Article November 16, 1899 Issue

A Religion of To-day

George D. Herron

New York Journal

It is time for us to create a world that shall be founded on faith—faith in the living presence of a living God amidst a living people. Most of us accept traditions of a God who lived down through the Hebrew prophets and the early Christian apostles. Possibly some of us have an undefined sense that God was living during the Reformation and until the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or we are willing to believe, and that with a considerable degree of emotion, in a God who will live suddenly and immensely in some after-death world, or in some remote millennium, in which He shall sit in terrific judgment on the world. But the idea that God is living now, in the midst of a living people, inspiring and teaching them even more directly than He inspired and taught the people of centuries ago, with revelations concerning our present problems as sure and safe as any revelations of the past, and with judgments as swift and immediate as any judgments of the future—at such a faith we grow pale, or turn from it in anger. The reason, of which we are unconscious, lies deep in the spiritual and intellectual requirements of such a faith. It is easy enough to assent to formulated beliefs, coming from constituted religious authorities, concerning the God of yesterday or the God of to-morrow.

Such assent is no evidence whatever of faith, but rather evidence of lack of faith. Formulated beliefs are largely the refuge of timidity, servility, spiritual indolence, and the unwillingness to undertake the effort of thinking; yea, the most insistent orthodox beliefs are defended by a subconscious but deep-seated and most practical atheism. We are all of us secretly ready to make any terms with faith that will keep God out of the immediate present; keep Him from having a mind about our actual affairs, or at least keep Him from speaking it, until some convenient judgment time. We forget that the prophets and martyrs and apostles have met their tragic ends just because they declared that God was alive, and insisted upon saying things about the immediate and practical concerns of men; that they characterized as downright infidelity the beliefs that put God into yesterday and His judgments into to-morrow. The faith that God is living and judging right now, and that the pressing and perplexing problems of the moment are the real vision of His glorious presence, requires an altogether more strenuous sort of living than we are apt to think or talk about. Such a faith means that God is looking us straight in the face every moment, and that the whole of life is a perpetual judgment; it means that every irrelevant act. or idle word, accounts for itself in injury to the individual soul and loss to the common life; it means that we must at once come to judgment with ourselves, and straight off give an account of our words, deeds, and motives to the awful judgment-seat of the highest ideals and divinest instincts that we have disbelieved in, or put off, or trifled with. But strenuous and exacting as such a faith is, the human race cannot live without it.

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