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Page 12
The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our
religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works
in life. "He that willeth to do His will shall know." Coleridge bursts
out indignantly: "'Evidences of Christianity'! I am weary of the word.
Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the
self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own
evidence." Religion approaches men saying, "O taste and see that the
Lord is good." He cannot be good unless He _is_. A fancied Deity, an
invention however beautiful of men's brain, supposed to be a living
Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse.
If our religion is a stained glass window we color to hide the void
beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a God
or not, let us smash the deceiving glass, and face the darkness or the
daylight outside. "Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its
workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of
science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an
hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself.
Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of
believers who have tried it and proved it. The God and Father of Jesus
is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let
God convince him. To commit one's self to God in Christ and be redeemed
from most real sins--turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to
freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and
find one's self empowered and enlightened;--is to discover that faith
works, and works gloriously. A man's idea of God may be, and cannot but
be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to
Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness
of the Reality behind it.
Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is
a social attestation of the workableness of faith. The surest way of
establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with
another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him
with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him. The most
effective defender of the faith is the missionary. "It requires," as
David Livingstone said, "perpetual propagation to attest its
genuineness." Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however
cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are
spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of
One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those
who prove wholeheartedly loyal.
For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future. The glory
of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together.
But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated
by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work
tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all.
CHAPTER II
THE BIBLE
In terms of the definition of religion given in the last chapter, we may
describe the Bible as the record of the progressive religious experience
of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, a record selected by the
experience of the Jewish and Christian Church, and approving itself to
Christian experience today as the Self-revelation of the living God.
The Bible is a _literary_ record. It is not so much a book as a library,
containing a great variety of literary forms--legends, laws, maxims,
hymns, sermons, visions, biographies, letters, etc. Judged solely as
literature its writings have never been equalled in their kind, much
less surpassed. Goethe declared, "Let the world progress as much as it
likes, let all branches of human research develop to their utmost,
nothing will take the place of the Bible--that foundation of all culture
and all education." Happily for the English-speaking world the
translation into our tongue, standardized in the King James' Bible, is
a universally acknowledged classic; and scarcely a man of letters has
failed to bear witness to its charm and power. While most translations
lose something of the beauty and meaning of the original, there are some
parts of the English Bible which, as literature and as religion, excel
the Hebrew or Greek they attempt to render.
The Bible is a record of _religious experience_. It has but one central
figure from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_--God. But God is primarily in the
experience, only secondarily in the record. All thought succeeds in
grasping but a fraction of consciousness; thought is well symbolized in
Rodin's statue, where out of a huge block of rough stone a small finely
chiselled head emerges. With all their skill we cannot credit the men of
faith who are behind the Bible pages with making clear to themselves but
a small part of God's Self-disclosure to them. And when they came to
wreak thought upon expression, so clear and well-trained a mind as
Paul's cannot adequately utter what he feels and thinks. His sentences
strain and sometimes break; he ends with such expressions as "the love
of Christ which passeth knowledge," and God's "unspeakable gift."
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