NEW THOUGHTS.

North Otago Times, 3 August 1903, Page 3

NEW THOUGHTS.

(By Lux.) ; " There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half Die creeds.?—TENNYSON. Those who confuse the new theology witli the old make a huge mistake. it is true the new theology is not a new formation, It is not a destruction of the old theology, but it is nevertheless more truly a reconstruction, a re-foriuation oi it, than the movement set on foot by Luther and Melancthon was a re-for-niulio'n of the Christian religion of the sixteenth ccnturv,'

The new theology frees intellect and the moral sense in man from Hie trammels and shackles of human dogma and creed, and leaves the soul free lo work out, by the exercise of its own God-given powers, iis eternal destiny. The new theology is, as it were, " a recryslallizalion of the old elements of faith, enlarged and ennobled." The old was an tin* scientific theology, and it travelled on parallel lines, never to meet, with an irreligious science. Those who are allowing their minds to be bent in the direction the new thought is taking, hope for, if they have not already found, " a scienlilic theology," and " a religious science " going hand in hand.

The old theology insists Unit the Bible is, in its entirety, mi infallible, inspired, record of truth, God's word to man, and that whatever is there recorded must be accepted as truth by man, no matter to what extent it conflicts with physical science or the moral senge, or shocks his intellectual faculties, By thus insisting upon the 'plenary inspiration of tho Bible, the old theology lias blinded the eyes of many to the noble truths, tho beautiful ethics, the grand philosophy which it contains. The new theology looks on the Bible as perhaps the most wonderful book that has ever been written, yet still as only the ,worl; of human hands and intellects, and therefore full of faults, mistakes and errors. It therefore seeks to sift and separate Ihe wheat from the chaff. To lay hold of tiie truth in it, and let go the false. As a historical record it regards it as entitled to just such credit as internal and external evidence prove it merits, but no more. As to the poetry, philosophy, ethics and metaphysics, it finds on its pages, it admits that tliey are unrivalled, sublime, inspired if you will, as written by poets, seers or philosophers, but inspired only in the sense in which poets and seers and philosophers, in all ages and all countries, may be said to have been inspired when their intuitive, perceptions enabled them to get nearer to truth and God than was possible for their less gifted more earthly fellows.

Tlie old theology teaches that the world and man were created some six thousand years ago in six days of twenty-four hours each. The new theology accepts the teaching of scientists as to the theory of evolution, and with it adopts the belief in a vast age for both the world and man. The old theology teaches that the soul is created and enters into the body of the infant when it breathes its first breath of life. The new looks backward, into the dim vista of the past ages, to a time unrecorded and unknown, when God separated each soul from himself and created it a living entity, subject, as all other things, 'to. the universal evolutionary law, governed and controlled, by which it has reached its present plane of existence, and goverened and controlled by which it will yet reach higher and still higher planes until it reaches that perfection which should be now its aim and goal, The old theology teaches the dogma of original sin, inborn, and handwl on from tho fall in Eden, The result of one single act of disobedience. ,The new, translates *' original sin " into " the law of heredity " which dowers us to-day with the unconquered, inherited, passions and appetites oi the brute man of past ages.

The old theology sees in the hereafter two worlds, a heaven and a hell. The one a place where unalloyed, perfect peace and happiness reign supreme. The other the abode of horrible, unending, agony and torture. To one of these two worlds each soul departs at death, there to remain for ever. The new theology sees, for the souls of men, in the hereafter, all varieties of experience, each variety the natural, necessitated consequence of prior life and thought, and it recognises and believes that there or then, as here and now, there will be a God of infinite love and mercy, mighty to save even to the uttermost,

The old theology teaches the utterly incomprehensible dogma of the Trinity, a " hopeless puzzle to the intellect, a standing menace to faith, and to nine-tenths of believers a formula of scarcely disguised tritheism." The new tells us of one God in whom "we live and move and have our being," of whom we are a i part. Revealed to us partly in Na- | tuve. The Good, Law, Love, Truth, Revealed to us more than all by our 'own intuitive perception of his being, which is nothing else than consciousness of our kinship with Him as " heirs of God.'",

The old theology teaches 'the doctrine of the immaculate conception, and of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a dogma which" represents God as coming down through space from somewhere at a Certain moment of time and embodying Himself in a man. The new theology teaches the incarnation of God in all men. That Bis spirit is in all men. Ensouled in them, and so filled ono man that, "in him dwelt the fullness, of the Godhead bodily/' and made him true, type'of perfect man. It teaches that the true Christian! is hot the man who believes this or that creed, who holds blindly ..to.,this or that dogma, be it - that of the vicarious atonement for sin bjr one

other, but he is the man who lives the Christ life, and thinks tlw Christ thoughts, realising the universal brotherhood of men, their sonship to* God, and God's fatherhood to them. Thus it teaches us tlio golden rule for life and the hereafter, Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, And this suffices.