THE DECAY OF EVANGELICALISM?
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
8ia,—The discussion of this subject reminds me of a grand pro- phetical saying of Edward Irving's :—" When the Holy Ghost departs from any set of opinions, or form of character, they wither like a sapless tree."—" Life," Vol. I., p. 347.
I do not mean to suggest that the Divine Spirit has departed from the Evangelical party, far from it. Probably the party was never doing more useful work than it is now. But they started with a set of opinions, some of which were pure Christ- ianity; others, like the quid pro quo doctrine of the Atonement and the Calvinistic doctrine of election, exaggerations or carica- tures of great truths. The element of truth which these com- bined, made them, for a time, useful weapons in the rough battle which the early Evangelicals had to fight. Who can doubt, for example, that the terrors of a literal, material, never-ending hell, woke up thousands of torpid consciences to cry, " What must I do to be saved ?" But when these had done their work, the principle well described by the author of " Le Maudit " as " la cl6snetude " came into play. The doctrines were not repudiated, they were not consciously dropped ; simply men ceased gradually, first, to preach them, then to think about them, and finally to hold them. In truth, there is in theology, as in everything else, a survival of the fittest. A doctrine wholly false dies at once. Doctrines which have in them a soul of truth live as long as the soul can keep the body alive, but in time they wither and die, and the deathless soul makes itself a home elsewhere. Only those survive which can make good their right to do so. And thus the history of doctrines, a new branch of ecclesiastical history hitherto worked almost exclusively by Germany, becomes the foundation of a science of comparative theology ; and we learn to hold, not indeed our principles, but our views provisionally, and to apply to opinions what Cicero says some one asserted of friendship, —" Ita amare oportere, ut si aliquando esset osurus." For indeed John Henry Newman had got hold of a great truth, though he held it by the wrong end, when he asserted the prin- ciple of the development of doctrine. Much that was true to our forefathers is not true to us ; much, perhaps, that is true to us will not be true to our children. And so theology becomes, like other sciences, progressive ; and the old motto, " Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," may turn out to be the expres- sion of the latest principle of modern science applied to theo- logical subject-matter.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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