This being so, how does it behove a Christian minister, eating the Church’s bread, but fully alive to her mortal danger, to steer his course?
Shall he, as so many do, continue to act in the nineteenth century as he would have acted in the fifteenth, or indeed in any century up to the Revolution? Shall he base his teaching on the certainty of miracles, on the existence of supernaturalism, on the evil of the human heart, the vanity of this world, and the certainty of rewards and punishments in another? Shall he brandish the old hell fire, or scatter the old heavenly manna?
I do not think so!
Knowing in his heart that these things are merely the cast-off epidermis of a living and growing creed, he may, in perfect consciousness of God’s approval, put aside the miraculous as unproven if not irrelevant; warn the people against mere supernaturalism; proclaim with the apostles of the Renaissance the glory and loveliness of this world—its wondrous scenes, its marvellous story as written on the rocks and in the stars, its divine science, its literature, its poetry, and its art; and treading all the fire of Hell beneath his feet, and denouncing the threat of eternal wrath as a chimera, base his hope of immortality on the moral aspirations that, irrespective of dogma, are common to all mankind.
This I think he may do, and must do, if the Church is to endure.
Let him do this, and let only a tithe of his brethren imitate him in so doing, and out of this nucleus of simple believers, as out of the little Galilean band, may be renewed a faith that will redeem the world. Questioned of such a faith, Science will reply—‘I have measured the heavens and the earth, I have traced back the book of the universe page by page and letter by letter, but I have found neither here nor yonder any proof that God is not; nay, beyond and behind and within all phenomena, there abides one unknown quantity which you are quite free to call—God.
Similarly questioned, Art will answer—‘Since you have rejected what was so hideous, tested by the beauty of this world, and since you hold even my work necessary and holy, I too will confess with you that I hunger for something fairer and less perishable; and in token of that hunger, of that restless dream, I will be your Church’s handmaid, and try to renew her Temple and make it fair.’
The keystone of the Church is Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus of the miracles, not Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, but Jesus Christ, the Divine Ideal, the dream and glory of the human race. Not God who made himself a man, but man who, by God’s inspiration, has been fashioned unto the likeness of a God.
And what, as we behold him now, is this Divine Ideal—this man made God?
He is simply, as I conceive, the accumulated testimony of human experience—of history, poetry, philosophy, science, and art—in favour of a rational religion, the religion of earthly peace and heavenly love. Built upon the groundwork of what, shorn of its miraculous pretensions, was a gentle and perfect life, the Divine Ideal, or Ideal Person, began. At first shadowy and almost sinister, then clearer and more beautiful; then, descending through the ages, acquiring at every step some new splendour of self-sacrifice, some new consecration of love or suffering, from every heart that suffered patiently, from every soul that fed the lamp of a celestial dream with the oil of sweet human love. And now, far removed as is man himself from the archetypal ape, is the Christ of modern Christendom, this spiritual Saviour of the world, from the ghostly skeleton of the early martyrs, from the Crucified One of early Christian art. The life of generations has gone to fashion him—all our human experience has served to nourish him—gradually from age to age He has drunk in the blood of suffering and the milk of knowledge, till He stands supreme as we see him—not God, but man made God.