It is painful to have to condemn utterly the writing of a man who claims to be a believer. But this essay, though taking as a homily on love or meditation on that magnificent chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians is entirely vitiated by the thinly disguised assumption that such love, such practical “religion, is not a strange or super-added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life.” It is with the writer a mere question of “practicing.” And so carried away is Mr. D. by his theories, imported from the scientific arena, that he even speaks of the Lord Jesus as “practicing” love in the carpenter's shop! To such unworthy thoughts of the perfect and spotless One— “that holy Thing” —does a materialistic philosophy incline even a professing Christian. No one disputes that our Lord “learned obedience.” To obey was to Him a new thing. Yet it characterized the Son when He became man. As God, He had been wont to command.
Again, our author says that spiritual laws are as natural as the laws of nature; that they are both natural or both supernatural. St. Paul says, “First that which is natural; afterward that which is spiritual.” Our blessed Lord Himself says, “The flesh profiteth nothing.” Again, “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Has Prof. D. weighed the force of these words? or is he prepared to explain them away? They will not fit in with his theories. Must they be “re-crystallized,” to borrow his own metaphor? As an eminent prelate (the Abp. of York) said the other day, “A revelation without the supernatural cannot be conceived; it would be merely a speculation.”
But if anything more were wanted to show the hollowness and profanity of Prof. D.'s views, the following remark from his address would demonstrate it. “We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws from those in which we get the body and the mind.” What plainer denial can there be of original endowment? It is a virtual negation of the truth of man's spiritual nature, and, though probably the Prof. is not aware of it, sheer materialism. Mr. D. is evidently bent upon riding to death his favorite hobbies of “environment and habit,” borrowed as they are from the godless philosophy of Herbert Spencer. But is there nothing more than this in “religion”? Is man merely a creature of “environment and habit”? No one would deny the influence of surroundings and of good, as alas! of evil habits. But Professor D. shows where he is, when he makes it everything, and actually puts the Christ of God on the same level! And so, as everything spiritual is to be degraded to the natural, he labors to minimize faith, “without which (says the scripture) it is impossible to please God.” How fatuous to set one grace against another! All grace is of the Spirit, and if love be undoubtedly the greatest, faith is essential as owning our evil, looking to God, and receiving Christ and His work, our only salvation, which flows from God's gratuitous love to us and alone produces love in us. Without faith man has no love according to God.
As was remarked at the outset of this paper, Mr. D.'s pamphlet may serve as a practical homily, and many simple souls who discern not the shadowy foundation may even be edified, and possibly stimulated to nobler practice and walk. All the same, the article is at bottom pernicious in the extreme. That this contention is fully borne out is plain from other remarks early in the address, where it is urged that commandments such as to love God, and not take His name in vain, are useless, because a man who loves does not need them. Also that “it would be preposterous to tell a man not to kill if he were full of love to his fellow.” Quite so. But is man full of love by nature, by “environment and habit?” What do we see on every hand? And how idle to speak and write as if there were no sin, no Fall, no death (part of the wages of sin), as if, in short, these were only nightmares, and what man has to do were simply to practice love and improve his “environment and habits?” Nay, Prof. D., the Spirit of God can and does (by faith in Christ and His redemption) produce love in the renewed heart, in the “new man” that is in him, “born of water and the Spirit,” in the one who, recognizing his impotence to keep God's holy law, whereby sin is shown to be “exceeding sinful,” died with Christ and reckons himself dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus. But these are the very points slurred over in the essay, if not indeed ostentatiously shut out from souls. In truth, while pleasingly written, like everything that comes from the Professor's facile pen, and with a wealth of pointed remarks (no ill whipping up for a true Christian) the article is based upon the shallowest possible conception, and indeed ignoring of real Christianity in Christ. The writer is so enamored of his evolutionist theories that he can see nothing else, and makes divine love merely a growth, to be produced as mechanically as a new color in a tulip.
Nothing would be easier than to traverse many of the isolated statements; but the object is merely to point out the fundamental falsity of the writer's position as a warning to the unwary. A few statements, however, may be adverted upon. “We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth.” Can we make too much of peace with or in heaven? Did not Christ “make peace by the blood of His cross”? Is not that work of His the basis of our peace, for heaven as well as on earth, of the rest to our consciences, of our “deliverance from the wrath to come”? Does Prof. D. believe in “wrath to come”? But again, did Christ, make so much of peace on earth? Angels announced what will infallibly be one day, its pledge even then in the birth of Immanuel. But did He not say, “Think you that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division “: “I am come to send fire on earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? “Hence no such thing as immediate peace on earth was contemplated, as indeed Luke 19:39 implies to the intelligent ear. It will surely reign in the millennial earth.
Again, we are told that “our heart is slowly changed.” This is strange from a man who has written truth on the “new birth.” But to the readers of that too popular volume, “Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” to such at least as had eyes to see, it was too plain that the author would drift still farther away. It seems strange, to make one more quotation, to say (though this does not bear directly on the question, but may serve as a specimen of Prof. D.'s hasty inferences) that love was not Paul's strong point! It was strong enough to make the great apostle of the Gentiles wish himself “accursed from Christ” for the sake of his brethren, and to give him “continual sorrow of heart.” Did John go farther or as far, blessed witness though he was of the same divine love?
The rationalism of the Professor is shown later in the pamphlet as his materialism is prominent throughout. For he interprets the “failing” of prophecies to mean that, having all been fulfilled (was this before they were uttered?), they have now nothing to do but to “feed a devout man's faith.” And faith, according to Mr. D., is not of much account. Are we not abundantly justified in our strictures? Alas! one prophecy is being fulfilled, that “men shall depart from the faith.”
In conclusion, some of the closing words may be quoted. “The words which all of us shall one day hear sound, not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter and clothing, not of bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water in the name of Christ.” And Christ is spoken of merely as “the One Who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick! “Not a word of His deity while very man, not a word of eternal life in the Son, of His sacrifice, of His atonement, of Himself our righteousness. Nay, it is rather insinuated that be who feeds the hungry, he is also Christ! And this is the modern substitute for the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.” R. B., Jun.