Abstract
We are continually being told that Christianity, to use a favourite word with modern society, is "doomed." It is so utterly at variance, we are informed, with modern culture, modern discover, modern science, modern enlightenment, that it is impossible that it can do more now than drag out the remains of a lingering existence. Expelled from among the cultivated and intelligent, it will soon be obliged to take refuge with the ignorant and superstitious, until the progress of education shall one day sweep the last vestiges of it from off the earth. It is true that neither modern culture, discovery, science, enlightenment, have enabled us to make much progress in the mental, certainly not in the theological-I use the word in its strictest acceptation-departments of philosophy. The latest discoveries in this last region are only a progress backward about two thousand yeas. The "unknown and unknowable," or, as Mr. Arnold prefers to call it, "the unexplored and inexpressible," is, after all, only a new name for the Supreme Being of Epicurus and of the Gnostics. The absolute reign of unchangeable law has been heard of before in the schools of the Stoics. And the modern doctrine which identifies God with ourselves and ourselves with God, and all with the universe, is also to be found in many of the ancient systems. Yet, in spite of the inability of our modern philosophers to present us with anything but theories of the Infinite and Absolute which have been found incapable of meeting the wants of mankind, the blasts of the trumpets at which the walls of our Jericho are to fall flat are blown, as confidently as ever. The danger is in fact considered so imminent, that a mediator between the combatants has appeared in the person of the gentleman whose name stands at the head of this paper. Christianity, he considers, is lost, unless she enter into a parley with her assailants. It is time, that the conditions of peace should be decided, and he has drawn them up. It would be a serious thing for the world if Christianity and the Bible were to be entirely abandoned. Therefore they are to be suffered to exist. But modern culture has had so indisputably the best of the conflict, that, in order to escape total annihilation, by far the greater part of Christianity must be sacrificed. The Bible is to be retained, but not all, only just so much as Mr. Arnold thinks we are entitled to keep. Miracles, prophecy, the authenticity of its books, its doctrine of a Personal God, all are to go; but we are to be allowed to retain as a residuum, that, and only that which, according to Mr. Arnold, has a "verifiable basis" the proclamation of a "not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Christianity is to exist still, but she must be prepared to surrender her belief in the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in God manifest in the flesh, in a Risen Saviour, in God the Holy Ghost. She must abandon her creeds-all of them -as the product of "popular" or "theological science," and she must content herself with that exposition on of the "stream of tendency whereby we fulfil the law of: our being," which has been given to the world by means of what Mr. Arnold calls the "method," the "secret;" and the "mildness and sweet reasonableness" of Jesus.