Article October 24, 1908 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from A. C. McGiffert, R. George McLeod

[Prof. A. C. McGiffert in The Hibbert Journal.]

When many men are interested enough in a particular system to attack it, it still has a hold upon the world; when they are too absorbed in other matters to trouble themselves about it, its day is over. And so it is evident that a new age has dawned in the history of Christianity and the old apologetic is out of date, not because it attempts to prove so many unbelievable things, but because it attempts to prove so many things in which men have no interest. Much mattered in other days which does not matter now. An apologetic which is to be of value today must defend the things that matter to-day, and only those. The question, then, for the modern apologist is not merely what is true, but what is important. What is the one thing, if there be one thing, that really counts — the one thing whose acceptance or rejection means the acceptance or rejection of Christianity? For this it is the business of the Christian apologist to secure approval and support. Failing this, his apologetic is a failure, whatever else he may successfully defend.

[The Christian Life.]

What means the unrest of this age, particularly in connection with matters of religion? It means the revolt of the million against the moral tyranny of ecclesiastical organizations. It means a protest against sacerdotalism, and against the mind-enslavement which inheres in the insistence upon creed profession as a condition of membership of Christian congregations. It means the uprising of the common sense of civilized society against all forms of oppression or repression of the human mind; against all theology which is in disharmony with the plain teaching of Christ, and all religion of the magical or mechanical sort. It means profound dissatisfaction, not with the Church as such, but with the fact that it is still in large measure in discordance with the spirit of the age, and that its history bears witness against it of many sins, both of commission and omission.

[Rev. R. George McLeod in The Universalist Leader.]

It is a matter of common assent that our age is witnessing a process of theological disintegration. Dogmas, thought forever established by the authority of creed, no longer rest secure upon ex cathedra foundations; doctrines, the crystallization of centuries, are in a state of solution; beliefs, never before questioned, are haled before the bar of inquiry. Hence the beholder receives impressions of wide-spread spiritual unrest and intellectual insecurity, and the "orthodox" see in the attempts in theological reconstruction a veritable "eclipse of faith" and the annihilation of the norms of spiritual religion.

[The Outlook.]

Over the face of the world lies a strange mist, bred by the lawlessness, sins, perversities of men, through which many radiant stars are invisible, and in which many things appear out of focus, distorted, misshapen; so that what we call progress is not so much rectification of knowledge by discovery of truth, as purification of knowledge by character and correction of the fancies of disease by the clear vision of health. The redemption of society is an intellectual quite as much as a moral process, and the end of it is the restoration of the race to health.

[The Congregationalist and Christian World.]

We do not doubt that God is speaking to men now as really and clearly as ever He has spoken in any age ; and the same tests now as in every age, will show what are genuine words of God and how to understand their meaning.

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