If these hesitating ones of whom we speak would take up the examination, they would find that some of the clearest and noblest minds of the past have given their assent to this very faith, and that the doctrines in opposition to it are not to be regarded as past questioning when they have been sanctioned by generations involved in as much mental and moral darkness as most of those which have preceded us.
Christ came to teach positive truth, and his religion invites the largest and freest inquiry as to its claims. And so this theology of the past will be investigated. It is undergoing the process now in minds and in the midst of institutions where this old conviction of the superiority and sacredness of the past has been revered as it never can be again. All the sects are more or less affected with this contagion of inquiry. It will not be suppressed. To silence it for a season is but allowing it to accumulate greater force with which it shall again make itself manifest. Said a speaker, a few years since, in a Methodist Conference in New York city:—
"What reason can be given for the difference in manifestation of conviction of sin between our day and the times of our fathers? Whereas we used to preach to sinners that an endless hell awaited all who died in their sins, we now leave the fact almost wholly out of sight. We say we believe that when men thus die they go to a place of everlasting burnings, where the Almighty tortures them alive as long as he the Almighty lives. If we believe this, why do we not preach it now? Why do not our editors write about it, and our bishops thunder it from their pulpits till the people tremble?"
A brother minister present took exception to these remarks. He thought that the Christians made by what were termed the "reformed methods" of the day are as abundant in good works, and their lives redound to the glory of God full as much as was the case under the machinery of fifty years ago. "We do not propose to go back on the operation of the Holy Spirit to-day, because he acts now in ways different from those of old." A sensible conclusion. The churches are growing,—growing out of unreasonable doctrines which had their origin in the darkness of the olden time, and which must vanish away as the full day of Christian truth comes in to gladden the waiting world.
Christianity will stand all this controversy. It was made to. It is not only the wisdom and the love, but the power of God, and that endures and triumphs. It needs of itself no alteration. While it can suit itself to all the shifting phases of human history, it is of itself, like its author, "without variableness or shadow of turning." It has the same fulness and adaptiveness now that it ever had. Says Rev. Mr. Spurgeon:—
"Men in the days of Whitfield looked back to the days of Bunyan, and men in the days of Bunyan wept because of the days of Wyckliffe, Calvin, and Luther; and men then wept for the days of Augustine and Chrysostom; men in those days wept for the days of the apostles; and doubtless men in the apostles' days wept for the days of Jesus Christ; and, no doubt, some in the days of Jesus Christ were so blind as to wish to return to the days of prophecy, and thought more of the days of Elijah than they did of the most glorious days of Christ. Some men look more to the past than to the present. Rest assured that Jesus Christ is the same that he was yesterday, and will be the same forever."
Verily so; and what he is, it is our business in the present to ascertain. How much of his fulness may we now be able to comprehend?
And so again we say, "the world moves," the church moves, the spirit of the All-wise and Almighty is moving upon the heart of humanity. Man advances. This is the Divine process. For long centuries there may be but little, comparatively, accomplished; then a new activity will be realized. We do not expect to go back to the Dark Ages again. The very last half-century, as we have seen, has been more marked with progress than any other before in the world's history. Our own nation has given signal evidence of this. Our Declaration of Independence has an increased luminousness at the present hour. That the next half-century will have equal advancement, we are not sure; but all signs are hopeful that there will be more growth, continued improvement. One thing seems evident in reference to our own nation, which is, that the religion of the Gospel is needed in it more than ever before, to meet its increasing needs, and to give it strength of character and permanent life. Truer words were never spoken than those by the orator at the Yorktown Centenary celebration during the past year:—
"No advanced thought, no mystical philosophy, glittering abstractions, no swelling phrases about freedom,—not even science, with all its marvellous inventions and discoveries,—can help us much in sustaining this republic. Still less can any Godless theories of creation, or any infidel attempts to rule out the Redeemer from his rightful supremacy in our hearts, afford us any hope of security. In that way lies despair! Commonplace truths, old familiar teachings, the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, the farewell address of Washington, honesty, virtue, patriotism, universal education, are what the world most needs in these days, and our own part of the world as much as any other part. Without these we are lost. With these, and with the blessing of God, which is sure to follow them, we may confidently look forward."[66]
If we are reading the signs of the present and the indications of the future aright, we readily conclude that it is but early day yet in the history of humanity,—we mean in its moral and spiritual history. Gross darkness, fearful wrong, appalling sin yet afflict and demean it. If we have the gain of the past to encourage us, if we would be aids in the world's progress, the new instrumentalities of the present which we possess must be used as though we had full faith in their power, that is, in the Divine indications that are in them. If the true millennium is yet afar off, it is advancing. So should we be, not as children of the night, nor of any darkness of the past, but of the Christian day, which has had its heavenly breaking, and whose rising bids us to be risen also, and to be moving on! We are debtors to the past, how great we can never fully realize. We are equally debtors to the future. What can we now do for its largest blessing, its permanent life?