THE DECEPTION OF THE DEVIL.
THE writer listened just recently to a lecture from one of the leading lights in modern theology, Dr. Lyman Abbot. His subject was, “The Foundations of Religious Belief.” It was the first of a regular course to be given to the students of the Pacific Theological Seminary, a Congregational school, but it was given in the First Presbyterian church of Berkeley, to the public as well. The first part of the doctor’s lecture was the setting forth and the repudiation of the agnostic theory of religion or the unseen, the theory that all knowledge comes to us through our senses or deductions from such knowledge. This theory left us without a future, without a soul, without a God, without will, without responsibility, mere machines, responsive to the caprice of impulse and the influence of environment. Or, at the very best, it could recognize any of these desirable things as mere hypotheses. Surely a most undesirable and unreasonable theory, and one utterly incapable of meeting the longings, aspirations, and needs of the human heart. But what did the doctor have to offer in its place? Nothing, absolutely nothing; but human consciousness and the concurrent testimony of human consciousness. And he believed this to be the paramount authority, not only in the pagan religions of the world, but in Christianity as well. The basis of the Christian belief was human consciousness alone. It was not a book written eighteen hundred years ago, the doctor told us, nor the miracles Christ wrought, nor anything else save that which was within man. Verily, the doctor’s witness is lamentably lame and fearfully fallible. Led by it, we have the multitude of religions in the earth to-day, and a world-wide Babylon. Never was there planned a better basis for the world-wide, last-day deception of the devil. It is the basis of the New Thought doctrine, of Modern Spiritualism, and other destructive isms. It has for its evidence one witness only, the most fallible conceivable. (We are not here speaking of the religious instinct which demands something to worship, but the true foundation for belief in the religion of Christ Jesus.) Human consciousness as authority will seek to possess constantly clearer evidence in the lines of human desire. It will lay the whole being open to suggestions which appeal to human consciousness. And, guided by the consciousness alone, it will open the heart and soul to all the deceptions of the devil, the master of the carnal mind. The one true great evidence of the Christian is the Bible, the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures. The truth and divinity of that Book are fortified with such clear, strong evidences that the honest in heart, the lover of truth, must accept them even tho he is opposed to the Book. That Book is not affected by human consciousness. It speaks ever the same story. It reveals the way, the truth, the life. It warns of dangers. It points out sin. It speaks pardon to the transgressor. It reveals an immutable law. And all that is needed in morality and grace is revealed in that Word. That is the divine unchangeable witness. When work has been wrought in our heart which witnesses with the revelation of that Book, then may we know that God’s truth is true to us, and not till then; and the one infallible witness then is the ever-living Word. “The voice of One saying, Cry. And one said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the breath of Jehovah bloweth upon it; surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand forever.” Isa. 40:6-8. This is the relative worth of the human and the divine. What wonder that Christian Science, Modern Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, and other isms find the churches such favorable recruiting grounds? Such teaching as that of Dr. Abbot has prepared the way.