History of Rationalism | Page 6

the true way to measure, understand, and judge it, is by answering the inquiry, What has it done? Its work must determine its character. This work has been most injurious to the faith and life of the church, and its deeds must therefore be its condemnation. There are those who say, "Tell us nothing about skepticism; we know too much about it already." Would it be a prudent request, if, before penetrating the jungles of Asia, we should say, "Tell us nothing of the habits of the lion"; or, before visiting a malarious region of Africa, we should beg of the physician not to inform us of the prevalent fever and its appropriate remedy? Forewarned is forearmed. We are surrounded by Rationalism in many phases; it comes to us in the periodical and the closely-printed volume. Even children are reading it in some shape or other. Shall we know its danger; then we must know its deeds.
III. OF RATIONALISM IT MAY BE AFFIRMED, AS OF ALL THE PHASES OF INFIDELITY, THAT IT IS NOT IN ITS RESULTS AN UNMIXED EVIL, SINCE GOD OVERRULES ITS WORK FOR THE PURIFICATION AND PROGRESS OF HIS CHURCH. A nation is never so pure as when emerging from the sevenfold-heated furnace. It was not before Manasseh was caught among thorns, bound with fetters, and carried to Babylon, that he "besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers;" nor was it before this humiliation that the Lord "brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom." The whole history of religious error shows that the church is cold, formal, and controversial before the visitation of skepticism. When every power is in full exercise, infidelity stands aloof. God has so provided for his people that he has even caused the delusion by which they have suffered to contribute great benefits but little anticipated by the deluded or the deluders themselves. The intellectual labors of the German Rationalists have already shed an incalculable degree of light on the sacred books, and upon almost every branch of theology. But thus has God ever caused the wrath of man to praise him.
Taking this view of the indirect benefits resulting from skepticism, we cannot lament, without an admixture of solace, that the path of Truth has always been rough. The Master, who declared himself "The Truth," premonished us by his own life that his doctrines were not destined to pervade the mind and heart of our race without encountering violent blows, and passing through whole winters of frost and storm. Many things attending the origin and planting of Christianity gave omen of antagonism to its claims in coming generations. Nor could it be expected that the unsanctified reason of man would accept as the only worthy guide of faith and life what Judaism, Paganism, and Philosophy had long since decidedly rejected. But the spirit of Christianity is so totally at variance with that of the world that it is vain to expect harmony between them. Truth, however, will not suffer on that account; and when the issues appear it will shine all the brighter for the fires through which it has passed. The country where Rationalism has exerted its first and chief influence is Germany, than which no nation of modern times has been more prospered or passed through deeper affliction. At one time she was the leader of religious liberty and truth, not only in Europe, but throughout the world. She was thirty years fighting the battles of Protestantism, but the end of the long conflict found her victorious. Since that day, however, she has lost her prestige of adherence to evangelical Christianity; and her representative theologians and thinkers have distorted the Bible which she was the very first to unseal. We rejoice that her condition is more hopeful to-day than it was twenty-five years ago; but recovery is not easy from a century-night of cold, repulsive Rationalism. As a large number of those stupendous battles that have decided the political and territorial condition of Europe have been fought on the narrow soil of Belgium, so has Germany been for ages the contested field on which were determined the great doctrinal and ecclesiastical questions of the European continent and of the world. Happily, the result has generally been favorable; and let no friend of evangelical truth fear that Rationalism will not meet its merited fate.
We must not imagine that, because the term Rationalism has been frequently employed within the last few years, it is of very recent origin either as a word or skeptical type. The Aristotelian Humanists of Helmstedt were called Rationalists in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and Comenius applied the same epithet to the Socinians in 1688.[1] It was a common word in England two hundred years ago. Nor was