So some of us perceive that what is needed to-day is to arrest the
attention of the man in the street, to get him to perceive that
Christianity has much more to say for itself than he suspected, and
that Christian Philosophy will place in his hand a clue which will
guide him in the labyrinth of life.
“I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it.”
We must set men free from phrases and get them to think. It suits the
game of the party politician to pretend that ethics are easily
self-evident, and that there is a simple fundamental religion on which
all men are agreed; but there is a question which must be insistently
urged, and upon the answer to which all things depend, “What think ye
of Christ?”
Probably nothing has done more to alienate the man in the street from
religious observance than the hypocritical pretence that all men are
agreed about “simple Bible teaching.” He knows well enough that what
really matters is whether a man believes or not that God became man.
If ever the Labour Party should definitely declare for elementary
education without religious teaching it will be because the men whose
children attend the elementary schools know that they cannot read the
New Testament without asking, “Is it true?”
“Did Jesus Christ really die and rise again the third day according to
the Scriptures?” “Did Jesus Christ go up into heaven in the sight of
the apostles till a cloud received Him?” “Did Mary’s Son come to her
as other babies come?” “Was Joseph Jesus Christ’s real father?” Our
members of Parliament who have no leisure to know their own children,
who keep them in the nursery till it is time for them to go to the
Preparatory School, who leave their training to the governess and the
head-master, may talk about “the cruelty of the religious differences
which hinder the establishment of an efficient system of education for
the children of the State.” But the men and the mothers who live with
their children and talk to them about their lessons, know that a child
will insist upon an answer to its questions. A father of a family in
the artisan and labouring classes, if he be at all intelligent, loses
all respect for ministers of the Gospel who pretend that there is no
difficulty about the simple Gospel story, and losing his self-respect
for the men who have appointed themselves his teachers, he is tempted
to throw all theology aside. And if he ventures on this despairing
expedient he finds himself in mental confusion again over ethics
instead of theology, and there arises a prospect of anarchy and
disorder. Capital is timid, so enterprise is checked. Poverty
increases and riot follows, and it all ends, not now-a-days in the
Napoleonic “whiff of grape-shot,” but in the rattle of the maxim in
the streets and the desolation of a thousand homes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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