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Page 46
"Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary's breast
Renew from day to day;
O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest
On this frail clay!
Till I am Thine with my whole soul, and fear
Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near."
So, only when we include in the term "knowledge" understanding plus
good will, is the humanist position true, and this, I suppose, is
what Aristotle meant when he finally says, "Vice is consistent with
knowledge of some kind, but it excludes knowledge in the full and
proper sense of the word."[38]
[Footnote 37: _Culture and Restraint_, p. 104.]
[Footnote 38: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. v, p. 215.]
Now, so finespun a discussion of intricate and psychological
subtleties is mildly interesting presumably to middle-aged scholars,
but I submit that a half truth that needs so much explanation and
so many admissions before it can be made safe or actual, is a rather
dangerous thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation of
average men and women. It cannot sound to them very much like the good
news of Jesus. Culture is a precious thing, but no culture, without
the help of divine grace and the responsive affection on our part
which that grace induces, will ever knit men together in a kingdom
of God, a spiritual society. As long ago as the second century Celsus
understood that. He says in his polemic against Christianity, as
quoted by Origen, "If any one suppose that it is possible that the
people of Asia and Europe and Africa, Greeks and barbarians, should
agree to follow one law, he is hopelessly ignorant."[39] Now, Celsus
was proceeding on the assumption that Christianity was only another
philosophy, a new intellectual system, and he was merely exposing the
futility of all such unaided intellectualism.
[Footnote 39: _Origen, contra Celsum_, VIII, p. 72.]
It is, therefore, of prime importance for the preacher to remember
that humanism, or any other doctrine which approaches the problem of
life and conduct other than by moral and spiritual means, can never
take the place of the religious appeal, because it does not touch the
springs of action where motives are born and from which convictions
arise. You do not make a man moral by enlightening him; it is nearer
the truth to say that you enlighten him when you make him moral.
"Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see
God. If any man wills to do the will, he shall know the doctrine."
Education does not wipe out crime nor an understanding mind make a
holy will. The last half of the nineteenth century made it terribly
clear that the learning and science of mankind, where they are
divorced from piety, unconsecrated by a spiritual passion, and largely
directed by selfish motives, can neither benefit nor redeem the race.
Consider for a moment the enormous expansion of knowledge which the
world has witnessed since the year 1859. What prodigious accessions
to the sum of our common understanding have we seen in the natural and
the humane sciences; and what marvelous uses of scientific knowledge
for practical purposes have we discovered! We have mastered in these
latter days a thousand secrets of nature. We have freed the mind from
old ignorance and ancient superstition. We have penetrated the secrets
of the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely prolong
the span of human days. We face the facts and know the world as our
fathers could never do. We understand the past and foresee the future.
But the most significant thing about our present situation is this:
how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It has made
men more cunning rather than more noble. Still the body is ravaged and
consumed by passion. Still men toil for others against their will,
and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the
sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused
nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities
are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and
hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live
without hope, and millions exist--not live at all--from hand to mouth.
As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see the
horrors of war between nation and nation, and between class and class,
it would not be difficult to make out a case for the thesis that the
scientific and intellectual advances of the nineteenth century
have largely worked to make men keener and more capacious in their
suffering. And at least this is true; just so far as the achievement
of the mind has been divorced from the consecration of the spirit,
in just so far knowledge has had no beneficent potency for the human
race.
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