Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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You may reply, and with some justice, that there is a danger in this repeated appeal to the test of “working.” “What,” you may ask, “about the Buddhist and the Mohammedan, the one with his peaceful missions, the other with his victorious sword? Cannot both make the same appeal? In advocating the invariable appeal to ‘working,’ do we not come dangerously near urging the acceptance of any doctrine that will afford good leverage to moral effort, regardless of its truth or falsehood? Ought not, after all, the harmony of the doctrine with Reason (in the highest sense—not only syllogistic, but intuitive, imaginative, or whatever you choose to call it) to be the ultimate criterion?”

I suppose there is a “danger” in every means of attaining truth, a danger in observation, a danger in experiment, a danger in inductive, a danger in deductive, reasoning: but it does not follow that any of these means are to be discarded, only that they are to be carefully used. If the Buddhist can appeal to the successes of centuries, that proves, I should say, that there is some element of genuine truth in his religion; if the Mohammedan points to conversions, in India and elsewhere, far more rapid than those made by Christianity and not dependent on “the victorious sword,” that also proves that in some important respects for example in the practical recognition of the equality of all believers without respect to rank or race—Mohammedans have been far more faithful to their teacher than we have been to ours. And generally, any religion that succeeds in making men better with it than they were without it, must be admitted (I think) to contain (so far as it succeeds) some element of divine revelation. And therefore, while admitting the appeal to Reason, I cannot reject the appeal to Experience as well. Do not think that, in laying so much stress on “working,” I ignore the difference between the propositions of Natural Science and those of Religion, or forget how much more ready and convincing verification is in the former than in the latter. The means of verifying may differ in different ages: why not? In the earliest period of Christianity, men had, as a test, the contrast between the heathen and the Christian life; the burning zeal of the freshly imparted Spirit of Christ; and the “mighty works” wrought by the Apostles and perhaps by some of their successors. Now, for us in Christendom, the proof from “contrast” is less obvious, and we have lost also something of the fresh and fiery zeal—must we not add the occasionally misguided zeal?—of the first Christians: but by way of compensation, we have, besides our individual experiences, the collective evidence of many generations shewing what Christ’s Spirit can do to help us when we obey it, to chasten us when we disobey. Are we wrong then in inferring that one test of religions is the same which our Lord appointed for testing men: “By their fruits ye shall know them”?