British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871Various
History
British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871
Various
English periodicals
We believe that those champions of the Church of England who glory in
their formularies, as containing and maintaining the 'form of sound
words once delivered to the saints,' and who regard them as the
strongest bulwarks of the truth, are glorying in her weakness. She has
followed systematically the policy against which the great Founder of
the empire of modern thought so energetically protested. She suffers
no revision, no readjustment, except by tricks of interpretation which
fill timid men with distress and honest men with shame. And yet
readjustment is imperative. Theology, in the very nature of things,
must progress with the progresses of the world or fall out of its
march. The connection is a profound one, as we have said, between the
secular life of an age and its religious beliefs. The history of the
growth of the Augustinian, the Calvinistic, and the Arminian
theologies is profoundly interesting, when studied in the light of the
vital secular movements of the ages which gave them birth. The present
collapse of the Augustinian theology has its springs distinctly in the
secular sphere. Because the world has been progressing so rapidly,
enlarging its views of all things around it, searching out the secrets
of nature and of man, theology must move on or perish. And, in truth,
in no province of human thought and life is there stronger
fermentation; spirit working out new forms of expression and action,
and working so strongly that the old vessels of the State creed can
contain it no longer; they must be unbound, or it will burst them to
pieces. The belief of this age about God, man's relation to God, God's
work for man, God's way in the government of the world, demands
readjustment quite as much as the biography, the chemistry, the
geology which our fathers handed down to us; and the idea that this
new spirit must be made to let theology alone, that theology is too
sacred, too settled in a fixed form by a Divine hand, to be capable of
progress or expansion, is the nurse of atheism and the mother of
despair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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