Effect of Studying Error.
By L. A. S.
The Christian does not need to study error in order to recognize it as such. The best possible way to be prepared to know error is to study and know the truth. The study of error often leads to its acceptance as truth. The result to an eminent teacher in this country, of the study of the heathen systems of the Orient, is stated in a recent issue of the Outlook. The individual in question, Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall, president of Union Theological Seminary, has attained great “success” as a preacher to India. He took up the study of the religions of India with a purpose of finding and appreciating truth in them, and he has found what he sought. He says, as quoted in the Outlook:— I desired to be a humble learner from the systems of belief that commanded the allegiance of immense numbers of my fellow men, and that represented the insight, research, and aspiration of long lines of eminent and saintly personages.
The result, as he states it, was:— From time to time, in this course of preparation, the conviction has recurred with increasing definiteness that the East could, if it would, give more adequate expression to Christianity than the West ever has given; that India might, if it would, express the innermost secret of Christ with an exaltation of tone, an emancipation from the thralldom of things visible, a grasp on the eternal, the invisible, the imperishable, never yet attained by the average thought of Europe and America.
Going to India in this frame of mind, he was received by his Hindu audiences with “enthusiastic approval.” Of the effect of his study of India’s religions, the Outlook says further:— He is able not only to see the truth both in the pantheism of the Orient and in the doctrine of divine personality of the Occident, but so to state each truth as to make it intelligible to those who have dwelt with the other.
To be able to see truth in two systems, each of which is destructive of the other, is an attainment of very doubtful value. Christianity and pantheism are fundamentally opposed to each other, and the individual who thinks he can reconcile one with the other, is in a state of deception. He sees truth where truth does not exist. The study of error, with the purpose of discovering truth, leads to confusion of the distinction between truth and error, the perversion of truth into error and the reception of error as truth. The proper study of mankind is not man, or human systems of belief and of worship, but the study of God. There is no safety, nor necessity, in searching for divine truth outside the revelation God has given of himself in his Word and works. The field of truth here opened to man is of infinite extent; and for his study he has the aid of an infallible word and an unerring Guide. It is not only useless, but unsafe, to study error.