Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
Such then is the highest philosophy to-day of those who, refusing to
be called atheists, nevertheless reject all faith in God; of those
who, rejecting Christian theism, claim to be positively neither more
nor less than the men of science. Men of science though they be,
their philosophy is the philosophy of nescience and the philosophy
of despair. We need be under no apprehension that such a philosophy
will ever be generally accepted. It is too strong, too sorrowful, too
nauseous a composition to suit the common taste. It not only dissolves
morality and its foundations, but it precludes all hope of immortality.
The race indeed may be immortal and progressively great and glorious,
although how even so much can be known is more than I can see; but the
individual man by man, woman by woman, child by child, perishes each
one for ever. Men and women with yearning, loving hearts, with tender
and passionate affections, who have buried their dead out of their
sight, and who could not endure to live if they were doomed to sorrow
without hope, cannot but reject with loathing and horror such doctrines
as these. Men of various culture, of manifold intellectual resources,
who live in the midst of refined and accomplished society, and who are
not suffering from the pang of immedicable anguish and irreparable
bereavement, may possibly live so merely intellectual and speculative
a life, may be so wholly absorbed in mere science, may have so far
separated themselves from all that belongs to the heart's affections
and the trembling religious sensibilities of human nature, as to adopt
the philosophy of nihilism with hardy calmness, although I confess
that it passes my power to understand or conceive this; such men may
be content to follow their speculative conclusions into the "blackness
of darkness" for ever, and may thus, if not less, be more than the
common crowd of humanity. But such a philosophy will not content
those who share the ordinary wants and sensibilities of our race. The
working, sorrowing, loving, hoping men and women of this human race
will no more be able to satisfy themselves with any atheistic or, if
any should prefer so to call it, pantheistic philosophy, than they can
"feast upon the east wind." They will cleave to that Christian truth
and faith which has "brought life and immortality to light," and which,
in "showing" to the craving heart of needy, sorrowing, sinful man "the
Father" reconciled in Christ, has blessedly "sufficed" a longing world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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