Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1889-04-14
REASON Is RELIGION.
Gail Hamilton Says Reason is Gods
Own Revelation to Every Man.
PAGANIsM OF RELIGIOUS FORMS.
Christ's Influence on Life To-Day in Eu-
rope and America.
HIS NAME THE PIVOT OF THE WORLD
WRITTEN FOR THE D1srArcH.l

WRITTEN FOR THE DIsPATcH.1
What the world needs just now is not a
new religion, but a more accurate knowl-
edge of the old religion. Church of En-
glandism is not the old religion. Roman
Catholicism is not the old religion. Con-
gregationalism, Unitarianism, Presb7 7terian-
ism are not the old religion. They are all
different forms of paganism. All torm.con-
sidered as religion is paganism. This is not
to say that they are bad. All paganism is
not bad. But God is a spirit, and they that
worship Him purely must worship Him in
spirit and in truth.
Christianity is the spiritual truth of all
the ages, irrespective of all forms, distilled
from all sources, forever vitalized with the
power of an endless life in Jesus Christ our
Lord.
All the conflict which Mrs. Humphrey
Ward portrays comes from taking the
Church of England as spiritual authority,
instead of taking the authority of ones
own reason. studying the words of Christ,
the work of God. Everything which sub
stitutes authority for reason is to that ex-
tent paganism. Reason is Gods own revela-
ton to every, man. He may use his reason
in judging authority, but nothing has au-
thority except so far as it is founded on rea-
son.
Mr.. Gladstone but falls into the common
way OF talk when he says of the new religion
christianity without Christ, that it aboi-
ishes, of course, the whole authority of
Scripture. But Scripture itself has no au-
Shortly outside itself; outside, that is, of its
own reasonableness. The Scripture writers
never hesitate to abolish each others au-
thority. Isaiah swept away the ground
from under the feet of Moses. Paul with
stood Peter to the face because he was to be
blamed. Christ in so many words affirmed
that the great jewish law giver had COM
promised with sin and framed iniquity into
law which was not the upright law of the
beginning. The Bible has no authority ex-
cept that of right reason in the reasoning
animal, man.
REASON VS. AUTHORITY.
Ever and anon this is put forth as a
startling innovation 1t is as old as
thought itself; but because we are still so
beastly and therefore Intellectually lazy,
choosing to pull and snatch and be greedy
and quarreisome, spending our time like the
hens and cats and dogs we still belong to,
in getting the largest part of the corn and
bone, instead of following out the lines of
clear thought and high benevolence, as we
shall when we cease to be cats and dogs and
become pure spirit-why, we are constantly
laying our reason to sleep and taking au-
thority in its stead.
"Reason is the only faculty we have
wherewith to judge concerning anything,
even revelation itself"
Who has ever made a more radical, a
more "free-thinking" statement?
If Robert Elsmere had been sent young
to the school of the Rev. and Mrs John P.
Cowles, of Ipswich, Mass, and had been set
down to a proper grapple with tough old
Bishop Butler, as he certainly would have
been if he had gone there. he would not
have been torn to pieces with wild reaction
and recoil after he was full-grown rector
by remembering that an Oxford professor
once said: "God is forever reason; and His
communication, His revelation is reason.''
His poor little red head would have been
banged black and blue with it at that school
to such an extent that no subsequent Ok
ford Gray or green could ever have taken
him by surprise.
"It is of much more Importance to give
our assent to doctrines upon grounds of
reason and wisdom than on that of faith
merely"
What modern victim, at the mercy of
thought, at the mercy of truth, uttered this
iconoclastic pronunciamento and died in the
effort? Origen-only he did not die of it
and it seems to have cost him no more effort
was simple conclusion of common sense.
A CLEAN, CLEAR PATH.
(which subject he (Cyprian) did not
handle as he ought to have done, for he
(Demetrius) ought to have been refuted,
not by the testimonies of Scripture, which
he plainly considered vain, fictitious and
false, but by arguments and reason"
It is from Lactantius 1nstitutiones Di-
vina and all along the way a clean, clear
path has been stamped by the strong, steady
feet of thinkers fighting for reason when
reason meant chains and stake and cross;
and we who have entered into their-rest but
never into their labors, we pipe a feeble
squeak for reason and on the strength of it
call ourselves original and heroic, the slaves
of thought.
There are always plenty of people in the
mass to run after authority like sheep over
a wall-in theology as in everything else.
But when we speak of science we mean
what the leaders of science have discovered.
the conclusions of original scientific inves-
tigation. The opinion of unlearned indi-
viduals, indeed the opinion of the unlesrned
mass has no scientific weight. So in the
ology, undoubtedly the Bible occupies to
many Protestants, the pastors occupy to
many focks, a relation quite analogous to
that which the Pope and the church occupy
to many Catholics; none the less the way of
Professionalism is studded thick with the
electric lights of reason and who fails to see
them should bestir himself as to the condi-
ton of his own eyes and not bemoan himself
for the darkness of the path.
Christianity something small and local?
1t is true or it is false according as it is set
against Christ's words or against some un-
tenable human dogma built up on Christ's
words. If we must believe that the whole
world was lost in sin without any effort on
the part of its Creator to communicate Him
self to His children, to teach and guide and
strengthen them except through one little
wretched wandering desert tribe leading to
Christ who benefits only those who con-
sciously met Him on earth, and those who
now accept Him through a certain definite
formula against such theory, the declara-
ton that Christianity is something small
and local is revolutionary.
A MUSTARD SEED.
But if any Church Of England rector.had
valued the Bible more and the Thirty-nine
Articles less he would have learned long be-
fore he took holy orders that all his books
could not make Christianity much smaller.
much more local than the grain of mustard
seed, the little leaven whereunto Christ
ikened it. But, small and local, the vital