JEREMIAH vi. 16 19
her outward and sensuous life. He was severely practical. It was not doctrine he was concerned for so much as life. He knew perfectly well that if you cross-questioned this people, you would find them orthodox. Indeed, he himself says as much. He says : " Though they say, the Lord liveth ; surely they swear falsely." They say it, but they do not believe it. It is their creed, it is not their faith. Their doctrine is true, but it is not living. It has no relation to their life. They do not believe it. They hold it as a convenient intellectual formula and national creed — but they do not honour it with their own personal loyalty. Their orthodoxy is lifeless, barren, soulless. It has become a hollow sham and a miserable falsehood. It is worn as spotless clothing to veil the hideous corruption of the spirit. It is separable from the soul ; and if you tear it off, you find the life it covers is foul and loath- some and false. These men, who boasted that they stood where their fathers did and held to the old paths, were aliens to the spirit and life of the sons of God ; and Jeremiah felt that in the name of righteousness it was well that they should know.
T[ We cannot but believe that in the future the whole conception of orthodoxy is destined to grow less and less pro- minent. Less and less men will ask of any opinion, " Is it orthodox ? " More and more they will ask, " Is it true ? " More and more the belief in the absolute safety of the freest truth- seeking, in truth-seeking as the only safe work of the human mind, will deepen and increase. Truth will come to seem not a deposit, fixed and limited, but an infinite domain wherein the soul is bidden to range with insatiable desire, guarded only by the care of God above it and the Spirit of God within it, educated by its mistakes, and attaining larger knowledge only as it attains complete purity of purpose and thoroughness of devotion and energy of hope. As that truer understanding of what truth is grows wide and clear, men will cease to talk or think much of orthodoxy, and the humble service which it is made to render it will render all the better when it is stripped of the purple and the sceptre, the dominion and tyranny, to which it has no right.1
(2) Another reason is the Bible. For if there is a book in the world that illustrates on every page of it the principle of develop- ment, the principle of evolution, the principle of change, it is this book that we call the Bible. Take, for example, the name of God.
1 Phillips Brooks, Essays and Addresses, 196.
2o THE OLD PATHS
Go to the Book of Genesis, and you find that the old Hebrews called God " Elohim," the strong one. That was their idea of the Creator — not a bad idea, not a wrong idea. It is a great and glorious truth. But come down the stream, come down to the time when the Lord Jesus Christ clothed Himself in our humanity, and listen to His teaching. Is it the teaching of the Book of Genesis regarding God ? Not at all. Jesus tells us that God is our Father. He taught His disciples to pray, " Our Father which art in heaven." What a difference — almost as far as the East is from the West — between the " Elohim " of Genesis and the " our Father " of the gospel !
^f At first, faith need not be more than the acceptance of a few central facts of revelation. These will be sufficient to illuminate and justify that primitive, deep-seated instinct of kinship with God which we recognized at the beginning as the raw material of religion, and which we saw giving expression to itself in an imperfectly understood ritual of sacrifice and com- munion. Such a faitlj, again, will be sufficient to illuminate and justify the obstinate conviction that the values which we blindly pursue and cherish are perfectly realized and eternally conserved in Him who is the Word and Wisdom of the Father.
What an unlimited opening does faith thus provide for the development of religion ; for the garnering of religious experience in prayer and meditation ; for the confident quest of the true, the beautiful, and the good ; for the practice of fellowship with all who share the clansmen's sacrificial feast and are pledged thereby to mutual service ! *
(3) A third reason is the history of the Church. For when we come down the history of the Christian Church we find precisely the same thing ; change is stamped on every age and generation. We do not worship as our fathers worshipped fifty years ago, and we do not think as our fathers did in theological matters fifty years ago. " The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." We cannot stand still. Why, if men acted on that principle the world would never have developed at all; there would have been no Christianity, no Eeformation, no change whatever in men's thoughts and ideas through the ages. That is not God's purpose. We are all children, and all in God's school, and God is teaching us every day ; and if we are true children of