II
From whatever cause, whether as a reaction against the mode in which this great truth has been at times presented, there have been, and there are, attempts to supersede Christianity because of its narrowness. Religion must not be identified with any one name: God manifests Himself to all, and no Mediator is needed. Theism, therefore, the worship of the One Almighty and Eternal Being, not Christianity, in which a Human Name is associated with the Divine Name, can alone pretend to be the Universal Religion, the Religion of all Mankind. It is not the first time that such an attempt to do without Christianity and to do away with it has been made. In the eighteenth century there was a similar movement. To this day at Ferney, near Geneva, is preserved the chapel which Voltaire erected for the worship of God, of God as distinguished from Christ as Divine or as Mediator between God and man. Voltaire thought that he could overthrow and crush the Faith of Christ, but he none the less erected a temple to God. The Deists upheld what they called the Religion of Nature and repudiated Revelation. Christianity not Mysterious; Christianity as old as the Creation, were among the works issued to show the superiority of Natural Religion, its freedom from difficulties, its agreement with reason, its universality. The most enduring memorial of the controversy is Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature, in which it was argued that the Natural Religion of the Deists was beset by as many difficulties as the Revelation of the Christians, that those who were not hindered from believing in God by the problems which Nature presented need not be staggered by the problems which were presented by Christianity. Bishop Butler's argument was directed against a special set of antagonists, an argument, it may be said, of little avail against the scepticism of the present day. The argument seems to have been unanswerable by those to whom it was addressed. The grounds on which they rejected the Revelation of Christ were shown to be inadequate. When they accepted this or that article of Natural Religion, they had accepted what was as difficult of belief as this or that part of the Revelation which they rejected. The mysteries which existed in the religion with which they would have nothing to do were in harmony with the mysteries which existed in the religion which they declared to be necessary for the welfare of society. That retort may be made with even more effect to those who so far occupy that same ground to-day. They rejoice to believe that there is a God, that He is not far off, that He communicates Himself to their souls, that the love which we bear to one another is but a faint image of the love which He bears to us, that the noblest qualities which exist in us exist more purely, more gloriously in Him, that we are in very deed His children and are called to manifest His likeness. It is by prayer, both in public and in private, both in congregations and alone with the Alone, that His Love and His Help can be comprehended and used. He is no absent God: His Ear is not heavy that it cannot hear, nor His arm shortened that it cannot save. With this belief we, as Christians, have no dispute: we gladly go along with Theists in asserting it: we only wonder at their unwillingness to go along with us a little further. For if God be such as they glowingly depict Him, if our relations to Him be such as they esteem it our greatest dignity to know, there is nothing antecedently impossible in the thought that One Man has heard His Voice more clearly, has surrendered to His Will more entirely, than any other in the history of the ages and the races of mankind: nothing antecedently impossible in the thought that to One Man His Truth has been conveyed more brightly, more fully than to any other; that in One Man the lineaments of the Divine Image may be seen more distinctly than in any other. If God be such, and if our relations to God be such, as Theists describe, why should they shrink with distrust or with antipathy from a Son of Man Who has borne witness to those truths in His Life and in His Death with a steadfastness of conviction which none other has ever surpassed; Who, according to the records which we possess of Him, habitually lived to do the Father's Will and died commending His Spirit into the Father's Hands: a Son of Man Who could truly be said to be in heaven while He was on earth? If God be such, and our relations to God be such, as Theists describe, would not that Son of Man be the confirmation of their thoughts? Would not His testimony be of infinite value on their side? Would He Himself not be the radiant illustration, the eagerly longed for proof of the truth for which they contend? They believe in God: why should it, on their own showing, be so hard to believe in Christ?