But vision—yea, his very hand and foot—
In moments when he feels he can not die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again.”
It is very strange that a matter that has been in existence for almost two thousand years, that has already busied the minds and hearts of millions of teachers and writers, and that has been borne with great cost and exertions over seas and preached to nations to whom it was unknown, has become unfamiliar in its own place of dominion and among the most cultured nations of the globe. Or can we asseverate that the spirit, or, let us say, even the thought, of Christianity is something that is generally known and acknowledged in our European states?
Far removed from this view, some within so-called Christendom, like the Roman procurator Festus, hold Christianity to be a sort of more or less harmless superstition concerning “one Jesus, who was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive”; others regard it as a society which it is the proper thing to belong to, without necessarily having any further interest in it; a third class looks upon it as a hierarchy of priests which, for reasons mostly external, they either reverence or abhor. To yet others it is a science called theology, to penetrate which there is need of very long courses of study and many examinations. And when they come to the particulars in the “structure of doctrine,” not many among the learned wholly agree as to what faith is, or mercy, or the significance of the “sacrifice of Christ,” whether there is predestination and eternal punishment, or a “restoration of all things,” or what are the methodical steps one must take, to be saved. Every one who ventures into these labyrinths of theological and philosophical thought, without at the same time possessing a very decided aspiration toward the highest truth and a very sound understanding of human nature, is apparently in danger of losing the one or the other. And so, thousands of the most cultured men of our day have, in fact, given up making any further trial of what seems to be joined with only trouble, contention, doubt, and renunciation of the natural enjoyments of life, only to lead, at the end, to nothing other than a kind of human slavery, without any better assurance than before. Christianity is now, for the greater part of Christians, a doctrine of the churches and the schools, which one listens to as long as one must, but from which a cultured man will inwardly free himself as quickly as possible, even if he still outwardly believes he must allow himself to fit into forms of the social life when once they have become historical.
The simple answer to this is that we can neither dispense with Christianity nor put something in its place. We do not know (and it would be useless to wish to discover) what would have become of the civilized world, if Christianity had not appeared in it when it did; but it is certain that we can no longer get away from it now, nor ignore it, but we must reckon with it as with something that will endure, yet can not be wholly explained by science. True, science can not be prevented from discovering, as completely as possible, everything that is knowable, or from extending the sphere of the knowable as widely as possible; that is its right and its duty. With this there goes, in the conception of particular minds, the supposition that everything is knowable that concerns mankind, or that, at any rate, everything can be made knowable in time. This is the basis of a considerable part of the courage and the perseverance found in scientific investigation. But just as little may it be forbidden us to doubt that men will ever succeed in completely fathoming human nature in all its relationships to the universal Being and in its connection with all things; but even so, it is the duty (and of cultured people most of all) nevertheless, to stand firm, and in particular to put away the presumption with which imperfect knowledge, or even mere hypotheses, are wont to be set up in the place of the inward conviction as to the existence and worth of super-sensual things.
Highly as humanity has cause to value science and its steady advance, it would, nevertheless, take a tremendous backward step, if one should be able to remove from the sphere of its life and from the motives of its actions everything that is not scientifically provable. This is the ideal of many educated people of our time, but it is a false and a very inadequate one.
Our knowledge is patchwork, and will remain such. We shall scarcely ever be able to know even everything that concerns ourselves. Nor do the strongest motives of our best actions spring from the sphere of knowledge; otherwise the most learned people must always be the most perfect, which is by no means the case. Our spiritual Ego is rooted rather in the Unexplainable, and experience shows that if this something unexplainable is ever taken from the Ego in questions of faith, it tries to make up for the loss by adopting some superstition or other.