From that first nothing ere our birth
To that last nothing under earth.”
And there is only one starting-point for those who journey on this quest of an answer to the enigma of life. They must resolutely abandon the long travelled “a priori road.” They must understand that the science of to-day is not tied to any materialistic axioms, that metaphysic cannot be ignored by the physician, and that no competent scientist to-day would say of the Resurrection of Jesus on which ultimately depends His claims to our adoration, “That could not happen.” We know enough now of the laws of the Universe to know that we do not know them all.
So some of us perceive that what is needed to-day is to arrest the attention of the man in the street, to get him to perceive that Christianity has much more to say for itself than he suspected, and that Christian Philosophy will place in his hand a clue which will guide him in the labyrinth of life.
“I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it.”
We must set men free from phrases and get them to think. It suits the game of the party politician to pretend that ethics are easily self-evident, and that there is a simple fundamental religion on which all men are agreed; but there is a question which must be insistently urged, and upon the answer to which all things depend, “What think ye of Christ?”
Probably nothing has done more to alienate the man in the street from religious observance than the hypocritical pretence that all men are agreed about “simple Bible teaching.” He knows well enough that what really matters is whether a man believes or not that God became man. If ever the Labour Party should definitely declare for elementary education without religious teaching it will be because the men whose children attend the elementary schools know that they cannot read the New Testament without asking, “Is it true?”
“Did Jesus Christ really die and rise again the third day according to the Scriptures?” “Did Jesus Christ go up into heaven in the sight of the apostles till a cloud received Him?” “Did Mary’s Son come to her as other babies come?” “Was Joseph Jesus Christ’s real father?” Our members of Parliament who have no leisure to know their own children, who keep them in the nursery till it is time for them to go to the Preparatory School, who leave their training to the governess and the head-master, may talk about “the cruelty of the religious differences which hinder the establishment of an efficient system of education for the children of the State.” But the men and the mothers who live with their children and talk to them about their lessons, know that a child will insist upon an answer to its questions. A father of a family in the artisan and labouring classes, if he be at all intelligent, loses all respect for ministers of the Gospel who pretend that there is no difficulty about the simple Gospel story, and losing his self-respect for the men who have appointed themselves his teachers, he is tempted to throw all theology aside. And if he ventures on this despairing expedient he finds himself in mental confusion again over ethics instead of theology, and there arises a prospect of anarchy and disorder. Capital is timid, so enterprise is checked. Poverty increases and riot follows, and it all ends, not now-a-days in the Napoleonic “whiff of grape-shot,” but in the rattle of the maxim in the streets and the desolation of a thousand homes.