Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again. Joseph Barker
a very small portion of Christianity, and the portion they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, like the Latin of the Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language—an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases used by preachers and religious writers which neither they nor their hearers or readers understand. In some of them there is nothing to be understood. They are mere words; meaningless sounds. Some of them have meanings, but they are hard to come at, and when you have got at them you find them to be worse than none. They are falsehoods that lurk within the dark and antiquated words. I have heard and even read whole sermons in which nine sentences out of ten had no more meaning in them than the chatter of an ape. Perhaps not so much. I have gone through large volumes and found hardly a respectable, plain-meaning sentence from beginning to end. And wagon loads of so-called religious books may still be found, in which, as in the talk of one of Shakespeare's characters, the ideas are to the words as three grains of wheat to a bushel of chaff; you may search for them all day before you find them; and when you find them they are good for nothing. When I first came across such books I supposed it was my ignorance or want of capacity that made it impossible for me to understand them; but I found, at length, that there was nothing in them to understand. There are other books which have a meaning, a good meaning, but it is wrapped up in such out-of-the-way words and phrases, that it is difficult to get at it. Men of science have not only discarded the foolish fictions of darker ages, but have begun to simplify their language; to cast aside the unspeakable and unintelligible jargon of the past, and to use plain, good, common English, thus rendering the study of nature pleasant even to children; while many divines, by clinging to the unmeaning and mischievous phraseology of ancient dreamers, render the study of religion repulsive, and the attainment of sound Christian knowledge almost impossible to the masses of mankind. And all these things become occasions of unbelief. "So long as Christian preachers and writers are limited so much to human creeds and systems, or to stereotyped phrases of any kind, and avail themselves so little of the popular diction of literature and of common life, so long must they repel many whom they might convince and win." Dr. Porter, President of Yale College.
5. Then again: the divisions of the Church, and the uncharitable spirit in which points of difference between contending sects are discussed, and the disposition sometimes shown by religious disputants to impugn each other's motives, to call each other offensive names, and to consign each other to perdition, are occasions of stumbling to some.
6. And again: many advocates of Christianity, more zealous than wise, say more about the Bible and Christianity than is true, and attempt to prove points which do not admit of proof; and by their unguarded assertions, and their failures in argument, bring the truth itself into discredit. Others use unsound arguments in support of the truth, and when men discover the unsoundness of the arguments, they are led sometimes to suspect the soundness of the doctrine in behalf of which they are employed. The pious frauds of ancient and modern fanatics have proved a stumbling-block to thousands.
Albert Barnes says, "There is no class of men that are so liable to rely on weak and inconclusive reasonings as preachers of the Gospel. Many a young man in a Theological Seminary is on the verge of infidelity from the nature of the reasoning employed by his instructor in defence of that which is true, and which might be well defended: and many a youth in our congregations is almost or quite a skeptic, not because he wishes to be so, but because that which is true is supported by such worthless arguments."
7. Again; theological students sometimes adopt erroneous principles or unwise methods of reasoning in their search after truth, and do not discover their mistake till they are landed in doubt and unbelief. They find certain principles laid down by men in high repute for science, and adopt them without hesitation, not considering that men of science are sometimes mad, fanatical infidels, and that they manufacture principles without regard to truth, for the simple purpose of undermining men's faith in God and religion. Writers on science of one school tell you, that in your study of nature, you must be careful never to admit the doctrine of final causes; or, in other words, that you must never entertain the idea that anything in nature was meant to answer any particular purpose. You must, say they, if you would be a true philosopher, shut out from your mind all idea of design or contrivance in the works of nature. You must just look at what is, and not ask what it is for. You may find wonderful adaptations of things to each other, all tending to happy results; but you must never suppose that any one ever designed or planned those adaptations, with a view to those happy results. You must confine yourself entirely to what you see, and never admit the thought of a Maker whom you do not see. You must limit your observations to what is done, and not dream of a Doer. You may see things tending to the diffusion of happiness, but must not suppose that there is a great unseen Benefactor, who gives them this blessed tendency. And if you feel in yourself a disposition to gratitude, you must treat it as a foolish, childish fancy, and suppress it as irrational.
A sillier or a more contemptible notion—a notion more opposed to true philosophy and common sense—can hardly be conceived. How any one could ever have the ignorance or the impudence to propound such an unnatural and monstrous absurdity as a great philosophical principle, would be a mystery, if we did not know how infidelity perverts men's understandings, and, while puffing them up with infinite conceit of their own wisdom, transforms them into the most arrant and outrageous fools.
Yet this monstrous folly has found its way into books, and papers, and reviews, and, through them, into the minds of some Christian students; and when the madness of the notion is not detected, it destroys their faith, and makes them miserable infidels.
Some adopt the principle that reason is man's only guide—that reason alone is judge of what is true and good, and that to reason every thing must be submitted, and received or rejected, done or left undone, as reason may decide. This sounds very plausible to many, and there is a sense in which it may be true; but there is a sense in which it is fearfully false; and the youth that adopts it, and acts upon it, will be likely to land himself in utter doubt, both with regard to religion and morals. There are numbers of cases in which reason is no guide at all—in which instinct, natural affection, and consciousness are our only guides. You can never prove by what is generally called reason alone, that man is not a machine, governed entirely by forces over which he has no control. You cannot therefore prove by what certain philosophers call reason, that any man is worthy of reward or punishment, of praise or blame, of gratitude or of resentment; or that there is any such thing in men as virtue or vice, according to the ordinary sense of the words. The ablest logicians on earth, when they take reason alone as their guide, come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as liberty or moral responsibility, in the ordinary acceptation of the terms, but that all is fixed, that all is fate, from eternity to eternity. They accordingly come to the further conclusion, that there is no free, voluntary Ruler of the universe—that there is no Almighty Judge and Rewarder—that there is neither reward nor punishment, properly speaking, either in this world or in the world to come. They become atheists.
You can never prove by reason that a woman ought to love her own child better than the child of another woman. You cannot prove by reason that she ought to love it at all. You may say no children would be reared if mothers did not love their children, and even love them better than the children of other mothers. But how will you prove that children ought to be reared? Can you show that the mother will confer any advantage on her child, or secure any advantage to herself, or any one else, by rearing it? Can you prove that it will not be a torment to her—that it will not bring her to want, and shame, and an untimely death? The fact is, a mother's love, a mother's partiality for her own child, is not a matter of reason. The hen loves her chickens, the she bear loves its cubs, the mother dog loves its whelps, and the ewe loves her lambs, without any regard to reason. Their affections and preferences are governed by something infinitely wiser than reason; infinitely higher, at least, than any reason that man can boast. And men love women, and women love men, and men and women marry and form new families, not at the bidding of reason, but under the influence of instincts or impulses that come from a wisdom infinitely higher than the wisdom