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[Jan Dominquez]

Theymay be criticised by those who, satisfied with the more traditionalways of stating the historic Christian faith, will dislike theirdiscrimination between some elements in that faith as more, and othersas less, certain. I would reply that they are intentionally but apartial presentation of the Gospel for a particular purpose; and furtherI find my position entirely covered by the words of Richard Baxter inhis Reliqui: "Among Truths certain in themselves, all are not equallycertain unto me; and even of the Mysteries of the Gospel, I must needssay with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever men pretend, the subjectiveCertainty cannot go beyond the objective Evidence: for it is causedthereby as the print on the Wax is caused by that on the Seal. I am notso foolish as to pretend my certainty to be greater than it is, merelybecause it is a dishonour to be less certain. They that will begin alltheir Certainty with that of the Truth of the Scripture, as thePrincipium Cognoscendi, may meet me at the same end; but they mustgive me leave to undertake to prove to a Heathen or Infidel, the Beingof God and the necessity of Holiness, even while he yet denieth theTruth of Scripture, and in order to his believing it to be true."

I am indebted to two of my colleagues, Professor James E. Frame andProfessor A.C. McGiffert, for valuable suggestions in two of thechapters, and especially to my friend, the Rev. W. Russell Bowie, D.D.,of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Va., who kindly read over themanuscript.

When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stonewas made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe norany tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectualbeliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to housetheir religious faith have been built, for the most part, out ofmaterials they found already prepared by other movements of the humanmind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of thequarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand theconstruction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear inmany minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than acentury; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet beenexhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but newopenings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot becertainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear anidentifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of theprincipal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of thetemple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit ofthe Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out ofthe thought of each age.

Something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

It baptized men into a new sense of wonder; everything became for themmiraculous, instinct with God. It quickened the imagination, and sentwriters, like Sir Walter Scott, to make the past live again on the pagesof historical novels. Sights and sounds became symbols of an innerReality: nature was to Emerson "an everlasting hint"; and to Carlyle,who never tires of repeating that "the Highest cannot be spoken inwords," all visible things were emblems, the universe and man symbols ofthe ineffable God.

(1) That religion is something more and deeper than belief and conduct,that it is an experience of man's whole nature, and consists largely infeelings and intuitions which we can but imperfectly rationalize andexpress. George Eliot's Adam Bede is a typical instance of thismovement, when he says: "I look at it as if the doctrines was likefinding names for your feelings."

(2) That God is immanent in His world, so that He works as truly "fromwithin" as "from above." He is not external to nature and man, butpenetrates and inspires them. While an earlier theology thought of Himas breaking into the course of nature at rare intervals in miracles, tous He is active in everything that occurs; and the feeding of the fivethousand with five loaves and two fishes, while it may be morestartling, is not more divine than the process of feeding them withbread and fish produced and caught in the usual way. Men used to speakof Deity and humanity as two distinct and different things that werejoined in Jesus Christ; no man is to us without "the inspiration of theAlmighty," and Christ is not so much God and man, as God in man.

(3) That the Divine is represented to us by symbols that speak to moreparts of our nature than to the intellect alone. Horace Bushnellentitled an essay that still repays careful reading, The Gospel a Giftto the Imagination. One of our chief complaints with the historiccreeds and confessions is that they have turned the poetry (in whichreligious experience most naturally expresses itself) into prose,rhetoric into logic, and have lost much of its content in the process.Jesus is to the mind with a sense for the Divine the great symbol orsacrament of the Invisible God; but to treat His divinity as a formulaof logic, and attempt to demonstrate it, as one might a proposition ingeometry, is to lose that which divinity is to those who haveexperienced contact with the living God through Jesus.

A second quarry, which Christianity itself did much to open, and fromwhich later it brought supplies to rebuild its own temple of thought, isHumanitarianism. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century with its strugglefor the rights of man, this movement has gone on to our own day, settingfree the slaves, reforming our prisons, protesting against war andcruelty, protecting women and children from economic exploitation, anddevoting itself to all that renders human beings healthier and happier.

(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and dutyto become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginativelyreconstructing history, many Lives of Christ have been written; and itis no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understoodat present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.

A third quarry is the Physical Sciences. As its blocks were taken outmost Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for thetemple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings ofthings; its greatest book during the century bore the title, The Originof Species; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itselfappeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominanteverywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayerand miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into natureexposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all thethings for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was inthe minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of thewriters of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed aconstant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with manyattempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle wasdue to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and areligious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when eitherattempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I donot attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Bothphysicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" assomething fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural andwhat supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding all the while to newstimuli, and the title of a recent book, Creative Evolution, indicatesa changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.

(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence andattributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to findin the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it nowis can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.

A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of thisscientific quarry, is the historical and literary investigation of theBible. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church,and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexaminedthe books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter ofindifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch,pronounced the Books of the Chronicles less accurate historically thanthe Books of the Kings, considered the present form of the books ofIsaiah, Jeremiah and Hosea probably due to later hands, anddistinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of lessmoment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, andsuggested Barnabas as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Butthe Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to theScriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism towhich all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discoveryof the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of theBiblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use ofthe documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods theyprofess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.

(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,science, ethics and theology of its age, and the religious experience ofwhich it is the record, and in which we find the Self-disclosure of God.

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