“It is doubtless in the realm of ethics and religion that the disastrous results of a too exclusive analytical process and a too exclusive critical spirit are seen. Carrying the same spirit, applying the same methods, to the investigation of religion, the Bible becomes to him simply a collection of ancient literature, whose sources, structure, and forms he studies, whose spirit, he, at least for the time, forgets; worship is a ritual whose origin, rise, and development he investigates; whose real significance as an expression of penitence, gratitude, and consecration he loses sight of altogether. Faith is a series of tenets whose biological development he traces; or a form of consciousness whose relation to brain action he inquires into; or whose growth by evolutionary processes out of earlier states he endeavors to retrace.
“Vivisection is almost sure sooner or later to become a post-mortem; and the subject of it, whether it be a flower, a body, an author, or an experience, generally dies under the scalpel. It is for this reason that so many students in school, academy, and college lose not merely their theology, which is perhaps no great loss, but their religion, which is an irreparable loss, while they are acquiring an education.”[176]
Ministers accept Socratic reasoning
This spirit of doubt characterizes the teachings of modern higher critics. The critical study of the Bible, Dr. Newton tells us, “has disposed forever of the claim that it is such an oracle of God as we can submit our intellects to unquestioningly.” “Dr. Briggs says that there are three co-ordinate authorities—the church, the Bible, and reason. ‘But when they disagree, which is to be the final court of appeal?’ asks Dr. Newton. ‘They do disagree widely to-day.’ Dr. Newton believes that the ultimate court of appeal is reason,—not the reason of Thomas Paine and the present-day realistic rationalists, but rather the ‘Divine Reason’ of Socrates and of Plato.... Reason in this sense means not merely or chiefly the rationalizing faculty, but the moral nature—the whole spiritual being of man. ‘It is what conscience teaches, as well as what intellect affirms, that, together with the voice of the heart, forms the trinity of true authority—of reason.’”[177]
Secular methods and religious truths
This is indeed the exaltation of reason. There is, in such a system, no room whatever for faith. W. T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, writing of Sunday-schools, attributes their decline to the adoption, by Sunday-school teachers, of the methods employed in the secular schools. A few words from him will suffice. He says: “With the spectacle of the systematic organization of the secular schools and the improvement of methods of teaching before them, the leaders in the church have endeavored to perfect the methods of the religious instruction of youth. They have met the following dangers which lay in their path; namely, first, the danger of adopting methods of instruction in religion which were fit and proper only for secular instruction; second, the selection of religious matter for the course of study which did not lead in a most direct manner toward vital religion, although it would readily take on a pedagogic form.”[178]
In order to show the reason why methods which are perfectly proper in giving secular education are not adapted to religious instruction, Mr. Harris explains: “The secular school gives positive instruction. It teaches mathematics, natural science, history, and language. Knowledge of the facts can be precise and accurate, and a similar knowledge of the principles can be arrived at. The self-activity of the pupil is ... demanded by the teacher of the secular school. The pupil must not take things on authority, but must test and verify.... He must trace out the mathematical demonstrations.... He must learn the method of investigating facts.... The spirit of the secular school therefore comes to be an enlightening one, although not of the highest order.”
The whole tendency of secular education, according to Mr. Harris, is to develop a spirit of investigation and proof. This, he says, is a means of enlightening, but not of the highest order. The highest means of enlightening the mind is by faith. That is God’s method. Christian schools must avoid the secular methods of instruction, adopting in their stead that highest form of enlightening,—faith. That separates Christian schools from secular schools in methods as well as in the subject matter taught.
Secular methods require material proof
This secular method of investigation saps the spiritual life, and is responsible for the decline in modern Protestantism. Mr. Harris continues: “Religious education, it is obvious in giving the highest results of thought and life to the young, must cling to the form of authority, and not attempt to borrow the methods of mathematics, science, and history from the secular school. Such borrowing will result only in giving the young people an overweening confidence in the finality of their own immature judgments. They will become conceited and shallow-minded.... Against this danger of sapping or undermining all authority in religion by the introduction of the methods of the secular school which lay stress on the self-activity of the child, the Sunday-school has not been sufficiently protected in the more recent years of its history.”