MODERNISM. 



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plane. His words are no less miraculous than His works For 

 what is the use of denying that He walked on the sea or healed 

 the sick or gave sight to the blind or even raised the dead to life, 

 if it is true that He lived Himself without sin, that He forgave 

 the sins of others, that He could minister comfort to all the 

 weary and heavy-laden souls of earth, above all that He shall 

 come again in the glory of His Father and the holy angels to 

 be the Judge of all the living and the dead ? 



There is a danger that Modernism, like Agnosticism, may forget 

 certain positive laws of human nature. One of them, in the 

 domain of religion, is that, if a person does not hold one belief, 

 he does and must practically hold the opposite belief. Belief is 

 not a mathematical certainty ; it is the choice of one among two 

 or more possibilities; it is the inclination of the logical scale to 

 one side or the other. Tennyson was fond of saying, "It is 

 difhcult to believe, but it is more difficult not to believe." He 

 meant, for example, that the theistic position, difficult though 

 it might be, was less difficult than the atheistic position. Agnos- 

 ticism may not unfairly be described as intellectual cowardice, 

 if not as intellectual impotence, because it refuses to pronounce 

 a judgment in a domain where it is essential that a rational 

 being such as man is should be a judge. It is impossible that 

 such a being, finding himself placed in a universe so orderly yet 

 so wonderful as it is, should refrain from asking himself, How 

 did it come into existence? Who was its author and what is 

 his relation to myself and to all other human beings? For if a 

 man does not believe that there is a God, he believes that there 

 is no God. If he does not act as believing in God, then he acts 

 as disbelieving in God. Similarly, if a man does not believe that 

 Jesus Christ was Divine as well as human, he believes, or prac- 

 tically believes, that Jesus Christ was only human. Then he 

 discards from his creed the supreme qualities which distinguish 

 Jesus Christ from men who are only men. He discards also the 

 supreme obligation of humanity to Jesus Christ. The Modernist, 

 I think, is open to the same criticisms. He will tell you what 

 he does not believe ; he will suggest grounds of doubt if not of 

 disbelief; but he will not tell you what he does believe. Yet if 

 he refuses to believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus Christ, then 

 he believes that Jesus Christ w^as born of human parents in 

 the natural order. If he does not believe that Jesus Christ rose 

 in His bodily presence from the grave, then he believes that the 

 body of Jesus Christ mouldered in the grave. If he does not 

 believe that Jesus Christ left the earth by a mysterious process 

 which is theologically called the Ascension into Heaven, then he 

 believes that Jesus Christ still lives only in the sense in which 

 all men who have ever been born, or at least all the redeemed 

 of Christ, live also after death. It may be admitted that the phrase, 



