FAITH AND ITS EXPONENTS. 31 apostles, there lie seams of the finest moral wealth. To neglect these is to neglect Christian truth in its fairest and most fragrant flower. The Churches have been more concerned about doctrine than about ethics, about polity than about conduct. If they are to live and grow in strength and influence they must not fear to develop and preach the moral principles of the faith they confess, applying them to the questions that are evermore emerging, to the conduct of living men and women, to our divisions, to our class and caste hatreds, to the questions and controversies between capital and labour, to the motives and interests that inspire and guide, or misguide, our home and foreign politics. No society is at liberty to abdicate its own proper functions, or can do so without losing both the right and the power to exercise them. Its failure to put forth its real and patent moral energies has cost our actual Christianity an immense loss in moral influence. It was meant to live a brave and active life, going everywhere with man, ruling him in all things, in all places, and only as it is made to do so will it have its proper power and do its proper work. But the relations of Modern Faith to Modern Thought must, after all, mainly depend on its living representatives and exponents. A system can act upon an age only through the men in whom it lives and by whom it works. As our Christian thinkers are, so must our Christian thought be. Unless they are as eminent and enlightened as the thinkers they oppose, it is impossible that their opposition can be anything else than feeble and bootless where it is not absolutely absurd. In an age of science it is not possible that ignorance should be power. The religious teachers we need are men of large and living sympathy, sympathy with knowledge, with science and philosophy, with doubt, with the inquiries that often lead to doubt, and, above all, sympathy with the noble minds that are often bewildered by the maze of cross-lights that at once lighten and darken their path in the eager quest after the highest good. With such teachers Faith cannot die; without them it ought not to live. If Faith is at once wise, generous, and brave in its conflict with Modern Thought, there need be no fear as to the issue. The nobler is in the long run the stronger, and the more enduring is sure to conquer. Man can never outgrow himself, and he has been made to seek and find his Maker. Human society reposes on religion. Civilization without it would be like the lights that play on the northern sky-a momentary flash upon the face of darkness ere it again settled into eternal night. No age ever needed more than ours a holy and beneficent religion, and such a religion the Christian is, and ought to be made to appear to be. It has fashioned all that is noblest in our modern world; breathes in our atmosphere, pulses in our institutions, glows in our civilizations; and it ought to be so presented to living minds as to be seen as it is: the truth that reconciles reason to reality, that can alone make man noble and set man free. "Different therefore from both these sciences [physics and mathematics] is that which deals with the transcendent and inmovable, if any such being exists. But of transcendent and immovable being we shall endeavour to prove the existence, and such a nature, if it finds place in the world of reality, may be said to constitute the domain of Deity and to be itself a first and regnant principle."- Aristotle "Metaphysica," x. c. vii. "We owe modern atheistic philosophy sincere thanks for having first made us vividly conscious how incomparably great a thing it is to affirm the existence of God."-Rothe: "Stille Stunden,” p. 43. "The true nature and the true good of man, true virtue and true religion, are things inseparable in knowledge."Pascal: "Pensées et Lettres," vol. ii. p. 142 (ed. Faugère). 34 THEISM AND SCIENCE.1 "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.”—Psalm XC. I, 2. I. It THIS is one of the sublimest of the old Hebrew Psalms, fitly expressing the faith Israel gave to the world. It is well said to be "a prayer of Moses, the man of God," for the truth that came by him here proves its inspiration by its power to inspire, to awaken sad contrition, deep reverence, and delighted awe. sets God, the Eternal, over against man, the mortal, and makes us feel how the very earth that bears and the time that enfolds our race, are but moments in His being, moments that come and pass and perish while He abides. They are because He is; without Him they had not been and could not be. Before, behind, beneath, and beyond all is God, thinking the thoughts that create our world, willing the changes that measure our time and form our history, making our successive generations no aimless march from void to void, from birth to death, but an order constituted by intelligence, penetrated by purpose, and governed 1 Preached in Salem Chapel, York, 4th September, 1881, during the sittings of the British Association. 35 |