p. 500 | The Road to Nothing by C. W. Stiles

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 9, 1882

The Road to Nothing.

By C. W. Stiles

A HIGHWAY WITH MANY TRAVELERS BUT A VERY UNCERTAIN DESTINATION.

OUR common report concerning the vagrant souls who now and then wander away on this road, is full of laments which center upon their theological errors, and we speak of them as if they chiefly illustrated a degeneracy of faith. Skeptics hail such departures as signs of decaying orthodoxy, as if the usual and prime reason of men for abandoning the highway of evangelical truth was a disagreement with the theologies. The most noted of infidels frequently repeats the statement that departure from the prevailing faiths is only a question of a little more brains, as if most men leave, who do leave, because they become intellectually more enlightened. But when the secret history has been well understood, of the men who set out upon this road to Nothing, no one will fail to understand that something deeper and subtler and more dangerous than any intellectual dissent lays behind the exodus.

By all the laws of the higher life, movement of any sort should begin below the head; and, in fact and experience, we shall surely find that what should be, is.

A man may be accredited as entirely evangelical, and for a long time may be so, as far as his beliefs and reasonings and verbal assents are concerned, who never with his inward life and love has embraced and settled in any of the great verities which seem true to him. Of course such men will finally go to their own place—if they do not, they ought to. But when they go, it is not head first. Every man makes his own logic, and the logic finally follows the spirit that is in him. The secret of all infidelity is not, never has been, and never will be, an intellectual secret. Men may jabber of theologies at any length; it is not theology that staggers men who are looking for truth. Who are the men to-day who stand serene and untroubled amidst the conflicts of our time? Theologies are shaken on every hand. The very foundations, not of the Christian system merely, but of all religion, are assaulted; but there are two classes of men who do not tremble. One class holds simply, and even ignorantly, to their own sweet experiences, and hold on to God because they ask no questions, and because they are satisfied with the peace of a complete salvation. The other class are the wisest, widest, most earnest men, who have found a faith large enough to span the gulf between history and prophecy, and can take up the verities of the old faiths into such vital relations with the hopes and outlook of our time that they gain new glory with every lightning flash of the storm. And in both cases men are staid in truth not by any merely human forecasting of the fortunes of the creeds, but entirely by the power of a living and vital soul faith, out of which their logic must weave itself, and in which their philosophy always must be molded.

A young man not long ago went out on this Nothing road, avowing himself an Agnostic. Men said of him that he had cast off the truths of the Christian system. The simple fact was, he had always so worn them that they would drop off as soon as he had lost his motives to preach them. He saw there was conflict between the new and the old. He was not a patient man, waiting for light. He had no fine, strong, faith to take up the new and old together—to evolve them in the crucible of a consecrated love into a new and diviner result. "He never was converted," his near friends said, and they told the whole story in one sentence.

By all which, I mean to say that the road to Nothing is always through the gate of spiritual godlessness. We open to it out of the church as often as we invite into it unconsecrated men. Learning is as bad as ignorance to the man who has not been truly converted. A prominent rationalist, once a Congregational minister, said in public that he would have been satisfied with orthodoxy if he could only have felt it to be true. That is the bottom of the whole matter. A man's creed will be shaped on the lines of his heart as surely as the veins locate the blood on a man's face. If we are to keep the creed it must have its life in such experience as begets creeds—a living certainty in men that the creed is true because it has been felt.

The road to Nothing should never radiate from the church, much less from the ministry. Churches are better dead than made up of unconsecrated men. The ministry is better off—a greater power for God, depleted to a handful, than filled with men who will go the road to Nothing by-and-by, because they can't believe what they have never felt.—Rev. C. W. Stiles, in Christian at work.