of Christianity assumes extreme rigidity--Christianity is a static system
finally formulated, a deposit to be accepted in toto if at all, not to be
added to, not to be subtracted from, not to be changed, its i's all
dotted and its t's all crossed.
The most crucial problem which we face in our religious thinking is
created by the fact that Christianity thus statically conceived now goes
out into a generation where no other aspect of life is conceived in
static terms at all. The earth itself on which we live, not by fiat
suddenly enacted, but by long and gradual processes, became habitable,
and man upon it through uncounted ages grew out of an unknown past into
his present estate. Everything within man's life has grown, is growing,
and apparently will grow. Music developed from crude forms of rhythmic
noise until now, by way of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, our modern music,
still developing, has grown to forms of harmony at first undreamed.
Painting developed from the rough outlines of the cavemen until now
possibilities of expression in line and colour have been achieved whose
full expansion we cannot guess. Architecture evolved from the crude huts
of primitive man until now our cathedrals and our new business buildings
alike mark an incalculable advance and prophesy an unimaginable future.
One may refuse to call all development real progress, may insist upon
degeneration as well as betterment through change, but, even so, the
basic fact remains that all the elements which go to make man's life come
into being, are what they are, and pass out of what they are into
something different, through processes of continual growth. Our business
methods change until the commercial wisdom of a few years ago may be the
folly of to-day; our moral ideals change until actions once respectable
become reprobate, and the heroes of one generation would be the convicts
of another; our science changes until ideas that men once were burned at
the stake for entertaining are now the commonplace axioms of every school
boy's thought; our economics change until schools of thought shaped to
old industrial conditions are as outmoded as a one-horse shay beside an
automobile; our philosophy changes like our science when Kant, for
example, starts a revolution in man's thinking, worthy, as he claimed, to
be called Copernican; our cultural habits change until marooned
communities in the Kentucky mountains, "our contemporary ancestors,"
having let the stream of human life flow around and past them, seem as
strange to us as a belated what-not in a modern parlour. The perception
of this fact of progressive change is one of the regnant influences in
our modern life and, strangely enough, so far from disliking it, we glory
in it; in our expectancy we count on change; with our control of life we
seek to direct it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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