Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/22

12 In this light, science sees that the love of Christ, or of God, may transform a man's life, but not by any peculiar and supernatural process, but by a universal and well-known law, namely, that we grow like that which we love. Every object we look upon or think of with the emotion of love, that object in a measure we become. But, to begin with, we are not capable of loving it until we are in some degree, either potentially or actually, like it. No radically un-Christlike nature will ever come to love Christ. Hence the subtile truth in the old doctrines that have been so hardly and literally stated, "Except God work in you to will and to do," etc. The Christian, the virtuous, pious soul, is born, and not made, just as truly as is the poet or artist, and the "new birth," in the one case, can mean no more than it does in the other. The true Christian only gives a new name to his natural piety or aptitude for Christianity, but in no sense is there a radical change of nature. It is simply a transference of allegiance, as in the case of Paul. All these things may be so stated as to harmonize with the rest of our knowledge, but as expounded in theological books they do not so harmonize, but run counter to it completely. Subjective truths are stated as if they were objective facts; qualities of the mind and spirit are expounded as if they were realities of the experience.

Certain of the alleged miracles of the New Testament, as the healing of the sick by an act of faith, agree with what we now know to be true. Certain human ailments, mainly diseases of the mind and the nervous system, have in recent times undoubtedly yielded to an act of faith in the supreme efficacy of certain rites, or to an unwonted mental resolution. But the remedy is subjective and not objective. The virtue was not in the hem of the garment touched, but in the effort of the will of the person who touched it.

What is at variance with the rest of our knowledge in the New Testament are such things as grew up naturally in a superstitious age around the person and teachings of such a transcendent being as Jesus was the notion that he was more than human, that he had no earthly father, that he had some superhuman control over the forces of Nature, that he rose from the dead, that his death bore some mysterious relation to the sins of the world, etc. When a man talks about the value and importance of the ethics of Christianity—of charity, of mercy, of justice, of gentleness, of purity, or righteousness, or of what the world has in all ages taught to be highest and best—we can understand him; he speaks the language of truth and soberness. When he says, with Marcus Aurelius, that there is but one thing of real value—"to cultivate truth and justice, and live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men"; or when he says with Peregrinus that "the wise man will not sin, though both gods and men should overlook the deed; for it is not through the fear of punishment or of shame that he abstains from sin: it is from the desire and obligation of what is just