Starting a New Religion
By B
THE well-known college professor and author, Harry Elmer Barnes, has recently published another volume, “The Twilight of Christianity.” If Christianity is founded on argument alone rather than upon demonstration and experience, then some may think the author has demolished once and for all the Christian religion. The chief conclusion of his book is that there is no god. But we ask, Why go to all the trouble to write a book with such an end as this in view, and why urge us to buy the book because of “the new information” it contains, when David, who lived three thousand years ago, tells us in his writings (Psalms 14:1; 53:1) that the “fools” of his day had already discovered the fact that “there is no god.” Barnes, with all his erudition and the “superior enlightenment of this scientific age,” appears only to be infringing upon the copyright of those wiseacre chaps back there. In fact, the allegation that there is no god is one of the most ancient legends and traditions that ever has been passed on from one generation to another. After Barnes has demolished Christianity, he fails to give us something in its place. While he advocates a religion from which the supernatural has been removed, yet he does not outline his proposed secularized system of belief, save to say that we ought to have one. Right there is where many antis fall down. They stop when they exhaust their destructive arguments, but never offer any constructive ones. If Professor Barnes is hoping to start a new religion that will have the influence and power that Christianity has, we would recommend to him the plan offered by one of the keenest minds France ever had to an atheist who proposed to start a new religion: “Go, get yourself crucified, and rise again the third day.”
Christianity survives every assault of every generation of ranters, and it moves on in its conquest of human hearts because of two elements: (1) Because it is founded on truth, and (2) because of the sacrificial love actually demonstrated by its Founder. Who ever heard of an atheist’s volunteering to go to the uttermost parts of the earth to risk his life to carry “the truth” to savages? Jesus Christ “gave His life a ransom for many,” and that is the reason why Christianity attracts its millions while atheism gets only hundreds. A few think it superior to declare their independence of God, and they profess satisfaction in sterility and barrenness of belief; but the great majority have so demonstrated the worth of Christianity in their everyday living that the banal arguments of the atheists fall ineffectual as broken arrows. An ounce of demonstration is worth a ton of academic and theoretic argument. B.