Among all the faiths which mankind has cherished and by which it has
been helped in life's adventure, none have been more universally and
more passionately held than those associated with religion. In the
daring experiment of living, men naturally have sought by faith
interpretation not only of life's details but of life itself--its
origin, its meaning, and its destiny. Australian bushmen, unable to
count above four on their fingers, have been heard discussing in their
huts at night whence they came, whither they go, and who the gods are
anyway. And when one turns to modern manhood in its finest exhibitions
of intelligence and character, he sees that Professor Ladd, of Yale,
speaks truly: "The call of the world of men today, which is most
insistent and most intense, if not most loud and clamorous, is the
call for a rehabilitation of religious faith."
For it does make a prodigious difference to the spirit of our
adventure in this world, whether we think that God is good or on the
other hand see the universe as Carlyle's terrific figure pictures
it--"one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its
dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb." It does make a
difference of quite incalculable magnitude whether we think that our
minds and characters are an evanescent product of finely wrought
matter which alone is real and permanent, or on the contrary with John
believe that "Now are we children of God and it is not yet made
manifest what we shall be" (I John 3:2).
How great a difference in life's adventure religious faith does make
is better set forth by concrete example than by abstract argument. On
the one side, how radiant the spirit of the venture as the New
Testament depicts it! The stern, appealing love of God behind life,
his good purpose through it, his victory ahead of it, and man a fellow
worker, called into an unfinished world to bear a hand with God in its
completion--here is a game that indeed is worth the candle. On the
other side is Bertrand Russell's candid disclosure of the consequences
of his own scepticism: "Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and
all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good
and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its
relentless way; for Man condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow
himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to
cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his
little day--proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate
for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have
fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."
Man's life, interpreted and motived by religious faith, is glorious,
but shorn of faith's interpretations life loses its highest meaning
and its noblest hopes. Let us make this statement's truth convincing
in detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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