CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE
The devout and conscientious believers in the Christian Religion of to-day often view with sorrow and alarm the encroachments of modern science.
Unable to prevent these encroachments, they stubbornly resent them. Once admitted, it seems to them that nothing sacred or worthy the name of Religion would remain. To shift to other and more ancient faiths can never be considered at all, for the “higher criticism” and “pragmatism” have left them all in even a worse plight.
It seems to these devout souls like the death of religion itself, and its elimination from the life of man.
The intuitive basis and the intrinsic necessity of religion in some form have already been considered.
This point is often overlooked or ignored by the Iconoclasts.
Their position would seem to be, “Unravel the superstition, disprove the possibility of miracle, and let the deluge come if it must.”
Neither pragmatism nor higher criticism has been in any large sense constructive, but more largely destructive. The really spiritual element in all religions, already referred to, is generally lost sight of.
Modern psychology is no nearer a science of the soul, than are folklore and superstition to true religion. It should be recognized and granted once for all that psychology, as a department of modern physical science, has no substitute whatever to offer in the place of Religion.
It is gathering facts, classifying, and labeling psychic phenomena.
Here and there an advanced scientist, like Sir Oliver Lodge, ignores tradition, repudiates orthodox scientific restraints, and steps over the border of actual or implied nihilism.
This smug nihilism with its superior air of scientific wisdom, is often only the opposite pole of the dogmatic certitude of the churchman. Actual knowledge of the human soul is quite as far removed from the one as from the other. Credulity and Incredulity simply annul each other; often make faces at each other; while Progress stalks alone in the middle of the road, a “tramp” or a “vagabond,” like Paracelsus, “reading the leaves of the book of Nature,” laughing at poverty, fleeing from persecution, yet knowing, and “becoming a light to man forever.”
The consensus of opinion among the presidents and professors in the leading colleges and universities of this country, their unhesitating and unqualified denial or repudiation of the claims set up by the church regarding revelation and the basic dogmas of the Christian Religion, and which his “Holiness” of the Vatican designates as “Modernism,” reveal, not only the “signs of the times,” but show indisputably that modern education has shaken itself free from the superstitions of the past, and repudiated the old restraints to free thought and modern progress.
Orthodoxy in religious matters has often nothing to do in determining college curriculums, in the selection of presidents, or in filling the chairs.
Bright young men and women, the advanced students of the schools of to-day, who are to become the leaders of thought and the teachers of to-morrow, find little restraint and no formative element in the creeds and dogmas that in the past have been so much in evidence, and so constraining. Intensity of feeling has given place to breadth and inclusiveness, and under the name of “Comparative Religions,” ancient faiths and modern, are classified, and studied like fossils in the different ages of the past.
The “crusader impulse” has rather settled down in each individual breast, as the master passion, to do, to dare, and to become something more and better than the individual, or than the past has hitherto known. Such a general period of intellectual activity, with so few restraints, history nowhere else records, and the world has never before known.
Here lie the elements, the impulses, and the formative stage of the new Avatar.
At this stage of our discussion it is of exceeding interest and importance to bear in mind one great fact. The average intelligent student of to-day may take this fact tentatively, reserving final judgment till accumulative evidence becomes satisfactory and conclusive.
No one who is dominated by shallow incredulity, and who attempts to close this door contemptuously, will ever arrive at the real truth. The judgment of such individuals is simply worthless, notwithstanding the smug conceit of their own opinions.
The important fact referred to, is the demonstrated existence, all through the ages, of the so-called Mysteries.
Their existence is beyond all question. What they concealed and taught is sometimes difficult to determine.
There were also the genuine and the spurious Mysteries, and a fair appreciation of their origin, purpose, methods, and genius, as illustrated by Plato, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, and nearly every great sage of antiquity, leaves no possible doubt that in these “Secret Orders” were preserved the loftiest and the most profound mental and spiritual achievements of all previous human history.
If there were no other evidence in existence at the present day except the traditions, landmarks, ritual, and Genius of Freemasonry, a careful and intelligent study of that Ancient Order would be sufficient.
Whether one Mason in a thousand to-day apprehends and realizes this fact, has nothing whatever to do with the real question. The evidence is there, and the indifference or superficial intelligence of numbers cannot alter it.