The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-06-11
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

People say they are impatient with "doe- trine," but 1t k not true. There never was an age so welded to 1t aa this in which we live. Every wild scheme of life has It's doc Urine, and it's doctrinaires who teach 1t from soap box and platform. It Is seldom that these latter so without hearing. Like the AtheniAns of old, we lend our ears to every wild teaching-new thought, spiritualism, socialism or anarchy, if only it comes to us fresh from the crucible of life and endowed with the charm of novelty. If people are impatient with Christian doctrine-and doubtless many of them are-it is not be- cause it is "doctrine" but because it is old. It is because they think of it as the finely spun theories of God which were given to the world by minds of ancient cast nearly 2,000 years ago. They would be enthralled with it if only it were new; if only it came to them fresh from the actual experience of actual men with life.
 And yet--that is just where it did begin. Nothing could be farther from the truth than to say that the early church invented Christian doctrine around the council tables of long ago. The truth which we are asked to believe was wrought from life itself. The world has been struggling toward a belief in Creating Fatherfor thousands of years before the Christian era. In the doe Urine of God that Jesus knew were the faith and sacrifice of patriarchal desert journeys. In 1t was the steadfast courage of Moses. It was red with the blood of the prophets; 1t was bathed with the tears of men. It was not true merely because Jesus and the Am, ik Gao through life, they and other strugglers hal found it to be true.
 Then there is the faith we have in Jesus as the Son of God and Redeemer of the world. Did the apostles invent that? Nay --at the beginning they did not believe It. Though He heaped miracle on miracle and spake as never man spake before, they did not believe. At the last the worst of them betrayed Him and one of the best denied Him--and they all forsook Him. After His death they started back to their tax-gather- ing and their nets--and then they had most remarkable experience. Their dead Master came back to them. They still doubted and thrust their hands into His open wounds. He ate with them and lived with them. They could not understand it. All they could do was to believe. They wen. forth to teach their doctrine swhich was wrough from life. They said, "We do not know how this can be--but we know it is true" There was truth, not evolved from mems inner consciousness, but certified by the experience of men who knew, though they could not understand.
 And then through the years God led them. He was not in heaven, nor dying on a tree. He was at hand. He looked into their eyes while they were ~-ing for Him. He healed their hearts when they were breaking. Into the dark places where they went to proclaim the truth of their own ex- perience, He went with them. He has walked with His children ever since. Men do not understand God the Spirit more than they do the Father and Son, but they have known that He is here, and so they believe.
 And this is the sum of Christian doctrine It is not true because 1t is in the Bible. It is there, because 1t is the truth which men have found after countless thousands of years of God-ward struggle.
 MIDDLETON S. FAREWELL.