The Religious Situation | Page 4

dominion with the Father, and destined
together with the Father to judge the world. But, in his mortal hour of
anguish in Gethsemane, he prays to the Father to let the cup pass from
him; an act hardly consistent with the 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