course angry, and sacrifices are supposed to avail. Vows of various sorts, provided they made a deserved misery, were assumed to do good. Men emulated each other in trying to pase God by sacrifice without mercy. Paul, John, Clement, Origin, Athanasius and even Peter are forgotten. Divine Law is often turned into a code as easier to enforce. All goes by rule, exact, visible, explicit, stringent. Heresy is self-will. Protestant and Roman Catholic both said " assent or burn." The Church lost its ancient simplicity and purity because it lost the atmosphere in which these grow, that of free intelligence. Councils became scandals. Ideals lowered farther and farther. The government of the state and Church increased in both machinery and expense. Many people of decency fled from the cities. Reverence descended to terror. The people, blindly wise, raised reverence for Mary, to worship. God had been taken from them as a Father and given to them as a King. They found more courage to address the saints and confessors than to think of reaching an absent and monarchical God. The Incarnation was a mystery rather than a practical reality. Whatever it was in theory, it was doing nothing for them. They fell back on symbols, and then identified the symbol with the thing symbolized. Image worship arrived. Bestiality of northern races joined the wreck. The year one thousand came, and the shuddering world shouted for joy. Gloom surrendered to transport, when they found themselves on earth and not in hell. Most of the great cathedrals were then built. The German and British forests gave architects models for the Gothic roof imitating God's first temples. Influences started, which despite the horrors of time have given the blessings of liberty to the great modern world. Finally, is it so very strange that men have perpetuated so many false distinctions, between class and class, people and clergy, holy days and common days, the sacred and secular, the human and divine, nature and Scripture? Will not the presence of God with us in all life, make every day holy, all truth a revelation, Jesus Christ the most natural personality in history? The inspiration, of God in His World, gives us the open vision of unified creation, the real kingdom gradually Christianizing society and absorbing the sects, the brightening pages of history and citizenship in the New Jerusalem where there is room for all. "When we have been out into all the fields of science and gotten our opinion of the scientific order by which God works in matter, and the laws immaterial by which all matter is swayed, I believe that we shall turn round God-ward, to consider what our relations may be on that side; and then we shall not only take up the doctrine of the Spirit and of holy inspiration, looking no more, as now, after some mere casual, fitful, partially fantastic visitations of what we call the Spirit, but we shall discover in it the truth of a grand universal, intelligent, systematic, abiding inspiration, and the whole human race, lifted by this discovery, will fall into this gift, knowing that in God is the only divine privilege of existence."-Horace Bushnell. |