The provincial American and other papers

by Meredith Nicholson

I

My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been rather varied, and while they present nothing unusual, I shall refer to them as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches. One of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and Presbyterian, and I “joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming later a communicant of the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a vestryman and a delegate to councils, and for twenty years attended services with a regularity that strikes me as rather admirable in the retrospect.

As a boy I was taken to many “revivals” under a variety of denominational auspices, and later, as a newspaper reporter, I was frequently assigned to conferences and evangelistic meetings. I made my first “hit” as a reporter by my vivacious accounts of the performances of a “trance” revivalist, who operated in a skating-rink in my town. There was something indescribably “woozy” in those cataleptic manifestations in the bare, ill-lighted hall. I even recall vividly the bump of the mourners’ heads as they struck the floor, while the evangelist moved among the benches haranguing the crowd. Somewhat earlier I used to delight in the calisthenic performances of a “boy preacher” who ranged my part of the world. His physical activities were as astonishing as his volubility. At the high moment of his discourse he would take a flying leap from the platform to the covered marble baptismal font. He wore pumps for greater ease in these flights, and would run the length of the church with astonishing nimbleness, across the backs of the seats over the heads of the kneeling congregation. I often listened with delicious horripilations to the most startling of this evangelist’s perorations, in which he described the coming of the Pale Rider. It was a shuddersome thing. The horror of it, and the wailing and crying it evoked, come back to me after thirty years.

The visit of an evangelist used to be an important event in my town; converts were objects of awed attention, particularly in the case of notorious hardened sinners whose repentance awakened the greatest public interest and sympathy. Now that we have passed the quarter-million mark, revivals cause less stir, for evangelists of the more militant, spectacular type seem to avoid the larger cities. Those who have never observed the effect of a religious revival upon a community not too large or too callous to be shaken by it have no idea of the power exerted by the popular evangelist. It is commonly said that these visits only temporarily arrest the march of sin; that after a brief experience of godly life the converts quickly relapse; but I believe that these strident trumpetings of the ram’s horn are not without their salutary effect. The saloons, for a time at least, find fewer customers; the forces of decency are strengthened, and the churches usually gain in membership. Most of us prefer our religion without taint of melodrama, but it is far from my purpose to asperse any method or agency that may win men to better ways of life.

At one time and another I seem to have read a good deal on various aspects of religion. Newman and the Tractarians interested me immensely. I purchased all of Newman’s writings, and made a collection of his photographs, several of which gaze at me, a little mournfully and rebukingly, as I write; for presently I took a cold plunge into Matthew Arnold, and Rome ceased to call me. Arnold’s writings on religious subjects have been obscured by the growing reputation of his poetry; but it was only yesterday that “Literature and Dogma” and “God and the Bible” enjoyed great vogue. He translated continental criticism into terms that made it accessible to laymen, and encouraged liberal thought. He undoubtedly helped many to a new orientation in matters of faith.

My reading in church history, dogma, and criticism has been about that of the average layman. I have enjoyed following the experiments of the psychical researchers, and have been a diligent student of the proceedings of heresy trials. The Andover case and the Briggs controversy once seemed important, and they doubtless were, but they established nothing of value. The churches are warier of heresy trials than they were; and in this connection I hold that a clergyman who entertains an honest doubt as to the virgin birth or the resurrection may still be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. To unfrock him merely arouses controversy, and draws attention to questions that can never be absolutely determined by any additional evidence likely to be adduced. The continuance in the ministry of a doubter on such points becomes a question of taste which I admit to be debatable; but where, as has happened once in late years, the culprit was an earnest and sincere doer of Christianity’s appointed tasks, his conviction served no purpose beyond arousing a species of cynical enjoyment in the bosom of Smith, and of smug satisfaction in those who righteously flung a well-meaning man to the lions.

Far more serious are the difficulties of those ministers of every shade of faith who find themselves curbed and more or less openly threatened for courageously attacking evils they find at their own doors by those responsible for the conditions they assail. Only recently two or three cases have come to my attention of clergymen who had awakened hostility in their congregations by their zeal in social service. The loyal support of such men by their fellows seems to me far nobler than the pursuit of heretics. The Smiths of our country have learned to admire courage in their politics, and there is no reason for believing that they will not rally to a religion that practices it undauntedly. Christ, of all things, was no coward.

There is, I believe, nowhere manifest at this time, within the larger Protestant bodies at least, any disposition to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, and this is fortunate in that it leaves the churches free to deal with more vital matters. It seems fair to assume that criticism has spent its force, and done its worst. The spirit of the Bible has not been harmed by it. The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity, mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism. The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits, who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully realized in their own hearts and lives. And the essentials of Christ’s teachings have lost nothing by criticism.

The Smiths who have drifted away from the churches will hardly be brought back to the pews by even the most scholarly discussion of doubtful texts. Smith is not interested in the authenticity of lines or chapters, nor do nice points of dogma touch the affairs of his life or the needs of his soul. The fact that certain gentlemen in session at Nicæa in A.D. 325 issued a statement of faith for his guidance strikes him as negligible; it does not square with any need of which he is conscious in his own breast.

A church that would regain the lost Smiths will do well to satisfy that large company of the estranged and the indifferent that one need not believe all that is contained between the lids of the Bible to be a Christian. Much of the Bible is vulnerable, but Jesus explained himself in terms whose clarity has in nowise been clouded by criticism. Smith has no time, even if he had the scholarship, to pass upon the merits of the Book of Daniel; but give him Christ’s own words without elucidation and he is at once on secure ground. There only lately came into my hands a New Testament in which every utterance of Jesus is given the emphasis of black-face type, with the effect of throwing his sayings into high relief; and no one reading his precepts thus presented can fail to be impressed by the exactness with which He formulated his “secret” into a working platform for the guidance of men. Verily there could be no greater testimony to the divine authority of the Carpenter of Nazareth than the persistence with which his ideal flowers upon the ever-mounting mass of literature produced to explain Him.