Arrows of FreethoughtFoote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Arrows of Freethought
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
The Dean's treatment of God the Son is amusing. He writes of Jesus
Christ as though he were a principle instead of a person. "The
Mahometan," he says, "_rightly_ objects to the introduction of the
paternal and filial relations into the idea of God, when they are
interpreted in the _gross and literal sense_. But in the moral spiritual
sense it is true that the kindness, tenderness and wisdom we find in
Jesus Christ is the reflection of the same kindness, tenderness and
wisdom which we recognise in the governance of the universe." This may
be called mysticism, but we think it moonshine. Gross and literal sense,
forsooth! Why, was not Jesus Christ a man, a most literal fact, "gross
as a mountain, open, palpable?" Dean Stanley approves the Mahometan's
objection, and yet he knows full well that it contravenes a fundamental
dogma of the Christian Church, and is accounted a most damnable heresy.
Why this paltering with us in a double sense? To our mind downright
blatant orthodoxy, which is at least honest if not subtle, is preferable
to this hybrid theology which attempts to reconcile contradictions
in order to show respect to truth while sticking to the flesh-pots of
error, and evades all difficulties by a patent and patently dishonest
method of "interpretation."
Quoting Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," Dean Stanley tells us that one great
benefit traceable to God the Son is the recognition of "humility and
poverty, mockery and despising, wretchedness and suffering, as divine."
Well, if these things are divine, the sooner we all become devilish the
better. Nobody thinks them divine when they happen to himself; on the
contrary, he cries out lustily against them. But it is a different
matter when they happen to others. Then the good Christian considers
them divine. How easily, says a French wit, we bear other people's
troubles! Undistracted by personal care, pious souls contemplate with
serene resignation the suffering of their neighbors, and acknowledge in
them the chastening hand of a Divine Father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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