The Bible is not much longer than seven short novels. The most of people read seven novels in a year. The ordinary modern magazine has the same number of words as a short novel. A great many people read a magazine from cover to cover once a week. If the Bible were read in the same free spirit, unclouded by inherited prejudice or taint of “creeds,” the return to belief among youth would be a thing to astound the world.
Why isn’t it so read?
To quote the theologian—because “the literalists” insist that in the reading, youth shall read into the context what they dictate rather than what youth finds of everyday usable livable truths; and to-day, youth will not be dragooned. He is going to follow the light of truth as he finds the light of truth and proves the truth. He isn’t going to accept one set of opinions on Sunday, which he finds won’t work out in everyday life on Monday. Christianity has to be a workable scheme for every day in the week, or youth is going to leave the church pews empty and crowd to “the movies,” to the theater, to the anarchist lectures, to the wild abandon of joy in the rhythmic emotional dance; and—youth is right. With unfettered feet and wings of dawn to its soul, it faces always the new day. It never looks backwards. It rejoices in Life; and Christianity must be put in terms of youth, or preach to emptier and emptier pews. Paul never ceased reiterating “Rejoice—rejoice and again I say—rejoice.” Too often we have clothed a glad and glorious message in habiliments of age and woe, which are really the consciousness of past sins and failures. The Communion is not a Doleful Supper commemorating a death. It is a Loving Cup commemorating a wonderful and glad new birth. The Kingdom of Heaven is not to-morrow. It is now; or else it is never. And yet, let us not blame the Middle Age interpretations shadowy with crime and sorrow. In a carnival of lust and crime and rapine and sword, the Middle Age Church preserved and conserved for humanity, like an oasis of the spirit in a desert of materialism, all that has helped humanity most, and this in spite of the fact it foolishly punished astronomers, who proved the earth round and burned men who differed by a hair’s breadth from its “credo.” While it was guilty of these tragical mistakes of obeying the letter rather than the spirit—as the Pharisees who crucified Christ, had done before it—the Middle Age Church kept the faith for us, inspired and conserved art, science, letters, in a wilderness of barbarism. Who encouraged almost sublime architecture? Who produced paintings that have never been equaled to this day? Where did Roger Bacon work out his great, though concealed, truths of science? In the safety, though it was the imprisonment, of a friar’s cell. Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the friar at Oxford, wrote these words. Were they clairvoyant foresight, or the superior knowledge of a scientist from facts? “Ships will go without rowers and with only a single man to guide them. Carriages without horses will travel with incredible speed. Machines for flying can be made in which a man sits. Machines will raise infinitely great weights. Bridges will span rivers without supports.” His superior knowledge was ascribed by his superiors to Black Magic; but Pope Clement IV supported him and ordered his knowledge set forth in books, of which he wrote three in eighteen months without secretary; but his own immediate superiors ascribed his marvelous knowledge to communications from the Devil, and had him imprisoned for fourteen years. After seven hundred years, the light of that cell comes out to the world: yet, the men who suppressed him thought they were protecting God’s word from assault. It can only be added that the history of ignorance repeats itself with surprising persistence. The good men of his day were simply trying to tie truth down to the dead line of their own ignorance. With a charity and a clarity infinite as the love of God, let us be careful we do not do the same thing.
Rather than condemn the mistakes of the Middle Age Church from whose darkened and superstitious interpretations we yet suffer, let us beware we do not repeat their mistakes by shutting out the new light of history and archæology and science, where we should welcome it.
Christianity does not need to apologize for itself, or beg the question. When it does that, he who excuses accuses. When it does that, it is off the carpet in the modern world. It can stand on the solid foundation of its own truth. If that foundation cracks, it will fall as the Holy City fell before a New Order. Rather than repel attack, we should welcome it. Attack is the storm wind that strengthens the hold of the roots on the eternal rocks. It is the wind that causes the corn stalk to put out guy ropes above its roots to hold fast to sure foundation. I love to read attacks on Christian truth if they are sincere and not cheap, cynical, ignorant sneers, which never get anywhere. They force examination of the certainty of the facts beneath our faith.
To take but one example of what muddy thinking has done to stir up shallow waters to make them look deep—consider the furious and foolish controversy in the modern church over “miracles.” “We believe in miracles,” shouts one section of the Church, “and if you don’t, we’ll see that you are put out of the church and prove that you are damned.” “We don’t believe in miracles and we defy you to put us out of the church; or we’ll pull down the pillars of youth like Samson as we go out,” shouts back the other section; and neither stops to ask in simple clarity:
What is a miracle?
Is it God breaking, or intervening to prevent, the effect of His own laws?
We have no such phenomena in natural life, and shy back from answering that question in as bold terms as it is asked.
Or is it the working of a higher law overruling and annulling a lower law? There are cases of that in nature, as when the effect of a warm and constant ocean current is annulled by a cold wind from the north; but in this case, neither law is abrogated. We are getting the effects of each; but the effect of one is stronger than the other. That might be the meaning of “a miracle”; but the explanation is so obscure and the workings so complex and in the unknown, that if that be the conception of “miracle” we had better not split the church over it. We are dealing with too many unknown quantities to postulate with mathematical certainty what we do know and what we don’t of fact, or to exclude from fellowship on the grounds of what is unknown.