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.”****
[*
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
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
“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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