Article February 15, 1913 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Rudolph Eucken

[Prof. Rudolph Eucken, Ph.D., in Christian Commonwealth.]

What obligations does the rebirth of religion in our time lay upon us? What are our immediate duties as friends and advocates of a free, rational, and spiritual faith? First, we must fully and frankly recognize the changes which through the productivity of the last centuries have been wrought in the spiritual concerns of mankind. Whatever, therefore, is antiquated, outgrown, and no longer useful, we must be willing to surrender as no longer of significance and value to our day and generation, as, perhaps, a positive harm to it. These older systems of thought and conceptions of religious truth once had their validity and importance, and are to be respected, even revered; but the picture of nature has become so enlarged, our insight into causal relations so deepened, our interpretation of universal law and order, our understanding of historical and critical processes, so extended, that we can no longer hold absolutely to the older philosophies and doctrines. Much in the old systems that was once held to be absolute truth is now felt to be only a symbol. The latter conception of it is the chief excuse for its retention on our part. But it will be still better if we openly and frankly disavow it, and not wait until our opponents compel us to do so. It is our duty as Protestants earnestly, reverently, to revise our traditional beliefs, that religion itself may live. Deprived of these husks of outgrown dogma, the essential kernel of religion will not die, but only be purified and released for new germination and increase.

[Continent.]

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