MODERNISM

 

By D. M. PANTON.

 

We are reaching days in which it is of growing and vital importance to demonstrate that faith is no more meritorious than the hand of a pauper held out to receive an alms.  It is never faith that saves: it is Christ that saves.  Here - to illustrate it - is a giant locomotive, moving royally to the head of a heavily laden train, with steam up, and a pregnant power equal to drawing twice as many trucks; yet the whole train is motionless.  Why?  Because the couplings are not attached.  As soon as those giant hands are clasped, and the iron bar slewed round, making the trucks and engine one, the train moves.  Those couplings are faith: the moment appropriating hands are laid on Christ, salvation is achieved.  But look again.  Here is another colossal engine, empty of steam and fire: the couplings are now clasped - yet the train is motionless.  Why?  Because it is not the couplings, but the engine, which draws; nor is it any engine, but that engine only which holds the power: so I may have faith, and yet be lost, because the faith is attached to the wrong engine

 

Faith, in itself, is totally without saving power: it draws all its merit from the Christ on Whom it is fastened.

 

Now it is a startling revelation of the prophetic Scriptures that not unbelief, but faith, is to be the dread reality of the last days: not a negation of good, but an affirmation of evil; not a gross materialism but a subtle and deadly spiritualism; not merely a refusal of Christ, but an actual embrace of Antichrist.  Paul states it with great boldness.  God sendeth them a working of error [an energy of delusion], that they should believe a lie (2 Thess. 2: 11): not an hypocrisy, nor a creed accepted under compulsion; but an ecstasy of enthusiasm - like the infatuation of the Mohammedan - producing a genuine faith - a faith, but in a lie.  The religious instinct, like nature, abhors a vacuum: the Faith the returning Christ will not find (Luke 18: 8); but a new faith, in judicial retribution, will have mounted the throne of the old.

 

Now we are not without grave symptoms, though on a scale incomparably less than the Apocalyptic, of the presence of this dread reality.  In such organisations as the Progressive and Liberal Christian Leagues, organised as their president, Mr. R. J. Campbell tells us, “not to antagonise the Churches, but to permeate them,” there is gathered under one roof a strange amalgam of modern faiths, curiously combining in an enthusiasm of belief.  The basis is essentially infidel.  Not one feature,” says the leading weekly exponent of Modernism in England, “of the story of Jesus in the New Testament is original - the angelic annunciation to Mary, the Virgin birth, the wondrous Child, the Magi coming from afar, the star that guided them, the shepherds to whom the news first came, the song of angels, the meeting of the evil power in the wilderness, His being put to death as a sacrifice to the principle of evil, the miraculous resurrection escaping the bonds of death, the ascent to heaven, to be speedily followed by His advent to earth to reign over a renovated world: all this is hundreds, it may be thousands, of years older than the Christian era.  This should teach us surely that here we are not in the presence of historical fact, but of one of those wonder-stories that the world has repealed over and over again - a world-wide myth which has been the common property of all peoples from, the very childhood of the race.”*  No degree of Infidelity is excluded from fellowship, or even from the supreme executive of the Leagues.  Mr. Bernard Shaw is a leading figure-head in the official Handbook of the Progressive League; and it is Mr. Shaw who says, “Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation.”** That the teaching consists of the commonplaces of the infidel platforms is frankly admitted.  It is supposed that it is the New Theology which first stated the obnoxious facts.  The truth is that they are the commonplaces of those who argue against the Christian verities;”*** and with what bitterness of antagonism these are served afresh let this sentence bear witness.  Not one of these phrases - the ‘wrath of God,’ the ‘terrors of Hell,’ and the ‘atoning blood which cleanses from sin’ - evokes anything but a feeling of repulsion.  To hand such Gospel literature to wayfarers is equivalent to the exposure and sale of indecent prints.  There is an obscenity of the spirit which is quite as vile as anything which the police have orders to suppress.”****

 

[*Christian Commonwealth, Dec, 8, 1909.  **The Spectator, Jan. 8, 1910.  ***Christian Commonwealth, Feb. 23, 1910.  **** Ibid. April 9, 1913.]

 

But the crucial significance of this mass of loosely connected spiritual phenomena does not lie in its negative creed: the portent is its intense and passionate conviction.  We are handling a new faith.  Old Romanism and old Protestantism,” it says, “are dying.  What is now taking place is a silent reformation on an incalculably vaster scale than the Lutheran movement of four centuries ago.  The cry is reproduced and echoed from country to country and from shore to shore.  Like every true and sincere call, it is a call to sacrifice, to warfare, are, to consecration.”  Modernism gathers within itself many contributory streams of antichristian faith.  Everywhere the leaven of Liberalism is active, in Judaism, in Islam, in Buddhism.  Its sympathies quiver all round the globe.  It is we of the Progressive camaraderie who have the best right to say, Securus judical orbis terraritm.”* Thus these Leagues shelter Christian Science and Swedenborganism; they are incorporated with Socialism and the Woman Movement; they expound Buddhism with warm appreciation; they are wholly sympathetic with Spiritualistic investigation and doctrine; frankly and profoundly, Gnostic, they gravitate towards Theosophy, perhaps the most deadly and powerful of modern Occultisms: and through all the new propaganda rings the note of an assured and jubilant faith.  All the world’s false Messiahs are welcomed into the new Pantheon.  I do not know,” says Canon Cheyne, “whether the composers of the Manifesto of the Liberal Christian League were wise in applying to Jesus the sublime statement of Col. 2: 9, that in Him dwelleth all the Pleroma of the Godhead bodily. There are, I think, some Liberals who would hesitate to follow them. If the goal of the Liberal Christian League is not merely the world‑wide extension of the Christian Church but a united humanity, must we not do justice to the other great central personages beside him ‘whom our soul loveth,’ and admit that, if not the Pleroma, yet at least a wondrous flood of Divine life manifested itself in these great and almost adorable personages?”**  So an Anglican Canon and Oxford Professor of Divinity approximates, in the new enthusiasm, to the worship of Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed.

 

[* Commonwealth, March 9, 1910.  ** Ibid, Oct. 19, 1910].

 

Nor are such organisations as the Progressive League without an incipient Messianic aspect.  No man could kill Mahdism,” says the official Handbook, “as no one could kill the Messianic hope of the expectation of the second coming of Christ.  The great movement into which we are now entering is another phase of the Messianic hope; it presages the arrival of a new era, and announces a re-birth.  That is what I take to be  deepest meaning of your League.”*  The out-look,” says Sir Oliver Lodge, “was never brighter than it is to-day; many workers and thinkers are making ready the way for the second Advent - a reincarnation of the Logos in the hearts of all men; the heralds are already attuning their songs for a reign of brotherly love; already there are 'signs of his coining and sounds of his feet’; and upon our terrestrial activity the date of this Advent depends.”

 

[* The New Theology (12th. thousand), p. 253.

 

Moreover, an early issue of the organ of Modernism, in its supplement on Theosophy, endorses the prediction of Mrs. Besant that the great Messiah of all religions will arrive in the middle of this century; and behind this coming World Teacher, for whose Advent, as “Supreme Teacher of Gods and men,” the Order of the Star in the East is netting the world, theosophy perceives one of whom it says, “There is no name, attribute or title of Godhead, Power, or Majesty, ascribed to God either in the Old or New Testament, but that same is the name, title, and attribute of Satan.”*

 

[* Lucifer, Sep.. 1888.]

 

Such an attitude could not be riper for a Superman with superhuman powers, “whose coming is according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,” offering himself as the Messiah of all religions, and summing up in his own Person the very Religion of Man which is incipiently embodied in Modernism.

 

Now how is this portent ‑ strange and new in England, though familiar in heathendom - explicable, of faith in a lie?  The surface reason is obvious.  The day that approaches, on whose confines we seem to be, is “with all deceit” - every species of Satanic subtlety – “of unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2: 10): it comes in the guise of all truth, and clothed with a garb of all righteousness, but it is “all deceit.  We must be prepared for counterfeit conversions, counterfeit revivals, counterfeit miracles of the Spirit, and even counterfeit heavenliness of character.  But it is a still more pregnant fact that the seeds of deceit find so abnormal a receptivity of soil.  This unparalleled hallucination,” as Dr. Eadie says, “indicates a mysterious state of mind and of society - antichristian, antitheistic, credulous, with a fatal facility of being imposed upon by hellish mastery and subtlety.”  It is the testimony of a Spiritualistic mediuin:-The communications received appeared much more beautiful to us at the time we were mixed up with Spiritism than they do now.”  But even so the problem is not solved.  Beneath the Satanic subtlety of the deception, and the abnormal receptivity of the age, there must be a deep moral reason for such a mental growth out of Gospel soil: the Apostle reveals it. Because they received not the love of the truth.”  Here is a phrase of masterly revelation.  It is not, “they received not the truth: God is very tender and patient with our blind stumblings and foolish unbeliefs, and His grace can bring us at last to receive truths we may have rejected for years.  But the phrase – “received not the love- seems to show that to every soul, however blind, however dark, God offers the love of truth: the after life reveals whether the soul accepted that love or not.  We little dream of the peril we run when it we refuse to love the truth.  These never followed truth at all cost: they trifled with the tremendous convictions of the Holy Ghost: they toyed with the Scriptures, and disparaged doctrine - only to find at last that behind “all deceit of unrighteousness” lurks an irresistible horror of energizing damnation.

 

For we are here confronted with the dreadful fact of judicial retribution.  God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”  Love of error is an automatic recoil of indifference to the truth.  Man’s soul is so made that every rejection of the truth weakens it against the assaults of temptation; the heart that refuses to melt, automatically hardens; and the faculty of discernment between good and evil becomes blunted and atrophied with disuse.  A final chastisement of sin is deeper sin. For this is the goal of righteous retribution.  God sendeth”: when man shuts the door in the face of God, God locks it; and the diseased eye, blinded by the light it has refused, sees an illusory glare on a curtain of pitch darkness.  On such falls the predicted woe:- “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (Isa. 5: 20).  It is an irreclaimable ignorance and an impenetrable gloom.  If the light that is in thee” - the ideal, the ruling principles, the faith – “be darkness, how great is the darkness” (Matt. 6: 23).

 

Two counsels of the Holy Ghost are especially requisite for the present situation.  We, must, first, maintain at all costs a clean conscience.  The end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned: from which things some having swerved have turned aside;” “holding faith and a good conscience; which some having thrust from them made shipwreck” (1 Tim. 1: 5, 19).  Faith is a heart-whole acceptance of the truth: a good conscience is a life squared to that truth.  It is an absurd sentiment, too prevalent even among the people of God, that we may believe what we choose.  Faith in God is not optional, it is obligatory: I must believe what God says, and all that God says, or I sin: and the decisive proof of thah is obedience. My beloved brother,” Mr. Muller once said to Dr. Pierson, “the Lord has given you much light, and will hold you correspondingly responsible for its use.  If you obey Him and walk in the light, you will have more: if not, the light will be withdrawn.”  To see the truth and not to embrace it is to foul the conscience; to have the truth search our life, and refuse to let it be [known and] searched, is to foul the conscience; to decline to pay the price of truth is to foul the conscience: and apostasy is fearfully near to a wilfully defiled conscience.  But a conscience kept pure is like the needle of a compass kept free - it swings true.  All things are possible to him who follows God from light to light.  Many shall purify themselves, and make themselves while, and be refined; but the wicked shall do wickedly; and none of the wicked shall understand: but they that be wise shall understand” (Dan. 12: 10).

 

The second counsel of the Holy Ghost is that we cultivate a passionate love of, and faith in, the truth.  God has called us to salvation in (1) sanctification of the Spirit - which is His work, and (2) belief of the truth - which is mine; and if I refuse to do my work, it is impossible for God to do His.  No cost can be too great for truth: “her price is above rubies.”  In the ancient world it was said that the Sibyls, or prophetesses, used to write their prophecies on leaves, and lay them at the mouth of the cave in which they dwelt; and that these leaves must be read as quickly as they could be gathered, for once fluttered by the wind they became indecipherable.  The legend said that one of these Sibyls came to King Tarquin of Rome with nine scrolls priced at an enormous figure, but of great value to Rome.  The king refused them on the ground of their cost.  The Sibyl immediately disappeared; but, shortly after, she returned with six scrolls, saying, “I have burnt three volumes; they are lost to Rome for ever; but these six remain at the same price.”  Again the king refused them as too costly; and again the Sibyl disappeared.  Returning for the last time, she now offered but three volumes, saying, “Six volumes I have destroyed; no money can ever buy them now; these three I offer you at the same price.” The king at last bought the three scrolls for Rome, where they were treasured for centuries; and the Sibyl, disappearing, never returned to the world again.  As it is the penalty of unbelief to lose all that is within its grasp, so it is the privilege of faith to multiply it.

 

Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he thinketh he hath” (Luke 8: 18).

 

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