RELIGIOUS PERPLEXITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18856, 8 May 1923, Page 4

RELIGIOUS PERPLEXITY

THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST AND THE

MODERN WORLD.

The Rev. L. G. Whitehead, warden of Selwyn College, who preached a Unherbity sermon at All Saints’ Church on Sunday last, took as his text, “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ” (Romans i, 16). He said: My object this afternoon is to consider some reasons for believing that the religious anarchy of our clay is only a passing phase, and that Christianity will ever continue to be the source from which men will draw the truths by which the best life is alone possible. Any inquiry into the ' causes of the chaotic condiiiou of the modern world would have to go back in history at least 150 years. The social changes which began then were too great for the .moral, political, or economic wisdom of that or any later time, for the increase of wealth and population were unprecedented. This failure alone would have had serious consequences enough. But science, too, at the same time, was inaugurating great changes both in the practical and theoretical; spheres. On tho one hand, man’s control of natural forces was vastly increased and opened up vistas of secular advancement hitherto undreamed of. On the other baud, scientific theory, notably the Darwinian Hypothesis, gave a rude shock to what may, be called theological orthodoxy. Semi-popular systems of philosophy came into vogue, and by tho end of the nineteenth century there resulted a complete change in the ethics of Western civilisation, a change more farreaching than any since the beginning of the Christian era. What came'into question were not merely secondary matters like the doctrine of special creation, but the fundamental valuations on which all human goodness and greatness rest. The sum of the new gospel was this, man is the accidental product of a universe that has neither meaning nor purpose within it, let us make heaven on earth. What is the logical- connection between these two propositions has never been quite clear. A qnasi-pholisophical system symptomatic of the popular thought of those days was that of Ernst Haeckel. The optimistic professor begins by attempting to destroy all the beliefs which have made European civilisation possible, and on the ruins he sets up a sentimental worship of the Platonic Trinity, though logically he should have held truth, wisdom, and goodness as hardly so significant in tho universe as a taste for sugar? Haeckel’s system was a striking example of what Inge calls “an intolerable dualism between fact and value.” In sum. such philosophy says that, physical science alone is true, it alone deals with facts; goodness, truth, beauty, indeed all values, belong to the region of the imagination. Henoo physical science has the monopoly of truth, religion, the lion’s share of fiction. Such was the quasi-philosophical dogma that formed the foundation of the thought of a very influential part of .the educated and semi-educated classes at the beginning of tin’s century. . \ * Despite the noble lives of many sceptics, the effect of their teaching was to make men feel that immediate enjoyment of material goods was the groat aim of life. Hence the mortal sickness of our “acquisitive society,” culminating in the most colossal conflict in history. So disastrous has this been to the world of the white man that “we live, as it seems, in a time of exhaustion —exhaustion of principles, exhaustion of personalities—exhaustion almost of faith and hope.” Fact, and Value.—Yet when examined closely how intellectually baseless is this anti-religious philosophy! Carried to its logical conclusion, it would destroy the foundations not only of religion, but of science. Even in its physical aspect, science is based on a valuaOa, at the very least on a judgment that distinguished between appearance and reality. , The fundamental assumption lying behind the pursuit of knowledge of and kind is what Dean Inge calls the “gallant faith of Plato” that "the real i* the good”: the belief that knowledge is good implies in the end that the Universe is good and that is the fundamental belief of religion. To call this assumption an act of faith is not to disparage it. “All ultimate verdicts, whether religious or anti-religious, are ventures or acts of faith.” “There is not the slightest warranty in the history of thought that we can over sum up tho Uni verse as a whole except _ by an effort of faith.” I hope to show, in the sequel,’ that “tho Gospel, in its simple appeal to the individual consciousness, in its certain and confident answer to the problems' of life, demands no greater venture of faith than we see underlying the speculations of honest doubt.” The Problem of Evil.—A fundamental dinculty must bo considered before we come to the presentation of the Christian Gospel on its positive side. The world’s pain, and its moral turpitude are the perpetual enigma of faith. Nevertheless, failure to trace the operation of moral or spiritual law in many of the miseries of men does not prove such law to be absent. It must be remembered that the demand we so often make for equivalence between virtue and reward, or between vice and punishment, would, if conceded to us, destroy the moral order, of the world, for morality by its very nature demands that its justification should be a matter of faith and not of sight. This conclusion is in complete agreement with the Christian faith, which regards life as essentially a probation and the world as existing “for the perfecting and discipline of a. higher destiny in art unseen world; of this God Himself i has been the example and will be the reward.” • .

The problem of unmerited suffering is one- thing to the man who believes in immortality, and quite another to the man who does not. Christianity cannot, in justice. be asked to solve the secularist’s problem of evil. Say what one will, however, there is always a residuum of inscrutable mystery in many of the facts of suffering "and evil. In the face of these agonising problems we must agree with Eotze that“no one has here found us the thought which would save us from our difficulty.” But we may also add with the same thinker: “If I still hold fast by confidence in the existence of u solution which we do not know, what I wish to give expression to is not a didactic affirmation to be bolstered up by some kind of speculative support, but only the watchword of a struggle in which I desire that my readers should participate—a struggle against the confidence of views which impoverish faith without enriching knowledge. But to regard the course of the wor.n as the development of some blind force which works on according to universal latvs, devoid of insight and freedom; devoid of interest in good and evil—are wo to consider this unjustifiable generalisation of a conception valid in its own sphere, as the higher truth? Is it not rather the unsatisfying conclusion to which w'eary thought may come back at an- moment, if it gives up its unattainable but not less certain goal?”

Believer and unbeliever alike have no intellectual key to this insoluble problem. “But it is to Christianity,’’ as von Hugol says, “that wo owe our own deepest insight into the wopdrously wideband varied range throughout the world, as we know it, of pain, suffering, evil; iust as to Christianity We owe the richest enforcement of the fact that, in spite of all this, God is, and that He is good and loving. And this enforcement Christianity achieves at its best, by actually inspiring soul after soul, to believe, to love, to live this wondrous faith.” *

The Romance of the Christian Religion.— The Christian Faith is then, we must hold, rather an attitude t to the universe as a whole than an intellectual construction. This attitude is one of ever-growing wonder, nothing is too good to he true, provided it really is a good, “On the surface of things there is discord, confusion, and want of adaptation; hut dig down, first to the centre of the world, and then to the .centre of your own nature, and you will find,a most wonderful correspondence, a most beautiful harmony, between the two—the world made for the hero, and the hero made for the world.” The agonies and tragedies of existence are to the Christian who understands his faith but calls to that strenuousness and compassion which show ..us the world as the valley of soul-making, “a place of true, marvellous, inextricable courage and power, a torture-chamber by rack and fire, with no sleep among the angel-watchers, none among the demon questioners, none among the men who stand or fall beside these hosts of God.”

The religious life must not, therefore, be thought of as one of; tears and woe. On the contrary, the end of all religion is joy; joy in immediate sezwice; joy in the battle against fearful odds; joy some day in (he final victory. Saving souls is guiding ’them to happiness, not to that low sort with which the majority of men try to satisfy themselves, but to the sharing in that ineffable bliss, which in this life must always be three-oarts p i in.

In all. living there are those elements of risk, of the irrevocable, and of the unforsoouble which constitute the essence of adventure. Nictschze’s advice to live 1 dangerously is somewhat superfluous. And religion’s task, I take it, is not to lessen this risk, to provide soft/cushions for us to fall on, but rather to heighten our sense of

danger by increasing its significance. It teaches us to_ see in every human act and life, as human, a striving after the eternal and the divine. Hence every decision for good or: evil has its significance in that eternal world of which this is but the shadow and imago. Never a sigh of passion or of pity. Never a wail for weakness or for wrong, Has not its archive in the angel’s city, Finds not its echo in the endless’song.

So, as Principal Jacks says; “The penalty —no, not the penalty but the high, reward — of having any religion that is worth the name, is that it, will conduct us into critical situations, that it will reveal perplexities where without-it none would exist. From some preplexitifes religion does .indeed give release. It gives release from’ those that are not worthy of its, that belittle us when we indulge in them, that make us selfish, timid, and unloving—the care for self, the fear that something dreadful may happen to us, either in this world, or in the next, unless we take immense precautions against its happening. But in releasing us from these perplexities, which are not worthy*of us, it confronts us with others on a higher level, where our finer essence finds the employment for which it was made. Instead of hiding the great crises, instead of banishing them, or giving us anaesthetics to make iis unconscious of their presence, religion reveals them, makes us aware of them, sharpens -our consciousness of their .presence:; hut at the same time reveals ns to ourselves as beings who are capable of overcoming them. If, on the one hand, it uncovers the pain of life and make us feel it with a new intensity, on the other it liberates the love that conquers pain, a power mightier tnan death and sharper than agony. One might almost define religion in these terms. That in each of us, and all of us which faces the crisis, which rises to meet it. which feels, when confronted by it, that its hour is come and for this cause it came into the world. (“Religious Perplexities,” p. 55.) ’Flic Pefhiauent Demands of the Religious Consciousness. —Modern investigation has enabled us to gain au extensive knowledge of all the great, world religions. A wide induction made from this vast accumulation of ( facts forces on us the conclusion that foif the mass of men there are certain permanent demands of the religious consciousness. which secularism can neither satisfy nor abolish. And what arc these demands? (1) In the -first place, religion must give its followers an ideal object for their efforts —i.e. t , they must feel they serve a cause greater than their own individual interests, greater even than the interests of all humanity. No one can deny that this temper has been able to stir and transform tho world. ( (2) Secondly, this cause must always involve the need of a sovereign who can recognise merit and * i guarantee future trijunph Assured c-f these two things, the faithful find the other demands of religion satisfied—viz., ~o) Tho demand for a sense of personal 'value and (4) Tho demand for the worth of endeavour. /

It is a common indictment against religion in general (and against Christianity iii particular) that it encourages selfishness, in that it teaches man to look for a reward for their efforts. Such an accusation is not neoissarily trite, and can come only from those who d j not understand religion s motive power. Ihe demand for immortality and recognition by God are not based on selfish and long-sighted calculation of profit and loss. Tins demand arises from a deep-footed of common justice and fitness of things.* It is a satisfaction of. ■reason rather than of greed.* Hear -the testimony of one, who was a dissented from all the churches (Professor, Goldwiu Smith): “I think that human goodness and greatness. judging from the history of the race, depend on the existence of a practical desire to reach an ideal as yet unfulfilled, but in the fulfilment of which all who contribute to it will in some way share.” Christianity Vindicated.—Our conclusion is that Christianity is democratic in the only true sense of’that ill-used word—that is \to’ say, it is adapttd to the abiding needs of the average man, When our religion set out on its conquering mission, it did. not begin by proclaiming to men difficult doctrines about the omniscience, the omnipotence and the omnipresence of God —not even the dogma of the Adorable and Ever-blessed Trinity ; it began “by presenting to men the spectacle of a suffering criminal” ; thus it met the distressed and the degraded upon their own ground, and on this foundation raised and still raises a theology which the wisest cannot exhaust. The Christian Faith starts with the weakness of God; "with - sin and ' sorrow and pain,—facts which none can deny—and on this basis builds its edifice of morals and piety and hope. + . Attacked by critics within and without in a way that no other great world religion has- ever been, Christianity still offers to men of good Will a rational cause to servo, a Master whose triumph we shall share if we are faithful, a sense of personal value, not only as His servants but as His friends, and thus a meaning for our efforts and our lives. In doing this, it, ceases to be a religion, and becomes religion “in its deepest and most universal'aspect.’.’ We may well believe that men will cease to be human, before they permanently reject these essential truths of Christianity. . God grant us to live and die in this faith, fully assured that, in the face of all the manifold confusions our timo fliicl of fl.ll tho 1 complexities and achievements of modern thought, we have no need to be ashamed of the gospel of Christ.

(») See F. W. Bussell, Bampton Lectures. 1005 t See Dr Bussell, op. oit.