to add that this time-this time they are quite confident that they are right. "If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets; but as for these prophets who have the effrontery to stand and preach in our own hearing-let them be crucified !" I cannot doubt, then, that if the churches of this land are in the future to make good their appeal to thoughtful men and women, it is an urgent need that the fullest and most ungrudging recognition should be given to the claim of all sound knowledge to be a revelation of God. It is an urgent need, that is to say, that the churches should give practical effect to their faith as expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God,”. the God of natural law, the God of the social order, the God of reason-"the Lord is one." Yet I would not end on the thought of past failure. Rather I would close this lecture by reminding you once more of the wealth of inspiration that we may find in this old formula of which we have been thinking. All life is sacred. All life brings to us a divine message. All life may be an act of worship. For so the whole round earth is every way CHAPTER II THE DOCTRINE OF PROVIDENCE After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father Thy will be done.-St. Matthew vi: 9, 10. I F we were to ask a large number of people what it is that the third commandment forbids the commandment which declares, as you remember, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," I suppose that ninety-nine out of every hundred of them would reply that it has to do with swearing and bad language. But that would be, at the best, a very incomplete answer; for it ignores another way of transgressing the command which is much more devastating in its effect upon a man's attitude to life-a way of transgressing, moreover, which is by no means rare among religious people, and which they should, therefore, be all the more careful to keep in mind. It is so much easier to condemn the sins of others than our own that the churches have shown little disposition to follow their Master in His resolute insist ence that the worst sins are those of the religious world-hard-heartedness and hypocrisy, narrowness of sympathy and spiritual blindness. How many ministers of the Christian gospel could be found today, teaching that ecclesiastical intolerance is a blacker sin than adultery? The same partial treatment has been given to the third commandment, and a zealous denunciation of the sinfulness of profane speech outside church doors has often been our excuse for overlooking the sinfulness of profane thinking within them. To understand what is involved, let us remind ourselves of the changes that have taken place in the way in which men have thought of God. It would take us too far from the subject of this second lecture to trace these changes in detail, but we know that in two respects especially the conception of God has developed in the religious history of mankind: in regard, namely, to the extent of His authority, and to the attributes of His character. In so far as the Hebrew race is concerned, we can study this development in the pages of the Old Testament. The Hebrews, as we know, thought of Jehovah at one time as a national God, and only gradually attained to the belief that He was the God of the whole earth; and at the same time their conception of His character passed through various well-defined stages in which He was a powerful warrior, a magnificent potentate, a dispenser of social justice, a God of love. Now it would plainly be a mark of singular foolishness on our part if we found fault with those who stood at one stage of religious development for not being at a later one—if, for example, we blamed Deborah for not using the language of Amos, or Solomon for not thinking the thoughts of Micah and Isaiah, or Samuel for not representing the divine attitude to the Amalekites as a later writer represented it to the six-score thousand persons in the great city Nineveh. But, on the other hand, we should certainly be right in blaming a man who, professing to have accepted the teaching of Amos, should go away and talk like Deborah, or who, after listening to the words of Jesus Christ, should maintain that Samuel rightly interpreted the mind of God. When the higher truth has been perceived, to rest in the lower is to be guilty of blasphemy; and this, surely, is the sin against which the third commandment warns We must not think unworthy thoughts about God; we must not be satisfied with views about His us. nature and character (for that is what the Hebrews meant when they spoke of His "Name") which are less true than those to which our generation has attained; we must not guide our lives by the theology of a past age in so far as that theology has been corrected by later teaching. We are familiar enough with the view that the mutual relations of sovereign states are not under obligation to the laws of morality; what is this but to conceive of God as national in His interests, and to take one's stand with Deborah rather than with Amos? We are familiar enough with the view that the test of a man's religion is the regularity of his attendance at church on Sundays, or the frequency of his communions, rather than the unselfishness of his relations with his fellow-men throughout the week; what is this but to suppose that the priests of Solomon saw more clearly than Micah into the mind of God? We are familiar enough-yes, even to-day-with the belief that thousands of men and women pass through the gate of death into an experience of torment which will last to all eternity; what is this but to think that Samuel's instructions to Saul reveal God more truly than the parable of the Prodigal Son or that of the Shepherd who seeks his sheep until he finds it—until he finds it? Thus |