The reminting of our Christian convictions is a somewhat similar process:  the precious ore of the religious experience continues, but it bears the stamp of the current ruling ideas in men’s view of the world.  But lifeless metal, however valuable, cannot offer a parallel to the vital experiences of the human spirit.  The remolding of the forms of its convictions does more than conserve the same quantity of experience; a more commodious temple of thought enables the Spirit of faith to expand the souls of men within.  In theology by altering boundaries we often gain territory.  We not only make the map of our soul’s life with God clearer to ourselves, so that we live within its confines more intelligently; we actually increase the size of the map, and possess a larger life with God.

CHAPTER I

RELIGION

Religion is experience.  It is the response of man’s nature to his highest inspirations.  It is his intercourse with Being above himself and his world.

Religion is normal experience.  Its enemies call it “an indelible superstition,” and its friends assert that man is born believing.  That a few persons, here and there, appear to lack the sense for the Invisible no more argues against its naturalness than that occasionally a man is found to be colorblind or without an ear for music.  Mr. Lecky has written, “That religious instincts are as truly part of our natures as are our appetites and our nerves is a fact which all history establishes, and which forms one of the strongest proofs of the reality of that unseen world to which the soul of man continually tends.”

Some have sought to discredit religion as a surviving childishness.  A baby is dependent upon its parents; and babyish spirits, they say, never outgrow this sense of dependence, but transfer that on which they rely from the seen to the unseen.  While, however, other childish things, like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be “incurably religious,” and the most completely devout natures, although childlike in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity.  When one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children.  And further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus.  Although apparently successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow.  On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain.  Again and again religion has been pronounced obsolete, but passing through the midst of its detractors it serenely goes its way.  When men laboriously erect its sepulchre, faith,

  Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
          Will arise and unbuild it again.

Its indestructible vitality is evidence that it is an inherent element in human nature, that the unbeliever is a subnormal man.