"I learned through a preacher to realise the spirit of true Christianity."
"You are a Christian then?"
"Yes, I acknowledge Christ."
"But you don't believe that he was God?"
"He never said so himself. He called himself God's son, and we are all God's sons."
John's lady friend interrupted the conversation, which was a type of many others in the year 1865. John's curiosity was aroused. There were then, he said to himself, men who did not believe in Christ and yet had peace. Mere criticism would not have disturbed his old ideas of God; the "horror vacui" held him back, till Theodore Parker fell into his hands. Sermons without Christ and hell were what he wanted. And fine sermons they were. It must be confessed that he read them in extreme haste, as he was anxious that his friends and relatives should enjoy them that he might escape their censures. He could not distinguish between the disapproval of others and his own bad conscience, and was so accustomed to consider others right that he fell into conflict with himself.
But in his mind the doctrine of Christ the Judge, the election of grace, the punishments of the last day, all collapsed, as though they had been tottering for a long time. He was astonished at the rapidity of their disappearance. It was as though he laid aside clothes he had outgrown and put on new ones.
One Sunday morning he went with the engineer to the Haga Park. It was spring. The hazel bushes were in bloom, and the anemones were opening. The weather was fairly clear, the air soft and mild after a night's rain. He and his friend discussed the freedom of the will. The pietists had a very wavering conception of the matter. No one had, they said, the power to become a child of God of his own free will. The Holy Spirit must seek one, and thus it was a matter of predestination. John wished to be converted but he could not. He had learned to pray, "Lord, create in me a new will." But how could he be held responsible for his evil will? Yes, he could, answered the pietist, through the Fall, for when man endowed with free will chose the evil, his posterity inherited his evil will, which became perpetually evil and ceased to be free. Man could be delivered from this evil will only through Christ and the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. The New Birth, however, did not depend upon his own will, but on the grace of God. Thus he was not free and at the same time was responsible! Therein lay the false inference.
Both the engineer and John were nature worshippers. What is this nature worship which in our days is regarded as so hostile to culture? A relapse into barbarism, say some; a healthy reaction against over-culture, say others. When a man has discovered society to be an institution based on error and injustice, when he perceives that, in exchange for petty advantages society suppresses too forcibly every natural impulse and desire, when he has seen through the illusion that he is a demi-god and a child of God, and regards himself more as a kind of animal—then he flees from society, which is built on the assumption of the divine origin of man, and takes refuge with nature. Here he feels in his proper environment as an animal, sees himself as a detail in the picture, and beholds his origin—the earth and the meadow. He sees the interdependence of all creation as if in a summary—the mountains becoming earth, the sea becoming rain, the plain which is a mountain crumbled, the woods which are the children of the mountains and the water. He sees the ocean of air which man and all creatures breathe, he hears the birds which live on the insects, he sees the insects which fertilise the plants, he sees the mammalia which supply man with nourishment, and he feels at home. And in our time, when all things are seen from the scientific point of view, a lonely hour with nature, where we can see the whole evolution-history in living pictures, can be the only substitute for divine worship.
But our optimistic evolutionists prefer a meeting in a large hall where they can launch their denunciations against this same society which they admire and despise. They praise it as the highest stage of development, but wish to overthrow it, because it is irreconcilable with the true happiness of the animal. They wish to reconstruct and develop it, say some. But their reconstruction involves the destruction of all existing arrangements. Do not these people recognise that society as it exists is a case of miscarriage in evolution, and is itself simultaneously hostile to culture and to nature?