Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/163

Rh Indeed, the question which it is not safe to ask of any religion is just the one we are prone to ask first, namely, Is it true? A much safer question is, Is it saving? That is, does it hold men up to a higher standard of life and duty than they were otherwise capable of? Does it cheer and sustain them in their journey through this world? Could the religion of Greece have faced the question. Is it true? And yet the German historian of Greece, Dr.Curtius, says that the religion of Apollo was nowhere introduced without taking hold of and transforming the whole life of the people. It liberated men from dark and groveling worship of Nature; it converted the worship of a god into the duty of moral elevation; it founded expiations for those oppressed with guilt, and for those astray, without guidance, sacred oracles." Can historical Christianity any better face the question, Is it true? Did all these events fall out as set down in the New Testament? Are they set in their true light? And yet who besides Professor Clifford dare say that Christianity has not been a tremendous power in elevating and civilizing the European nations?

Science affirms that every child born of woman since the world began belonged to the human species, and had an earthly father; theology affirms that this is true of every child but one: one child, born in Judea over eighteen hundred years ago, was an exception, was indeed very God himself. Theology makes a similar claim with regard to the Bible. It affirms that every book in the world was written by a human being, and is therefore more or less fallible and imperfect, with the exception of one—that one is the Bible. This is the great exception: the Bible is not the work of man, but is the word of God himself uttered through man, and is therefore infallible. Science simply sees in the Bible one of the sacred books of the nations—undoubtedly the greatest of them all—but still a book or a collection of books embodying the history, the ideas, the religious wants and yearnings of a very peculiar people—a people without a vestige of science, but with the tie of race and the aspiration after God stronger than in any other people—a people still wandering in the wilderness, and rejected by the nations to whom they gave Christianity. Science knows God, too, as law, or as the force and vitality which pervade and uphold all things; it knows Christ as a great teacher and prophet, and as the savior of men. How? By virtue of the contract made in the Council of the Trinity as set forth in the creed of Calvinism? No; but by his unique and tremendous announcement of the law of love, and the daily illustration of it in his life. Salvation by Christ is salvation by self-renunciation, and by gentleness, mercy, charity, purity, and by all the divine qualities he illustrated. He saves us when we are like him, as tender, as charitable, as unworldly, as devoted to principle, as self-sacrificing. His life and death do inspire in mankind these things; fill them with this noble ideal. He was a soul impressed, as perhaps no other soul ever had been, with the oneness of man with God, and