Tf As you look out over the heathen world with its lords many and gods many, and see working in every form of faith the same religious aspirations, producing in varying measure indeed, but yet everywhere, to some extent, the same civilizing and moralizing effects — are you perhaps sometimes tempted to pronounce it enough ; possibly adding something about the special adaptation of the several faiths to the several peoples, or even something about the essential truth underlying all religions ? This is " deisidaimonism." And on its basis the whole missionary work of the Church is an impertinence, the whole history of the Church a gigantic error ; the great commission itself a crime against humanity — launching the Christian world upon a fool's errand, every step of which has dripped with wasted blood. Surely the proclamation of the gospel is made, then, mere folly, and the blood of the martyrs becomes only the measure of the narrow fanaticism of earlier and less enlightened times.1
T[ On the other hand, there is an attitude to other religions which has hindered the progress of Christianity. It is the attitude of ignorance and contempt. By unduly depreciating all other religions we have placed our own in a position which its Founder never intended for it; we have torn it away from the sacred context of the history of the world ; we have ignored, or wilfully narrowed, the sundry times and divers manners in which, in times past, God spake unto the fathers by the prophets ; and instead of recognizing Christianity as coming in the fulness of time, and as
1 B. B. Warfield.
ACTS xvii. 22, 23 157
the fulfilment of the hopes and desires of the whole world, we have brought ourselves to look upon its advent as the only broken link in that unbroken chain which is rightly called the Divine government of the world.1
II.
An Unknown God.
" I found also an altar with this inscription, To an unknown God."
1, At first sight it would appear that when the Athenians had erected an altar to every possible god that they knew or could think of, hardly content with their efforts to stand well with heaven, they then proceeded to something further. Lest they might unwittingly have overlooked or omitted some deity that expected their votive offering, and that they were bound to worship, with a pious zeal which the Apostle could not but admire they erected yet another altar which they left un- appropriated. But not to leave the entablature of this altar entirely blank, they filled it in provisionally with this strange dedication : To an unknown God.
T| The feeling of an uneasy conscience is shown similarly in the Penitential Psalm which a Babylonian king, about 760 B.C., addressed to his offended deity —
Against a God, known and unknown,
I have committed errors, I have multiplied rebellions:
I am afraid, I dread the look of Thy divinity.2
2. God is to-day to a very large number of men, some of them men of culture and influence, an unknown God. And that openly, argumentatively. They hold that God cannot be known. They have even invented a title for their attitude to God, calling it Agnosticism. But agnosticism is not something that simply affects religion, it is something that affects all life. The only men who have ever done anything worth doing in the world are men who have acted from deep and profound conviction ; and if we are to-day to have an agnostic age, then it is a very bad look- out for those who want to see the life of their country grow more
1 Max Muller. 3 A. Smythe Palmer.
158 AN UNKNOWN GOD
noble, more humane, more just and more free. You can see the effect of agnosticism to-day from the top of the life of this country to the bottom. It has affected politics. We are in an age of "unsettled convictions." All the vacillations and hesitations of to-day are very largely the result of the fact that we have been losing our hold of the great driving principles that made humanity advance in the days gone by.
f| The contrast is striking between the light humour of Matthew Arnold's prose writings and the gloom of his poetry. In the poems, which are so admirable in their way, one may not doubt that his inmost feeling finds expression. There pervades them a tone of sadness — a sadness without remedy and without solace. Faith gone, the fountains of joy are dry. And yet he sees that the millions —
have such need of joy!
The want of the world is
One mighty wave of thought and joy lifting mankind amain.
But the poet sees no ground of hope. He has no counsel to give to mortals, in their unquenchable yearning for bliss, but to " moderate desire," to be content with what a few days on earth may yield. A lesson may be read in Tennyson the reverse of the despairing inference of Arnold —
My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is ;
This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty ; such as lurks In some wild Poet, when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.