Francis John McConnell

“ Though the Bible was given to a peculiar people, self-centered and exclusive, it nevertheless abounds in suggestions that its content can be appreciated the full only by those whose sympathies run out to men at the very ends of the earth. In the eyes of the Scriptures a human being is a human being anywhere. The differences between men are as nothing compared to the likenesses. Every revelation must begin somewhere and must attack its problems in proper sequence, one after the other; but mere priority of approach does not mean that one problem is inherently more important than another. ”

“ Incredible as it may seem at first thought, the universe might theoretically be regarded as a system ruled over by a Deity who had brought forth a character like that of Christ just for the sake of seeing what he could achieve in the way of a masterpiece, without being himself fundamentally involved in self-revelation. Christ might conceivably be a sort of poetic dream of the Almighty rather than a laying bare of the Almighty's own life. We find that human authors by an effort of great imagination fashion creations in a sense completely different from themselves. ”

“ It is the merest commonplace to repeat that the inspiration of the Scriptures must show itself in their power to inspire those who partake of their life. Does a fresh moral and spiritual air blow through them? Is there in them anything that men can breathe? Anything upon which men can build themselves into moral strength? This is the final test of inspiration. Physical breathing is in itself a mystery, but we know when the air invigorates us. Abstract doctrine of inspiration apart from life and experience is a very stifling affair compared with inspiration conceived of as a breath of life. ”

“ There are those who proclaim that we do not need any revelations of God to make then human ideal fully significant—the human ideal stands by itself. Some such thinkers go consistently the full length of saying that they are willing to keep their eyes open to the hopelessness of the universe. They can see nothing beyond this life but total oblivion. Nevertheless, with their eyes open they will fight on manfully to the end and take the final leap into the dark without flinching. They are very apt to add that their philosophy is the only unselfish one ”

“ So the soul that is to catch the finest stirrings of the divine must rest upon the solidest stones of hard work for the moral purposes of the scriptural Kingdom.
Still some one will insist that the Bible is a book built around great crises in human experience; that it is a record of these crises; that the people in whose history the crises occurred were a peculiar people, apparently arbitrarily chosen as a medium for religious world-instruction; that the crises cast sudden bursts of intense light upon the meaning of human life, but that they themselves are far apart from ordinary experience. ”

“ Now, Christ is the ideal, but the ideal is one toward which we not only labor in our own strength, but one whose attainment by us is an object of solicitude for God himself. And so we see in the cross a patience which will bear with men to the utmost, and which will reenforce them as they press toward the goal. The glory of Christianity is largely hi the paradox that it sets before men an unattainable ideal and then commands them to attain the ideal. If the cross is nothing but a revelation of an ideal for men, this paradox is insoluble and intolerable. ”

“ Why they come to pass is beyond us, except in a most limited sense. The purposes for which events occur in this world are not self-evidently clear. Explanations of purposes only make matters worse; and at any moment this problem of the mystery of the universe may take personal significance in the form of a blow upon the individual which seems to mock all hope of anything worth while in human life. There is nothing more futile than the attempts even of ministers to divine the meanings of afflictions or of those inequalities of lot which attend the natural order. ”

“ God is the hero of the Bible. His heroism appears in growing revelation from the beginning. It shows itself superbly in his willingness to bear the burdens of mankind and in the appeals which he makes for response from men. The picture is of a God who dares to believe in men and who dares to call on them for the extremes of self-sacrificing devotion, not to himself as an arbitrary Person, but to himself as the center of the moral life which is above all other life worth while. ”

“ It is legitimate to declare that there is little either in the teaching of Christ or in his character that is not at least foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The uniqueness of the Christ revelation consists in the manner in which the separate streams of truth of the law and the prophets and the seers and the poets are merged together in the Christ teaching, and in the fine balance with which the ideal characteristics seen from afar by the saints of the older day were realized in the living Christ. ”

“ As a member of the human race I can be profoundly thankful for a philosopher like Kant. I can, indeed, dedicate myself to the study of the Kantian philosophy with some hope of mastering it. I can seek to reproduce in my life all the conditions that surrounded the life of the great metaphysician, but I cannot hope to make myself a Kant. ”

“ The advice of the world is to do the best we can and let the rest go. We are not to take ourselves too seriously. But the long moral advances of the race have come through those who have taken the voices of conscience seriously. Now, what can a sensitive conscience make of moral duty? Assume that we have before us the exalted Christ ideal, and accept this as the guide of our lives—assume that we even have hope of some day attaining to that ideal—the distracting question is bound to jump at us: Are we doing enough? Have we sacrificed enough for those in worse plight than ourselves? ”

“ The severities of the Christian life are nowhere disguised. Men are never lured on by false pretenses. The path is the path of cross-bearing, and the reward is the comradeship between God and man as they together work toward the highest goal, a comradeship which of itself brings relief to men burdened with the mystery of the universe and agonized by remorse over sin. This essay is quite as significant for what it has not said as for what it has said. In our omissions we have tried to keep clear the main outlines of scriptural revelation. ”

“ One of our deepest yearnings is to know whether our exalted belief about man has any validity before the larger ranges of the activity of the universe itself. It is very common, for example, for those who go forth to social tasks with a passion for humanity to lose that passion if they do not keep alive a passion for God. Disappointment with some phases of human nature itself and despair over the failures of men are apt to be so trying that the passion for humanity dies down unless familiarity with actual human life is reenforced by communion with an ideal which reaches up toward the Divine. ”

“ Now, after we have made the most of the miracles recorded of Jesus, after we have made them seem just as extraordinary in themselves as possible, their most extraordinary feature is this use to which the power was put; and on the other hand, if we strip the miracles of everything that suggests breach of natural law and make them just revelations of super-normal control over nature through laws like those whose existence and significance we are beginning to glimpse to-day, still we cannot empty these narratives of their significance as revealing a morally responsible use of force. ”

“ In our own time we have seen advocacy of the doctrine that the man of wealth is a law unto himself in the handling of the power that comes with wealth. Such mistakes never were really a part of the biblical idea. In shaping the threefold notion of priest and prophet and king to make the people familiar with the functions of God-sent leadership the strokes of emphasis always fell on the responsibility of the prophet to proclaim his message at whatever cost to himself, of the priest to keep in mind the sacredness of his office, and of the king to rule in righteousness. ”

“ If anyone at this juncture becomes nervous and insists that we are likely to introduce the new-fangled notions of the present day into a discussion where they are out of place, let us remind such a one that the danger of putting the material before the spiritual has always been the chief stumbling stone in the path of the biblical revelation. It may be too much to say with the old version that the love of money is the root of all evil, but the Scriptures place the sin of greed in the forefront among the evils that block the revealing process. ”

“ The book of Christianity must be interpreted by the disciples of Christianity. Judged merely by bookish standards, there is no satisfactory explanation of the power of the Bible. But lift the whole problem out of the realm of books as such! The glimpses into any high truth that are worth while—how do they come? They come out of experience. Even when they are repeated from one mind to another they become the property of that second mind only as they reproduce themselves in experience. Otherwise the whole transaction is of words, words, words. The Scriptures have to do with deeds, not words. ”

“ The Scriptures make it very clear that there is something which satisfies God himself in the work of redemption. God acts out of moral obligation, out of self-respect, out of love. But he acts always in respect for men as free moral beings. The cross appeals to the free spirit of men to behold the nature of evil, and to flee from that evil toward their redeeming God. If the redemption is to be a moral redemption, the last detail of the method must be moral. The power of the Almighty must not be used to break down freedom of men. ”

“ We have seen prophets attain to glimpses of the meaning of suffering for the divine life, and we have beheld the culmination in the suffering of Christ. In those perplexing phrases of the creeds like, "Very God of very God," the aim of the church has been perfectly clear—to guard the scriptural idea that God was so truly in Christ that the sufferings of Christ were the sufferings of God. Even when least intelligible the pain of men becomes more easily borne if men can believe that in some real sense their pain is also the pain of God. ”

“ Many a scientist tells us that we do not further need the biblical idea of God in view of the vast suggestions concerning the Divine which science places before us. The world in which we live has broadened immeasurably since the days of the Hebrew prophets and seers. The idea of God, broadening to correspond, has to expand so overwhelmingly that we ought no longer pay heed to the imaginations of the biblical writers. Large numbers of scientists to-day avow themselves devout theists. Materialism is decidedly out of fashion, and agnosticism is less in vogue than a decade or two ago. ”

“ Slowly and surely, moreover, the people attained grasp on the doctrine that the greatest revelation of God is the revelation in human character itself. They began to look forward to the coming of one who would in himself embody the noblest and best in the divine life, who would gather up in himself all the ideals and purposes toward which the law and the prophets had looked. ”

“ In the scriptural light of the cross, however, we catch the glory not of an abstract ideal, but of a Father's love for his children—not of the commands of conscience in the abstract, but of the desires of a personal Friend who will lift men as they stumble and fall. The ground for this patience seems as we read to be in the very nature of God himself. God has brought men into this world without consulting them, he has dowered them with the terrific boon of freedom, he has set them in hard places ”

“ There is, next, the method of learning through one's own experiment—through using microscope or telescope or textbook for oneself. There are, further, the social aids to the quickening of the mind as groups of students study and discuss together. But the deepest knowledge comes as the student feels his sympathy and feeling involved. If he must pay himself out for the acquisition of the truth, or if he must defend his conclusions at great cost to himself, this experience which involves the feeling involves also the sharpening of the intellect. ”