Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

All that is true and sweet and fine is a part of God's revelation of himself to his children, and makes up our Bible, which is not all written yet. Every new truth that shall be discovered in the future will make a new line or a new paragraph or a new chapter. God has been writing it on the rocks, in the stars, in the hearts, on the brains of his children; and his hand does not slacken. He is not tired: he is writing still. He will write to-morrow, and next year, and throughout all the coming time. This is the Bible.

We believe, for example, that the saying of the old Egyptian, God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, is just as divine and sweet as when said in the New Testament. We believe that the Golden Rule is just as golden when uttered by Confucius hundreds of years before Jesus as it was afterwards.

We believe that the saying about two commandments being the sum and
substance of the law was just as holy when Hillel spake them as when
Jesus uttered them after his time. All truth is divine, and part of
God's divine revelation to his children.

Here is our Bible, then. Now let me speak about Jesus, and see if our thought is less precious than the old. In my old days, when I preached in the orthodox church, Jesus was never half so dear, so helpful to me, as he is now. If I thought of him at all, I was obliged to think of him as somehow a second God, who stood between me and the first one, and through whom I hoped deliverance from the law and the justice of the first. I had to think of him as a part of a scheme that seemed to me unjust and cruel, involving the torture of some and the loss of most of the race. You cannot pick the old-time Jesus out of that scheme of which he is a part. I could not love him then as I love him now. I could not think of him as an example to follow; for how can one take the Infinite for an example? How can one follow the absolutely Perfect except afar off?

But now I think of Jesus and his cross as the most natural and at the same time the divinest thing in the history of man. Nothing outside of the regular divine order in it. Jesus reveals to me to-day the humanness of God and the divineness of man. And he takes his place in the long line of the world's redeemers, those who have wrought atonement, how? Through faithfulness even unto death.

The way we work out the atonement of the world, that is, the reconciliation of the world to God, is by being true to the vision of the truth as it comes to us, no matter by the pathway of what suffering, true as Jesus was true, true even when he thought his Father had forsaken him.

Do you know, friends, I think that is the grandest thing in the world. He verily believed that God had forsaken him; and yet he held fast to his trust, to his truth, to his faithfulness, even when swooning away into the unconsciousness of death.

There is faith, and there is faithfulness; and he shares this with thousands of others. There are thousands of men who have suffered more than Jesus did dying for his own truth; thousands of martyrs who, with his name on their lips, have gone through greater torture than he did. All these, whoever has been faithful, whoever has suffered for the right, whoever has been true, has helped to work out the atonement, the reconciliation, of the world with God, showing the beauty of truth and bringing men into that admiration of it that helps them to come into accord with the divine life.

Then one more point. Instead of the wail of the damned that is never, through all eternity, for one moment hushed in silence, we place the song of the redeemed, an eternal hope for every child born of the race. We do not believe it is possible for a human soul ultimately to be lost. Why? Because we believe in God. God either can save all souls or he cannot. If he can and will not, then he is not God. If he would and cannot, then he is not God. Let us reverently say it: he is under an infinite obligation to his own self, to his own righteousness, to his own truth, his own power, his own love, his own character, to see to it that all souls, some time, are reconciled to him.

This does not mean a poor, cheap, an easy salvation. It means that every broken law must have its consequences so long as it remains broken. It means that in this world and through all worlds the law- breaker is to be followed by the natural and necessary results of his thoughts, of his words, of his deeds; but it means that in this punishment the pain is a part of the divine love. For the love of God makes it absolutely necessary that the object of that love shall be delivered from sin and wrong, and brought into reconciliation with himself; and the pain, the necessary results of wrongdoing, are a part of the divine tenderness, a part of the divine faithfulness, a part of the divine love. So we believe that through darkness or through light, through joy or through sorrow, some time, somewhere, every child of God shall be brought into his presence, ready to sing the song of peace and joy and reconciled love.