I have given up Sunday-school work. Not that I disbelieve in it, but I find myself less and less able to adapt myself to the requirements of superintendents and “lesson helps,” and my conscience now forbids me to teach what I could once repeat so glibly and confidently.
Yes, let me say it frankly,—though I fear it will greatly shock you, you dear, pious soul,—I have gone over to the “New Theology,” and I have gone so far and so irrevocably that but few of those churches where my childhood’s faith is still believed dare open their doors to me.
I wonder if you can conceive how painful it has been to me to find the friends for whom I care most condemning as irreligious every thoughtful man or woman who ventures to treat the Hebrew scriptures in a reasonable way.
My last Sunday-school class was in the home school, where I had bright girls of sixteen. I did my best to make the Bible a living book to them, to make them study the history of the Jews in the same natural and enthusiastic way that they studied their Greek history at school, but I soon found that they considered this sacrilegious. They looked at me with cold, critical glances when I tried to spiritualize their “Gates Ajar” idea of heaven. I found that they had gone home and told their mothers that I did not believe in God or heaven or hell, and, to my bitter mortification and dismay, they left me one by one until I was alone.
Doubtless I had little wisdom. I was trying to teach them in a few months what it had taken me years of growth to reach. In trying to disabuse them of their anthropomorphic notions of God, I had succeeded in making Him only a nonentity to them. In taking away a literal Garden of Eden and the serpent, and substituting a theory of evolution, I had, in their imaginations, abolished all inspiration and moral responsibility. Not that they were girls who troubled themselves very much about such things; they could dance and flirt as well as the best; but as for really daring to face the evidence on such matters, that was wicked and dangerous, in their opinion.
Nor was this all. One good old clergyman, to whose church I brought a letter of recommendation, and who after my candid talk felt obliged to deny me a welcome, said, with tears in his eyes, that he hoped my mother’s prayers would save me.
It made me feel forlorn and homesick for a while. I like the strength, sincerity, and earnestness which the old faith gave, and I cannot lightly break away from it. I hate the lukewarmness and apathy of many of the more radical faith, and I cannot make up my mind to cast my lot with them. Besides, I have a half fear that, after all, they have not begun, even intellectually, to probe to the bottom these great historic beliefs on which the church has stood for ages. I fear that they treat them too cavalierly, too superficially. I find about as much intolerance among the so-called liberals as among the conservatives.
To me sin is not an ailment to be cured with sugared plums. The Puritanism in me rebels at the weakness and flabbiness of many who have left the old faith for a broader one. However much my mind is forced to accept their doctrine, my sympathies abide with the men of moral earnestness who still think it their business to be “saving souls.”
To me the doctrine of the Trinity is something more than a mathematical absurdity, as the men of one party say; and, on the other hand, something more than an inscrutable mystery to be accepted without deep philosophic study, as the men of the other party hold.
I pity and long to help the poor souls groping for some solution of the religious problems peculiar to our day. There are thousands of them—more than any one knows—inside the fold of the church itself, fed, but not nourished, and famishing for the kind of food which their good pastors know not how to give.