Editorial January 27, 1912 Issue

THE TRUTH THAT SAVES

John B. Willis

Christ Jesus effectively portrayed both the privilege and the need of mankind in his teaching that freedom and well-being are to be gained by increase of knowledge. His panacea for every human ill is found in his commanding utterance, "Ye shall know the truth."

The moment, however, one begins to think of the saving significance of the educational process, he is impressed with the seriousness of the handicap imposed upon us by belief in the universality and naturalness of that capacity to forget which is constantly wasting our laboriously garnered store. He remembers, too, that whatever the acquired wisdom of his parents, every child has to begin without capital, and learn every simplest thing for himself, so that in a sense human advance must pause and retrace a long, long distance of its course with the passing of every generation. Regardless of all this disability, however, the compass of human knowledge has so wondrously widened in these later centuries, that ground seems to be given for the assumption that racial redemption, the millennium, is rapidly drawing near, in fulfilment of the declaration of the Master that true knowledge is the universal emancipator.

We all know, however, that the spiritual advance of the race has not been coincident with its advance in learning; indeed, the scholastic life has in large part seemed to make its votaries characteristically indifferent to spiritual things. It therefore becomes apparent that the freedom-bringing truth to which Jesus referred is not the wisdom of the schools, and Job must have realized this when he voiced that most suggestive interrogation, "Canst thou by searching find out God?" Subjection to the rule of sin, sickness, and death is, as a whole, no less characteristic of the cultivated than of the ignorant, and this very noticeable fact accounts, no doubt, for much of the pessimism of the erudite.

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