YET IS HE MAN AND NOT GOD.
By Editor
Presumably, for it is the law of poor human nature, many weak souls will yield their little belief in the Bible and the God of the Bible because of Lyman Abbott's latest utterance in the interests of infidelity. Not that we believe that Dr. Abbott so intended his declaration, for he doubtless believes that his faith is larger, broader, better; but his utterance will, nevertheless, make for infidelity. The utterance was made in a sermon before Harvard students at Cambridge, Mass., December 18. Thus he expressed himself, according to the New York World report: I wonder if you students in Harvard will understand me when I say that I no longer believe in a great first cause. My God is a great and ever-present force, which is manifest in all the activities of man and all the workings of nature.
I believe in a God who is in and through and of everything—not an absentee God, whom we have to reach through a Bible or a priest or some other outside aid, but a God who is closer to us than hands or feet. Science, literature, and history tell us that there is one eternal energy, that the Bible no longer can be accepted as ultimate, that many of its laws were copied from other religions, that the Ten Commandments did not spring spontaneously from Moses, but were, like all laws, a gradual growth, and that man is a creature of evolution, not a creation.
And all this is the doctrine of New Thought, as it is also the doctrine of the tempter in the primeval Garden. It is a flat contradiction of the Bible. In his own personal consciousness Dr. Abbott has tried the Book, and in his judgment it is wanting. In other words, in the last analysis, it is Dr. Abbott against the Bible and the God which the Bible reveals, and the Bible is wanting; Dr. Abbott is judge and jury, why should he not justify himself and condemn the Book and its Author, and set up a god of his own, Dr. Abbott, to whom others beside himself will bow? Yet there is a Higher Court. We are doing him no injustice. He who departs from the recognized and verified standard, has no one but man to depend upon, and Dr. Abbott, like many others, prefers to trust to himself. The Bible reveals a personal God, with a habitation, a throne, a central seat of government. It also reveals that to all parts of His universe pulses out the Spirit, the life-force, the energy, of God. As to how that will affect man morally and eternally, depends solely on man's relation to God's law, the law of His life. That there are laws in the Bible similar to those found in other codes of laws is not strange. Many of these laws grow out of the very nature of things, such as laws for protection of life and property, and even less enlightened nations would selfishly see their necessity. But the Bible does not declare that the Ten Commandments sprang spontaneously from Moses; it clearly proves that the law is as eternal as God. But it does declare that man is a creation and not a product of evolution, and blessed be God, He who created can recreate; He who spoke the world from chaos to cosmos can speak from the chaos of sin to the cosmos of righteousness the sinner who has faith in Him. We are sorry to see men in their old age turning from God to self. We are grieved at heart to see great and precious talent, God-given, used to tear down the Book and the religion which has changed the face of the world, transformed deserts into vineyards, savagery and barbarism to civilization, demons incarnate into saints of God. But the religion of Christ and the Bible will stand. It will go on transforming man till Christ shall leave His mediatorial seat and come again. It will stand when all the religions which make men gods, or which count men as having God within themselves irrespective of faith, and all other schemes of self-salvation, shall have perished in their own utter weakness and innate corruption. Within that Book and the religion of that Book is the eternal potency of God, pledged to every believing soul; and we beg of our readers to cleave to it with perfect heart; for those who trust in the God of the Bible “shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”