Weekly Watertown leader. [volume] (Watertown, Jefferson County, Wis.) 1908-1909, 1909-01-22
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f}l'.LE,PI II
MYSTERY IN RELIGION.
By Henry T. Cope


How unsearchable are his judg
ments and his ways past finding out"
Romans, x, 33.
Men have often asked if religion is
of SO great Importance TO US why is
there no clear, unacceptable, and unmis-
taxable revelation of its truth? Why
uncertainty as to its precise meanings
and teaching if our lives are to be
led by it's light? And why is man,
hungry for the knowledge Of the in
finite. left in doubt as to the facts Of
the higher life?
Men have ever been seekers after
God. We are told that there is no
where q people without some form of
religious faith, some feeling after the
dim unknown. Yet there remains ever
and in all the sense of a search IN
satisfied. We find ultimate facts in
other departments of knowledge, but a
battling uncertainty confronts us here.
There always have been cravings for
concrete answers to our spiritual ques-
tionings. It does not satisfy one who
seeks to know to be told there are
things he cannot know, that in these
he simply must exercise faith. We
reason about all other things, and as
soon as you say to any one that re-
ligion lies beyond the realm of the ra-
tional you place it at once in the realm
of the unreal and the unrealfzable.
Totem and idol are but primitive at
tempts to satisfy this passion for real
ity in the spiritual life. Israel of old
demanded objects, definite and visible,
for worship, because it is SO difficult
to keep alive the fires Of devotion to
an idea or to a spirit who cannot be
seen. A good many people to-day in
all the churches content themselves
with the manifestations and represent
ations of religion in the building or its
adjoining.
L is easy for almost any 1mpostor IN
religion to find a large following If
only he will pretend to meet this need ;
the more extravagant his claims to di-
vinity the more ready are many to be-
1ieye, for such a one becomes to them
religion made visible, the spiritual in
terms within their understanding.
The records of all religions that have
deeply impressed humanity are filed
with this same longing for certainty,
definiteness, and finality in spiritual
things. The heart searchings of one
generation are satisfied, but new prob
lens arise; more light breaks forth,
but only to show doubt and darkness
just beyond
Yet whenever you find one with
whom all doubts are settled, one to
whom religion and spiritual life are all
as clear and demonstrable as an ex-
ample in mathematics, you find one in
whom the light and life has died down,
one without aspiration, with whom re-
ligion is as a cut and dried specimen
rather than a source of life and an
impetus TO struggle.
The uncertainty and incompleteness
of religion proves its vitality and sug-
gests its sublimity. The ages have
looked into this mystery and the light
with all our seeking and with all our
knowledge there still remain the great
mysteries, the depths that none has
sounded.
Only a shallow view of this life that
is religious can ever find present salts
faction. The mind that can be con
tented with catalogues of definitions,
mere strings Of words, will find sys-
TENS of theology that seem to answer
every question, provided the system
maker arranges the questions But if
religion is this inner life seeking to
ind itself, then there will remain al
ways peaks beyond our vision.
The idea of the infinite father of
spirits swings away from the old pic
ture of a colossal being seated in the
clouds and hides itself in mystery in
the measure that men think into this
problem of the divine. Yet this does
not leave us without touch or sight of
that life, for evidences of love as high
and divinely mysterious are constantly
within our comprehension.
To the extent that religion means to
you more than rites, more than theolo-
gy, there will remain difficulties, mys,
teries, for religion will be the attempt
of your life to relate itself to higher
living, to adjust itself to all other lives
and to enter into the new and higher
stages of being of which to-day's strug
giles are the promise. To that which
is evolving there is always mystery in
evolution.