Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again. Joseph Barker
and instantly suspect the man who utters them of unsoundness in the faith, and apply to him all the abusive terms of ecclesiastical reproach. For such the common pulpit jargon is the convenient refuge of ignorance, idleness and prejudice.
6. Speaking of certain kinds of religious books, Mr. Foster calls them an accumulation of bad writing, under which the evangelical theology has been buried, and which has contributed to bring its principles into disfavor. He adds: A large proportion of religious books may be sentenced as bad on more accounts than their peculiarity of dialect. One has to regret that their authors did not revere the dignity of their religion too much to surround it and choke it with their works. There is quite a multitude of books which form the perfect vulgar of religious authorship—a vast exhibition of the most inferior materials that can be called thought, in language too grovelling to be called style. In these books you are mortified to see how low religious thought and expression can sink; and you almost wonder how the grand ideas of God and Providence, of redemption and eternity, the noblest ideas known, can shine on a human mind, without imparting some small occasional degree of dignity to its train of thought. You can make allowances for the great defects of private Christians, but when men obtrude their infinite littleness and folly on the public in books, you can hardly help regarding them as inexcusable. True, many of those worthless and mischievous books are evermore disappearing, but others as bad, or but little better, take their places. Look where you will you will meet with them. What estimate can a man have of Christianity who receives his first impressions of it from such books?
7. There are other religious books that are tolerable as to style, but which display no power or prominence of thought, no living vigor of expression; they are flat and dry as a plain of sand. They tease you with the thousandth repetition of common-places, causing a feeling of unspeakable weariness. Though the author is surrounded with rich immeasurable fields of truth and beauty, he treads for ever the same narrow track already trodden into dust.
8. There is a smaller class of religious writers that may be called mock-eloquent writers. They try at a superior style, but forget that true eloquence resides essentially in the thought, the feeling, the character, and that no words can make genuine eloquence out of that which is of no worth or interest. They mistake a gaudy verbosity for eloquence.
9. The moral and theological materials of many religious books are as faulty as their style, and the injury they do the Gospel is incalculable. Here is a systematic writer in whose hands all the riches and magnificence of revelation shrink into a meagre list of doctrinal points, and not a single verse in the Bible is allowed to tell its meaning, or even allowed to have one, till it has been forced under torture to maintain one of his points. You are next confronted with a prater about the invisible world, that makes you shrink away into darkness; and then you are met with a grim zealot for such a revolting theory of the Divine attributes and government, that he seems to delight in representing the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose dominion is overshadowed with vengeance, whose music is the cries of victims, and whose glory requires to be illustrated by the ruin of His creation. One cannot help deploring that the great mass of religious books were not consigned to the flames before they were permitted to reach the eyes of the public. Books which exhibit Christianity and its claims with insipid feebleness, or which cramp its majesty into an artificial form at once distorted and mean, must grievously injure its influence. An intelligent Christian cannot look into such works without feeling thankful that they were not the books from which he got his conceptions of the Gospel. Nothing would induce him to put them into the hands of an inquiring youth, and he would be sorry to see them on the table of an infidel, or in the library of his children, or of a student for the ministry.—Foster's Essays.
These sentiments answered so astonishingly to my own thoughts, that I read them with the greatest delight. I laid them, in substance, before my brethren. I explained them. I illustrated them by quotations from books and sermons. I gave them instances of the various faults pointed out by Foster, taken from their favorite authors, and in some cases from the discourses of living preachers. I wrote several essays on the causes of the slow progress made by Christianity, in which I embodied and illustrated many of Foster's views. I wrote essays on "Preaching Christ," in which I embodied and illustrated Wesley's views on the subject, including his condemnation of what, in his days, was falsely called "Gospel Preaching." I wrote quite a large volume on these subjects, and read the contents, so far as opportunity offered, to my colleagues at our weekly meetings. I was badly requited for my pains. In some cases my colleagues listened to me and stared at me with amazement. They thought I "brought strange things to their ears." One, who is now dead, said I should be really an excellent fellow, he believed, if I could only get the cobwebs swept out of my upper stories. Everything beyond his own poor standing common-places was cobwebs to him, poor fellow. The remarks on this subject in the LIFE of the preacher referred to, show that my ideas and plans at that time are not yet understood by all his brethren.
Travel, they say, frees men from their prejudices. The more they see of the wonders of other countries, and of the manners of other nations, the more moderate becomes their estimate of the marvels, and of some of the views and customs of their native land. And it is certain that the more a man travels through good books by men of different Churches from his own, the less important will some of the peculiarities of his own denomination appear. As ignorance of the world is favorable to blind patriotism and home idolatry, so ignorance of Churches, and systems, and literatures different from our own, is favorable to bigotry and sectarianism. And as free and extended intercourse with foreign nations tends to enlarge and liberalize the mind; so the more extensive a Christian's acquaintance is with different branches of the Church, and with their customs, and writings, and manners, the more likely will his sectarian bigotry and intolerance be to give place to liberal views and to Christian moderation and charity.
But just in proportion as he becomes the subject of this blessed transformation, will he be regarded with suspicion and dread by those who still remain the slaves of ignorance and bigotry.
It was so in my case. I travelled through extensive regions of religious literature different from that of my own Church, and I did so with an earnest desire to learn what was true and good in all. The consequence was the loss of many prejudices, and the modification of many more. I lost my prejudices against all kinds of Christians. I could believe in the salvation both of Quakers and Catholics, and of all between, if they were well disposed, God-fearing, good-living men. I could believe in the salvation of all, not excepting Jews, Turks, and Pagans, who lived according to the light they had, and honestly and faithfully sought for further light. I believed that in every nation he that feared God and worked righteousness was accepted of Him. I believed that honest, faithful souls among the pagans of old would be found at last among the saved. I regarded the moral and spiritual light of the ancient pagans as light from heaven, as divine revelation. I looked on all mankind as equally objects of God's care and love, as His children, under His tuition, though placed for a time in different schools, with different teachers, and with different lesson-books. I came to believe that God was as good as a good man, as good as the kindest and best of fathers, and even better, and I felt assured that He would not permit any well-disposed soul on earth to perish. I believed that some who were first in privileges, would be among the last in blessedness; and that some that were last in privileges would be among the first in blessedness.
Yet I believed in missions. I believed that it was the duty of all to share their blessings with others; to give to others the light that God had bestowed on them—that though pagans might be saved without Christian light, if they lived according to the light they had, Christians could not be saved if they did not, as they had opportunity, impart their superior light to the pagans.
I respected the good moral principles, and the portions of religious truth that I found in the ancient Greek and Roman authors, just as I lamented and condemned the moral and religious errors that I found in Christian books.
"I seized on truth where'er 'twas found,
On Christian or on Heathen ground,"
and made it part of my creed: and I warred with error though entrenched in the strong-holds of the Church. I respected what was true and good in all denominations of Christians; and even in all denominations that called themselves Christians, whether