It is, therefore, of prime importance for the preacher to remember
that humanism, or any other doctrine which approaches the problem of
life and conduct other than by moral and spiritual means, can never
take the place of the religious appeal, because it does not touch the
springs of action where motives are born and from which convictions
arise. You do not make a man moral by enlightening him; it is nearer
the truth to say that you enlighten him when you make him moral.
"Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see
God. If any man wills to do the will, he shall know the doctrine."
Education does not wipe out crime nor an understanding mind make a
holy will. The last half of the nineteenth century made it terribly
clear that the learning and science of mankind, where they are
divorced from piety, unconsecrated by a spiritual passion, and largely
directed by selfish motives, can neither benefit nor redeem the race.
Consider for a moment the enormous expansion of knowledge which the
world has witnessed since the year 1859. What prodigious accessions
to the sum of our common understanding have we seen in the natural and
the humane sciences; and what marvelous uses of scientific knowledge
for practical purposes have we discovered! We have mastered in these
latter days a thousand secrets of nature. We have freed the mind from
old ignorance and ancient superstition. We have penetrated the secrets
of the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely prolong
the span of human days. We face the facts and know the world as our
fathers could never do. We understand the past and foresee the future.
But the most significant thing about our present situation is this:
how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It has made
men more cunning rather than more noble. Still the body is ravaged and
consumed by passion. Still men toil for others against their will,
and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the
sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused
nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities
are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and
hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live
without hope, and millions exist--not live at all--from hand to mouth.
As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see the
horrors of war between nation and nation, and between class and class,
it would not be difficult to make out a case for the thesis that the
scientific and intellectual advances of the nineteenth century
have largely worked to make men keener and more capacious in their
suffering. And at least this is true; just so far as the achievement
of the mind has been divorced from the consecration of the spirit,
in just so far knowledge has had no beneficent potency for the human
race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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