The Assault on True Religion
ONE of the chief assaults of the devil upon Christianity at this time, for which the way is open in these degenerate days, consists in an effort to tear down and obliterate the distinction between the true and the false in religion,—to submerge Christianity in the ocean of paganism which so nearly fills the world. The very air seems full of the taint of the idea that all life is one, and all religions are one in essence. Such quotations as the following from the Literary Digest of April 16 are current illustrations of this sort of teaching. The Rev. R. Heber Newton, of New York, attempting to show that every religion proves itself, in the light of scientific study, to be an expression of some necessary phase of religion, says:— Each subserves a use in the evolution of the fruitioning of humanity; each will find its permanent value preserved and its transient uses discarded in the attained unity of the flowering soul of man. As they [the various religions] grow, they grow together. . . . In their higher reaches they strain toward each other. The flowering of all beliefs is in one faith—all religions seeding down one religion. So, beneath the variant and discordant beliefs of the present the germs of the future universal religion can even now be traced. The ideals of character vary in varying lands, but only as the refractions of the same light falling in different angles of the same prism will vary. It is one and the same light of life through all the variations of the spectrum. The human ideals are one everywhere. Purity and justice and truth and temperance and charity,—these need no translation from the speech of the pagan to the tongue of the Christian. Saints are of blood kin the world over. There is nothing alien to the truly devout Christian in the devoutness of the Hindu Guru, or of the yellow-robed saint of Japan, or of the mystic worshiper among the Isawan Mountains. . . . In the presence of the man of the spirit, be his name what it may, we know that he is of our family and household of God. Whoever is familiar with the teachings of Spiritualism can easily recognize the spiritualistic character of these quotations. There is not one word in all the teaching of this sort that exalts Christ or the doctrine of salvation by faith in him. The whole effort is just the contrary to this. The atoning work of Christ is treated as of no consequence. The true religion, in which alone there is salvation from the wrath of God and from eternal death, always exalts Christ and emphasizes the truths of the total inability of man to save himself, and the sufficiency of Christ's atoning work in his behalf. Every teaching which tends either directly or indirectly to obscure these truths, by that thing proves itself to be a phase of antichrist.