The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-02-07

he proceeded, did not infallibly see and
interpret what they saw; sometimes they
misunderstood but there was this about
them, they were looking for God in human
life" The sacredness of the Bible. in his
view, is not in its infallibility, for that is a
mere superstition, but is due TO the fact
that sit was written by men who had God
in their hearts and the power of communi-
eating the light of the Bible TO other men"
This DR.. Abbott has affirmed these opin-
ions in q recent course of lectures before
the Lowell institute Of Boston, whose con-
sentative management always closed their
doors on Emerson and Parker; he has
preached before Harvard college, that
never recognized Emerson and Parker
after their departure from the church of
Charming. The rationalistic criticism OF
the Bible, preached by the heretical DR..
Briggs. is sustained by two out OF
the three great theological schools of this
church; it is preached within the Epjsco-
pal church by Newton. Rylance and 9TH
ers. The preaching of Bishop Phillips
Brooks, of Boston, is in line with the
Liberals of the English church, the late
Dean Stanley and Archdeacon Farrar.
Tie prediction of Cardinal Newman has
come true, the ultimate Protestant, whose
evolution began with Luther, has become
nationalist, not an atheist; not an agnos-
tic, but critical though altogether rever-
ent nationalist. Every Protestant church
= - IS ,4~t 81
ogy and seeking the reason of its faith.
The revolt of the seminaries is led by
their ablest teachers and by its
ablest pulpits. Christianity is dropping
up at its dogmatic theology; its Of
fensive supernaturalism; its notion of
the fall" its ''plan of salvation;" its
medieval theological metaphysics. The
reverent nationalist today holds that the
kernel OF Christianity is its humanity, its
selfsacriffce, its fatherhood of God and
brotherhood of man, rather than its super
naturalism; its mythologies; its Mosaic
cosm ogony and astronomy; its dogmas
concerning Christ, its miracles, its spirit
ual fuddle and its irrational assumptions
of every kind. There is disbelief, but it is
not the disbelief that rejects and re-
pudiates Christ. A man may reject the
story about the wholesale transfer of the
devils of insanity from the Gadarene to
the herd of swine without re-
jecting Christ's teaching and preaching
above and beyond all his predecessors
the love of our neighbor. the helping
and saving of other men at the expense of
SELF This is the essence Of Christianity
that has made it the most effective moral
power ever revealed, and in this lies its
immortal claim to reverence and obedi-
ence from thousands who care nothing for
its dogmas of human contrivance and its
out-worn creeds of ecclesiastical origin.
The life of Christianity lies in the in
spring teaching and example of Christ,
who came to bring light, liberty and life
to those who were in darkness, in chains
or in moral death. This ten dency of the
time is not toward irreligion, but toward
putting religion on rational basis;
an ethical religion is gradually dis
placing the religion of simple belief.
There are pure, devout, predetermined
men of religious genius, like Newman, to
whom this ethical religion, to which the
Protestant church is surely drifting, is not
sufficient or satisfying, but there are other
men as pure and noble, but with less of
the devotional poet and religious mystic
about them than Newman, like his brother
Francis. Francis Newman was a child of
the English church. like his more famous
brother, and he drifted as naturally and
conscientiously into rationalism as the
cardinal did into Eomanism. Rome and
rationalism are the two poles of the re-
ligious world. The church of absolute
faith and authority and the church of the
reason-that is the inevitable, logical ulti-
mate Of the Reformation.