Affectionately yours,
BERNAL LINFORD.
(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)
My Boy: For one bitten with skepticism there is little argument—especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency. You wanted to go to Harvard. I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard's Unitarianism. We compromised on Yale—my own alma mater, as it was my father's. To my belief, this was still, especially as to its pulpit, the stronghold of orthodox Congregationalism. Was I a weak old man, compromising with Satan? Are you to break my heart in these my broken years? For love of me, as for the love of your own soul, pray. Leave the God of Moses until your soul's stomach can take the strong meat of him—for he is strong meat—and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle— the Redeemer, who died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls. Centre your aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe, or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve. Do not deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet question the inerrance of Holy Writ—yea, with its everlasting burnings. "He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned."
I am sad. I have lived too long.
GRANDFATHER.
(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)
Grandad: It's all so plain, you must see it. I told you I had crossed to the farther bank. Here is what one finds there: Taking him as God, Jesus is ineffectual. Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great—or even plausible.
The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them. Jesus was too fine, too good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have come from God, save as we all come from Him.
Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those things which make him small—as a God. I would rather consider him as a man and point out those things which make him great to me—things which I cannot read without wet eyes—but you will not consider him as man, so let him be a God, and let us see what we see. It is customary to speak of his "sacrifice." What was it? Our catechism says, "Christ's humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time."
As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of integrity. Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites, humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead of into the family of a King? This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.