The Religious Situation | Page 4

doctrines of the Athanasian Creed. In the immortality of the soul and judgment after death he plainly believes. But he does not substantiate the belief by any explanation of the mode of survival; nor, in separating the two flocks of sheep and goats, does he say how mixed characters are to be treated. Tribalism seems slightly to cling to his conception of the just gathered in Abraham's bosom. Of his apologue of Dives and Lazarus, the last part appears to show that the world beyond the grave was to him a realm of the imagination.
The Sermon on the Mount would appear, by the strong impress of character it bears, to have special claims to authenticity. So may the Parables habitually employed as instruments of teaching and wearing apparently the stamp of a single imagination.
That with Jesus of Nazareth there came into the world, and by his example and teaching was introduced and propagated a moral ideal which, embodied in Christendom, and surviving through all these centuries the action of hostile forces the most powerful, not only from without, but from within, has uplifted, purified, and blessed humanity is a historical fact. With the civilization of Christendom no other civilization can compare. But we have been accustomed to believe that there was a miraculous revelation of the Deity. A revelation of the Deity, though not miraculous, Christianity may be believed to have been.
Revelation, direct and assured, of the nature, will, designs, or relation to us of the Deity through the Bible or in any other way we cannot be truly said to have. All that we apparently can be said to have, besides the religious instinct in ourselves, is the evidence of beneficent design in the universe; balanced, we must sadly admit, by much that with our present imperfect knowledge appears to us at variance with beneficence; by plagues, earthquakes, famines, torturing diseases, infant deaths; by the sufferings of animals preyed on by other animals or breeding beyond the means of subsistence; by inevitable accidents of all kinds; by the Tower of Siloam everywhere falling on the just as well as on the sinner. There may be a key, there may be a plan, disciplinary or of some other kind, and in the end the mystery may be solved. At present there seems to be no key other than that which may be suggested by the connection of effort with virtue and the progress of a collective humanity.
At the same time, we may apparently dismiss belief in a great personal power of evil and in his realm of everlasting torture. The independent origin of such a power of evil is unthinkable; so is the struggle between the two powers and its end. There is no absolutely distinct line between good and evil. The shades of character are numberless.
Another great change, rather of impression than of conviction, has been creeping over the religious scene. We have hitherto, largely, perhaps, under the influence of the Bible, been fancying rather than thinking that this little earth of ours was the centre of all things, the special object of interest to the Creator; and that the grand drama of existence was that enacted on this terrestrial stage and culminating in Redemption. Astronomical science is now making us distinctly feel that this world is only one, and, if magnitude is to be the measure, very far from the most important, of myriads of worlds governed by the same physical laws as ours, forming a system of which ours is a member, while the destiny of the whole system is to us utterly inscrutable; proofs of the most sublime and glorious order presenting themselves on the one hand, while on the other we see signs of disorder and destruction, errant bodies such as comets and aerolites, a moon without an atmosphere, the conflagration of a star. Whether the whole is moving towards any end and, if it is, what that end is to be, we cannot hope to divine. When with Infinity we take into our thought Eternity, past and future, if in Eternity there can be said to be past or future, our minds are completely overwhelmed.
Is belief in a future life generally holding its ground? My friend, the late Mr. Chamberlain, was by no means alone in resigning it. But if this life is all, how can we continue to hold our faith in divine justice? Mr. Chamberlain, as I said before, was evidently happy as well as good. His life, though short and regarded by him as ending in the grave, was to him so much gain, and proved beneficence on the part of the Author of his being. But if Mr. Chamberlain's theory is true, what is to be said in the case of the myriads to whom life has been wretchedness, ending