A FEW LETTERS

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Dear Grandfather: The college year soon ends; also my course.  I think you hoped I wouldn’t want again to talk of those matters.  But it isn’t so.  I am primed and waiting, and even you, old man, must listen to reason.  The world of thought has made many revolutions since you shut yourself into that study with your weekly church paper.  So be ready to hear me.

Affectionately,
BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

“Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.”  I am sending you a little book.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Dear Old Man: How am I going to thank you for the “little book” ­for Butler’s Analogy?  Or rather, how shall I forgive you for keeping it from me all these years?  I see that you acquired it in 1863 ­and I never knew!  I must tell you that I looked upon it with suspicion when I unwrapped it ­a suspicion that the title did not allay.  For I recalled the last time you gave me a book ­the year before I came here.  That book, my friend, was “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.”  I began it with deep respect for you.  I finished with a profound distrust of all Abyssinians and an overwhelming grief for the untimely demise of Mrs. Johnson ­for you had told me that the good doctor wrote this book to get money to bury her.  How the circle of mourners for that estimable woman must have widened as Rasselas made its way out into the world!  Oh, Grandad, if only they had been able to keep her going some way until he needn’t have done it!  If only she could have been spared until her son got in a little money from the Dictionary or something!

All of which is why I viewed with unfriendly distrust your latest gift, the Analogy of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham.  But, honestly, old man, did you know how funny it was when you sent it?  It’s funnier than any of the books of Moses, without being bloody.  What a dear, innocent old soul the Bishop is!  How sincerely he believes he is reasoning when he is merely doing a roguish two-step down the grim corridor of the eternal verities ­with a little jig here and there, and a pause to flirt his frock airily in the face of some graven image of Fact.  Ah, he is so weirdly innocent.  Even when his logical toes go blithely into the air, his dear old face is most resolutely solemn, and I believe he is never in the least aware of his frivolous caperings over the floor of induction.  Indeed, his unconsciousness is what makes him an unfailing delight.  He even makes his good old short-worded Saxon go in lilting waltz-time.

You will never know, Grandad, what this book has done for me.  I am stimulated in the beginning by this:  “From the vast extent of God’s dominion there must be some things beyond our comprehension, and the Christian scheme may be one of them.”  And at the last I am soothed with this heart-rending pas seul: “Concluding remarks by which it is clearly shown that those men who can evade the force of arguments so probable for the truth of Christianity undoubtedly possess dispositions to evil which would cause them to reject it, were it based on the most absolute demonstration.”  Is not that a pearl without price in this world of lawful conclusions?

By the way, Grandad ­recalling the text you quote in your last ­did you know when you sent me to this university that the philosophy taught, in a general way, is that of Kant; that most university scholars smile pityingly at the Christian thesis?  Did you know that belief in Genesis had been laughed away in an institution like this?  With no intention of diverting you, but merely in order to acquaint you with the present state of popular opinion on a certain matter, I will tell you of a picture printed in a New York daily of yesterday.  It’s on the funny page.  A certain weird but funny-looking beast stands before an equally funny-looking Adam, in a funny Eden, with a funny Eve and a funny Cain and Abel in the background.  The animal says, “Say, Ad., what did you say my name was?  I’ve forgotten it again.”  Our first male parent answers somewhat testily, as one who has been vexed by like inquiries:  “Icthyosaurus, you darned fool!  Can’t you remember a little thing like that?”

In your youth this would doubtless have been punished as a crime.  In mine it is laughed at by all classes.  I tell you this to show you that the Church to-day is in the position of upholding a belief which has become meaningless because its foundation has been laughed away.  Believing no longer in the god of Moses who cursed them, Christians yet assume to believe in their need of a Saviour to intercede between them and this exploded idol of terror.  Unhappily, I am so made that I cannot occupy that position.  To me it is not honest.

Old man, do you remember a certain saying of Squire Cumpston?  It was this:  “If you’re going to cross the Rubicon, cross it!  Don’t wade out to the middle and stand there:  you only get hell from both banks!”

And so I have crossed; I find the Squire was right about standing in the middle.  Happily, or unhappily, I am compelled to believe my beliefs with all my head and all my heart.  But I am confident my reasons will satisfy you when you hear them.  You will see these matters in a new light.

Believe me, Grandad, with all love and respect,

Affectionately yours,
BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

My Boy: For one bitten with skepticism there is little argument ­especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency.  You wanted to go to Harvard.  I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard’s Unitarianism.  We compromised on Yale ­my own alma mater, as it was my father’s.  To my belief, this was still, especially as to its pulpit, the stronghold of orthodox Congregationalism.  Was I a weak old man, compromising with Satan?  Are you to break my heart in these my broken years?  For love of me, as for the love of your own soul, pray.  Leave the God of Moses until your soul’s stomach can take the strong meat of him ­for he is strong meat ­and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle ­the Redeemer, who died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls.  Centre your aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe, or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve.  Do not deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet question the inerrance of Holy Writ ­yea, with its everlasting burnings.  “He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

I am sad.  I have lived too long.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

Grandad: It’s all so plain, you must see it.  I told you I had crossed to the farther bank.  Here is what one finds there:  Taking him as God, Jesus is ineffectual.  Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great ­or even plausible.

The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them.  Jesus was too fine, too good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have come from God, save as we all come from Him.

Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those things which make him small ­as a God.  I would rather consider him as a man and point out those things which make him great to me ­things which I cannot read without wet eyes ­but you will not consider him as man, so let him be a God, and let us see what we see.  It is customary to speak of his “sacrifice.”  What was it?  Our catechism says, “Christ’s humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time.”

As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of integrity.  Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites, humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead of into the family of a King?  This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.

Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and half human.  The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church must concede ­nay, proclaim ­the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a primitive Hebrew mythology ­and take him in the only way that he commands attention:  As a man, one of the world’s great spiritual teachers.  Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern mind.  Jesus, born to a carpenter’s wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person in the universe, who will come in a cloud of glory to judge the world.  He will save into everlasting life those who believe him to be of divine origin.  Yet he has been called meek!  Surely never was a more arrogant character in history ­never one less meek than this carpenter’s son who ranks himself second only to God, with power to send into everlasting hell those who disbelieve him!  He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we to-day call “the decent element.”  He called the people constantly “Fools,” “Blind Leaders of the Blind,” “faithless and perverse,” “a generation of vipers,” “sinful,” “evil and adulterous,” “wicked,” “hypocrites,” “whited sepulchres.”

As the god he worshipped was a tribal god, so he at first believed himself to be a tribal saviour.  He directed his disciples thus:  “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.  But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” ­(who emphatically rejected and slew him for his pretensions).  To the woman of Canaan whose daughter was vexed with a devil, he said:  “It is not meet to take the children’s bread to cast it to dogs.”  Imagine a God calling a woman a dog because she was not of his own tribe!

And the vital test of godhood he failed to meet:  It is his own test, whereby he disproves his godship out of his own mouth.  Compare these sayings of Jesus, each typical of him: 

“Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”  Yet he said to his Twelve: 

“And whosoever shall not receive you nor hear you, when you depart thence shake off the dust of your feet for a testimony against them.”

Is that the consistency of a God or a man?

Again:  “Blessed are the merciful,” but “Verily I say unto you it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.”  Is this the mercy which he tells us is blessed?

Again:  “And as ye would that men should do to you do ye also to them likewise.”  Another:  “Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida ... and thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down to hell.”  Is not this preaching the golden rule and practicing something else, as a man might?

Again:  “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?  Do not even the publicans the same?  And if ye salute your brethren, what do ye more than others?  Do not even the publicans so?” That, sir, is a sentiment that proves the claim of Jesus to be a teacher of morals.  Here is one which, placed beside it, proves him to have been a man.

“Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the son of man also confess before the angels of God;

“but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my father, which is in heaven.”

Is it God speaking ­or man? “Do not even the publicans so?”

Beside this very human contradiction, it is hardly worth while to hear him say “Resist not evil,” yet make a scourge of cords to drive the money-changers from the temple in a fit of rage, human ­but how ungodlike!

Believe me, the man Jesus is better than the god Jesus; the man is worth while, for all his inconsistencies, partly due to his creed and partly to his emotional nature.  Indeed, we have not yet risen to the splendour of his ideal ­even the preachers will not preach it.

And the miracles?  We need say nothing of those, I think.  If a man disprove his godship out of his own mouth, we shall not be convinced by a coin in a fish’s mouth or by his raising Lazarus, four days dead.  So long as he says, “I will confess him that confesseth me and deny him that denieth me,” we should know him for one of us, though he rose from the dead before our eyes.

Then at the last you will say, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”  Well, sir, the fruits of Christianity are what one might expect.  You will say it stands for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  That it has always done the reverse is Christianity’s fundamental defect, and its chief absurdity in this day when the popular unchurchly conception of God has come to be one of some dignity.

“That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”  There is the rock of separation upon which the Church builded; the rock upon which it will presently split.  The god of the Jews set a difference between Israel and Egypt.  So much for the fatherhood of God.  The Son sets the same difference, dividing the sheep from the goats, according to the opinions they form of his claim to godship.  So much for the brotherhood of man.  Christianity merely caricatures both propositions.  Nor do I see how we can attain any worthy ideal of human brotherhood while this Christianity prevails:  We must be sheep and goats among ourselves, some in heaven, some in hell, still seeking out reasons “Why the Saints in Glory Should Rejoice at the Sufferings of the Damned.”  We shall be saints and sinners, sated and starving.  A God who separates them in some future life will have children that separate themselves here upon His own very excellent authority.  That is why one brother of us must work himself to death while another idles himself to death ­because God has set a difference, and his Son after him, and the Church after that.  The defect in social Christendom to-day, sir, is precisely this defect of the Christian faith ­its separation, its failure to teach what it chiefly boasts of teaching.  We have, in consequence, a society of thinly veneered predatoriness.  And this, I believe, is why our society is quite as unstable today as the Church itself.  They are both awakening to a new truth ­which is not separation.

The man who is proud of our Christian civilisation has ideals susceptible of immense elevation.  Christianity has more souls in its hell and fewer in its heaven than any other religion whatsoever.  Naturally, Christian society is one of extremes and of gross injustice ­of oppression and indifference to suffering.  And so it will be until this materialism of separation is repudiated:  until we turn seriously to the belief that men are truly brothers, not one of whom can be long happy while any other suffers.

Come, Grandad, let us give up this God of Moses.  Doubtless he was good enough for the early Jews, but man has always had to make God in his own image, and you and I need a better one, for we both surpass this one in all spiritual values ­in love, in truth, in justice, in common decency ­as much as Jesus surpassed the unrepentant thief at his side.  Remember that an honest, fearless search for truth has led to all the progress we can measure over the brutes.  Why must it lose the soul?

BERNAL.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

My boy, I shall not believe you are sane until I have seen you face to face.  I cannot believe you have fallen a victim to Universalism, which is like the vale of Siddim, full of slime-pits.  I am an old man, and my mind goes haltingly, yet that is what I seem to glean from your rambling screed.  Come when you are through, for I must see you once more.

“For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.  He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God.”

Lastly ­doubt in infinite things is often wise, but doubt of God must be blasphemy, else he would not be God, the all-perfect.

I pray it may be your mind is still sick ­and recall to you these words of one I will not now name to you:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

ALLAN DELCHER.