Alexander Balmain Bruce

“ Foremost in importance among the good omens is the intense desire of many among us to know the mind of the historic Jesus, and to give to it the authoritative place in the faith and life of the Church. Not a few of our best men, I fear, have been tempted in these years to get weary of ecclesiastical Christianity. But one rarely meets with a man who is weary of Christ. The appeal of malcontents is rather from the Church to Christ, from modern presentations of the Christian religion to the religion embodied in the authentic sayings of the Great Master. ”

“ Herein surely lies a guarantee that the Christian name and faith are not going to die, that far from dying they are about to enter on a new lease of vitality, power and prosperity, through which greater glory will accrue to God in the future than has been yielded by all the past centuries! ”

“ If man be the crown of the evolutionary process, he is the key to the meaning of the process and to the nature of the great ultimate cause of all that happens. The world-process was meant to arrive at man, and the Great Being who cherished this aim must be manlike in his nature, a rational and moral personality guiding all things by a will of love. What is this but the Bible doctrine of man made in God's image, Christ's doctrine of divine fatherhood and human sonship? Jesus magnified the importance of man, science does the same. ”

“ It is an arduous task, not to be accomplished in a year, or even in a century, and before the consummation devoutly to be wished many changes, theological, ecclesiastical and social, may come which shall cause faint hearts to quake—such a shaking in earth and heaven as shall look like the final judgment. But it will be only a shaking of things that ought to be shaken in order that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. And during the shaking process the personal influence of Christ will be the sheet anchor of faith helping it to ride out the storm. ”

“ One of the inevitable tasks of the Christianity of the future will be the popularization of the Bible in accordance with modern critical principles. Whether we like it or not this is one of the things that lie before us. The inquiry into the history of the sacred books of our faith is a movement of too much depth, breadth, and strength to be stopped by prudential considerations. It must spread more and more till our ministers and even our Sunday school teachers have become more or less acquainted with its methods and results. It cannot remain a mere academic movement ”

“ Conscience is not so robust, nor the heart so filled with the passion of love, as to dispense with the aid of faith in a model Christ, our pattern at once in moral fidelity and in the enthusiasm of humanity, and in a Father-God who careth even for the lowest. A recent writer on social evolution has ably advocated a view of religion according to which it is a supra-rational element in human nature constraining men to be altruistic against the dictates of their reason, bidding them care for their own interest only. ”

“ Would all be well if economic socialism were accompanied with moral individualism—a spirit caring only for self? Manifestly the true bane of society is not property, but self-seeking, and the true need now and at all times moral socialism, caring for others, remembering that a man at the meanest is a man and treating him accordingly. That due heed to Christ's teaching will bring, that and all that properly goes along with it. And the function of the church of the future will be to secure that due heed shall be given to Christ's beneficent and humane doctrine. ”

“ Who, however much he may differ from his opinions about the Bible, does not sympathize with the general aim of Matthew Arnold in writing Literature and Dogma, viz., to rescue from neglect a book which, while containing some features not to the taste of men living in our modern era, was still the greatest book in the world in respect of the emphasis with which it asserts the value of righteousness, and the reality of a power not ourselves making for righteousness? ”

“ Ye have taken from us a Bible which we reverenced to idolatry but in many parts did not understand, and have given to us a Bible which, with undiminished claims to reverence, awakens in our minds a real, rational interest to which hitherto we have been comparative strangers. ”

“ We are now near the close of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, but the faith we profess is by no means a worn-out cult, a spent force, a religious movement which has run its evolutionary course and is now about to take its place among the things that have been. Such a fate may overtake a religion as well as other things. ”

“ But what if these modern churches, like the old ones they are to supersede, should become as salt which has lost its savor? Does the ethical spirit or the benevolent spirit not need support from a transcendental faith? ”

“ Chicago is a city whose small beginnings are remembered by men still living. It has already attained great dimensions, but shrewd judges predict that in fifty years or less it will be three times its present size, and in respect at once of population and commercial importance easily the first city of the American continent. The University of Chicago is but a child four years old, for its age it is a child of phenomenal proportions, but it is doubtless destined to indefinite expansion. ”

“ The two assumptions on which it rests, that religion is essentially supra-rational, and that reason is essentially selfish, are very questionable. But the general principle underlying Mr. Kidd's theory is sound, viz., that the humane benevolent impulses need the support of religion. A man is weak when he serves God with only a part of his spiritual nature. It takes all that is within us—conscience, heart, reason, imagination, the faith-faculty—to make us heroes in the warfare for justice and mercy. ”

“ Rather Christ is being born anew amongst us; through scientific study, devout thought and loving endeavor at imaginative realization, his life and ministry are being enacted over again, insomuch that it may be said with truth that the Hero of the gospel story is better known today, and more intelligently estimated than He ever has been since the Christian era began. ”

“ This is what we have to fear on a large scale. The Bible let alone by the community, allowed to lie on the shelf, hardly a copy even to be found in the house; Psalms, Prophecies, Gospels, Epistles relegated to oblivion. What a loss to the forces making for righteousness in a community! ”

“ Yet there are not wanting facts and phenomena which encourage hope, wearing the aspect of a new dawn, suggesting the thought that if we have arrived at a crisis, it is not a crisis of destruction, but of reconstruction, a crisis in which old things pass away to make room for better things of the same kind. ”

“ The religious and moral roots of the unknown future are the only things we need to care about. Given these, the vital outgrowth will look after itself; these lacking no changes in church or state can possess permanent value. In these days we hear much of "Socialism," economic socialism. "Let private property only pass away, and all things become common, and all will be well." ”

“ Traditional theologies may go, and ecclesiastical organizations be broken up, and old social conditions pass away, but Christ will remain, and the priceless worth of His words will keep the heart loyal amid temptation, and His ideas of God and man will be the fixed stars by which the mariner will steer his way through troubled seas to the desired haven. ”

“ And yet it seems to me that there is no place in the world where one may more pardonably assume the attitude of looking forward than in America, in Chicago, and in this University. America is a young country, as an independent nation about a century old. ”

“ Jesus was full of the enthusiasm of humanity, science tends to be humanitarian. No truly scientific man will ever encourage brutal indifference to human well-being, or feel otherwise than kindly towards the memory of Him whose meat and drink it was to do all the good in His power to others.
2. The new interest awakened in the Bible by modern criticism is a good omen. ”

“ And when one is in a pessimistic mood it is not difficult to point to phenomena which look like symptoms of senility, tokens of the approaching fall season of the Christian era. There is the miserably divided church, which looks very like the hopeless wreck of organized Christianity. There is sacramentarianism rampant in many sections of the church ”

“ It will be understood that it does not teach many things, the raw material of an elaborate creed, but rather a few things very thoroughly. It will also be understood that all things taught in Scripture are not of equal importance; that it is not necessary that every proposition that can be supported by proof-texts should become an article in a creed. A distinction will be taken between doctrines of faith and dogmas of theology. ”

“ Probably men in this precise state of mind are not wanting among us. But it is very far from being the prevailing state of mind. On the contrary since the Christian era began there never has been so much keen interest in and so much intellectual activity upon the sacred literatures of the Jewish and Christian faith as exists now. ”

“ Yet without special prophetic afflatus, with only a sufficient amount of sympathy with the longings of our most Christlike men and due insight into present tendencies, it is not impossible to sketch some of the broader features of the new development which Christianity is likely to undergo in the years that lie before us. ”

“ And all this is a labor of love on the part of men entirely emancipated, for the most part, from superstitious reverences. They undertake this work because they like it and think it worth their while. ”

“ Its buildings will be increased fourfold, its teachers will grow in number and in renown; its influence on all the higher interests of human life will wax in volume like the Mississippi, and become a mighty river fertilizing a whole continent. ”

“ They may be very good books in their way, and for their time, and for the people which produced them, but outside antiquated theories of divine origin, ideal value and unique function, there seems to be no good reason why we should not forget them, as the world has forgotten many other books which served a useful purpose in their day. ”