Gracious Conditions for Belief.
Ethical Conditions for Faith.
I now wish to declare my own confidence that the verification of the truths contained in the New Testament was never intended to rest upon an absolutely inerrant record or on an inspiration which dictated to a personality rather than expressed itself through a personality. The Bible presupposes a power in man to test and verify its statements and doctrines. It makes its appeal to this steadily from the earlier books to the later; the appeal growing in content as the soul has developed its power of recognition. This is the familiar law of knowing and doing, of proving by practice, of perceiving the leadership of Jesus Christ through the leading of the Holy Ghost. As to doctrine, there is left in man the power to make the beginning of a faith. On this beginning devotion builds a belief in the greater mysteries. Thus reason deduces a First Cause, then the unity of the First Cause. This is as far as reason can go. Huxley, looking out on the universe with this power, said: "There is an impassable gulf between anthropomorphism, however refined and the passionless impersonality underlying the thin veil of phenomena. I can not see one tittle of evidence that the great unknown stands to us in the light of a Father." Nor could he. Religious truth is conditioned in a way in which the apprehension of physical truth is not. There must be a certain condition of the heart, conscience, and will to see the truth of the Godhead of Christ. One may resist this evidence.[2] Only a living Christian is competent to look at the subject—"unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God." In physics "nothing is needed but open eyes and a sound understanding."[3] Moral character has nothing to do with it, except as vice may affect vision and deteriorate the judgment. But in a soul's relation to the Christian religion, the ethical element is that which is fundamental. "The pure in heart shall see God." The foul soul has no vision for the eternal purities. In the days of idolatry "there was no open vision." So in the heart of sin there is no light of spiritual truth. The higher verities appear fully founded to the Christian consciousness only.
Natural Ethical Canon.
Yet, let us remember that below this Christian consciousness lie the substrata of reason and ethical canon common to all men. Religious truth rests on these in its first revelations. Above the first and simplest revelation, truth rests on Christian experience as to those matters for which reason and natural ethical canon are insufficient.
General Calm of Methodist Episcopal Church.
Wesley's Advanced Views.
This having been the teaching of the Methodist Episcopal Church from the beginning, she has been little disturbed by the critical school. While holding that the Bible is the sole rule of faith, she has not committed herself to any one theory of inspiration. She has not believed the Scriptures because they are written, but, being written, she has found them true. She has believed in the supernatural power of the Gospel because in her sight its leaven has wrought in the individual and in society what it claims for itself. John Wesley believed that there were God-breathed teachings outside of the Bible. He believed this because of his feeling that the Divine Fatherhood must have spoken to other than His Jewish children. Inheriting from our founder these thoughts, we have kept a high degree of calm in these later days of inquiry and doubt.
Wide Range of Unbelief.
Natural Immortality.