Some Christian Convictions | Page 5

can be little doubt but that
fresh spiritual forces are to be liberated, indeed are already at work,
from this new contact with the Jesus of history.
Still another opening in the scientific quarry is Psychology. The last
century saw great advances in the investigation of the mind of man,
which revolutionized educational methods, gave new tools to novelists
and historians, and threw new light on every aspect of the human spirit.

Psychologists turned their attention to religion, and have done much to
chart out the movements of man's nature in his response to his highest
inspirations. They have altered methods of Biblical education in our
Sunday Schools, have shown us helpful and harmful ways of
presenting religious appeals, and have given us scientific standards to
test the value of the materials employed in public worship.
We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to
them:
(1) The normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been
regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human
spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed
personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You
may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease
to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great
quantity of Varieties of Religious Experience, and he deals with all of
them respectfully.
(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience. Man "wills to
live," and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are
dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any
he can find in his world. He "wills to believe," and discovers an answer
to his faith in the Unseen. This is a reaffirmation of the definition,
"faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test of things not
seen." And the student of religious psychology has now vastly more
material on which to work, because the last century opened up still
another quarry for investigation in Comparative Religion. An
Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and
false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less
developed. Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many
striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief. It is not possible
to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is light,
and within the rest all is darkness. Everything that grows out of man's
experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or practice that
has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human being is
without significance. Our own faith is often clarified by comparing it

with that of some supposedly unrelated religion. Many a usage and
conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to something in
our Bible. The development of theology or of ritual in some other
religion throws light on similar developments in Christianity. The
widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our assurance of the
reality of God. "To the philosopher," wrote Max Müller, "the existence
of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of the historian it
rests on the whole evolution of human thought." Under varied names,
and with very differing success in their relations with the Unseen, men
have had fellowship with the one living God. It was this unity of
religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving to
express when they wrote, "Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni;
sages name variously Him who is but One."
This study of comparative religion has gained for us:
(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity,
and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its
answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.
(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians
go not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing religious
experience of any people, however crude, God has already made some
disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith He has
written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is to be
added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God in
Jesus Christ.
A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value
to faith than any of those named, is the Social Movement. In the closing
years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on as
voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals,
which had not existed in the original "state of nature" where all men
were supposed to have been free and equal. The closing years of the
Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism,