Our Unitarian GospelSavage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Religion
Our Unitarian Gospel
Savage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Sermons; Unitarianism
For more than two thousand years he devotes himself to the training of
this people. How does he succeed here? He sends his messengers again,
his angels, his prophets, one after another. He inspires a certain
number of men to write a book to deliver his will to the people, fallen
into such condition that they are incapable of discovering the truth
for themselves. But, after all his efforts, they are so far from the
truth that, when the second person of the Trinity appears, they have
nothing to do with him except to put him to death. After that, God
sends the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to organize his
Church, spread his truth, convert men, bring them into the Church, and
so fit them to be saved. And, after two thousand years of that kind of
effort, what is the result? They tell us that not more than a third
part of the inhabitants of the world have heard anything about it, that
the majority of those who have heard about it reject it. Mr. Moody told
us last year that in this country, which we love to think of as the
most favored and highly civilized and intelligent country in the world,
out of seventy millions of inhabitants, not more than thirty millions
ever see the inside of any kind of church. I do not vouch for the
accuracy of the statistics. I wish to impress upon you the result of
this theory of this six thousand years of endeavor on the part of God
to bring his own children to a knowledge of his own truth. The upshot
of it is that the few, the minority, will be saved, and the great
majority eternally lost.
Now here is one world theory, one scheme of world history which I wish
you to hold clearly and as definitely as possible in your minds, while
I place alongside of it another theory.
According to this other, God did not suddenly create the world in a
week or in a hundred thousand years. It is a story of continuous and
eternal creation. As Jesus said, with fine and noble insight, "My
father worketh hitherto." He did not recognize that God was resting on
any day or through any period of time.
The world, then, has always been in process of creation. The same
forces at work in accordance with substantially the same laws. The
world has been millions of years in this process; and the process all
around us, if we choose to open our eyes and note it, is still going on
with all its wonder and divinity. And we know, as we study the heavens
above us, or around us rather, with our telescopes, that there are
worlds and systems of worlds in process of creation on every hand. We
are permitted to look into the divine workshop and observe the divine
method.
The world, then, is always in process of creation. This is the first
point in the new theory. It follows, of course, from this that we are
to hold the story of the antiquity of the earth, the earth millions of
years old, instead of six thousand or ten thousand.
And then, in the third place, it tells us the story of the antiquity of
the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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