INFIDELITY.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 21, 13 April 1872, Page 8

INFIDELITY.

No good-tempered man will quarrel with the letter in which Bishop Suter reports his saying about the state of faith in Nelson. A satirical person may indeed smile at the substitution of " one or two," for " two," as if the speaker meant that he only knew of one believer, and doubted if there were a second ; but the change of expression is really from a very definite and absurdly personal phrase, to a vague and general one. Let us go further : Nelson is not likely to be very different from other places where society is mainly English, and the saying may be understood to be, that faith is waxing weak among English societies. Prophets must use sensational language, and we shall not charge the Bishop's friend, or the Bishop himself, with presumptuous haste to judge of others, of whose minds they can know very little, because of this picturesque saying, that all the people in Nelson except one or two are infidels. We may differ from them as to the meaning of the word infidel, or if we agree on the meaning ; we may not agree on the value of the thing meant ; but the Bishop's letter justifies the spirit of his saying, and shows no waut of that charity which the greatest of believers declared to be higher than either faith or hope. True to the temper of his days, he takes in good part outside criticisms on his sayings in church. It is a great step forward that this should be. It means that the preachers of religion in one highly organized church or sect, are dropping the notion of a priestly class gifted with extraordinary religious light and exempt from criticism, and are putting a more real trust in the strength of truth. It may not be the fine, tranquil, nnshakeable scientific trust of Gamaliel, believing in the power of truth whatever may come of those opinions of his own •which he thinks to be the truth, but it is yastly better than the temper which made

men take on themselves the part of inspired assessors of G-od's judgments, and the executioners into the bargain . Taking for granted that our readers agree with the Bishop, that questions of universal importance are not unfit for the columns of a newspaper, which is practically the only place for laymen publicly to discuss such questions in the colonies, we offer a short lay sermon on the text furnished by the one word " infidelity." [ The word itself sounds ugly, partly i because it has been a word of reproach bandied about by men of every sect and religion. If we try to find out what there is in common in the' use all the religionists have made of it, it comes to this, that the infidel is one who shows that he does not believe what the speaker believes about the highest of subjects. But perhaps those who first employed the word in English, were not sorry that it had another sense, in which everybody at once hates it. In some languages faith, meaning religious belief, is expressed by a different word from that faith which means truth to engagements of honour, love, or duty. In German, for instance, belief is thoroughly distinguished from truthfulness of character ; but in English we confound in this same word "infidelity," the two ideas of want of trustworthiness and waut of belief in certain opinions. This unhappy confusion should viake charitable people careful of using the word when it can be avoided, and our language is rich in words fit to express both ideas. The " general decay of faith," has been a common and old complaint in all ages among progressive people, aud no doubt man's belief in things above changes shape with changes iv his outward circumstances and knowledge. These changes have come as it were in waves over mankind, and those who will not cast their eyes beyond the great wave on which they are rising or falling, are apt to take too sanguine or too gloomy a view of their case. At the present time it is plain enough, that belief in a great many of the dogmas of theology that have long been received, is loosened to a remarkable degree. The creeds have been duly repeated with reverent gestures and faces directed to the proper quarter; or among sects which disown formal confession of the kind, the scheme of salvation has been constantly rehearsed from the pulpit to quiet congregations, no one gainsaying ; yet it is undeniable that on all hands a working belief in the value of the dogmas is becoming more scarce. The doubters cling to their churches and services nevertheless ; as some harsh people think, with a mere deference to others' opinions ; or as others interpret it, with a weak lingering affection for friends found to be unworthy. Is the religion of the most advanced part of the human race dying — that religion which has given a name and a brotherhood to the group of most powerful and educated nations ? Is infidelity to Christianity nearly general? These are bold questions, which we should not have hoped to ask without offence had they not been put for us by Bishop Suter, who was doing a service beyond his own church when he broached the subject. A spectator from without, looking at Christianity as the most wonderful agency in history, sees in it a threefold character. Its primary documents — the books of the New Testament — contain narratives of events, theological doctrines, and practical morality. The documents, looked at from without, are of varying authority. Some bear convincing proof within them of having been written by the persons and at the dates commonly supposed, and which indeed they express ; others are of uncertain authorship and date. The facts they narrate are not always consistently stated, and as a whole this part of their contents offers itself to examination as other history does, excepting that the theological teachings and morality the books contain are of such a kind as to claim extraordinary reverence for the narrative. The theology stands in a different position. It claims superior authority, and appeals not to criticism but to the voice of God within us. Now it is of two kinds. It contains some statements as to the personality of God, which so far as they are definitions at all, can be supposed true only relatively to man. The Creator being infinite, the truest description of Him in words can only be true in condescension to finite minds ; and some of the truest descriptions may, as man grows in knowledge, cease to have fitness and value for him. But

Christian theology contains other statements about God to which this remark does not apply. It takes what it deems the noblest qualities of men, and assures us that these qualities find in God the original of which they are faint echoes and reflections. Man may be strong, but He is strength ; man may be wise, but He is wisdom ; man may be loving and pure and true, but He is love, purity, and truth. And Christian morality is absolutely consistent with this conception of God. It is not a code of rules for life, not a commanding and forbidding of special denned acts, but an appeal to the highest instincts, convictions, and aspirations of man. It erects conscience as the mouthpiece in the human heart of the infinite God of purity, love, and truth. Now to which part of Christianity thus analyzed, is modern society infidel — or is all of it together losing its hold ? Is it that the progress of historical science and physical discovery have overthrown confidence in the variously stated facts of the Christian history ? Is it that men in cultivated nations are outgrowing the attempts to define the infinite God, which once served good ends, like Bible pictures on a nursery wall ? Or is it alleged that the great I Am, whom we once felt to be Lord of all and Father of our spirits, is also vanishing from our lives like a cloud of the morning, and that we are losing faith in love, purity, and truth ? The first two of these questions we have already answered. Yes, there are frequent signs of the decay of historic trust, aud of the child-like faith of past ages ; nor can we see how it could be otherwise. The third question, however, is to our thinking a vital one, and we venture to commend it to our readers as well deserving their deepest thoughts. "We do not attempt ourselves directly to answer it, but we would make two or three remarks tending towards an answer. Faith and morals, like other great forces in nature, are subject to ebbs and flows, which however are not inconsistent with constant progress. The wonders of the outward world, obscure at times the yet greater mystery of the world within. But religion is natural to man, and there seems as muck reason to trust to its permanence, and to its development into higher forms, as there is in the case of any other of the works of nature. Scientific men do not now pass it by on the other side as an absurdity foreign to them. Logic compels them to recognize it as a part of that nature which they undertake to study. They deal with it as a phenomenon, but it is a strange phenomenon that man should be deeply convinced of the existence of a cause for phenomena — a living power behind nature, which has created and is ruling it. This general conviction natural philosophy cannot reasonably attribute to perversity on his part, for he and his convictions are alike parts of the great whole. This great fact of man's religiousness, which is exhibited most divinely in Christianity, will not perish. It will expand with the expansion of humanity. In the meantime, the very essence and foundation of religious belief is, that man himself is an agent ; and the kernel of Christian doctrine is, that he may be a fellow-worker with God. We may help in the progress of the race — or i perhaps retard it. A period when wealth, ease, and pleasure are exalted as gods, is not, then, to be looked on as less deplorable ; and levity as to truth and duty, private and public, is still, on this view, a thing to be denounced by the teacher of religion ; and there are enough of these, evils now. But the teacher, to be efficient, must himself have faith in the issues for which he works — must distinguish the temporary from the essential, and remember that the periods of man are but the moments of God's purposes.