Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
This is what makes him so interesting a study for those curious about
the workings of religious psychology. Here is a thoroughly good man, as
fearless and upright as any man in the kingdom, a figure among scholars,
a power among organisers, a very able, sincere, and trenchant
personality, who has thrown the whole weight of all he has to give on
the side of Christianity, but who, for some reason, in despite of all
his hard work and unquestionable earnestness, does not convey any idea
of the attraction of Christ.
It makes one doubt, not that the Bishop has reserved his feelings for
another affection, but whether he has any feelings to bestow. One thinks
that he has drawn up and concentrated so effectually all the forces of
his personality into the intellect that it is now impossible for him to
see religion except as an intellectual problem. One thinks, too, that he
has never dreamed of converting other people to his views, but only of
arguing them out of theirs. Yet, after all, there are more ways of
converting the world than beating a drum.
I am certain, however, that he could easier convince a socialistic
collier or a communistic iron-moulder of the absurdity of his economics
than persuade either the one or the other of the spiritual satisfaction
of his own religion. Perhaps religion presents itself to the Bishop, as
it does to a great number of other people, as a consecration of moral
law, and clearly moral law is something to be established by reason, not
commended by appeals to the sentiments; not for one moment, all the
same, would he countenance the famous cynicism of Gibbon--"The various
modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all
considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally
false; and by the magistrate as equally useful"--for no man sees more
clearly the permanent need of religion in the human spirit, and no man
is more sincerely convinced of the truth of the Christian religion. But
he brings to religion, as I think, only his intellect, and so he has
intellectualised its ethic, and has left its deepest meaning to those
who possess, what he has either always lacked or has forfeited in his
intellectual discipleship, the qualities of mysticism.
One might almost say that he has intellectualised the Sermon on the
Mount, dissected the Prodigal Son as a study in psychology, and taken
the heart out of the Fourth Gospel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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