Article October 22, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from W. B. Hinson, R. J. Campbell, Albert E. Hylan

[Christian World.]

This provincialism of faith—which goes one mile and refuses to go the next—has produced some singular results in doctrine and life. So often man's blundering, half-educated intellect has cut across the heart's truer and more generous verdict. For centuries a wrong interpretation of the Bible has proved the enemy of faith. The dogma that the Old and New Testaments were throughout on the same level of inspiration shut up good men to the belief in an immoral Deity. How pitiful it is today to read the arguments of Law, of Waterland and other orthodox divines of the eighteenth century, to prove that the massacre of the Canaanites, the pitiless slaughter of the Amalekites, the whole story of Jewish atrocities recorded in the Bible, were justified by the fact that they were by God's express command! The light which has come to us had not yet dawned upon them; the light which enables us to see in these actions simply the moral level to which these people had attained, a level which permitted them to perform the deed, and then to boast about it as divine! It is the same want of faith, the faith that the highest is the truest, that has led theology into such strange conceptions of the divine nature, and of its dealings with man. Theologic pessimism, also we may say its cynicism, surely reached its height in the position of Mansel, who in his Bampton lectures argues that the Deity is essentially unknowable; that our moral sense is no guide to the divine moral sense, and that therefore we are in no position to judge of the deeds recorded as of God in the Scriptures, because our notion of good and evil may be quite different from His. If we believed that doctrine we should have to cease believing in Jesus as any authentic revelation of the Father; cease believing in the soul as of any common nature with the Over Soul; cease believing in reason as reflecting the universal reason; cease believing in the unity of life, in any coherence of things, in any proper link between this world and the next. Mansel proclaims his doctrine as the true orthodoxy. We proclaim it as the most baneful of heterodoxies, the heterodoxy which denies that man is made in the image of God.

[British Congregationalist.]

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