body, but none the less they do find in themselves an answer to Christ's assertion that they will not see death. It may be given in the language of longing and fear, and not in that of courage and assurance, but the reply is there, and witnesses to the inspiration of the hope. Of course one cannot test the reality of a man's Christianity by saying, Does he fear death P If the object of Christianity were to enable men to meet death with a smile then not Christ but the aristocrats of the French Revolution must be looked on as the light of the world. If when Christians think of death they " begin to be sorrowful and very heavy," they do not forfeit their right to the name or deny by their state of mind that there are things worth dying for. But to return to what we may call the " eternal doubt." Selfishness is part of the obvious creed. In practice we all—very often—believe in it. This article is differently worded in different ages. The savage holds it simply, the sophisticated man upholds it by the endless subtleties of philosophy; but whether it is expounded by an Epicurus, or a Nietzsche, or by the wildest barbarian it is exactly the same thing. Christianity throws doubt upon the egoistic theory as a guide of life. It does not supply the religious man with arguments; it merely interprets his own misgiving and tells him that that misgiving is in- spired. "Thou fool" is the only answer which religion makes to the argument of the egoist, and ninety-nine men in a hundred know in their hearts that the comment is just. It is from within us that the Sermon on the Mount finds con- firmation, and the Publican goes down to his house justified rather than the Pharisee in the eyes of every right-minded man. Would it be too much to say that there is to-day in the Western world no secularist capable of moral aspiration in whose mind the teaching of Christ does not raise a doubt P This doubt is the great disintegrator which shall "overcome the world." The Christian religion has in its essence nothing to do with erudition, nothing to fear, nothing to gain from it. It is a religion for children and wayfaring men, a religion that does not acknowledge the authority of the Scribes, while leaving to them an absolute freedom of thought.
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